Chapter Forty-One
Back then
Barnaby and Lex left for Mykonos immediately after the wedding, because Lex had wanted to be “somewhere with a pool and a vibe” and Barnaby had wanted to be “literally anywhere that isn’t Chatham House after five hundred and twenty people spent an evening trampling the south lawn.”
They’d compromised on a private villa on the eastern coast that cost the same per night as a mid-range London studio flat cost per month. Lex’s Instagram stories revealed it to have a pool shaped, somewhat improbably, like a guitar.
Barnaby had been sending James photographs of the sunsets with captions that read like wine-tasting notes.
Excellent layering tonight. Notes of tangerine and pink marshmallow.
Lex had been sending videos of himself belly-flopping into the guitar pool while Barnaby, in the background, held a paperback clear of the splash radius.
On the Thursday of the first week, Benton appeared in the study doorway at four o’clock with his leather folio tucked under one arm.
“Sir, shall I make arrangements to have Mr Whitlock brought up to Windsor this weekend? The weather’s looking rather promising, and I thought—”
“No need.”
Benton paused. The folio stayed where it was, held to his ribs.
“Very good, Sir,” he said. He withdrew, pulling the door closed behind him, and James turned back to his red box and the Cabinet Office memo on agricultural subsidies that he’d been trying to get through for the past twenty minutes.
The knock on his apartment door came just after eight, and James called out from the sofa for his visitor to enter, as only one person was allowed into his inner sanctum without any warning from security.
Caroline let herself in. She looked at James and the penguin documentary playing out on his television. She set her handbag on the hall table and pulled him into her arms.
James went rigid, but then he folded forward into his sister and let her hold him, his forehead pressed to her collarbone and his breathing gone ragged.
Caroline held him without speaking. Her hand moved through his hair in slow, steady passes. “I’m so sorry, Jams,” she said. “I had hoped he’d be the one.”
James sat up and scrubbed a hand down his face. The penguins were still at it on the television, huddling against a blizzard with a grim resolve that he found deeply relatable.
“I’m going to die alone and unloved,” he said with conviction.
On screen, a penguin waddled across the ice shelf towards its mate, and the narrator explained, in tones of hushed reverence, that emperor penguins bonded for life.
“I want to be a penguin, Caroline.” James watched the reunion on screen, misty-eyed.
“My life would be infinitely simpler. I’d find a mate.
We’d huddle. We’d take turns with the egg.
There’d be none of this.” He waved a hand at the general concept of his existence.
“No preparation programmes. No Cecil. Just two homosexual penguins, committed to the project of hatching their egg and bringing forth life.”
“You would so hate the cold, Jams.”
“I would. But I’d endure it, because I’d have a partner.
A proper, lifelong, constitutionally uncomplicated partner.
” He paused. “And then, knowing my luck, I’d lose them to a killer whale attack three weeks into the arrangement.
A freak orca. Completely unprecedented. The David Attenborough voiceover would describe it as a rare and tragic event, and the entire nation would weep, and I would stand on my ice floe, alone in the Antarctic forever. ”
“That’s a very specific alternate James scenario.”
“I’ve had time to think it through.” He sank lower into the sofa.
“And anyway, it’s a moot point. I could never really live as a penguin.
Penguins smell atrocious. Have you ever been to an enclosure filled with them?
They market it as a treat. A VIP experience.
You pay twenty-five pounds to stand in a room that smells like Billingsgate on a hot day while a zookeeper in fleece hands you a bucket of sprats and a penguin bites your finger.
It’s not a treat, Caroline. It’s an assault on the senses dressed up as enrichment and I hate that I’m made to do it every single time I visit an aquarium. ”
Caroline studied him. “You’re the father of the nation, James. And I have a vested interest in seeing you reproduce. I won’t let you die alone.” She smoothed his hair flat and withdrew her hand. “I need to make sure my children stay off the throne and have as normal a life as possible.”
James stared at the penguins. “Smart,” he muttered.
The weeks passed, and Tristan was excised from James’s life with a neatness that would have impressed a surgeon.
There was no formal announcement for James to make. The household had folded Tristan into James’s routine without being asked. It unpicked him now with the same efficiency.
Tristan’s preferred Nespresso pods were not restocked. Henford stopped laying a second place at the Saturday breakfast table, and the borrowed wellies that Tristan had worn on their walks through the grounds were returned to the boot room.
Nobody asked him what had happened.
James filled the days. The red box arrived at half past seven each morning, and he opened it, read the briefs, and signed whatever needed signing. He attended a housing-association tour in Brixton, a military-rehabilitation charity in Portsmouth, and a primary-school harvest assembly.
