Chapter Thirty-Three
Princess Caroline’s offices ran on the principle that no one in them needed to be told twice what to do, and Beauchamp knew one week in that it was the most beautifully ordered environment he’d ever worked in.
He had a corner desk by the second window, looking out across the garden to the wall that separated Clarence House from the Mall.
He had a fountain pen, a bottle of emerald green ink, and a printer two rooms over that would, when fed the right command, produce the next day’s diary items on the heavy cream stock the Household used for the documents that crossed the princess’s desk.
He fed the diary command into the system at half past three and walked the long corridor to the printer at a pace that allowed him to nod to two passing equerries and exchange a brief word with the head of housekeeping about a leak in one of the upstairs bathrooms. The diary printout was waiting for him in the tray when he arrived, four pages of it, printed single-sided and stapled in the top left corner.
He carried it back to his desk, sat down and began to review it.
The first pass was for timings.
Tomorrow’s diary opened with a nine o’clock briefing on the Princess Royal’s Trust schools programme and ran through to a six-thirty drinks reception at the Royal College of Music.
Beauchamp went down the page with the nib of his pen, ticking each entry in the margin once he had cross-referenced it against the master diary, the security log, and the transport schedule.
A car movement at eleven-fifteen had been provisionally pencilled for the wrong vehicle; he marked the correction in the margin with an arrow and the registration of the Range Rover that should be doing the run instead.
A lunch at the Garrick had been set for half past twelve when the host had asked for one o’clock; he flagged it for the diary secretary to ring through and confirm.
A photo call at three on the steps of Somerset House had been allocated five minutes, which was four minutes more than any photo call required and would leave the Princess standing in the cold; he reduced it to two.
He worked through the page in twenty minutes, and by the time he’d finished the timings pass, the press secretary had brought him a cup of tea without breaking off her phone call.
He drank it, set the cup down on the corner of the blotter, and started the second pass.
This was the one he enjoyed.
The second pass was for the small human details that the diary itself did not capture and that Princess Caroline, in his first week, had taken him aside to explain were the difference between a competent Assistant Private Secretary and an indispensable one.
Beauchamp annotated all of it in emerald green ink, in the right-hand margin.
Mrs Whitcombe at the Trust briefing: daughter Cordelia married 14 March, ask about honeymoon (Sicily).
Sir Anthony Hardwick at the Garrick: recently widowed (Margaret, October), do not ask after wife.
Maestro Lefèvre at the Royal College drinks: bad knee, please ensure chair near piano.
Lady Clifford at the photo call: recently bereaved (whippet, Manolo, twelve years old), spaniels in back office.
Princess Caroline read the annotated version with her morning coffee. She had not, in three weeks, said a word about the green ink, and was yet to miss a single one of the details he had flagged.
He capped the fountain pen and set the annotated diary in the tray for the diary secretary to collect. She would photocopy it and put the original on the Princess’s desk for the morning.
He had tried this once with Vidal.
Eight days into the posting, with the man’s calendar in front of him and a charity gala at the V she has views.” He had looked up. “Beauchamp, why on earth would I raise the subject of foxhunting with the widow of a banker at a charity gala?”
“You raised it with the Norwegian ambassador on Tuesday, sir.”
“That was different. The Norwegian ambassador had brought it up himself in the context of Sami reindeer husbandry, and we had a very stimulating discussion about the ethics of pursuit-based hunting, which I won.”
“Yes, sir. Hence the note.”
Vidal had laughed at that, with his head thrown back, and patted Beauchamp on the shoulder as he came round to sit on the table itself, with one bare foot on the chair beside Beauchamp’s thigh.
“Beauchamp. I am going to spare you a great deal of work over the coming months. Put the pen down and look at me.”
Beauchamp had looked at him.
“I do not need briefing notes. Not for tomorrow, not for the Italian ambassador’s tea on Thursday, not for the lunch at the Spanish embassy whenever it lands.
I read people, Beauchamp. I read them in an instant.
It is a thing my Catalan grandmother taught me when I was very small, sitting on a stool beside her at the market in Cardona while she haggled over peppers.
She would say to me, Vidal, my love, look at the woman selling the peppers, and tell me before she has spoken three words what kind of week she has had.
And I would. Perfectly.” He had bitten into the peach.
“It is a parlour trick I have refined over twenty-six years, and I would no more outsource it to you than I would outsource the choosing of my own shirts.”
The words, taken by themselves, ought to have been a slap.
He had spent the better part of an hour on those notes.
But Vidal was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen table in a silk robe, eating a peach, and the only thing in his voice was the warm conspiratorial delight of a man letting a friend in on a secret. There was no way to be wounded by it.
“Take you, for example.”
“Sir, I don’t think — ”
“You cook the same four meals on rotation. The chicken, the chilli, the pasta, and on Sundays a roast that you eat across three days. I know this because I have looked at the lunches that you bring and place in the fridge, and I see a man who has decided that food is fuel alone rather than a source of joy. This is not natural to you, Beauchamp. This is a position you have arrived at because someone in your life was so chaotic about meals that you have built a fortress against it. A parent, I should think. Yes? Mm. Yes.”
Beauchamp had not answered.
“You are aggressively responsible. You have the bearing of a man who became the adult in the household at an age at which he should have been being a child. You eat at consistent times. You arrive at consistent times. You have a favourite mug, Beauchamp, do not deny it, I have seen it is the green one with the chip on the rim, and you wash it by hand because the dishwasher is too rough on the glaze. You wear the same brand of sock every day, and you always carry a handkerchief.”
He hadn’t told Vidal a single one of those things. The man had clocked a lot about him over the last eight days.
“I do not need your briefing notes, my love. You may keep them in your file for your own reassurance, but I shall not be reading them. Now. Make us our coffee, and tell me what you think of the green tie or the navy.”
Beauchamp had made their coffees. He had landed on the navy tie. Then he’d folded the three pages of briefing notes in half and put them in the rubbish.
Beauchamp shook his head once, briskly, at the window above the garden wall. He capped the green ink, slid it back into its slot in the desk tidy, and turned to the next item in the tray.
The Princess had a letter to sign for the Royal College of Music that wanted his eye on the wording. He pulled it towards him and got on with the afternoon.