“You were performing fullness to avoid a second helping, which is not the same thing. James, tell him.”
“Barnaby, you need to eat more.”
“This is a constitutional overstep. Much like your ‘get fucked’ command.”
James winced.
They sat together until the grey afternoon light faded from the windows and Benton reappeared to remind James that the Home Secretary was arriving at six. James walked them to the door himself, which he never did, and his hand settled on the back of Barnaby’s neck in the corridor and stayed there until they reached the entrance.
“Ring me,” James said. “Whenever. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning, or if I’m with the PM. Ring me through Benton.”
Barnaby nodded. His throat was too tight to speak.
The days blurred together. Vidal cooked. They walked Florence twice a day. They went to Kensington Palace three more times, and on one of those visits, James produced a box of squid ink crisps that he’d had Benton source from a Japanese import shop in Soho. Barnaby looked at them, and his vision went hot. He excused himself to the lavatory where he pressed his back against the door and breathed until he could rejoin the room with his face rearranged. By the time he’d returned, the crisps had been secreted away.
In the evenings, Vidal opened wine and they sat in the Chester Square sitting room while Perry drifted in and out, emboldened by Vidal’s presence to be in the same room as his brother’s grief. Vidal told stories about people they’d known at school. He described, in excruciating detail, the time James had tried to sneak out of Eton for a Radiohead concert and been caught by the housemaster wearing a disguise that consisted entirely of a flat cap and a false moustache he’d bought from a joke shop in Windsor.
“He looked like a child’s drawing of a Victorian bank robber,” Vidal said. “The moustache was ginger. He did not understand why this was a problem, and yet your nation trusts him to be head of state.”
Barnaby laughed. The sound surprised him, with its roughness, and Perry’s head came up from his laptop across the room. The look of relief on his brother’s face hurt to see.
On the fourth night, when the wine was finished and Perry had gone to bed, Vidal turned the television off and sat facing Barnaby on the sofa with his legs folded beneath him.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” he said. “But I need to know if you are angry or if you are sad, because they require different interventions, and I have been deploying the anger protocol for four days. I am beginning to suspect I have the diagnosis wrong.”
Barnaby stared at his empty glass. The dregs of the Rioja left a dark crescent at the bottom. “I’m both.”
“Which one is winning?”
The silence held. Florence sighed in her basket by the radiator.
“The sadness,” Barnaby said. He put the glass down. “The angry bit is easy. I know what he did, and I know why it was wrong. I know I’ve made the right decision, and all of that sits in a neat row that I can look at it without flinching. The sad bit is everything else. It’s the parts that weren’t the game. The parts that were real.” He stopped. His jaw ached from clenching. “Our afternoons walking through the parklands at Chatham House. The way lying next to him made me feel…” His voice dropped. “Those moments weren’t gameplay. I know they weren’t. But I want to make myself think they’re not real…because if they are…then the thing I’ve lost is bigger than the thing I’m angry about.”
Vidal’s hand found his knee. He didn’t squeeze. He just rested it there.
“You know what James would say,” Vidal said.
“James would say something wise and appropriate.”
“James would say that two things can be true at once. That Lex can have done a terrible thing and also loved you.” Vidalpaused. “I, on the other hand, would say that if he comes near you before you are ready, I will hit him over the head with a wine bottle.”
? ? ?
Aweek before the Morozov fight, on a Tuesday afternoon that smelled of the hyacinths Mrs Harding had put on the hallway table, the doorbell rang, and Barnaby’s body knew — before his brain caught up — who exactly this visitor would be.
Florence’s head came up. Her ears swivelled forward, and her tail began a low, fast wag that thumped against the rug. She knew, too. She was already on her feet and moving toward the hallway. The enthusiasm of her response told Barnaby everything, because Florence had a hierarchy of greetings calibrated to her affection for each visitor, and this particular velocity of tail wagging was reserved for exactly one person outside of Barnaby himself.
Vidal was already moving towards the door. He’d been meeting every Deliveroo order himself since his arrival, delighted by the anonymity of being a rich nobody in London.
Then Lex’s voice filled the hallway. “Afternoon. Is Barnaby in?”
Barnaby’s mug hit the coffee table, but he managed to keep his posture perfect. The fact that his ribs had contracted around his lungs was a private matter between himself and his skeleton. He heard Vidal’s voice, low and rapid, and then the front door closed.
Florence stood in the doorway of the sitting room, her tail still going, her liquid eyes moving between Barnaby and the front hall. She whined, a single questioning note.
He couldn’t hear the words Vidal was having with Lex. The door and the brick wall between the sitting room and the pavement reduced their voices to low murmurs. He could hear the rhythm of the exchange, though; Vidal, true to character, was doing most of the talking.
Barnaby got to his feet without making a conscious decision about it.
