Chapter Twelve
Beauchamp dressed for comfort, certain that whatever waited for him in the kitchen was going to require full range of mobility.
He settled on a pair of dark jeans, a plain navy jumper, and the canvas trainers he’d owned since a posting in Cyprus.
It was his second scheduled day off in a fortnight, and he’d meant to spend it horizontal in front of the snooker.
Instead, he was about to spend his day off being companionably dismantled by a man in a silk robe.
He came down the corridor to find the kitchen already in a state of advanced chaos.
Vidal had pulled every item of conceivable interest out of the fridge and arrayed it across the counter.
A block of manchego sat on the chopping board beside the last of the sourdough, a glass dish of olives, a jar of cornichons, and a bundle of radishes.
Vidal himself had exchanged his silk robe for loose linen trousers and a cream shirt open at the collar.
He was cracking eggs into a ceramic bowl while singing softly in Catalan.
“Beauchamp! There you are. Look at you, in your weekend attire. We’re going on a picnic.”
Beauchamp took one careful step into the kitchen and said nothing.
Vidal cracked another egg with a sharp flick of the wrist and tossed the shell into a bowl on the counter. “Don’t give me that face. It’ll be a small thing. The garden’s ours, Beauchamp, and the sun has finally consented to visit this miserable island.”
“We can’t go out, sir. That was the entire point of yesterday’s—”
“We’re not going out. We’re going downstairs.
The garden is the ground floor of this very building, which, if my understanding of your document is correct, falls entirely within the perimeter you’ve spent the last twenty-four hours sealing like a tomb.
Yes? A picnic in the garden. A picnic of really quite modest ambition by any continental standard, but it’s the one your protocols will allow me. ”
Beauchamp was handed a wooden spoon before he could protest.
“Scramble, please. On low heat, with plenty of butter. I’ve started them in the bowl, you’ll take them across the line. I must attend to the bread.”
Vidal was already at the hob, tipping olive oil into the pan without measuring. Beauchamp poured the eggs in beside him on the second ring, dropping a knob of butter into the pan as he began to stir.
“Beauchamp.”
“Sir.”
“You haven’t used enough butter, and you’re stirring too conservatively. They’re eggs. They’ll forgive you a little boldness.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And not sir, please, not this morning. I’m wearing linen and you’re wearing denim and we’re about to eat breakfast on a lawn. Sir is for the moments when I’m being foolish and you’re saving me from myself. This morning you may call me Vidal.”
“I’ll stick with sir, if it’s all the same.”
“Oh, Beauchamp. You’re going to make me work for every inch.
” Vidal pressed a slab of sourdough into the oil in the second pan, and the kitchen filled at once with the delicious smell of frying bread.
“That’s fine. I’ve the stamina for it. Now, the cheese.
Cut it into rough pieces, none of this thin elegant slicing you English like to do.
I want chunks that a man can actually get a taste from. ”
He cut the cheese into hefty chunks. The eggs on Beauchamp’s hob had begun to gather themselves into soft yellow folds, and he pulled them off the heat before they could toughen.
Vidal leaned across him, pinched a little between finger and thumb, put it in his mouth, and made a satisfied hum that Beauchamp was embarrassed to find pleased him.
“The eggs into the blue bowl, please. Cover it with the plate beside it, they must stay warm. Now.” Vidal turned from the counter with both hands on his hips and surveyed the spread.
“Olives, cheese, bread, eggs, cornichons, radishes, the butter, the pot of honey from the top shelf. Beauchamp, pass me the honey. What have I forgotten?”
“A picnic blanket, sir.”
Vidal stopped with the honey pot halfway to the counter. “Ah. We don’t have one.”
“No, sir.”
“This is a gap in my provisions which I intend to address at the earliest opportunity. In the meantime…” Vidal set the honey down and turned the full beam of his attention on Beauchamp. “Your robe.”
“My — sir, no.”
“Beauchamp. Go and fetch your robe, please.”
“Sir, it’s a dressing gown. It’s not built for picnics.”
“It’s flannel. It’s the approximate shape of a small rug. Go and fetch it.”
Beauchamp took the dressing gown off the hook on the back of his door and folded it once over his arm. When he came back into the kitchen, Vidal had packed everything into a laundry hamper, and had added a bottle of Albarino and three wine glasses to the top.
“It’s nine in the morning, sir.”
“It’s nine in the morning on a Saturday, Beauchamp, which is the correct hour for wine in every serious country on earth. Come.”
