Chapter Twelve #2
Beauchamp put a forkful of egg into his mouth and chewed it.
Vidal waited. Beauchamp nibbled on a piece of cheese.
Vidal continued to wait. Finally, because Vidal appeared prepared to sit there until nightfall waiting for Beauchamp to participate in this conversation, he set his fork down on the edge of his plate.
“I did a gap year in South America before Sandhurst.”
Vidal’s whole face lit up as though Beauchamp had produced a Diptyque candle from behind his ear. “A gap year, Beauchamp! In South America! This is marvellous, this is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to know. Where? Tell me where. Tell me everything.”
“Peru, mostly. Bit of Bolivia. I was with a charity that built houses for families who’d lost theirs in the floods. It was a good year.”
“A good year.” Vidal rolled the phrase around his mouth.
“Beauchamp. My dear man. You went to South America at the age of — what, eighteen? Nineteen? You were young, you were free, you were presumably surrounded by other young people who were also young and free, and the best you can offer me is that it was a good year. Did nothing else happen?”
“I learned to lay a foundation, sir. And some Spanish.” He reached for the block of manchego and held it up between thumb and forefinger. “Este queso está muy bueno. ?Me puedes pasar el pan, por favor?”
Vidal stared at him across the dressing gown. Then he clapped his hands together once, delighted.
“Beauchamp! He speaks! He makes a joke! In a second language, no less, which is more than the average Englishman manages in his first!” He passed the bread with a flourish.
“But no. You don’t escape me by charming me with your cheese Spanish.
I’m on to you now. I’ve seen the edges of a personality and I’ll not rest until I’ve excavated the rest of it.
” He set his olive down with great seriousness.
“I’m not asking about the Spanish, Beauchamp.
I’m asking about your sexual awakening. Every young man who goes to South America has a sexual awakening.
It is practically a condition of the visa.
Did you have a Pau of your own? Were they a local?
Were they another volunteer? Did you fall in love with someone who broke your heart in a hammock? ”
“I was seeing someone back home, sir.” The wine had got ahead of him by a glass and a half. His tongue had slipped the leash, and the sentence was out on the grass between them before he could recall it.
Vidal went still.
It was a small change, and Beauchamp only caught it because he’d spent the last fortnight learning this man’s tells. The forward lean eased and the bright inquisitorial glee went out of his face.
“Ah.” Vidal’s voice had come down half an octave. “I see.”
Beauchamp should have stopped there, but the wine was doing its work, and Vidal was watching him with an attentiveness that was more dangerous, in its quiet way, than any of the teasing had been.
“We met on a summer music course. I was seventeen. He was at the Royal Opera by twenty. We were together until last spring.”
The numbers sat there in the sun. Seventeen to thirty-five. Eighteen years. He hadn’t said the years aloud to anyone since the night Julian had left, because every time he let his mind linger on it, the pain came out of hiding.
Vidal didn’t pounce on any of it, or ask what had happened. His eyes stayed on Beauchamp’s face, searching.
The gentleness caught Beauchamp off guard, and so he found himself pressing on. “I was very devoted to him, sir. So there was no wild sexual awakening in the Amazonian jungles. I’m sorry to disappoint.”
“Devoted all the way from Lima.” Vidal considered him over the rim of his glass. “That is exactly the sort of thing I am learning to expect from you, my Beauchamp. But surely there must have been the occasional spicy video call to pass a lonely Tuesday evening in the highlands.”
“Technology hadn’t got that far yet, sir.”
“Beauchamp. You are telling me you are a man of a vintage that predates the dick pic. I am going to need a moment to reconcile this information with the rest of my understanding of you.”
“Spicy conversation this early? Now I know I’m gonna have a good breakfast.”
Connor had come through the garden door in grey trousers and a waistcoat over a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the forearms. His hair was still damp at the temples from his shower.
“Mornin’, gents. Thought I heard a summons.” He came across the grass and lowered himself onto the far corner of the dressing gown next to Vidal. His eyes swept the spread, the glasses, and Beauchamp’s face. Then he reached for an olive as if nothing had happened at all. “Don’t mind me. Carry on.”
“Connor, mi amor, you’re just in time.” Vidal’s voice came back up into its usual register. “Beauchamp has been telling me, with enormous resistance, about his gap year and his first love.”
“I’ll happily tell you about mine, if it’ll give Beauchamp a bit of a break.” Connor started picking through the spread laid out before him. Vidal’s head swivelled so fast that Beauchamp thought, with a flicker of hope, that the conversation had been redirected for good.
“Connor. Yes. Please. Tell me about yours.”
“Wasn’t fancy. I never had a gap year. Didn’t go to uni.
I lived in a tower block in Bow, twenty-three floors of it.
It had a lift that worked maybe four days out of the seven.
So the fire stairs…” Connor ate a chunk of cheese, a smile curving the corner of his mouth, “the fire stairs, gents, were something else.”
“Go on.” Vidal was leaning forward so far that his chin was nearly on Connor’s shoulder.
“My first was a girl called Tracey from the eleventh floor. We went up to the twenty-third landing, and when we got there, there was already a pair of lads from the nineteenth having a proper go at it against the fire hose cabinet, and a girl sat on the step above them eating a packet of McCoy’s and waiting her turn with one of ‘em.”
Beauchamp had put his fork down some sentences ago. He had the distinct sense, which had been developing steadily since Connor said fire stairs, that this was about to turn into a story he would not be able to unhear.
“I am going to need,” Vidal said, lowering his voice, “considerably more detail.”
Connor laughed and reached for the bottle. “Right. Well. I’ll need a drink for this one, and so will you, because I’m only getting started. Major, pass us that cheese in the hamper, would you? There’s a good lad.”
Beauchamp passed the cheese, and resigned himself to learning something about the Bow Estate that he would carry to his grave.