2. So-Called ‘Best Buds’
Worth Herring, where Briar and Seb grew up, is the south-east tip of a close triangle of villages, with Langton Herring to the west and Herring Bridge to the north.
Residents tend to refer to themselves as citizens of the Herring Triangle at large, unless someone from one of the other villages has done something embarrassing (drunk-driven into a living room, fucked a married neighbour without discretion, sprayed illicit bee-killing chemicals at the allotment), in which case suddenly they’re only from their specific village, where nobody would ever do anything so foolish.
There are three types of people living in the Triangle.
The first are standard locals, the majority of whom are over the age of sixty and care deeply - achingly - about loitering and pothole management.
The second flavour are those who visit to spend the summer in their lavish second homes, newly gated estates with mile-long driveways.
This sort does not tend to be hugely popular among those who can barely afford their first homes, and think having two might be taking things a bit far.
The third and final type are rarer: the wealthy year-rounders, who might keep a flat in London, pop to Gstaad or St. Moritz for a bit of skiing in the winter and spend a good stretch in the Maldives or the south of France come September, but otherwise live full-time in ancient, stately houses swaddled in acres of land.
Such houses are usually passed down through the generations, but are on occasion purchased at great expense by the newly rich, who like the idea of striding about the great outdoors in padded gilets but have never seen a real owl.
Seb’s family, the Wolfes, have lived at Grove House since it was built in 1758.
Before that, the Wolfe ancestors lived in a different palatial manor further south, until half of them died of smallpox and the vibes were altered so significantly that they sold up and had a new one built, a fresh start on a hundred and eighty-nine acres.
The Wolfes have three water features and six living rooms, although three of the living rooms and two of the water features are defunct and/or mouldy around the edges, and probably only count as halves.
Briar’s mum moved their family to Worth Herring to live with her organic dairy farmer boyfriend (Sean) when Briar was four.
They have no water features, one living room, and only the homemade goat’s cheese is mouldy.
Sean likes to say that it ‘puts hairs on your nipples’, and then beat his chest with one hand encouragingly, to demonstrate that hairy nipples are very desirable.
Briar likes to throw the mouldy stuff away, and buy balls of Edam in wax jackets and shiny orange cheese strings from the corner-shop-slash-post-office, which is only open from 1-5 p.m., and closes early on Wednesdays so that Elizabeth can go to stitch ’n’ bitch.
By rights, Briar and Seb’s paths shouldn’t have crossed.
The Wolfes are that blood-soaked, musty sort of rich that involves coats of arms, odd traditions that go back generations and seemingly unlimited Labradors.
Their cars are all thirty years old with interiors that have never met a vacuum cleaner. They have lineage. They have staff.
Unfortunately for them, there was only one decent school to send their children to in the vicinity of the Triangle, and Seb’s mum wasn’t ready to send him away to board just yet.
Briar doesn’t actually know when they met Seb.
It’s like trying to picture life before you were born; the time before their friendship is a featureless void.
There are old photos of the two of them somewhere at a brightly coloured nursery school performance, pink-cheeked and blurry, both dressed as flowers.
Briar’s head is on Seb’s shoulder, Seb squinting as he almost loses an eye to one of Briar’s cardboard petals, smiling shyly.
Sometimes it feels like Briar’s entire childhood took place in the damp corners and rambling grounds of Grove House, hiding from Seb’s rail-thin, chain-smoking mother and subsisting on the gold boxes of slightly stale Ferrero Rochers they found piled high and untouched in the pantry.
As a child, Seb was narrow all over. He had a mop of colourless hair, and skin so pale you could identify all his major arteries from half a mile away.
He read voraciously, claimed to love tea but only drank it with four sugars, was fascinated by every variety of insect and ran incredibly fast for someone who generally avoided all sporting exertion.
He loved to read, and to write, and kept a series of diaries secured with heart-shaped padlocks.
On Friday evenings he’d take his mother’s crack-spined romance novels into the bath with a wine glass full of cranberry juice.
