“My husband was.”
“Was?”
“For forty-one years. He died in March.”
“Ah.” Vidal didn’t flinch from this the way the English would have flinched. He simply nodded, slowly, and said, “I am verysorry. The first spring is the worst, I think. Everything insists on being beautiful, even if one is not yet ready for it.”
The woman looked at him for a moment over her sunglasses, and then she lowered them slightly. “Yes. That’sexactlyit.”
They talked for a while about her husband, who had taught Greek at a school Vidal had not heard of, about her sons who lived abroad, and about the terriers, who had been her husband’s idea and were now her entire morning. Vidal listened with the complete and unwavering attention that was the only gift he had ever consistently been able to give other people. When the woman finally said that she must let him go, she said it as though she were apologising. Vidal kissed the back of her hand and told her that he would think about her terriers and her charming conversation all day, and she walked away towards the park looking, he thought, fractionally less alone than she had before they talked.
He kept walking.
From a small bakery he bought a pastry of indeterminate provenance that the woman behind the counter described as a sausage roll but which she also described asblessed, with great seriousness.
He sat and arranged the peonies on the bench beside him. Then he extracted the pastry from its paper bag and held it out so that Mercè could sniff it suspiciously and then turn her head away. This was not a good sign. He took a bite, and this sausage roll did not taste blessed in any sense he recognised, but it was hot, and it had buttery pastry on the outside. Even he had to accept that there are mornings on which one settles for what one is given.
Then he heard the running.
Running, in central London, was unusual enough that he looked up, prepared to be irritated by some smug jogger in shorts and sweated-throughactive wear. What he saw insteadwas Major H. R. Beauchamp, coming around the corner of the square at a pace that no man who wore that particular close cut of suit had any business sustaining, with another man behind him in similar dishevelment. Both of them were coatless, having clearly come from somewhere in a great hurry. The English were that way: they hurried, and had no time for an aimless wander.
“Major!” Vidal waved his half-eaten sausage roll at him in delighted greeting. “And you have brought afriend. This is excellent. I have been worried, you know, that you did not have any. As you did not demonstrate the appropriate comforting behaviours last night when I met you, I assumed you had no previous practice. Sit, sit, both of you, there is room. Well, there is room if I move the peonies, and I am happy to move the peonies.”
He was halfway through gathering the peonies into his lap to make space on the bench when he registered, properly, that Beauchamp had not moved. The other man was murmuring into a small black radio. Vidal caught the wordsrecovered,visual confirmedandstand down.
Beauchamp had brought his breathing back under control. His hands were now folded behind his back at parade rest, his eyes fixed on Vidal in a way that Vidal had not been looked at in some time. He searched for the word for this look in three languages and found it in his fourth, Latin.Sollicitudo, care under duress. The man had been afraid.For him.
“Ah,” Vidal said. Quite quietly. “I have done something.”
The man with the radio finished his transmission and clipped the device back onto his belt. He took a small step backwards, putting himself a professional distance away from the bench. He didn’t look at Vidal, he kept his gaze on a point in the middle distance and declined to witness any of it.
“Major,” Vidal’s own voice came down several registers without his permission. “How long have you been looking for me?”
“An hour and forty minutes, sir. Conceição called the residence at half past seven. She’d let herself in to clean and found the flat empty. She was concerned, so she rang the contact number I’d left on the kitchen noticeboard.”
“I did not know,” Vidal said, “that I was not allowed to go for a walk.”
“You’re notnotallowed, sir.”
“Then —”
“You’re required, sir, to inform someone before you leave the residence. So that someone can go with you.” Beauchamp spoke to the paving stones with great evenness. “There are people in Cardona who’d prefer that you weren’t in London. There are also people in this city who occasionally take an interest in unaccompanied foreign nationals of significant personal wealth, and although I’m confident in your ability to charm any one of them individually, evenyouwould have difficulty talking your way out of being moped-mugged.”
“Moped-mugged…” Vidal repeated thoughtfully. “What is this thing, Beauchamp?”
“Two men on a moped, sir. They come up the pavement. One drives. The other takes the watch off your wrist before you understand what’s happening. The Marylebone end of Mayfair has had nine incidents just this month.”
Vidal looked down at his own wrist, where a £25,000 watch was sitting that he had been wearing in public all morning without knowing about these moped-muggings.
“Show me,” he said.
“Sir?”
“Thismoped-mugging. I cannot imagine it. I require a visual.” He gestured vaguely at the air between them. “A film. There must be a film. Everything is a film now.”
Beauchamp reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and produced his mobile.
“Come and sit on the bench, Beauchamp,” Vidal said, more gently. “I cannot watch a film from four feet away. I do not have the eyes of a bat.”
