Chapter Nineteen
The cab crawled up Marylebone High Street in the sort of traffic that made Beauchamp want to get out and walk, except that he had Mercè in her canvas carrier on his knee and Vidal beside him giving a running commentary on the window displays.
Beauchamp had been trying, since leaving the flat, to settle on a version of who Vidal was that could be offered to his father across a plate of schnitzel without causing a scene, and he hadn’t yet landed on one.
The trouble was that he could see the next hour in full cinematic detail.
Vidal would walk into the restaurant, Hunter would clap eyes on him, and Hunter would draw Vidal out with the same warm attentive grin he had used on Julian across a thousand opening nights.
Vidal, whose tolerance for a responsive audience was essentially infinite, would bloom under it, and within twenty minutes the pair of them would be an echo chamber of warm flamboyance.
He had watched Hunter and Julian escalate a simple lunch into an operatic duet on more occasions than he could count.
They’d fed each other punchlines. They had, on one memorable afternoon in a pub in Clapham, re-enacted a scene from Tosca for a table of stag-do lads who had given them a standing ovation.
The thought of Hunter and Vidal sharing a bread basket brought a pulse of tension to the hinge of his jaw.
“Beauchamp. You are grinding your teeth again. I can hear it from here, and the cab driver can hear it from the front, and it is going to wear your molars down to stumps before you are forty.”
“I’m not grinding my teeth, sir.”
“You are grinding them now with some enthusiasm. Whatever you are thinking about, stop.”
He was spared the obligation of a reply by the cab pulling up outside the restaurant, a narrow Edwardian frontage with green tiles above the windows and FISCHER’S painted across the glass in gold. Beauchamp paid the driver, gathered the carrier by its handle, and held the door for Vidal.
Hunter was on his feet before they had even cleared the vestibule.
“My boy! My darling boy, there you are, come here, come here.”
Beauchamp handed the carrier to Vidal without looking at him and submitted to being embraced by his father across the brass rail that separated the entrance from the dining room.
Hunter hugged him, one hand on the back of Beauchamp’s head, the other flat between his shoulder blades.
His father made a soft sound of contentment against his ear, and swept him into a rocking motion that lasted much longer than Beauchamp was comfortable with as a man in his late thirties.
When Beauchamp was released he took a half-step back and saw, for the first time, that his father’s table was a four-top.
A man in a lambswool sweater-vest was sitting in the chair opposite Hunter’s. He had a neatly trimmed beard, wire-framed glasses, and a cup of tea held in both hands at chest height. Beauchamp had never met this man before, but he looked like a Trevor who worked in cybersecurity.
“Rix.” Hunter was beaming. He did not seem to have registered Vidal at all. “Rix, my darling, this is Trevor. Trevor, this is my son Hendrix.”
The bad feeling that had been assembling itself in Beauchamp’s stomach all morning completed its construction.
“Mr Morrow.” Vidal had set the carrier down between his ankles and was already extending a hand across the table.
“What a great pleasure this is. I am Vidal, I am Beauchamp’s principal, we spoke on the telephone.
And Trevor, my dear, I am so pleased to meet you, Beauchamp has told me nothing about you, which is exactly the sort of discretion one wants from a potential partner, is it not? ”
Trevor, who had risen from his seat at the sight of Beauchamp and hadn’t quite decided what to do with the hand holding the teacup, transferred the cup to his left hand and shook with his right. “It’s — yes. Hello.”
“Sit, sit, we are all here now, sit down.” Vidal pulled out the chair beside Trevor’s and installed himself there before Beauchamp had worked out the seating plan. This put Beauchamp opposite Vidal and next to his father. Vidal turned the full brightness of his attention on Trevor and began.
“Now. Trevor. I must know everything. Tell me what you do, precisely. I want the whole picture of you as a man with passions.”
Trevor set his teacup down on the saucer, and didn’t quite meet anyone’s eyes as he spoke. “I do penetration testing, mostly.”
