Chapter Forty-Five
Now
Brianna Sheffield, over her ten years as Tristan’s publicist, had developed a form of communication conducted entirely through touches to the inside of his elbow. It worked by varying the pressure of her grip, from move along to smile wider to for the love of God stop fidgeting with your cufflink.
Tristan winced at her death grip and stopped playing with his cufflink.
The Royal Festival Hall’s South Bank entrance had been transformed into a corridor of branded backdrops and camera positions that stretched the full length of the riverside terrace.
Tristan knew this game, and how to angle himself perfectly for the cameras.
It was instinct for him to keep his chin down, jaw forward, shoulders dropped and rolled back, his weight on the rear foot to lengthen his body.
He even knew which side of his face photographed better thanks to Brad, who’d consulted with a plastic surgeon about his facial symmetry metrics once he’d got past what Brad called ‘his ugly duckling late teen awks’ and his features set into their adult cast.
Brianna steered him through the solo positions and deposited him beside Birrell at the paired-interview station, where a Sky Arts presenter waited for them.
“You look like you’re about to shit yourself,” Birrell murmured, as he pulled Tristan in for a quick hug.
“Nah. If anything, I feel constipated.”
Birrell angled them both towards the Sky camera without a single break in his expression. “Just look at me when you can’t think of what to say, and I’ll cover.”
The interview lasted ninety seconds. The presenter asked about working together, and Birrell complimented Tristan’s instincts.
She asked about the nomination, and Tristan delivered the words he’d rehearsed in the hotel bathroom mirror: “I’m just grateful to be here, honestly, the whole team deserves this,” even as he recognised the intense hunger in him for a win.
Brianna extracted them with a touch to his elbow and they made it through three more interview stations before the press line funnelled them into the building’s main reception space, where the temperature immediately jumped twenty degrees and the noise trebled.
The lobby had been dressed for the ceremony in BAFTA’s signature black and gold. Champagne circulated on trays carried by staff between clusters of nominees, presenters, and BAFTA members.
Tristan took a champagne flute from a passing tray and held it without drinking. Brianna had vanished, and Birrell had been drawn into conversation with a woman in a teal trouser suit who Tristan recognised as a Channel 4 commissioning editor.
He scanned the room.
James was forty feet away, near the far wall, talking to a woman in a black cocktail dress who was laughing at whatever he’d just said.
Benton stood two paces behind his left shoulder.
James wore the navy velvet suit. The velvet caught the reception’s downlighting so that the nap shifted between midnight blue and near-black.
Tristan couldn’t take his eyes off him, even as James conspicuously ignored him.
The King was working the room. Each conversation lasted only a few minutes, but James fixed his attention fully on each person before he moved on to the next with a transitional phrase so smooth that nobody registered they’d been dismissed.
Benton tracked it all from his two-pace perimeter, occasionally leaning in to murmur something that adjusted James’s trajectory.
When James reached the Better Half contingent, Birrell handed his glass to a passing waiter and buttoned his jacket in one smooth motion.
“Mr Birrell.” James extended his hand, his smile warm. “Congratulations on the nomination. You gave a remarkable performance.”
Birrell shook his hand. “Thank you, Your Majesty. It’s an honour just to be here, genuinely.”
“You’ve done something quite extraordinary with the role. I understand the show’s had a significant impact on how domestic abuse is discussed in this country, which is the greatest outcome, isn’t it? That your art makes people look harder at their own lives.”
Birrell gave a modest answer about the writing team and the charity partnerships, and James listened with his eyes on Birrell, his body angled into the older man.
Then James turned to Tristan.
“Mr Whitlock.” James offered him his hand. “How are you this evening?”
Tristan took it, and bowed over it. “I’m very well, Your Majesty.”
“And you’ve also secured a well-deserved nomination.
” James paused in a beat so perfectly timed that Tristan braced for a crack about the apron, or some dry reference to Ben’s “good boy” routine.
“I’ve watched series one, and I have to say, the production identified, with rather impressive precision, the ceiling of what you could be asked to do. You were perfectly cast.”
It took a monumental amount of effort for Tristan to hold his expression still, recognising the barbed line from Barnaby, flipped around to a compliment.
“Thank you, Sir,” he managed. “That means a great deal.”
James gave him a gracious nod and turned to the next cluster of guests.
That was it. Forty-five seconds of interaction.
Birrell touched his arm. “We should head in. They’re seating our section.”
Tristan turned and followed him towards the auditorium doors, where a young woman with a headset and a seating chart directed them down the centre aisle to the third row.
The seats were narrow and upholstered in BAFTA black, arranged in a curve that angled towards the stage. Birrell settled in beside him.
Somewhere behind him and above, in whatever section they’d seated the president of BAFTA, James was taking his place too.
Tristan didn’t look to find him.
