Chapter Twenty-Nine
The pygmy goat had been in the kitchen for twenty minutes, and nobody had yet shown any interest in removing it.
Beauchamp had counted, from his armchair in the corner of the main room, four discrete deposits of poo pellets across the flagstones: two near the Aga, one under the long oak table, one in the doorway to the boot room, where Marley’s eldest had nearly trodden in it before being scooped sideways by an aunt who hadn’t broken off her own conversation to do it.
The goat itself was now tucked against Lennon’s hip on the sofa opposite, chewing methodically on the trailing fringe of a throw Helen had given Hunter a decade ago.
The dog, a long-suffering lurcher called Patti, had taken herself behind the armchair and put her chin on Beauchamp’s foot in what he understood to be a gesture of solidarity.
“Major.” Hunter swept past the back of the armchair with one of Marley’s twins on his hip and a glass of something pink in his free hand. He kissed Beauchamp on the crown of the head without breaking stride, and carried on towards the kitchen. “Eat something, darling. You’re glowering.”
“I’m not glowering.”
“You’re glowering with your whole face, Hendrix.”
He went on into the kitchen, where he could be heard kissing a daughter-in-law on each cheek.
Beauchamp closed his eyes for a moment.
He had arrived at the barn at half past eleven on the strength of a phone call from Helen at nine, in which she had said, with the particular brightness she used to disguise news he wouldn’t enjoy, that everyone was descending and it would mean a great deal to your father if you came down, too.
Descending now felt like the operative word here. Descending into chaos. Descending into madness and into a state of affairs in which a goat was given free range of their father’s home.
He had got into the car on the grounds that he was three weeks into Princess Caroline’s diary and would, before long, be far too busy to be social. Better to go and see the family now, while he still could.
In the far corner, Jagger had set up a Bluetooth speaker on a stack of cookery books and was working through what sounded like one of his own demos.
Two of Nicks’ children were running the length of the room with what Beauchamp identified, on the second pass, as the carving knife from the Sunday roast. He sat forward an inch in the chair before he saw the elder of them hand it off to Joplin’s husband in the doorway, who took it without comment and carried it back to the kitchen.
“Right.” Joplin lowered herself into the armchair opposite his with a glass of red and a plate of cheese balanced on the arm. “Move your feet, Patti, that’s a good girl. Hendrix, darling, you look appalling.”
“Thank you.”
“When did you last sleep properly?”
“Five years ago.”
“You look like you’ve spent three weeks lying in the dark listening to the radiators.” She popped a piece of cheddar into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Dad says your secondment ended.”
“Dad needs to stop briefing his children on my postings.”
“He doesn’t brief us, darling. Dad weeps about you to anyone within earshot. You’re his tragic uncoupled baby, tamping down your grief by serving the big, bad Institution.”
Beauchamp took a measured sip of the coffee Helen had pressed on him an hour ago, which had gone cold against his palm.
“So.” Joplin settled in. “Are you seeing anybody?”
“Joplin.”
“I’m asking as your sister.”
“You’re interrogating me as a journalist.”
“I write a parenting column for the Telegraph, Hendrix, you’re hardly my usual subject. You’d have to go out and have some cock first.”
“The unfortunate biological reality of homosexual sex makes fatherhood by way of cock something of a non-starter for me, Joplin.”
“No. The shagging won’t put a baby in you. Thank god for that! You’d be a moody pregnant bitch. But it’s a start towards settling down with someone you can have a family with, Rix. Don’t be obtuse.”
He looked at her over the rim of his mug. Joplin had Hunter’s eyes, pale grey, and much too piercing, and she had been using them on him for intimidation purposes since they were children. She reached across and patted his knee twice.
“Go have another look at Trevor Greaves, Rix, if you don’t want to die alone in a grace-and-favour flat with just your cardigan and slipover collection for company.”
“Joplin, I swear to God.”
“Whoever it was that put that face on you, I hope they’re hurting too.”
“Nobody put this face on me. This is my perfectly normal face.”
“That’s your tragic face. I’ve known it since you were eight and Dad sent you to school with that haircut that looked like the clippers had got away from him.”
Across the room, his father had picked up the goat off the sofa and was holding it against his shoulder like a baby, swaying it, as he approached. “Jop, let your brother be. He’s had a tough go these last few months.”
The goat landed in Beauchamp’s lap before he had registered Hunter letting go of it. “There. Hold Bertie.”
“Dad — ”
“Hold Bertie the goat, Hendrix. Now, shove up.”
The goat bleated softly against his chest, an indignant little tremor that travelled up Beauchamp’s sternum and settled at the base of his throat.
It smelled of warm hay and something faintly milky underneath.
Its fur, when his fingers settled tentatively against its flank, was much softer than he had been braced for. He began to stroke it.
Hunter wedged himself sideways into the armchair beside him. The chair had not, in any meaningful sense, been built for two grown men. Beauchamp’s left shoulder was crushed against the wing. The goat was now braced between his thigh and his father’s.
“Dad. There’s a sofa.”
“There’s no room on the sofa. Len’s coat is on it.”
“Then move the coat.”
