Chapter Twenty-Six
Adelina smelled, Vidal had decided within ninety seconds of first holding her, of warm bread and clean cotton and something else he could not name but recognised at the cellular level as a Montcadan signature.
He had not put her down for the better part of an hour, and Maria had stopped attempting to retrieve her by the third refusal.
“Pare. Pare, look at her. Look at this nose. Tell me she does not have Avi Joan’s nose.”
His father, on the sofa beside him in the cardigan he only ever wore in private, leaned over and pressed his lips against the top of Adelina’s head. He had done this for three sons, and now he was being permitted to do it for the next generation.
“She has your nose, Vidal.”
“Lies. Slander. I have a Roman nose, Pare, an imperial nose. This child has the snub little Catalan nose of our forefathers, and I will not have her insulted.”
Across the drawing room, Fidel was lying on the rug with Mercè draped across his chest, scratching her behind the ear.
Mercè had the glassy expression of a dog who had been passed between trusted hands all morning and was no longer sure which of them was her primary attachment.
Jordi, Vidal’s eldest brother, was at the kitchen counter opening a pomegranate with a small sharp knife while his partner Aina supervised.
His mother appeared at his elbow with a cup of camomile tea he had not asked for and would not be permitted to refuse. “Drink, my darling. The doctor said hydration is important while you’re recovering.”
“Mama, I am holding the baby.”
“Then I shall hold the cup, and you shall drink.”
She held the cup to his mouth as though he were five, and he drank because there was nothing else to be done about it.
Adelina, sensing a window of inattention, turned her face into the front of his shirt and made a wet noise that meant either she was about to fall asleep or be sick on the linen.
He could not, even now, fully tell the two states apart.
He looked up.
Beauchamp was at the window with his back to the room, reading something off his mobile.
Captain Wallis was beside him in a navy suit, taller than Beauchamp by an inch and broader through the shoulders, his hair cropped to regimental specification.
They were going through what Vidal understood to be the Thursday rota: the routes to the Connaught, the timings of the airport run for their older cousins based in Italy who would be arriving on Saturday, the contingency arrangements should Pare wish to attend Mass at the Spanish chapel on Sunday morning.
Beauchamp had been doing exactly this since the family had arrived.
He had positioned himself in the corner of every room they were in, a silent fixture against the wallpaper, and he had handed Wallis the keys to Vidal’s life in increments so neat that Vidal could not, if pressed, point to a single moment when the transfer had occurred.
“Vidal.” Pare’s hand had come to rest on his good shoulder. He turned his head. “You are squeezing my granddaughter. You are holding her with the firmness of a man who is thinking about something he does not wish to think about, and Adelina is becoming unhappy.”
Vidal eased his arm until Adelina let out a contented snuffle and went still against him.
“Where is your mind, my boy?”
“Nowhere, Pare. I am here. I am with all of you.”
His father didn’t say anything to that. He simply kept his hand on Vidal’s shoulder even as he turned his attention back to Adelina.
? ? ?
Connor came up at half past six on Wednesday with a bottle of Spanish-origin wine under one arm.
He had been told he was welcome three separate times that day and was clearly still not convinced, based on his rolled-in shoulders.
Vidal met him at the door in stockinged feet and walked him into the drawing room by the elbow before he had finished taking off his coat.
“Pare. Mama. This is Connor Evans, who lives downstairs and who has been absurdly kind to me since I arrived in this country. Connor, my father, my mother, my brothers Jordi and Fidel, and Maria, who is the saint who married Fidel, and Aina, Jordi’s partner.”
Mama rose from the armchair, took both of Connor’s hands in hers, and looked him over before she leaned in and kissed him on each cheek.
“Mr Evans. Vidal has spoken about you a great deal.”
“Has he?”
“Constantly. And I shall say this in your favour, Mr Evans — he has not, on this occasion, exaggerated. He told me you were very handsome, and I had braced myself for some disappointment, because Vidal will describe a perfectly ordinary man as though he were Michelangelo’s David. But you are, in fact, very handsome.”
“Mama! Your husband is in the room!”
“I am paying the man a compliment, Vidal.”
Pare, on the sofa, didn’t get up. He held out his hand and waited for Connor to come to him, the way Pare had received people his entire life, and Connor, who understood what was being offered, crossed the room in four steps and took it.
“Sir.”
“Sit, Mr Evans. Have a drink.”
It was Jordi who absorbed Connor into the proceedings.
By the time Maria had come back from settling Adelina, Connor was on the rug with Fidel, a bottle of Rioja open between them, being walked through the familial offences of a cousin called Quim who had once tried to sell Jordi a horse with three good legs.
Connor had taken his jacket off and rolled his sleeves.
Mercè had migrated from Fidel’s chest onto Connor’s thigh and was being scratched behind her preferred ear.
“Connor.” Fidel had his guitar out, the Spanish one he travelled with at all times. “You will learn El cant dels ocells.”
“I will what?”
“It is a Catalan song. A carol, technically, but we sing it for everything. Births, deaths, weddings, hangovers. You will learn it tonight because you are sitting in a room with three Montcada brothers and a bottle of wine, and there is no escape from this.”
