“Mr Evans. Vidal has spoken about you a great deal.”
“Has he?”
“Constantly. And I shall say this in your favour, Mr Evans — he has not, on this occasion, exaggerated. He told me you were very handsome, and I had braced myself for some disappointment, because Vidal will describe a perfectly ordinary man as though he were Michelangelo’s David. But you are, in fact, very handsome.”
“Mama! Your husband is in the room!”
“I am paying the man a compliment, Vidal.”
Pare, on the sofa, didn’t get up. He held out his hand and waited for Connor to come to him, the way Pare had received people his entire life, and Connor, who understood what was being offered, crossed the room in four steps and took it.
“Sir.”
“Sit, Mr Evans. Have a drink.”
It was Jordi who absorbed Connor into the proceedings. By the time Maria had come back from settling Adelina, Connor was on the rug with Fidel, a bottle of Rioja open between them, being walked through the familial offences of a cousin called Quim who had once tried to sell Jordi a horse with three good legs. Connor had taken his jacket off and rolled his sleeves. Mercè had migrated from Fidel’s chest onto Connor’s thigh and was being scratched behind her preferred ear.
“Connor.” Fidel had his guitar out, the Spanish one he travelled with at all times. “You will learnEl cant dels ocells.”
“I will what?”
“It is a Catalan song. A carol, technically, but we sing it for everything. Births, deaths, weddings, hangovers. You will learnit tonight because you are sitting in a room with three Montcada brothers and a bottle of wine, and there is no escape from this.”
“Mate, I can’t sing.”
“Neither can Fidel,” said Jordi, “and yet he persists.”
Fidel made an obscene gesture at his older brother without looking up from the strings, and began to play. The melody was the one Vidal had grown up on, the one Avi Joan had hummed over the kitchen sink in Cardona when Vidal was small enough to sit on the counter and watch him peel oranges.
He sang the first line. His voice came out steadier than he had expected.
En veure despuntar el major lluminar…
Fidel came in underneath him on a low harmony. Jordi, who could not carry a tune, sang anyway, loud and cheerful, refusing on principle to be embarrassed in his mother’s presence. Maria joined from the doorway with a tea towel over her shoulder. Even Pare, who did not sing in front of company, hummed it under his breath from the sofa.
Connor sat on the rug with Mercè across his thigh and listened. By the second verse, he was mouthing the syllables a beat behind Fidel. By the chorus, he had got the shape of it, and his voice came in soft and surprisingly true on the long held notes.
Vidal watched him across the rug. Connor was singing his grandfather’s carol with Mercè asleep on his thigh, and Vidal had to look down at his sling until he had got himself in hand.
“Good man.” Fidel reached over and clapped Connor on the knee at the end of the verse. “We shall make a Catalan of you yet.”
“What an honour.”
“Wait until we make you eat the snails.”
Beauchamp was at the window the entire time. Vidal saw him once, when he turned his head to take a glass of wineoff Mama, framed against the curtain with Wallis’s binder still under his arm. Beauchamp was watching Connor sing. His face was perfectly composed.
Vidal turned back to his brothers and did not look that way again.
? ? ?
Thedays passed in the particular blur of a family-filled household. Maria reorganised the kitchen on Wednesday. Jordi commandeered the second sofa as his bed and refused all offers of the Connaught on the grounds that he had not seen his little brother in eleven months and would not be put up the road like a visiting solicitor. Pare took Mercè into the garden in the afternoons and sat with her on his knee on the wrought-iron chair.
Beauchamp was in the flat from seven until nine, and again from one until three, and then from six until whenever the family went to bed. He blended into the corners. He kept Wallis at his side and spoke to him in undertones at the threshold of every room.
Vidal registered all of this, even as he took care not to look at him directly. He could not look at him. Each time he tried, the day went sideways, and there was his baby niece on the rug and his father on the sofa to lavish his attention on.
He talked to Pare about Geneva, and to Fidel about Adelina’s favoured lullabies. He held the baby and lit his Figuier candle every evening at six.
