Chapter Twenty-One
Now
The photograph came through at twenty past ten, while James was being briefed on the security cordon at a crisp factory in Leicester, and it arrived with no caption at all.
It was a shot of a paper coffee cup. A Pret a Manger flat white, framed close on a windowsill, the cardboard sleeve turned to show the logo, with a wedge of grey sky behind it.
James looked at it, and his whole morning rearranged itself around that paper cup.
Tristan was in the UK, announcing it with a photograph of the most aggressively mundane English object he could lay hands on within an hour of landing.
James turned his mobile face-down on his knee.
The morning belonged to the Crown, and the Crown was here to learn about the art of crisp-making.
He would learn about crisps with his entire heart.
Be the most engaged man ever to walk the Munchmore production floor, and he would not, on any account, spend the entire visit thinking about Tristan being in the country.
The managing director met him in the lobby. Sandy was a brisk woman who started reciting Munchmore’s yearly production figures before James had even finished shaking her hand.
“Four hundred million packets a year out of this site alone, Your Majesty. We could carpet the whole of Leicestershire twice over, if we were minded to.”
“I should hope you’re not minded to.”
“Only on the bad days.” She steered him past a wall of framed packets. “We’ve something rather exciting coming for the autumn, as it happens. A pickle-flavoured treat. Very tangy. We’ve high hopes for it.”
“I can hardly wait to taste it,” James said, with total sincerity. “I do love a good pickle.”
Beside him, Benton’s eyes widened a fraction, which from Benton was a klaxon to the fact that his pickle line hadn’t landed.
For a month, a blameless courgette had been doing the meme rounds online. And now here he stood, freshly outed, announcing his appetite for a pickle in front of the rota press.
Benton dropped his voice. “You are not, under any circumstances, to be photographed holding a pickle-shaped object. Nor are you to put your mouth anywhere near one. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, Sir.”
James turned and glared at him.
They put him in a hard hat, a hi-vis tabard, and a fine blue hairnet that a man named Derek assured him suited him enormously. Benton, kitted out identically at his shoulder, declined to confirm this claim.
They walked him along a steel gantry above a conveyor full of potatoes that ran to eleven tonnes an hour, sliced and washed and fried on their way to the seasoning drums at the far wall.
James asked the questions a visiting King was meant to ask.
At the end of the line a foil bag came off warm, fat with the new pickle-flavoured crisps, a cheerful cartoon gherkin printed up the front of it.
James took it and laid one hand flat over the gherkin before a single lens could get him and the vegetable into the same frame, then looked to Benton for a ruling.
Benton considered the bag, and the wider question of pickle-shaped objects. He gave one grave nod.
James ate three flatly non-phallic crisps on camera for Marina’s benefit, as Sandy and Derek led the enthusiastic applause of the Munchmore employees. Benton contributed two slow claps and declined a third.
All the while the mobile sat against his hip.
He held the line all the way to the car and through the goodbyes.
Then he folded himself into the back of the Bentley.
The door shut, the lock thunked home, and the instant the kerb began to slide past the window James gave up every good intention of the last sixty minutes and opened his messages.
He looked at the photograph of the coffee cup one more time, then pressed call.
Tristan picked up on the second ring.
“Guess where I’ve just been.” James rushed right in. “A crisp factory: Munchmore. It’s the largest crisp producer in the Midlands, making four hundred million packets a year. I wore a hairnet, and a man named Derek told me it suited me.”
“Did you do a joke?”
“I didn’t.”
“Okay. Next time someone hands you a crisp on camera, you need to make sure it’s a crinkle cut. You hold it up to the light, you take your time over it, and you say ‘this is ridged for my pleasure’ right as you eat it.”
“That’s filthy,” James said, grinning, “and much too risqué. I have to uphold the dignity of the Crown at all times, Tristan. I’m the personification of our great nation after all.”
Benton’s eyebrows had been climbing steadily up his forehead; at ‘Tristan’ they shot for his hairline. He positively radiated disapproval, so James looked away from him and watched a service station slide past instead.
He got it out before he lost his nerve. “Do you want to meet up?” he asked, aiming for casual. “If you’ve the time? I imagine there’s a queue of men beating your door down, what with you being a gay icon now, thanks to your show.”
“I’m not as big an icon as you, Jams. You’re coming out of this well, you know. Genuinely.”
“Am I?”
“You are. Everyone thinks you’re brave and tragic rather than just a sloppy drunk.”
James had spent six months wishing for a bigger reason than that for their failure. He’d longed for there to be a true villain to pin all the blame on, rather than having to confront the mundane truth that what had ended them was that Tristan liked his job, and the freedom of his non-royal life.
Benton sat rigid beside him, pretending with great commitment that his ears weren’t registering this conversation. It was a mere courtesy; there wasn’t a fact of James’s life Benton didn’t already hold.
“What would you have done, Tris?” James blurted out. “If you’d got the voicemail that night like you were meant to? Would that have changed things?”
The line went quiet. “Okay, James,” he said. “We clearly need to talk, and not over the phone.” He gave a street in Marylebone, then a flat number. “It’s a rental. Come round the back, where there’s a mews.”
“I’ll see you later, then.” James ended the call.
“Benton, I’d be terribly grateful if you could arrange some discreet transport for me later tonight. A smaller car. Nothing marked. And not a word to Caroline.”
“Yes, Sir,” Benton said. Then his entire face drew inward, puckering around the middle, as though someone had taken hold of a drawstring at the back of his skull and pulled.