He threw the tote bag at Barnaby’s chest. Barnaby caught it against his sternum, the weight of it heavier than expected, and glass clinked around inside.
“It is not a Murano glass dildo,” Vidal said. “I am sorry to disappoint.”
Perry appeared in the doorway holding an espresso cup, just in time to catch that statement. The colour left his face.
Vidal turned, seized Perry by both shoulders, and kissed him on each cheek with a firmness that rocked him backward on his heels. “Peregrine. You are taller. You are also very pale.” Vidal’s lip curled up. “You are so English, but you may overcome this by eating something with iron in it.” He took the espresso from Perry’s unresisting hand, drained it in one swallow, and handed it back. “I have brought you Cardona olives. From my grandmother’s estate. Delicious bitterness to draw out the bitterness of heartbreak.” He held up the Cava. “And this, of course. Because you cannot eat olives without wine. It would be uncivilised.”
Barnaby opened the tote. Inside was a jar of olives in dark brine, a wedge of Manchego wrapped in waxed paper, and a smaller jar of something amber and viscous that he suspected was quince paste.
Vidal dropped onto the sofa directly beside him, thigh to thigh, and then his arm came around Barnaby’s shoulders andpulled him sideways until Barnaby’s head was resting against his collarbone. Barnaby went rigid for a full second before his body remembered that this was Vidal, and that Vidal did not observe the same rules about personal space as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.
“Now you can be not fine, Bash. I have seen you at your worst. Do you remember that haircut you had when we were sixteen? A travesty. I vowed never to bring it up, but I feel I must do so now, to show you how much you have already overcome.”
Perry stood in the doorway watching them. His expression cycled through alarm, then confusion, finally settling on relief. He backed out of the room without a word and pulled the door shut behind him.
Vidal’s hand found Barnaby’s hair and his fingers carded through it slowly. Barnaby closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of bergamot that Vidal always carried with him.
“I watched the interview,” Vidal said. “He looked terrible.”
Barnaby said nothing.
“He will look even more terrible when I kick him in the balls.”
“Vidal, he’s a heavyweight boxer with a fifteen-million-pound fight in a fortnight.”
“Yes. But I am scrappy.”
Barnaby turned his face into Vidal’s shoulder and pressed closer, his arm coming across Vidal’s chest. Vidal held him without comment, without comedy, his hand warm and steady on the back of Barnaby’s head.
? ? ?
Vidalstayed. He didn’t ask for permission, and Barnaby didn’t offer it. The question of the duration of stay was never raised because Vidal operated on the assumption that he was welcome everywhere.
He was relentless. He filled the house with noise and movement and the persistent smell of whatever he was cooking on Mrs Harding’s hob, which always required ingredients that had to be sourced from three separate delicatessens in Chelsea, because Vidal didn’t recognise Waitrose as a true purveyor ofqualitycured meats.
On the first morning, he woke Barnaby at seven by opening his bedroom curtains and placing a cortado on the bedside table.
“Up,” he said. “We are walking Florence. The dog needs exercise and you need sunlight. You are developing the complexion of a root vegetable.”
“Florence doesn’t walk until eight.”
“Florence has been reassigned to the Mediterranean schedule. She will adapt. She is more flexible than you.”
Florence, who was already at the bedroom door with her lead in her mouth, had clearly been briefed.
They walked through Belgravia in the weak March light, Vidal in his camel coat and Barnaby in his peacoat, Florence pulling them south towards the river. Vidal talked. He talked about Cardona, which was undergoing what he described as a “constitutional crisis” involving a disputed olive grove and two elderly aunts who hadn’t spoken since 1997. He talked about a sculptor in Barcelona who’d been commissioned to produce a bust of his grandmother and had made her look, according to Vidal, “like a Labrador in a tiara.” He talked about a new restaurant in Mayfair that served cuttlefish ink risotto and had a sommelier who’d once made Vidal cry with a Barolo.
Barnaby listened. He didn’t have to contribute, because Vidal didn’t require contributions to his conversations. He required anaudience, and Barnaby’s receptive silence served that purpose. The stories washed over him in a warm, ceaseless current, and by the time they reached the Embankment he realised he hadn’t thought about the Tokyo Tumble Tally in forty minutes.
This, he understood, was the point.
On the second day, Vidal dragged him to Kensington Palace. James was in his sitting room with a red box open on the coffee table and Benton stationed at the door. He stood when Barnaby came in, crossed the room, and pulled him into a hug that lasted long enough for Barnaby to feel the deliberate steadiness of James’s breathing against his own chest.
James didn’t mention Lex or the spreadsheet. He talked about the King’s Trust schools programme, which was expanding into Manchester, and a state dinner he’d attended with the Norwegian Ambassador who’d spent forty minutes telling James about his fly-fishing technique with a passion that bordered on evangelical. He poured tea and cut the Victoria sponge himself, because Benton had been dismissed and the three of them were alone in the room for the first time since the crisis had begun.
Vidal sprawled across the sofa with his feet in James’s lap. “He is eating,” Vidal reported to James, gesturing at Barnaby with a slice of cake. “But not enough. I made him ropa vieja last night and he left half of it. He claims he was full. I believe he was being dramatic. Through self-deprivation, in the way of the puritanical English.”
“I was full.”