“Mate, I can’t sing.”
“Neither can Fidel,” said Jordi, “and yet he persists.”
Fidel made an obscene gesture at his older brother without looking up from the strings, and began to play. The melody was the one Vidal had grown up on, the one Avi Joan had hummed over the kitchen sink in Cardona when Vidal was small enough to sit on the counter and watch him peel oranges.
He sang the first line. His voice came out steadier than he had expected.
En veure despuntar el major lluminar…
Fidel came in underneath him on a low harmony.
Jordi, who could not carry a tune, sang anyway, loud and cheerful, refusing on principle to be embarrassed in his mother’s presence.
Maria joined from the doorway with a tea towel over her shoulder.
Even Pare, who did not sing in front of company, hummed it under his breath from the sofa.
Connor sat on the rug with Mercè across his thigh and listened. By the second verse, he was mouthing the syllables a beat behind Fidel. By the chorus, he had got the shape of it, and his voice came in soft and surprisingly true on the long held notes.
Vidal watched him across the rug. Connor was singing his grandfather’s carol with Mercè asleep on his thigh, and Vidal had to look down at his sling until he had got himself in hand.
“Good man.” Fidel reached over and clapped Connor on the knee at the end of the verse. “We shall make a Catalan of you yet.”
“What an honour.”
“Wait until we make you eat the snails.”
Beauchamp was at the window the entire time. Vidal saw him once, when he turned his head to take a glass of wine off Mama, framed against the curtain with Wallis’s binder still under his arm. Beauchamp was watching Connor sing. His face was perfectly composed.
Vidal turned back to his brothers and did not look that way again.
? ? ?
The days passed in the particular blur of a family-filled household.
Maria reorganised the kitchen on Wednesday.
Jordi commandeered the second sofa as his bed and refused all offers of the Connaught on the grounds that he had not seen his little brother in eleven months and would not be put up the road like a visiting solicitor.
Pare took Mercè into the garden in the afternoons and sat with her on his knee on the wrought-iron chair.
Beauchamp was in the flat from seven until nine, and again from one until three, and then from six until whenever the family went to bed. He blended into the corners. He kept Wallis at his side and spoke to him in undertones at the threshold of every room.
Vidal registered all of this, even as he took care not to look at him directly. He could not look at him. Each time he tried, the day went sideways, and there was his baby niece on the rug and his father on the sofa to lavish his attention on.
He talked to Pare about Geneva, and to Fidel about Adelina’s favoured lullabies. He held the baby and lit his Figuier candle every evening at six.
On Friday evening, Beauchamp came into the drawing room at the end of the day with his coat folded over his arm.
“Your Serene High — ”
The slip went through the room like a dropped glass. Pare, on the sofa, did not look up from the newspaper. Mama, in the armchair, took a quiet sip of her tea. Fidel, on the rug with Mercè, busied himself with the dog’s ear.
“Mr Montcada.” Beauchamp’s voice came back down clean. “I’ll be off for the evening. Captain Wallis will be back at six tomorrow morning to take over the day shift. I’ll be in at seven for the final handover. Anything you need before I go?”
Vidal looked up at him from the sofa. “No, thank you, Major.”
“Sir.”
Beauchamp gave a nod to Pare, another to Mama, and let himself out of the flat. The latch clicked behind him with the soft decisive sound that Vidal had heard him make a hundred times now.
Pare turned a page of the newspaper.
“He is a very good man, that one.”
“Yes, Pare.”
“You are fortunate to have had him.”
“Yes, Pare.”
His father did not look up. Vidal kept his eyes on Adelina, who had fallen asleep against Maria’s shoulder across the room.
? ? ?
The flat emptied by stages. Jordi took himself off to the Connaught on Friday night after a long argument that he eventually lost to Pare.
Maria went up to the spare room with Adelina at half past nine.
Fidel followed her at ten, with Mercè under his arm, on the basis that the dog had grown attached and could not be deprived of her overnight rights.
Mama and Pare retired to Vidal’s bedroom at a quarter past eleven, after Mama had pressed three separate kisses to the top of Vidal’s head and Pare had held him at the door without speaking.
The flat went quiet.
Vidal sat on the sofa in the lamp-lit drawing room and listened to the silence settle. The fig candle was burning down on the side table. His sling itched at the elbow and he could hear the occasional soft creak of the floor as someone walked the length of the spare room.
He thought about going down to Connor.
It would be a kindness to himself. Connor would let him in and lead him through to the kitchen to pour him something he should not be drinking on the painkillers. Connor was very good at not asking questions.
After a long time, he got up off the sofa and went down the corridor in his bare feet, past his own bedroom door into the spare bathroom that had been Beauchamp’s domain, though there was nothing of him left in there.
Beauchamp’s shaving things were gone from the shelf above the basin. His green toothbrush wasn’t in the cup, and the citrusy smell of the body wash Beauchamp favoured had been replaced by the scent of Fidel’s toiletries.
Mercè came down the corridor, summoned by some private signal of Vidal’s unhappiness, and pressed her nose against his ankle. He bent and picked her up with his good arm. He held her against his face, her warm bald flank against his cheek, and felt the heat arrive behind his eyes.