Vidal sat down beside him. He folded his legs beneath him on the cold stone step, arranged his blazer over his knees, and waited.
“What keeps me up,” Lex said, “is that I can’t walk through that door. I can’t go in there, and put my arms round him, and say I’m sorry. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Everything else, the money, the sponsors, the career…I built all of that once andI can build it again, or I won’t, and either way I’ll survive. But I can’t fix this from out here.” His jaw worked. “I can’t fix it if he won’t let me in the room.”
Florence whined behind the door. Lex’s chest tightened.
“I deleted that photo,” he said. “I sent it, and I looked at it in the chat, and I deleted it, because I didn’t want them to see him like that. I wanted to keep what happened in Tokyoours.” He stopped. The word sat in the afternoon air, small and true. “It was ours. It was messy and it didn’t work. We tried so many times, and it didn’t really work. I know he thinks I went back to the lads and told them about it, but I didn’t. I never told them anything about what actually happened between us in that room. Because it mattered. Even when it was going wrong, it mattered.”
Vidal was watching him. The judicial sharpness had left his eyes.
“Getting him to trust me,” Lex said. His voice cracked on the word, and he let it crack, because he’d spent two weeks holding himself together, and he was tired. “Getting Barnaby to open up. To let me touch him. To stop bracing every time I got close…” He pressed his knuckles against his forehead. “That was the best thing I’ve ever done in my whole life. Better than the gold medals. As good as when I got to buy my mum her house. Better than any of it.” His hands dropped. “And I know that sounds mental, coming from someone who’s won world titles and fought at the Garden. But none of that changed me. Barnaby changed me.”
Lex looked at Vidal. “I don’t want to lose that. Please.” His throat was raw. “Can I see him, please? I’m flying off to Vegas tonight.”
Vidal looked at him for a long time. Then he reached over and patted Lex on the cheek. Three sharp taps, firm enough to sting, just short of a slap. A touch that saidI could hityou properly, and we both know I won’t, but I want you to remember that the option existsand thatI am best friends with the King of this land, and am a royal myself.
“No, big man.” Vidal’s voice was quiet, and final. “You will not see him today.”
Lex’s jaw tightened. “Vidal—”
“Listen to me.” Vidal held up one finger. “I am going to do you an extremely generous favour, and you are going to sit there and receive it, because you are not in a position to refuse favours from the people who love him.” He lowered the finger. “I am keeping you away from Barnaby. Not because I am cruel, although I can be, ask anyone. I am doing this because what Barnaby needs right now is to miss you. He needs to feel your absence like a draught under a door. He needs to lie in that bed upstairs, and he needs to notice that the house is too quiet, and that Florence keeps going to the front door and sniffing under it.” Vidal’s hand settled on Lex’s shoulder. “You must let him stew.”
Lex said nothing. His thumbnail was digging into the scabbed knuckle on his right hand hard enough to reopen the wound. Vidal smacked his hand away with a concerned cluck of his tongue.
“You are a big man,” Vidal continued, “with, I am told, a big cock.”
Lex laughed. It came out broken.
“This is not a joke. I have it on excellent authority. Barnaby is not forthcoming about these matters, as you know, but there are things one can deduce from context, and also from the fact that he walked like a man who had been riding a particularly spirited horse for several days after your weekend at Chatham House. He told me this himself.” Vidal waved a hand. “You must trust that this asset, and perhaps your personality, will be sufficient to draw him out. Eventually. When he is ready. No grand gesturesare required today. Barnaby does not like a fuss. There will be no scene where you kick down the door to get to him.” He jerked his chin towards the entrance of number twelve Chester Square. “That door is solid English oak, reinforced with a Banham deadlock. You will break your shoulder before you break it, and then you will not be able to fight the Russian, and Barnaby will be furious, because he has opinions about that fight, even if he will not admit to them.”
Vidal leaned closer. His dark eyes were steady and warm and utterly serious.
“Today you will think with your big head, not your little head. You will go to Las Vegas and you will win your fight. You will let him be. You will let him come to you, and open himself up to you, just as you have done before. That is the way with the nervy ones, yes? You cannot chase them. You can only stand very still and hold out your hand and wait for them to decide you are safe.” He paused. “Imagine: he did not even like me when we first met at Eton. Me! I was magnificent. I was thirteen years old and already the best-dressed person in Berkshire, and Barnaby avoided me until I made it so he could not.” Vidal laughed, bright and incredulous, as though the idea of anyone not immediately adoring him remained, after all these years, a source of genuine bewilderment. “It took him a full term to let me sit next to him at breakfast. A full term, Lex.”
Vidal stood. He brushed the seat of his trousers with both hands and picked up the shoebox from the step. His fingers closed over the lid, and he tucked it under his arm.
“I will give him his things. And the pork chop.” He looked down at Lex, still sitting on the cold stone. “Go and win your fight, big man. Come back in one piece. And when Barnaby is ready, he will find you. He always does. He found you in a common room in Tokyo at two in the morning, and he will find you again.”
Lex looked up at him. Vidal reached down and patted his cheek again. This one was harder. It landed with a crisp, open-palmed crack that echoed off the white stucco of Chester Square, and Lex’s head rocked sideways a fraction. It was absolutely a slap.
“That one was for me,” Vidal said.
He turned, opened the door just wide enough to slip through, and pulled it shut behind him. The Banham deadlock engaged with a heavy, final click.
Lex pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, breathed out through his nose, and stood up. He had a fight to win.
Chapter Thirty-Two
TheBrookridge Riding Centre sat on twelve acres of former dairy farmland just south of the M25, where Surrey began to remember it was countryside. The buildings were clean but unlovely. A prefabricated indoor school, an outdoor ménage with all-weather surface, a block of eight stables, and a Portakabin office that leaked in heavy rain and smelled permanently of instant coffee and horse nuts. His father had helped him set it up on his twentieth birthday, signing off on the lease and the charitable registration while Barnaby stood in the empty yard in his wellies and tried to explain, badly, that he wanted to build something that would matter.
Five years later, it mattered to rather a lot of people.
Barnaby reversed the shuttle minibus into the car park. The wing mirror clipped a wheelie bin, and he pretended it hadn’t happened. This wasn’t a driving test after all. He’d already passed that, after three tries, and a few awkward allusions as to who his father was. It was the one and only time in his life that he’d allowed himself to fall back on The Duke card.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the centre ran riding sessions for disabled children. On Wednesdays, it was veterans — men and women who’d come back from places that had broken something inside them and found that the steady, patient rhythm of a horse could reach them in ways that talk therapy couldn’t. On the other days, Barnaby mucked out stalls, schooled the horses, repaired fencing, argued with the feed supplier, and drove the shuttle minibus between the nearest rail station and the yard as a measure of last resort when absolutely no one else was available to make the run.
He could have just stuck to his patron lane. Kept his involvement limited to having his name prominently displayed on the letterhead, and a photograph in the yard once a year in clean jodhpurs and a waxed jacket. That was how most people in his position did it. But Barnaby didn’t want just his name stamped over the whole enterprise; he wanted his hands in it.
This morning’s session was a group of four children aged between six and nine. Sophie, who had cerebral palsy and rode with a side-walker on each flank. Amir, who was autistic and spoke mostly to the horses. Daisy, who had Down’s syndrome and screamed with delight every time her pony broke into a trot. And a new boy: seven-year-old Oliver, who had spina bifida, and was there for his first lesson.
