“Beauchamp.”
“Ma’am.”
“Go and talk to Mr Montcada. Use the small meeting room at the end of the corridor. I can manage on my own tonight.”
“Ma’am, I —”
“Go on.”
She crossed back to the door at an unhurried pace, paused beside Vidal long enough to lay a gloved hand against his good shoulder, and kissed him once on the cheek.
“Be kind to him, darling. He’s been miserable.” She was through the door before Vidal could answer.
Beauchamp turned without a word and walked the length of the corridor at a pace that Vidal had to lengthen his stride to match, sling jolting against his ribs as he went. The small meeting room was at the far end, and Beauchamp held the door open and waited for Vidal to pass through it, his face set. The door clicked shut behind them.
“Three weeks, Mr Montcada.” Beauchamp’s voice came out low and clipped. “I have been in this office three weeks. I’m still learning the names of the housekeeping staff. I am still working out which printer eats which type of paper, and you’ve just come storming through reception and made a spectacle of me in front of every secretary on the floor.”
“Beauchamp —”
“Now there is not a person on this corridor who will not spend the rest of the evening speculating about why a foreign principal turned up at Clarence House asking for me.” His hands had clenched so tightly that his knuckles had gone white. “You have embarrassed me. I don’t know how to be plainer about it than that.”
“Someonehas to make a scene,” Vidal snapped, “becauseyouwill not. I have come to take what I want, Beauchamp, because you have demonstrated, with great thoroughness, that you cannot be relied upon to take anything for yourself.”
Beauchamp’s jaw set harder. He didn’t speak.
“You are the mostfrustratinglynoble man I have ever met. Do you know that? You are self-sacrificing to the point of it being a clinical condition. You have spent three months in my flat noticingeverything about me, caring for me, and you have not once, in all that time, taken the slightest risk on your own behalf. You handed me over to Wallis with a binder. And even worse, you handed me toConnor, Beauchamp. You stood at the foot ofmy hospital bed and recited my care instructions to another man as though you were briefing the one who had taken the prize!”
Beauchamp flinched back at the mention of Connor.
“Youlikeme. Don’t you dare stand there and tell me otherwise, because the entire point of you is that you do not lie, and every signpost in the last three months has pointed in the same direction. You like me, and you have decided, with great English self-congratulation, that the dignified thing to do is to walk away from it without a word.”
Beauchamp’s mouth had gone into a flat line. “You werewithhim, Vidal. From the second week of my posting. You weren’t handed over to anybody. Youchosehim, and I had the good manners to step aside without making it a problem, because I knew I didn’t have a chance.” Beauchamp ran a hand through his hair. “I’m not flash. I’m not fun. I’m a thirty-six-year-old career military man with seven identical grey suits who watches canal-boating documentaries on his nights off. I loved a man for eighteen years who was theatrical and clever and the centre of every room we walked into, and I watched him eventually come to the conclusion that I wasn’t enough to hold his attention. I’m very familiar with the shape of that ending, and I had no intention of walking myself into a second go at it with you.”
“It is over with Connor.”
Beauchamp’s eyes did not leave his face.
“It is over, Beauchamp. He is a man I intend to keep close for the rest of my life, because I do not throw away people who have loved me well, and Connor has loved me very well indeed. But he is not what I need now. He never was. He was what I reached for because you would not let me reach for you.”
Beauchamp kept his eyes on a point just past Vidal’s left shoulder, and his expression did not give an inch.
“So I am going to tell you what is going to happen now, Major, and I would like you to listen.” Vidal drew a long breath.“I am Mr Vidal Montcada. There is nosirany more, and there is no Serene Highness. And I would like you, Mr Hendrix Riff Beauchamp, to know that I want a perfectly ordinary life with you. That is all. That iseverything. Now stop being such a damned Englishman and take what you want, Beauchamp. For once in your stoic, long-suffering, self-effacing lifetake it.”
Beauchamp looked at him from across the small meeting room. His hand was still in his trouser pocket. He did not speak.
Vidal waited.
He had just delivered the speech of his life. The line about wanting an ordinary life with Beauchamp landed exactly where he had meant it to, and even now, in the quiet of the meeting room, he could feel it had the weight of a thing said well.
“Well?”
Beauchamp said nothing.
“Beauchamp. I have just told you that I want a perfectly ordinary life with you. The most mundane day we shared in our flat beats the wildest week I ever had in Magaluf. I have come here in a sling, with my arm still sore. The least you can do is say something.”
Beauchamp stayed resolutely silent, staring at Vidal.
Vidal stomped his foot against the carpet. His camel overcoat flared open at the knee with the force of it. He had fully envisioned this moment culminating in being swept off his feet and kissed breathless, and the reality of being left standing in the part with no one to play it against was galling.
