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&A on the Friday, he had sat at the kitchen table in Mayfair with a fresh notebook and started annotating the guest list.
He was meticulous in noting that the Lebanese ambassador’s wife had recently lost her father, and the Director of the V&A had a daughter at Cambridge who had just won a prize for a thesis on Iberian metalwork that Vidal, with his anthropology background, ought to be able to make hay with.
He’d worked at it for the better part of an hour, writing up three pages of green ink. He had been pleased with it, and had offered it to Vidal as soon as he’d made his appearance in the kitchen. “Here are the briefing notes for tomorrow evening, sir. I’ve noted down information on the trustees, the curator, theprincipal donors. Listed some topics to raise versus topics to avoid.”
“Mm.”
Vidal had taken a bite of a peach. He had walked the length of the kitchen with the page held at arm’s length, reading aloud in the deliberately flattened voice he used when he was about to take something apart with great affection.
“Mrs Halloway. Husband Charles, lung cancer, two thousand and twenty-one. Do not raise the subject of foxhunting; 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.”