“Penetration testing.” Vidal pressed a hand to his heart. “Trevor, this sounds most alluring. Explain to me what it involves, and do not leave anything out.”
Beauchamp picked up his menu. He kept it between himself and the rest of the table and pretended to read about the schnitzel. Beside him, Hunter was signalling the waiter for another Guinness.
Trevor had begun to carefully answer Vidal’s question, clearly used to being asked what he did and then watching the asker’s eyes glaze over.
He explained what penetration testing was.
He used the phrase social engineering, then he mentioned a client in the banking sector whose name he was not at liberty to disclose.
Vidal listened. He leaned in slightly, nodded at the right moments, and produced, at one point, a gratified ah that suggested Trevor had just explained something genuinely revelatory about the nature of computing.
By the time Trevor had finished his summary of a recent engagement involving a phishing simulation at a regional building society, he had unbent from his braced upright posture and was gesturing with one hand.
“And you live in Reading, yes?” Vidal asked. “I have never been. Tell me about it. Not the guidebook version, Trevor, the real version. What is it like to live there? Where do you drink? Where do you buy your bread?”
“Reading’s all right, really. It’s got good rail connections. I can be at Paddington in twenty-seven minutes if there’s nothing on the line.”
“Twenty-seven minutes!” Vidal sat back in his chair. “This is remarkable. So you can be in London for dinner with no difficulty at all.”
“In theory.”
“Trevor, you are a well of wonderful information, and I intend to lower a bucket into every inch of you before pudding.”
Hunter set his pint glass down with an audible clunk against the cloth. He was no longer beaming, like he had been through the introductions, and through the first thirty seconds of Vidal’s love bombing of Trevor.
The waiter arrived. Vidal ordered for himself and for Trevor in the same breath; the wiener schnitzel for himself, the kalbsleber for Trevor on the grounds that it was the house speciality and one could not come to Fischer’s and order the salad.
Trevor, who had clearly intended to order the salad, accepted the liver with dazed acquiescence.
Vidal turned back to Trevor before the waiter had left the table.
“Your shirt, Trevor. I must tell you. I noticed it the moment you stood up, and I have been waiting for a natural pause in the conversation to remark upon it, because I did not want to interrupt you when you were explaining the phishing simulation so thoroughly. It is a very good shirt. The collar sits beautifully.”
Trevor looked down at his own shirt, a pale blue, perfectly ironed Oxford.
“Oh. Thanks. It’s from — ”
“No, no, do not tell me the shop. I do not want to know. I want to admire it in ignorance, Trevor, because if you tell me where you bought it I shall go there tomorrow and buy one for myself, and then there will be two of them in circulation and the magic will be broken. You must preserve my delight. Tell me instead about your father.”
Beauchamp put a piece of bread into his mouth and chewed it without tasting anything.
This was, he reminded himself, a good thing.
Every minute Vidal spent nattering at Trevor was a minute Beauchamp did not have to spend working out how to tell a nice man from Reading that he was not, regrettably, in a position to start something with him.
Trevor, lit up now, told Vidal about his father, a dentist who had taken up watercolours with a seriousness that was alarming the whole family.
When Trevor said that his father had had a show at the library community room last spring, Vidal pressed both hands flat to the tablecloth and said, “Trevor. I must see a photograph.”
Trevor produced his mobile and scrolled.
Vidal leaned in, their shoulders nearly touching over the screen.
Vidal made noises of appreciation over a view of the Thames at Goring, a somewhat ambitious rendering of a canal boat, and a portrait of Trevor’s sister’s dog that Trevor apologised for at length and that Vidal insisted was marvellous. It looked like a potato growing roots.
Beside Beauchamp, Hunter had gone entirely quiet. His second Guinness arrived and he took it from the waiter without acknowledging the man. He drank off the top third of it in one long swallow.
