He gave Beauchamp’s arm one final brief squeeze through the wool of his jacket, and stepped back to let him go back to Vidal and Mercè.
Chapter Twenty
Vidalhad put Young to work grating cheese at the far end of the table, and Beauchamp was being permitted, for once, to sit with his coffee and contribute nothing at all.
“Young, my darling, you must grate more firmly than that. You are handling it as though it were an egg. The manchego has feelings, but it is not made of glass.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And notsir, Young, not at this hour. You are in my kitchen and you are wearing your civilian jumper.Siris for later, when I am being a nuisance in the car.”
“Right you are, sir.”
Vidal let out a theatrical sigh and returned to the hob. Young, unbothered, kept grating at the pace he had started at. Beauchamp drank his coffee, watched the back of Vidal’s head, and didn’t hear a word of the domestic comedy unfolding a yard from his elbow.
He ate Trevor alive, Hendrix.
The sentence had been sitting in Beauchamp’s head for two days now alongside‘I don’t like him, Rix.’
That was the one that kept him up last night. His father likedeveryone. Hunter had adored Julian within ninety seconds of meeting him, and was now best friends with Dan Manly, a thirty-year-old Jehovah’s Witness who had turned up at the barn three years ago to flog his copies ofThe Watchtower. Hunter didn’t dislike people. It just wasn’t in his operating system.
And yet he’d flat out told him that he didn’t trust Vidal.Vidal, who had Hunter’s same galumphing puppy energy. If anyone in Beauchamp’s life was built to meet Vidal and vibrate in the same manically upbeat register, it was his father.
“Beauchamp.”
Vidal had turned from the hob with a wooden spoon held aloft, and Beauchamp understood, belatedly, that he had been asked a question.
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m miles away.”
“I can see that. I was asking whether you wanted tomatoes in yours, or whether you were going to continue your English insistence on eggs that are not on speaking terms with any other ingredient.”
“Tomatoes are fine, sir.”
“Tomatoes are fine, he says. Beauchamp, you will at the very least show them some respect. These are not tomatoes that have known the warmth of the Mediterranean sun. These are watery English tomatoes that have been ripened under a fluorescent strip in a Kentish polytunnel, but they are doing their best, and they deserve to be eaten by a man who understands what they are aspiring to. Young! What say you?”
“I’ll have whatever’s going, sir.”
“There!Young is a man who knows how to be fed.”
Vidal turned back to the hob. Young caught Beauchamp’s eye over the grater and returned to the cheese without comment.
The thing was, Hunter had not been wrong. Vidal had walked into that restaurant and made himself the centre of their table’s conversation. Vidalhadeaten Trevor alive and had done all of it in front of Hunter.
But I like him, Dad.
He had almost said it then, in the heat of the moment with Hunter. The words arrived without warning, but he’d managed to close his mouth around them. Across the kitchen, Vidal was watching him.
? ? ?
Mercèmade it to the corner of Mount Street before her legs gave out.
She didn’t collapse so much as decelerate, her tiny claws clicking slower and slower against the pavement until she came to a complete stop beside a bollard and sat down. Her tongue, which was enormous relative to the rest of her, hung sideways out of her mouth. She looked up at Beauchamp expectantly. They’d formed a system of glances now.
He scooped her off the pavement before Vidal could begin the performance of distress that was already gathering behind his eyes. “She’s fine, sir. Just done for the day.”
“She is notdone, Beauchamp, she isconserving herself. Mercè is a Mediterranean dog. She is bred for short, purposeful excursions followed by extended periods of horizontal recovery. She is not built for your English marches across the tundra.”
“We’ve done one block, sir, inMayfair. There’s no permafrost in sight.”