Barnaby and Lex came back from Mykonos on a Sunday afternoon, bronzed, loose-limbed, and still incapable of standing more than two feet apart for any sustained period.
They arrived at Kensington unannounced with a carrier bag from the airport and the glow of three weeks spent eating, swimming, and shagging.
“You look well,” James said, letting them in. Behind him, the penguins were back in their blizzard. He’d stopped counting how many times he’d watched the documentary since Caroline’s visit.
“He looks like a glazed ham,” Barnaby said, pointing at Lex.
The carrier bag turned out to contain souvenir t-shirts. Barnaby upended it onto the sofa.
“One for Vidal, which says I Put the Greek in Greek God. One for Beauchamp, which says Opa! above a picture of a donkey. One for Caroline, which is a perfectly tasteful watercolour of Santorini so obviously it was picked out by me, not Lex.”
“I wanted to get her one that said It’s All Greek to Me,” Lex said, “but Barns took it out of the basket.”
Barnaby threw two shirts at James in quick succession.
The first read Olive You So Much over a cartoon olive with heart-shaped eyes, and James caught it.
The second was enormous, a triple XL that unfolded to roughly the dimensions of a single bedsheet, printed with a photograph of the Parthenon and the words I’M BIG IN GREECE across the front.
“The big one’s for Tristan,” Barnaby said, already reaching for the next shirt. “If you’re anything like Lex, you’ll get off on seeing him absolutely swimming in it. Lex makes me wear his training tops to bed and they come down to my knees, which he finds a turn-on.”
“I like it when Barns smells like me.”
“You absolute caveman,” Barnaby scoffed, and then went up on his toes to kiss Lex’s neck.
James looked down at the shirt in his hands.
The Parthenon stared back at him in slightly pixelated glory.
Tristan would have worn it to bed with nothing underneath, the hem brushing his mid-thigh, the neckline slipping off one shoulder since the collar was designed for a man twice his width.
He would have padded into the kitchen in it on a Sunday morning to make his waffles, and James would have stood in the doorway watching him move around the kitchen in this ridiculous, hideous, perfect shirt that Barnaby, who had resisted Tristan and warned James off him, had bought in an airport gift shop now that he finally counted Tristan as one of their set.
“Jams,” Barnaby said quietly. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
James pressed the shirt to his chest with both hands, his face crumpling.
“That fucking bastard!” Barnaby’s voice dropped, stripped of every courtesy he’d been raised to deploy. “That calculating little shit.”
“Don’t, Bash,” James said.
“Don’t? He’s broken you, James. He’s taken the best thing that’s ever happened to him and tossed it in a skip, and you want me to be reasonable about it? No, James! I wish him the very worst that life can bring. Which for him would mean obscurity.”
Lex dropped onto the sofa beside James and draped a heavy arm around his shoulders, pulling him in. James let himself be gathered sideways into Lex’s warmth, still clutching the shirt.
“He was perfectly reasonable, Bash,” James said, once his voice would cooperate.
“He told me the truth. He has a career that he’s built up from nothing, and I was asking him to put it in a drawer and learn how to royal.
It would have been incredibly selfish of me to expect him to give all of that up. ”
“Bollocks,” Barnaby said crisply. “Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. He gave you up, James. He had a man who would have moved heaven and earth to make things work between you, and instead he chose his work, which involves looking cute and playing pretend, because he couldn’t stomach the thought of living within the bounds of an ancient historical structure that’s underpinned British life since 1066. ”
“He’s been offered an incredible role in an HBO limited series, actually. He’s playing Bobby Kennedy.”
“He’s off playing make-believe when he could have actually fucking become a historical figure with an impact!”
“It would never have worked out,” James continued. “But I’m glad for my time with him. I didn’t know what I was missing until he gave it to me, and now I can’t unknow it.”
Barnaby perched on the sofa arm, his hand finding the back of James’s neck, thumb working the tight muscle at the base of his skull. Lex still had him from the other side, and between the two of them James was penned in by more love than he could really stand.
“You’ll find someone, Jams,” Barnaby said with fierce certainty. “Someone who deserves you, and who’ll stay, and won’t run at the first sign of difficulty.”
James looked up at the two of them and gave them the smile they needed. “Of course I will,” he said and tried to sound like he believed them. On the television, the emperor penguins huddled tighter against the storm, exactly as Barnaby and Lex huddled around him.
They stayed like that. The penguins made it through their blizzard. The credits rolled, though nobody moved to find the remote.
Barnaby’s gaze dropped to James’s lap, where the I’M BIG IN GREECE shirt was still balled in both his fists.
He reached down, worked the fabric out of James’s grip and took it to the kitchen bin. The lid swung shut behind it with a tinny clang.