“I’m not moving Lennon’s coat, Hendrix, don’t be ridiculous.” Hunter looped an arm around his shoulders, drew him in tight against his velvet jacket, and pressed a kiss into his hair. “Have you eaten? You haven’t, have you? Helen, darling, has our boy eaten?”
His mother, from somewhere across the kitchen, said something Beauchamp couldn’t make out.
He was thirty-six, Beauchamp reminded himself.
He had been to Sandhurst, and on active tours.
He had been entrusted with the close protection of a royal foreign principal.
There was no need for him to be held against a velvet lapel by his father in front of his older sister.
The goat shifted in his lap and laid its bony head against the inside of his wrist.
“That man he was working for, Jop.” Hunter’s free hand was now resting on the crown of the goat’s head, scratching behind one of its ears. “A nightmare! He was an actual, certifiable nightmare. You know the type.”
“Type, Dad?”
“All over him, darling. Wouldn’t give the boy a moment to himself.
I had lunch with the pair of them at Fischer’s, and I’m telling you now, Jop, I have never in my life seen a young man so thoroughly hoovered up by his own employer.
It was like watching one of those films where the alien drops down on your spaceship and proceeds to eat everyone on board. ”
“Sounds dreadful.”
“It was dreadful. And the noise of him, Joplin — ”
“Sounds, in fact, rather familiar.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Dad. It’s just that you’re describing yourself, really.”
Hunter drew back an inch to give Joplin a wounded look across Beauchamp’s shoulder. “I am nothing of the sort.”
“You’re where Hendrix gets his coping mechanism for these ‘types’, Dad.”
“Joplin Morrow!”
“Dad, you’ve barely stopped to take a breath all day, you’re so busy taking centre stage with your audience. Hendrix has spent his entire life looking for the quiet corner. It’s hereditary. He’s allergic to people like you, and he was handed one to manage for his job.”
Beauchamp closed his eyes for a moment and let them argue across his shoulders. The goat had settled. Its breathing had slowed against his thigh into a long even rhythm, about to drop off into sleep.
“It was like watching Julian at work,” Hunter said, returning to his thesis as though the diversion hadn’t occurred.
“All flair and no off-switch. I mean it, Hendrix. Same shape, the pair of them. Theatrical. Permanently on. Centre of the room or the room doesn’t exist. You had Julian round your neck for eighteen years, and I could see it on you in real time at that lunch.
The boy hovering, the running commentary, the bloody dog he was lugging about! ”
Joplin scoffed into her wine glass. “Dad. The goat.”
“What about the goat?”
“You’re carrying it about like a baby!”
“That is entirely different, Joplin. Bertie is not just a prop to me. You should have seen the way he ordered for the poor Greaves boy. Did I tell you that, Joplin? Got him the calf’s liver. Trevor wanted the salad and Vidal — ”
“He’s nothing like Julian.” It came out flatter than he had meant it to, and louder.
The goat lifted its head off his thigh. Hunter stopped mid-sentence.
“Not really. Yes, the general shape of them is the same. They’re both theatrical and a bit much.
He doesn’t know how to walk into a room without rearranging the furniture so that everyone’s facing him. I’ll give you that.”
“Right.”
“But there’s nobody like Vidal.”
He hadn’t meant to say his name, but it sat there between them now, irrevocable.
“He smells of figs, Dad. It’s just him. His skin.
There’s something milky and sweet about it, and I think it’s why he’s so fucking obsessed with those candles.
He’s trying to live inside his own smell.
He has a sixty-pound bottle of olive oil that he genuinely believes is medicinal, and he’s not entirely wrong.
He told me once that the supermarket olive oil is pressed from olives that have given up on themselves, and I now can’t use Tesco’s Finest! ”
“Hendrix.”
“And he’s kind to everyone. Every single person.
The driver, the nurse at the vet’s, the woman at the deli with the bad knee.
He learns their children’s names. That’s the thing nobody who’s only seen him for twenty minutes understands.
He hands out his kindnesses in the small spaces of the day, when there’s nobody around to be impressed by it. ”
Joplin had stopped paying attention to her cheese plate by then.
“He’s the most fucking infuriating man I’ve ever worked for.
He won’t be told anything. But he just makes me…
” Beauchamp’s throat had thickened. He gave the goat one slow stroke from its shoulder to its haunch, and Hunter, beside him, was very quiet.
“He makes me want to take care of him, Dad. That’s the whole of it.
I can’t describe it any better than that. ”
Hunter’s arm tightened around Beauchamp’s shoulders. His other hand came up to cup the side of Beauchamp’s face, turned him against his lapel, and pressed a kiss against his temple. “Oh, dear boy. I’m sorry.”
Beauchamp didn’t know what his father was apologising for. Was it for goading him about Vidal? For the whole anti-Julian-thesis, and the way he’d let it run on long enough to crack his son open in the middle of a Sunday afternoon in front of their entire family?
Or was it pity over the fact that his son was thirty-six years old and stupidly, catastrophically gone on a man he was never going to have.
Bertie bleated once to register an objection to being squashed. Hunter went on holding Beauchamp anyway, and so he closed his eyes against his father’s velvet-clad shoulder, and let him.