Vidal had sunk back into the sofa cushions. One of his hands came up to cover the lower half of his face, and his eyes were shining with held-back tears.
“Sir?” Beauchamp prepared himself to jump into action. “What’s happened?”
Vidal lowered his hand from his mouth, and Beauchamp saw, with a disorienting lurch, that he was smiling. The tears were real and existed hand in hand with the smile that Beauchamp struggled to look away from.
Vidal turned the mobile around and held the screen out across the gap between them.
“Look, Beauchamp.” His voice had gone soft at the edges, every consonant rounded by feeling. “Adelina Sofia Montcada has arrived into our world.”
Beauchamp set down his beer and crossed the rug to take the mobile from his outstretched hand.
The photograph on the screen showed a newborn baby wrapped in a pale yellow blanket, eyes screwed shut against the light. One tiny clenched fist was free from the swaddling and pressed against a pink cheek. Her face had the squashed, indignant look of a creature who had been recently and unceremoniously evicted from somewhere comfortable. There was a tuft of dark hair on the crown of the small head and her lower lip was caught in the beginnings of a yawn.
“My brother Fidel,” Vidal said, his voice breaking. “He and Maria have been in Virginia since the spring. He took a fellowship at the university there before any of this happened, and they could not come back after the coup, so the baby was always going to be born in America. They have a little house in McLean. I have only seen the photographs, but Maria has put the cot in the room with the window over the garden, because she said the light there in the morning reminded her of home.”
He took the mobile back and looked at the screen again. His thumb moved across the surface in a slow stroking gesture, as though he were touching the baby’s cheek through the glass.
“She is my first niece, Beauchamp. The first Montcada born outside Cardona in eight hundred years. She will grow up speaking English with an American accent, and she will know our home only from the stories her mother and father will tell her. She will see our olive groves and cliffs only from the photographs in books. She is here, and she iswell, and Maria is well. Fidel has sent me a message in which he says only that her name is Adelina, after our grandmother, and that she has my mother’s chin. Tell me she is beautiful, Beauchamp.”
Beauchamp looked down at the photograph again. The baby was, by any reasonable measure, not beautiful. She was red and creased and scowling at the world. “She’s beautiful, sir. She’s got a strong chin. You can see your mother in her already.”
Vidal made a choked noise, and pressed the mobile against his chest. “Yes…my mother’s fierce chin is on a face the size of an apricot.Adelina.” He said the name once into the quiet of the drawing room, and then again. “Adelina Montcada.She is going to be magnificent, Beauchamp, I can already tell. Look at her, look at the small fist there. That is not the fist of a woman who intends to be quiet about anything. She is going to be the terror of her McLean playgroup within the year.”
On the television behind them, an Atlético player went down in the box, and the crowd began to roar. Neither of them turned to look at the match.
“I cannot even go to her, Beauchamp.” Vidal was still staring down at the screen as though he could climb through it. “I cannot get on a plane and fly to Virginia and hold her in my arms the way an uncle is supposed to hold his first niece. Fidel will be the one who sings to her, and Fidel has the most appalling voice in the entire Montcada line. Our grandmother used to make him mime in the choir at Christmas. She told him it was for the acoustics, but it was because he sounded like a goat being put through a mangle.”
He drew in an unsteady breath and let it out through his nose.
“There is a song, Beauchamp.El cant dels ocells. Every Catalan child is sung this song from the cot. It is the first piece of music we know, before we know our own names. And Fidel is going to murder it over her cradle, and there is nothing I can do about it.”
Beauchamp had been trained, at considerable public expense, in the management of crisis, but none of the modules atSandhurst had covered what to do when a Catalan prince began quietly weeping. He cast about for something to say. Anything, really, that might pull Vidal’s attention sideways and out of the dark room he was building for himself on the sofa.
What came out, in the end, was the only thing he could find that was both true and safe. “Adelina’s a beautiful name, sir.”
Vidal looked up from his mobile. “Yes. It is. There has been an Adelina in every other generation of the Montcada line since the fifteen-hundreds. We do not let the good names go to waste. And what about you, Beauchamp?”
“Sir?”
“What’s yourrealname. I have lived with you for some weeks now and I still do not know it. I have been signing for parcels addressed toMajor H. R. Beauchamp, and it occurs to me that I have no idea what those two stern little letters are standing in for. They cannot be your name, Beauchamp. They are an abbreviation on a payslip.”
“It’s not important, sir.”
“It isenormouslyimportant. I’ve just introduced you to my niece. The least you can do is introduce yourself to me properly in return.”
“Honestly, sir, the initials do the job.”
Vidal sat up straighter against the cushions. The wet shine at the corners of his eyes had begun to dry. “Beauchamp. I refuse to go on referring to you by two letters that sound like a department in a hospital. What is the name your parents gave you when they first laid eyes on you?”
The question landed in the middle of Beauchamp’s chest, in the private place where he kept this particular secret.
Hunter Morrow, lead guitarist of Slay, who had three charting albums and one wedding-playlist anthem everyone knew, had given him names that he’d kept on a need-to-know basis since sixth form.
Hendrix, after the guitarist.Riff, after the thing a guitarist played. It was a joke that a man would make when he was thirty, on tour, and high on various substances and the arrival of an unexpected son by a session vocalist he was very fond of but had not married. Hunter had never, in the thirty-six years since, shown the slightest sign of regretting the joke.
Beauchamp had spent the majority of his life not saying the names out loud. He signedH. R. Beauchampon every document the army had ever put in front of him. His mother had taken one look at the birth certificate, thanked Hunter warmly, and had called him Rix ever since, because Helen Beauchamp was a practical woman who understood that a child could be called Hendrix Riff on paper and still need to get through school without being laughed out of every room he stepped into.
He had never once, in his adult life, offered the full names up to another person without it being an absolute requirement of life administration. But Vidal had given him Adelina. It seemed an answerable thing to trust him back with his secret.
