“Connor,mi amor, you’re just in time.” Vidal’s voice came back up into its usual register. “Beauchamp has been telling me, with enormous resistance, about his gap year and his first love.”
“I’ll happily tell you about mine, if it’ll give Beauchamp a bit of a break.” Connor started picking through the spread laid out before him. Vidal’s head swivelled so fast that Beauchamp thought, with a flicker of hope, that the conversation had been redirected for good.
“Connor. Yes.Please.Tell me about yours.”
“Wasn’t fancy. I never had a gap year. Didn’t go to uni. I lived in a tower block in Bow, twenty-three floors of it. It had a lift that worked maybe four days out of the seven. So the fire stairs…” Connor ate a chunk of cheese, a smile curving the corner of his mouth, “the fire stairs, gents, were something else.”
“Go on.” Vidal was leaning forward so far that his chin was nearly on Connor’s shoulder.
“My first was a girl called Tracey from the eleventh floor. We went up to the twenty-third landing, and when we got there, there was already a pair of lads from the nineteenth having a proper go at it against the fire hose cabinet, and a girl sat on the step above them eating a packet of McCoy’s and waiting her turn with one of ‘em.”
Beauchamp had put his fork down some sentences ago. He had the distinct sense, which had been developing steadily since Connor saidfire stairs, that this was about to turn into a story he would not be able to unhear.
“I am going to need,” Vidal said, lowering his voice, “considerably more detail.”
Connor laughed and reached for the bottle. “Right. Well. I’ll need a drink for this one, and so will you, because I’m onlygetting started. Major, pass us that cheese in the hamper, would you? There’s a good lad.”
Beauchamp passed the cheese, and resigned himself to learning something about the Bow Estate that he would carry to his grave.
Chapter Thirteen
Theevening had arrived by slow degrees, the light going blue at the edges of the drawing room windows without anyone quite noticing when it had started. Vidal was curled into one corner of the sofa with Mercè draped across his thigh, a glass of a fine red within reach on the side table, his head fuzzy with the rewarding sense that his day had gone exactly as he’d wanted it to.
Connor had been in Vidal’s flat since the picnic. He had simply followed them up and then failed to leave, which Vidal found charming. Even Beauchamp appeared to have resigned himself to the man’s presence somewhere around his third cup of coffee. Connor was sprawled in the armchair opposite now, looking entirely at home.
“So you’re telling me you’re an only child, raised by your mum on her own, and then you buggered off to Sandhurst where you spent a couple of years being taught how to stand like you’ve got a stick up your arse.”
“There was a little more to Sandhurst than the standing.”
“Such as?”
“The saluting.”
Connor let out a delighted laugh.
Beauchamp had been permitting himself to be drawn out in small, grudging increments all afternoon, which Vidal considered an immense victory. They had already established that Helen Beauchamp lived in a village in Hampshire with a garden she defended against slugs, and that at some point in the distant past, she had been a piano teacher.
“And your mum,” Connor pressed, “did she teach you piano, or did she just let you run off to the army and hope for the best when you couldn’t pick out Chopsticks?”
Beauchamp considered his glass. Vidal caught the hesitation and leaned in on the sofa. These were usually a prelude to something interesting being surrendered.
“I play a bit of guitar. Learned from my dad.”
Connor sat upright in the armchair so fast that his glass rocked on the arm. “You what?”
“I play the guitar,” Beauchamp repeated, as though the admission were being offered under duress. “Not well. My parents were never together, but my dad was about. Visited a lot. Took me with him when he travelled for work, and he taught me while I was on tour with him.”
“Beauchamp.” Vidal set his own glass down on the side table. “You are telling me, after a full day in which I have been obliged to drag every interesting detail out of you, that you are amusician. You have been sitting on this information like a miser on a bag of gold!”
“I’m not a musician, sir. I play a bit of guitar.”
“This,” Vidal said to Connor, “is what I have been living with for nearly two weeks. He plays the guitar. He does not sayI play the guitar, he saysI play a bit.”
Connor had already crossed the drawing room in three strides and let himself out of the front door without closing it behind him. Vidal heard his feet going down the stairs at a pace that suggested he was taking them two at a time.
“Where has he gone?” Beauchamp asked the empty doorway.
“I have not the faintest idea.”
