“It’s for sandwiches.”
“It is for the bin.” He returned it to the shelf with the tips of his fingers and shut the door on it. “We will address your sandwiches another time. I cannot fix everything in one evening, as I have only one functioning arm. I am disappointed, Beauchamp. But I have decided I can work with you.”
Beauchamp bit back a smile. “Thank you.”
Vidal waved his gratitude away with his good hand, with all the benevolence of a dictator granting an audience, and moved on to the bookshelves. They filled the alcove beside the chimney breast, and Vidal worked along them with his head tipped sideways. The collection was history-heavy, almost without exception. Thick volumes on the Peninsular War, Stalingrad, a fat biography of Wellington, and three different accounts of the retreat from Kabul in 1842. He drew one out and thumbed it open across the back of the armchair. The margins carried small pencil annotations in a hand so level it could have been set with a ruler.
“You annotate your own books.”
“A habit from the MA.”
“Even your marginalia stands to attention.” He slid the book back home onto the shelf. “It is one of the great mysteries of my life that I find this attractive.”
The records lived in two wooden crates beneath the window, and Vidal lowered himself to one knee beside them and flicked through them with his good hand. Fleetwood Mac, Bowie, Kate Bush, the Stones, and a long run of things he did not recognise. Then his hand stopped on one.
“Beauchamp. This is an original pressing ofRumours.”
“It was my Dad’s twenty-first birthday present to me.”
Vidal eased it from the crate, turning it to the light to read the runout. “Your father has taste. I will tell him so at Christmas, and he will be unbearable about it until Easter.”
He slotted the record and rose, steadying himself on the windowsill, and that was when he saw them at the end of the lowest shelf, past the history and the field guides: a long run of slim spines in white, cream, and gold. Theatre programmes, Royal Opera House most of them:Tosca,Peter Grimes, three seasons ofLa Bohème. The spines were worn soft at the heads from handling, and there was no dust on any of them.
“Those were Julian’s.” Beauchamp had come to stand at the kitchen doorway with a tea towel in hand. “He’s got one for every production he ever worked on. I tried to contact him to take them — twice, actually. No response, but it seemed wrong to throw them out.”
Vidal said nothing, and let the silence stand open for him.
“When we were breaking up, he wanted to…contextualise, I suppose, how absent I’d been. So he went through the lot and made a stack of the ones I’d actually attended with him.” He folded the tea towel over the back of a chair, squared it, and looked at the shelf rather than at Vidal. “It was a very small stack compared to the ones I hadn’t.”
Beauchamp’s eyes ranged over the theatre programmes.
“I think,” Beauchamp said, “that it’s time I got those out of the flat.”
“Good.” Vidal crossed the rug to him. “I should like the shelf. I have a great many candles, Beauchamp, and they will need somewhere to live.”
He took Beauchamp’s hand in his good one, laced their fingers together, and kissed him. Then he rolled his hips up against Beauchamp in a long, deliberate grind.
Beauchamp’s breath went out of him against Vidal’s mouth, and Vidal quirked a brow towards the kitchen.
“No.” Beauchamp shook his head once. “The last time, I disgraced myself in three minutes flat in the Princess Royal’smeeting room. I intend to take rather longer over you tonight, Vidal.”
“Listen to you.” Vidal was laughing as Beauchamp drew him by the hand down the short corridor. “Now you havestandards.”
The bed was made to precision, the corners folded at forty-five degrees, the pillows plumped and squared. Vidal looked at it with enormous satisfaction. “We are going to ruin this bed, Beauchamp.”
“There are clean sheets in the airing cupboard. I’ll show you how to do the corners properly afterwards.”
Beauchamp came round in front of him and undid the buttons of Vidal’s trousers, easing them down over his hips along with his silk boxers, steadying Vidal by his elbow when he stepped out of them. When his hands moved up to the front of Vidal’s shirt, Vidal caught his wrist.
“Leave it. The cast makes the sleeves a production, and I have wanted your mouth on me since the corridor.” The wanting had gone past patience; it sat low and insistent under his skin. “Tonight you take what’s on offer.”
“Yes, sir,” Beauchamp said, and the old address in this new context landed like a firm hand on Vidal’s cock.
Beauchamp turned Vidal with a hand at his waist, walked him backwards to the bed, and laid him down onto the duvet with the sling settled against his chest and a pillow already under his bad shoulder.
Vidal got his good hand into Beauchamp’s hair and mourned his loss of the other. He wanted both arms around this man, so he could hold on with everything he had. Instead his arm lay strapped uselessly across his chest while Beauchamp knelt on the rug between his knees and unknotted his own tie with one hand.
“The cast comes off in a fortnight,” Vidal said. “I am warning you now. You will be held properly then, at length.”
