Chapter Seventeen
Mercè had given up on him around ten. She was now curled in the warm dent at the far end of the sofa, her back pointedly turned to him. He had not taken her downstairs to the garden to see Connor, and now she was sulking.
Vidal did not want to be made to feel better about his situation. This morning, he wanted to sit on the sofa in rumpled clothes and stare at the wall, feeling exactly as miserable as he was.
He had been there for some hours when he became dimly aware that Beauchamp had let himself out of the flat.
This was unusual enough to register through the fog.
Beauchamp had, ever since the TikTok fiasco, made a habit of dispatching Young or one of the others for the daily errands, on the grounds that the principal was safer when his attaché was in the building with him.
Vidal had taken this as yet another act of care from the man.
Vidal considered this change in behaviour, clocked it as Beauchamp reacting to him being unpleasant and cranky, and then went back to staring at the wall.
The flat’s door opened again some time after eleven.
Vidal heard the soft clunk of the deadbolt and the shuffle of a man wiping his shoes on the mat.
Beauchamp stopped in the archway to the drawing room, holding the paper bag against his hip with one hand and a white box from a patisserie with the other.
“Sir.”
“Beauchamp.”
Beauchamp came into the room and set the box down on the coffee table. From the paper bag he produced a candle in a familiar glass jar with a cream oval-shaped label. He placed it on the side table next to Vidal’s elbow without ceremony.
It was Diptyque’s Figuier candle. The one he had been describing to Beauchamp in the back of the Bentley on the night of his arrival. “And these,” Beauchamp said, opening the white box, “are for Adelina.”
Inside the box were two cupcakes. They were small and neat, frosted in pale buttercream, and into the top of each one Beauchamp had pressed a single thin pink birthday candle.
Vidal stood up. Mercè, dislodged, gave him a wounded look from the cushion.
He crossed the rug in two strides and put his arms around Beauchamp, pressing his face into the warm wool of his charcoal jumper.
After a beat, Beauchamp brought one hand up and laid it briefly between Vidal’s shoulder blades.
There were several things Vidal might have said then, but that would have ruined the moment. Instead he held on to Beauchamp for a long unhurried moment. When he stepped back, he held out his hand for the lighter that Beauchamp produced from the front pocket of his jeans.
He lit the first candle, then the second, shielding the flames with the curve of his palm until they steadied. He sat back on his heels and looked at them.
“Adelina Sofia Montcada.” His voice was quiet. “Welcome to the world, my darling girl. Your uncle Vidal is in London, and he is lighting a candle for you. He is going to spoil you so completely when he meets you that your mother will never forgive him.”
He reached for his mobile from the pocket of the dressing gown and held it out at arm’s length. Beauchamp, who had been standing a polite half-step back, recognised the manoeuvre and began the smooth pivot towards the door that meant he was about to absent himself.
“No, no, no, Major. Come here. You must be in this!”
“Sir.”
“Beauchamp. The candles will not survive a debate.”
Beauchamp came round the side of the coffee table and crouched beside him.
Vidal, without looking, slid an arm around his shoulders and pulled him in close enough that their cheeks were nearly touching.
He angled the mobile so that the cupcakes and their two small flames sat in the bottom of the frame.
He took many photographs. Mercè, sensing a moment of significance she had not been consulted on, had jumped down from the sofa and inserted her bald head into the bottom of the shot like an affronted gargoyle.
“Perfect. Perfect. Beauchamp, this is the photograph I shall send to my brother.” He set the mobile down on the table and reached for the first cupcake.
He blew the candles out with a reverent breath.
He pulled the candles out, licked the buttercream off the bottom of each, and handed one to Beauchamp.
“Eat. We are celebrating Adelina.”
Beauchamp took the cupcake from him and lowered himself onto the rug beside the coffee table.
Vidal peeled the paper from his own and bit into it without ceremony. He closed his eyes for a moment and let the sweetness sit on his tongue, and then he opened them again and looked at Beauchamp.
“Where did you find them?”
“Place on Marylebone High Street. Mum used to take me there when I was small.”
“And the candle?”
“Selfridges.”
“You went to Selfridges, Beauchamp?”
“Yes. For the Diptyque candle.”
Vidal began to laugh. He laughed around a mouthful of cupcake, and had to press the back of his wrist against his lips to prevent buttercream getting on the dressing gown.
Vidal shook his head and took another enormous bite of his cupcake.
“Beauchamp, you are an extraordinary man. I do not say this lightly. I have known a great many men in my life, and none of them have ever, on a Tuesday morning, gone to Selfridges on my behalf for a candle I mentioned once in the back of a car at four in the morning.”
Beauchamp kept his focus on his cupcake.
Vidal, for once, let him have his silence. He licked the buttercream from his thumb, picked up his mobile, and began composing the message to Fidel.
? ? ?
When Vidal had finished his cupcake, Beauchamp had wandered off to talk to Young. He gathered Mercè off her cushion and carried his dog and his lit Diptyque candle down the corridor to his bedroom.
He shut the door behind him with his hip, set the candle on the bedside table, and arranged Mercè in the warm hollow at the centre of the duvet. Vidal climbed onto the bed beside her, propped himself against the pillows, and opened WhatsApp.
He scrolled to The Privy Council group chat, which currently showed Barnaby’s last message from yesterday morning: a photograph of Lex asleep on the drawing room rug with a half-eaten croissant balanced on his chest and the message: He just woke up fifteen minutes ago.
Vidal opened his camera roll and selected the photograph of himself draped in Connor’s pawn shop gold.
After a beat, he added the one of Beauchamp crouched beside the cupcakes, their cheeks nearly touching.