The ceremony passed quickly. Birrell was a warm, solid presence beside him, occasionally leaning over with a murmured aside about a presenter’s outfit or the relative deserving nature of a particular nominee, which kept Tristan tethered to his seat when his thoughts drifted upwards to the section he couldn’t look at.
Best Drama Series went to a BBC miniseries about a fishing village. Its lead actor wept so thoroughly during his acceptance speech that the orchestra had to play him off twice.
Then Kendra Ray stepped up to the microphone and said the words “Best Supporting Actor.” Birrell’s hand landed on his shoulder and squeezed.
Tristan’s hearing went thick, as though someone had pressed their palms flat over both his ears.
On the screen above him, a montage played clips from all five nominees, and when his own clip appeared, Ben in the doorway of the kitchen, flour on his jaw, his expression collapsing as Jay’s voice carried over to him from the other room, Tristan watched himself from a distance, unable to connect the man on screen with himself as he sat with his fingernails digging crescents into his own thigh.
The presenter opened the envelope. Tristan braced, already composing the expression he’d wear for the losers’ cutaway shot: warm, genuine. He’d practised the enthusiastic clap that would broadcast I’m happy for this guy, even as his heart broke inside him.
“Tristan Whitlock, Better Half.”
Birrell’s palm hit him between the shoulder blades hard enough to send him lurching forward in his seat, and Tristan was on his feet before he’d processed that his actual name had just been called out.
The auditorium was applauding, a sustained wall of sound that came from everywhere at once, and Tristan stood blinking at the stage.
Birrell was on his feet beside him, gripping his arm, saying something into his ear that Tristan couldn’t hear over the noise and the blood pounding away in his own head.
His body turned without any direction from him. Tristan looked up and behind him, scanning the rows at the back of the hall. There was James.
James was on his feet with the rest of the room, clapping at a measured pace that gave nothing away. Then James caught his eye, and tipped his chin towards the stage.
That was all. A single, precise movement that nobody in the hall would read as anything more than the president of BAFTA acknowledging a winner. But Tristan saw the way James’s jaw was set, and the jerky way his throat moved on a swallow.
Tristan turned back towards the stage and made himself walk.
His legs weren’t working properly. The aisle between the rows stretched ahead of him like something out of a dream where the corridor keeps extending, and he had to pick his way carefully past people reaching out to shake his hand, because the floor had developed a tilt that he was fairly certain was not an architectural feature of the building.
The stairs to the stage were three shallow steps, and he took them one at a time. Then the presenter was pressing the mask into his hands. It was heavier than it looked, the bronze cool against his palms.
The stage lights were bright enough that the audience beyond the first ten rows dissolved into a warm, indistinct glow of faces and movement, but Tristan found the dark shape of the velvet suit, and James sitting in the half-dark, smiling.
The applause was dying down, the room settling into an expectant quiet, and Tristan looked at the microphone, then back at James, as his hands tightened around the mask.
He wanted to say his name.
To stand at this podium, in front of every camera in the building, and say James, the way Tristan said it when they were alone in the dark of James’s bedroom at Windsor when the fire had burned out and there was nobody left in the world but the two of them.
He wanted to say: This man. This man right here.
He’s mine, and I’m his. I ran away from him once because I thought I could do better than playing a supporting role to him.
But I’m ready. I’m ready to be that now, because I know that’s not a diminished life.
I wouldn’t become a footnote to James’s story; I’d be his better half…
It was quiet now, everyone waiting for him to speak.
The phrase snagged in his chest. Better half. He was standing there holding an award for a show called Better Half, and the words were right there, loaded and ready, and James would immediately recognise their stupid game.
Tristan leaned into the microphone.
“Thank you. Thank you so much,” he said, somehow managing to keep his voice level.
“I want to thank my family, who put up with me during the series one shoot. Of course I also want to thank the BAFTA voters, and our incredible crew.” He was running on autopilot now, the industry muscle memory carrying him past the names of people to call out while the rest of his brain raced over what he actually wanted to say.
“And I have to thank my better half. The person who taught me that the bravest thing you can do on camera is stop acting.” His throat tightened as his gaze lifted past the lights to James’s seat.
“Who’s made me want to stop performing altogether and just be with him in the moment. ”
James had one finger pressed lightly to his lips. His expression hadn’t changed. He was still composed, the picture of a BAFTA president listening to a perfectly standard acceptance speech. But his finger rested against his mouth.
“Daniel Birrell,” Tristan finished, turning to find Birrell in his seat, “who spent a whole summer making me look like a far better actor than I actually am.”
Birrell blew him a kiss, and the room laughed. Tristan stepped down from the stage. Birrell pulled him into a hug tight enough to crack his ribs the moment he reached his seat.
“Proud of you, kid,” Birrell said into his ear, and clapped him twice on the back before releasing him.
Tristan didn’t look towards James again for the rest of the evening. His hands stayed steady on the mask.
James would be waiting for him at Kensington, and Tristan would talk to him properly then about the gap between what he’d wanted to say and what he’d let himself say.