The food came, and Beauchamp was able to focus entirely on his food thanks to Vidal singlehandedly carrying the conversation with Trevor. Beauchamp ate his schnitzel in the shelter of Vidal’s monologue and did not have to say a word to anyone.
By the time the bill was settled — Hunter insisted, waving a card at the waiter with brisk impatience — Trevor had gone from the man who had clutched his teacup upon meeting them, to a man who was laughing at his own stories and shaping his hands in the air to illustrate a point about his sister’s choice of kitchen tiles.
They gathered their coats at the door. Trevor turned to Vidal, flushed with boldness of a man who had just had the best lunch of his year.
“I don’t want to be forward. But I’d love to stay in touch, if that’s all right. Could I have your number? Or an email, maybe.”
Vidal’s face softened. “Trevor. My dear Trevor.” Vidal laid his hand on Trevor’s forearm.
“This has been the most delightful lunch. You have made my week, and I am not exaggerating. I shall carry your father’s watercolours with me for many days.
But I am, at present, in a rather particular situation, which means that I am unable to exchange contact details with anyone who is not already on a very short list maintained by Beauchamp here on his mobile.
It is a matter of security, not of inclination, and I hope you will understand.
What I can do is tell you that if you are ever in Mayfair, and you happen to find yourself walking past a particular coffee shop on Mount Street on a Saturday morning, you may very well see Beauchamp and me at the window table, and you should come and say hello. ”
Trevor’s face went through a complicated series of adjustments. Disappointment, registered and absorbed, then relief at being given a graceful exit. He nodded. “Well, it’s been very lovely to meet you, Vidal.”
When the door had closed behind him, Hunter laid a hand on Beauchamp’s elbow. “Rix. A word.”
He drew Beauchamp a few paces down the pavement, past the window where Vidal had bent down to let Mercè out of her carrier for a wee against a lamp-post. Hunter kept his hand on Beauchamp’s elbow.
“That Vidal.”
“Dad — ”
“He’s a lot, Rix.”
Beauchamp looked down at his shoes.
“I know what that man is. He’s a very, very charming man, and I don’t trust him further than I could throw that cab you came in. I’ll tell you now, while Trevor is still within a hundred yards of here, that I think you ought to ring him tonight and apologise for what just happened.”
“Dad, he didn’t do anything wrong.”
“He ate Trevor alive, Hendrix. He ate him alive in front of us, and he enjoyed it, and he did it so prettily that you sat there with your schnitzel and just let him get away with it.”
“He got me out of a lunch I didn’t want to be at.”
“He inserted himself into a lunch you were owed.” Hunter’s hand was still on his elbow.
“A lunch I arranged for you, with a nice lad who came up from Reading for the specific purpose of meeting you. Instead Vidal made himself the centre of the table! Is that the arrangement you’ve signed up to?
Is there something going on with the two of you? ”
“Dad. He’s my principal. That’s all.”
“Rix.”
“Dad, that is all.”
Hunter looked at him flatly. “He’s not for you, Rix.
I’m saying it, even though I know you don’t want to hear it.
He’s too much. You got absolutely battered by what happened with Julian, and you don’t need to put yourself in another situation like that ever again.
You need a Trevor. You need a man who has a Lego collection and who’s going to come to Oxfordshire at Christmas to eat turkey and stuffing with our family.
But you’ve just sat in a restaurant and let your Trevor be walked off with by that man. ”
“Dad, please.”
“All right. All right, I’ve said my piece.
” Hunter turned his head to look back along the pavement to where Vidal had crouched on the kerb and was now talking to Mercè in a low consoling Catalan.
“But I don’t like him, Rix. I don’t like the way he was with that boy, and I don’t like the way he was with you.
I’ve been around long enough to know what happens when a man puts on the charm offensive like that. ”
He gave Beauchamp’s arm one final brief squeeze through the wool of his jacket, and stepped back to let him go back to Vidal and Mercè.