He typed beneath the pair of them: My favourite English gentlemen.
He pressed send, set the mobile face down on the duvet, and reached across to scratch Mercè behind one velvet ear.
His mobile started ringing inside ninety seconds.
He let it ring twice before he answered.
Barnaby and James’s faces filled the small bright squares at the top of the screen.
Barnaby looked like he was sitting in the back of a car, while James was unmistakably in one of the smaller drawing rooms at Kensington Palace, a cup of tea steaming on a side table beside him.
“Vidal,” James said. “Vidal, Vidal, Vidal.”
“Jaime.”
“You’ve been keeping yourself busy.”
“I have been keeping myself alive, James, which under the present circumstances ought to qualify as a Herculean labour worthy of —”
“I forbid you from ruining Major Beauchamp! I like him, Vidal. I like Beauchamp very much. He was wonderful as Caroline’s equerry, which is precisely why I was the one who had him taken off the books so that he could go and help you get settled in like a civilised human being.
Now I open my WhatsApp on a perfectly nice day and I find a photograph of him crouched on a rug, looking at you like you’ve personally hung the moon. ”
“He was looking at the cupcakes, James.”
“He was not looking at the cupcakes.”
“How dare you! How dare the pair of you! I will not have my morning ruined by your filthy little insinuations. Major Beauchamp is an honourable, devoted, and exemplary man who is a credit to his country, and I will not sit here while you cast aspersions on the dignity of my Major.”
“Vidal.” Barnaby’s voice came in over the top of him, mild and amused.
“Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester.”
“He looks exactly like every single ex you’ve ever had.”
Vidal’s mouth, which had been opening for another attack against James, closed.
“I also know Beauchamp,” Barnaby went on, in the same easy register. He was trimming a cuticle on his free hand as he spoke. “He’s polite, he’s competent and restrained. Vidal, you’ve been falling for variations of this man since we were fifteen.”
“That is —”
“I can list them.”
“You will not.”
“There was the rowing captain at Eton with the freckles. There was the Norwegian skiing instructor. The Carabiniere in Rome who arrested you for climbing the Trevi Fountain and who you ended up running away with for half a year. You still send him Christmas cards, don’t you?”
James was openly laughing now, a hand pressed to his mouth.
“Bash, you are being deeply unfair,” Vidal said.
“I will admit, because I am a fair-minded man, that I have a historical fondness for a certain type. But the Major and I are not anything. We have a professional arrangement. He sleeps in the second bedroom because my mother bullied his commanding officer into agreeing to this arrangement.”
“Listen to me, Vidal. You’re in a strange mental state at the moment. You’ve lost your country, your father is in Geneva, and your accounts are frozen. I think that perhaps it’s not the best time for you to be spreading yourself thin between lovers.”
“He’s not spreading himself thin,” James said. “He’s just spreading.”
“James!”
“What?”
“I am only spreading for one of them, the pawnbroker. The one who looks like an extremely muscular Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line. “About that, Vidal,” Barnaby said. “How old is he?”
“Forty-four. Or thereabouts. Possibly forty-five, I have not asked, it would be vulgar.”
Barnaby sighed. It was the long, slow, put-upon sigh of a man who had been fielding variations on this telephone call since they were all in their late teens. “This is a horrible idea, Vidal…”
Vidal pressed the back of his free hand against his forehead and tipped his head against the pillows.
“Listen to me, both of you. I am going to say this once, and I will not be drawn into a Council debate on the matter, because I am a grown man and I have earned a degree of privacy in this lifetime. Connor is what Connor is, and we have an arrangement that suits us both. The Major does not see me in that way. He came home with two cupcakes for Adelina, with little pink candles in them, because I had told him about her last night when I was crying on the sofa and he had not known what to do with me. Do you understand what kind of man does that? He is —”
He realised, halfway through the sentence, that the small bright squares at the top of his screen had gone very quiet. Barnaby had stopped fiddling with his fingers and James had set his teacup down on the side table without taking his eyes off the camera.
“— he is a good man,” Vidal finished, on a slightly higher pitch than he had begun.
“That is all I am saying. He is a good man and I enjoy his company. I am amused by him. I may take a certain pleasure in coaxing him out of his shell, because he has been buttoned up his entire life and somebody has to do it, but that is a thing I do with all of you English.”
“Mm,” said Barnaby.
“Do not mm at me, Bash.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“You said mm. After all these years, I know what your mm means, and I will not have it.”
James was wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Barnaby. Barnaby, do you remember…God, what was his name? The Italian boy in the Lower Sixth, the one with the —”
“Tomasso.”
“Tomasso! Tomasso, who wouldn’t give Vidal the time of day for a whole term. Vidal followed him round the cloisters like a tiny deranged sheepdog, and what did he tell us at the time? Do you remember what he said?”
“He said,” Barnaby supplied, “I am not interested in him in that way at all, James, I simply enjoy teasing him out of his shell. He is so terribly buttoned up and somebody has to do it.”
“BARNABY.”
“And then,” James said, “we found Vidal in the chapel with Tomasso’s hand down the front of his trousers six weeks later.”
“BOTH OF YOU. I am ending this call. I am withdrawing my friendship and my correspondence and my Christmas cards, all of which I now realise have been wasted on a pair of snakes, a pair of vipers.”
“Vidal,” Barnaby said, kindly. “We love you very much. But we all know you’re going to end up fucking poor Beauchamp.”
“I am going. I am hanging up. Goodbye, Bash. Goodbye, Jaime. May you both choke on a quail bone.” He jabbed at the red circle with his thumb and the little bright square went black.