He started down the corridor without waiting to see whether Beauchamp was following. Beauchamp fell in a half-step behind, his free hand near the hamper in case Vidal lost his grip.
They reached the landing. Vidal shifted the hamper into the crook of his elbow, freeing his right hand, and without breaking stride turned to the door of Connor’s flat and hammered on it with the side of his fist.
“GARDEN!”
The word rang down the stairwell and bounced back off the wrought-iron cage of the lift. Vidal was already moving again, sweeping onwards down the next flight of stairs with the hamper balanced against his ribs.
“He’ll come.” Vidal said it without turning round, his free hand trailing down the polished banister as he descended.
The ease of the gesture, and the unexamined certainty that Connor would appear, lodged itself at the back of Beauchamp’s mind and sat heavy there.
They came out onto the ground floor and into the walled garden. The sun had moved onto the flagstones, and the entirety of the narrow lawn was lit a soft yellow-green. Vidal stopped in the middle of it, set the hamper down on the grass, and turned.
“The robe, please, Beauchamp.”
“Sir…”
“Unfold it and lay it on the grass. There. A nice flat rectangle, if you please. We shall sit on it. Mercè shall sit on it. When Connor arrives, he shall also sit on it, and the four of us shall have our picnic like civilised people, and your dressing gown shall finally serve a purpose commensurate with the generosity of its cut.”
Beauchamp sighed, then unfolded the dressing gown and laid it out on the grass. It was, he noted, large enough to accommodate one reclining Vidal and no one else.
He lowered himself onto a patch of grass at the edge of the dressing gown, one knee drawn up, and accepted the piece of bread Vidal pressed into his hand.
“Eat. No, not like that, Beauchamp, with the oil, you must drag it through the oil first, the bread is the vehicle and the oil is the cargo. There. Better.”
Beauchamp dragged the bread through the oil and ate it. It was, to his considerable irritation, the best thing he’d put in his mouth in a fortnight.
Vidal uncorked the Albarino with a twist and poured a generous measure into each glass. He pressed one into Beauchamp’s hand. “Drink. You’ve been carrying the weight of my foolishness since yesterday morning, and your shoulders are up round your ears. “Salut.”
Beauchamp considered the glass in his hand. It was his day off. Young was stationed in the hall upstairs until six. Neither of them were going anywhere but a ten-foot square of walled garden in Mayfair. Why the fuck not?
“Salut, sir.”
Beauchamp drank. It was very good wine, cold from the fridge, and it went down easily on an empty stomach. Vidal refilled his glass before he’d set it down.
“Now.” Vidal propped his chin on his hand and fixed Beauchamp under his gaze.
“We must put each other at ease, Beauchamp. We are cohabiting. We are to be, for the next little while, thrown upon each other’s mercies at all hours.
It will not do to carry on as though we’re strangers on a train. We must know one another.”
“Sir.”
“Vidal!”
“Sir,” Beauchamp repeated with emphasis.
Vidal sighed, plucked an olive from the dish, and ate it with the air of a man taking some time to compose himself.
“Very well. I shall go first, since it’s evidently going to fall to me to demonstrate how the thing is done.
I lost my virginity, Beauchamp, at the age of fifteen, to a boy called Pau who was the son of the man who managed my father’s olive groves.
It happened in the stone hut at the top of the western terrace where the pickers took their lunches in the summer, and it was, I’m sorry to tell you, not romantic in the slightest. Pau was sixteen, and he had the finesse of a man attempting to open a tin of sardines with his bare hands.
I bled a little. I cried a little. Afterwards we ate the bread and cheese his mother had packed for him, and I decided on the spot that I was going to become extraordinarily good at this particular activity, if only so that I’d never again have to endure the experience of being so badly fumbled at by anyone. ”
Vidal paused to select another olive.
“I kept my promise to myself, Beauchamp. I’ve been making up for Pau’s sins ever since.”
Beauchamp, who had been chewing at his bread, kept his eyes fixed on a point somewhere above Vidal’s left shoulder and took another pull of his wine to fortify himself.
“So.” Vidal waved an olive in an encouraging circle. “Your turn.”
Beauchamp reached for the bowl of eggs and began to serve himself a portion.
He took his time about it, arranging the eggs on the plate beside a chunk of manchego, adding a cornichon, then a heap of radishes.
From the bread basket he took two more pieces, on the grounds that one could never have too much bread, especially if it kept his mouth too full for him to speak.
“Beauchamp. You’re building a fortification out of your breakfast.”