“Now, before you start, before you get yourself in a state, I want you to know that I am perfectly well. No one has died, no one has fallen down the stairs, the chickens are in robust health and the eggs are coming through brown as God intended. However, I am in The City.”
Beauchamp stopped in the middle of the corridor and the dull throb behind his right eye began on cue.
“I am in London, Hendrix, I am at this very moment standing in the lobby of Claridge’s having a coffee that costs nine pounds, and I have come to take my boy out to lunch. I have a table at one o’clock at that place in Marylebone you used to like when you were small, the one with the tiles, you remember, where they did the —”
“Dad. I’m at work.”
“You’re always at work, my darling.”
“That’s because I have a job.”
“Yes, I am aware. I’m very proud of this. But you have to eat, and I am here, and I am not here often, and I should very much like to sit across from you at a table for an hour and look at your face. That’s all.”
Beauchamp closed his eyes. “Dad, I can’t leave the flat. The principal —”
“MajorBeauchamp. May I have the mobile, please.”
He felt Vidal’s fingers prise it from his hand. Vidal had it pressed to his own ear inside a heartbeat, already moving back down the corridor.
“Mr Beauchamp! Oh,Mr Beauchamp, what a delight, what adelightthis is. My name is Vidal, I am your son’s principal, and I must apologise on his behalf for theextraordinaryrudeness he was about to show you. He was about to refuse you, can you believe it? He was about to tell his own father, who has come all the way to London, that he could not spare an hour of his day for lunch. I will not have it. The Major goes where I go. Weshall come to you. One o’clock, you said? At the place with the tiles? We shall be there. Yes.Yes.Of course. Mr Beauchamp, you are a treasure. I look forward enormously to making your acquaintance. Goodbye.”
He swept the mobile away from his ear, pressed end with a triumphant flourish, and held it out at the end of his arm for Beauchamp to take.
“There.”
Beauchamp didn’t take his mobile back. He stood in the corridor with his hands at his sides and looked at Vidal, and said nothing at all for a count of three. “Sir?”
“Yes, Beauchamp?”
“His name isn’t Beauchamp.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My parents never married. His name is Morrow. Hunter Morrow. And I know that you’re my employer, but it’s really not up to you to make decisions like that for me.”
Vidal lowered the mobile a fraction. His eyes had gone very dark, and the theatricality had drained out of his face. “Beauchamp, your father has come to London.”
“I’m aware, sir.”
“He has come from Oxfordshire to see you. You cannot tell him no.” Beauchamp held his ground. Vidal took one step closer. “If my father were in London this morning, Beauchamp, and if he had rung me to say that he had a table at Claridge’s for us, do you understand what I would do? I would walk out of this flat in my dressing gown. Nothing in this country would keep me from that table.”
Beauchamp’s jaw set. He looked at Vidal, and he understood with immediate clarity that he was going to lunch with his father and Vidal.
The man had already clapped his hands together once, the sound of it bouncing off the parquet and the high ceiling, andwas sweeping past him down the corridor with the mobile still held aloft.
“I shall change. I shall be ten minutes. Do not put on your brown suit, Beauchamp, wear the navy one with the open collar, and please for the love of God do something with your hair. You cannot meet your father with it parted as though you were eight years old.”
“Sir, I’ll go by myself.”
“We shall need to take Mercè, I cannot leave her in the flat for lunch, she is in one of her moods, and will hold the grudge.”
The door of Vidal’s bedroom shut behind him with a decisive click, and Beauchamp was left alone in the corridor.
Chapter Nineteen
Thecab crawled up Marylebone High Street in the sort of traffic that made Beauchamp want to get out and walk, except that he had Mercè in her canvas carrier on his knee and Vidal beside him giving a running commentary on the window displays. Beauchamp had been trying, since leaving the flat, to settle on a version of who Vidal was that could be offered to his father across a plate of schnitzel without causing a scene, and he hadn’t yet landed on one.
The trouble was that he could see the next hour in full cinematic detail. Vidal would walk into the restaurant, Hunter would clap eyes on him, and Hunter would draw Vidal out with the same warm attentive grin he had used on Julian across a thousand opening nights. Vidal, whose tolerance for a responsive audience was essentially infinite, would bloom under it, and within twenty minutes the pair of them would be an echo chamber of warm flamboyance.