He’d underline the particularly anatomical bits (in pen - Briar was always aghast) and then make Briar read them aloud the next morning, both of them laughing and squirming, sitting with muddy trainers in the wizened knuckles of a tree.
Briar had been obsessed with fantasy then, head full of ethereal elves and sharp-tongued wizards, who never seemed to have much time for kissing.
In the summer, Briar and Seb biked everywhere and camped in the Grove House grounds, toasting premade croque-monsieurs over fires and leaving the solar lamp on all night to ward off evil spirits, so they woke up riddled with bug bites.
When the weather started to cool, they lit the drawing room fires to read by, and watched horror films traded on the primary school black market until Seb insisted they put on something happier so they’d be able to sleep.
Briar was already devouring cinema thanks to Sean, and petitioned for westerns and noir while Seb begged for Shrek.
In the depths of winter they borrowed Venetian tea trays and sledged down the ha-ha, a hangover from when the Wolfes still grazed livestock just outside the boundary of their formal gardens.
When spring finally came, they’d go on short, wet hikes, and visit the lambs born to the tenants, playing at being farmers as opposed to the real, boring work that went on at Sean’s.
Seb would always get the most horrific hay fever, the severity of which ruled their days like a planet in retrograde.
One spring there had been a lamb born in half, some birth defect that meant only one side had developed as it should.
Briar hadn’t wanted to see, but Seb insisted, with the macabre resolve of a scientist or an exterminator.
They found the lamb already dead, left to rot in a back field, bloated and shivering with maggots.
Briar had only taken one glance and asked to leave; Seb lingered, wanting to turn it over, to see the proof that it had come out all wrong.
Blood on the grass, on Seb’s knuckles. Had he really touched it - been up close and personal with all that ugliness? Briar’s mind spared them the details.
In some ways the two of them were imperfectly aligned, two halves of a whole.
Seb talkative, Briar quiet. Seb liked to eat the bitter cores of Briar’s apples, and Briar would eat the crusts of Seb’s sandwiches.
They shared bottles of cloudy lemonade with perfect equality, two sips at a time, passing them back and forth like they were sharing a joint.
Seb’s mother, who had grown so obviously lonely that you could hear it chiming through everything she said, refused all suggestions that he might live with his father part-time in London, so Briar got to keep him and all his eccentricities; his wild mood swings from jubilant to guarded, his obsessions, his near-photographic memory.
By eight, he’d memorised Carroll’s Jabberwocky and Poe’s The Raven, and would sometimes mutter snatches in time with his steps, combining them at random: Beware, beware, and nothing more.
There was no functioning Wi-Fi at Grove House and very little phone signal, so when Seb got a silky black smartphone at the age of nine, they would tramp to the top of a nearby hill together so that they could read vicious arguments on forums and watch videos of newsreaders making mistakes live on air.
That was also the year that the teachers at school started hinting that they should think seriously about their higher education, after which Temple became practically the only thing Briar talked, thought and dreamed about.
They’d discussed it before, of course, in the matter-of-fact way kids do: Seb had older brothers who’d been to Temple, so of course he and Briar would both be going when the time came.
They would be first years together, become obscenely talented wizards, and go off into the world to do whatever it was that talented wizards did.
At nine, it suddenly felt like the time really was coming, and fast.
It was difficult to find any hard facts about Temple.
It was more a matter of faith. To believers, it was the only magic school in England - perhaps the whole world - and was deeply exclusive, only taking a hundred or so students a year.
To the more practical, it was simply an elite private school that leaned harder than usual into its own mythos, with about as much mystery as a Masonic hall.
Without a doubt, Templetonians graduated with secrets, connections and advantages, but so did Harrovians and Etonians.
It was mostly talked about with the reverence given to those other schools of its calibre, although sometimes with the snide implication that rumours of magic somewhat dulled its shine.
Whatever the case, Temple graduates went on to do extraordinary things. Oxbridge, Ivy Leagues. Whether the masses believed they were magic or not didn’t seem to bother tight-lipped Templetonians. They got results.