“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 watchingJulianat 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. Permanentlyon. 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 withoutrearranging 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 justhim. 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.
Chapter Thirty
Thebones had been in the pot for four hours, and Vidal was using a slotted spoon to skim a fine grey scum off the surface of the broth. He had his mobile propped against the salt cellar, blaring out on speakerphone, when his father said the wordKnightsbridgeagain for the third time.
“Pare. I am skimming the broth.”
“You can skim and listen to me at the same time, Vidal. You have always been very gifted at doing two things at once. It is one of your better qualities.”
“It is my best quality, and I am wasting it on a conversation I have already had with you twice this week.”
Carlos’s voice came down the line, muffled by distance. “The Knightsbridge tenant has gone, my boy. The flat is empty. It is a perfectly good flat, three bedrooms, a porter on the door, and the porter is very good with dogs. Mercè will adore him. He has a Schnauzer.”
“Mercè does not adore Schnauzers, Pare. She finds them too old looking, with their whiskers.”
Vidal laid the spoon across the rim of the pot and turned the heat down a notch. The kitchen smelled of celery and the sweetness of marrow. He was making this broth for Connor on the grounds that Connor had been sniffling into a tissue for the better part of three days now and refusing, with great working-class stoicism, to admit that he had a cold.
“Pare, I am not moving out of Barnaby’s flat.”
“Perhaps he would like it back, my boy. Perhaps you are encroaching on his kindness…”
“I’m paying him market rate rent, Pare. And Barnaby does not give a fuck about this flat. He has Lex now, and he is occupied with the very important business of being made happy in his own bedroom for the first time in his adult life.”
