18. Memory Is a Fickle Clown #3
Westby orders a bottle of sparkling wine with obvious disdain beneath the outward charm of his words, and it’s served to him with equal silent loathing. They carry the bottle and the glasses to an empty nook by the fireplace, protected from prying eyes, where Hadley happily overserves them.
‘They don’t ID?’ Briar asks, accepting their glass, wiping a smear of something oily from the lip with their thumb before they take a sip.
‘No,’ says Hadley. ‘They have a deal with the school.’
Briar puts the glass down again. ‘A what?’
Tate shrugs. ‘They’ve agreed that the upper years are to be served. Local police know, too. They don’t mind as long as there’s no trouble.’
Briar tries to imagine the administration at Dunts & Heaves striking up a deal with local authorities to permit seventeen-year-olds to drink on the weekends.
Instead, they were treated to an assembly about the horrors of addiction, during which one of the teachers told a harrowing story about his youth spent minesweeping clubs and smoking butts he found in the gutters.
‘So . . . somebody used the Work, then, to convince them?’
‘Nope,’ says Westby. ‘Didn’t even need to.
Keep your voice down, Jones, this is Britain’s best-kept secret you’re gabbing about.
Anyway.’ He lifts his sweating glass. ‘Cheers, all. To Jones and Adams, for risking life and limb, and coming away with the most charming home movie. Sorry they tried to kill you, Jones.’
‘I mean, did they?’ Tate says seriously, watching Briar over the rim of his glass. ‘Try to kill you? Certainly looks like it.’
‘Not really,’ When it becomes clear this is not enough of an answer, they add, ‘Well, yes. But Bastian sort of . . . stopped them.’
‘Ha,’ says Hadley. ‘I knew it. You see, Jones?’
Westby squints at her, suspicious. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
Hadley drinks about half her glass in one gulp before she speaks. ‘Look, Jones and Wolfe have history, and we’d be stupid not to use it.’
‘Watson, we agreed to your plan,’ Westby says sharply.
‘We did not agree to any addendums. We ruin the Trials, we get the footage, we send it to the board at graduation once we’re safely away.
Mons are duly disgraced, they never get the keys to the kingdom, and Buck spends the rest of his days as a financial advisor or a chartered accountant. ’
‘The keys to the kingdom?’ Briar asks. They’ve never really understood the full ramifications of this plan.
‘The board takes the Trials very seriously,’ says Tate.
‘They go off without a hitch every year. If they fail under Buck and Wolfe and the others, they’re fucked.
I mean, not like, dead. But the board pretty much decides who succeeds and who fails.
They’re the ones who choose the scholars for advanced classes, the most powerful texts, and we’re pretty sure there are even more texts you only read once you’ve graduated.
And they also decide who gets to come back and visit, too, to study their specialities in their free time and get even stronger. If they don’t like you . . .’
‘You might end up just being . . . CEO of some tiny start-up, or even teaching at Temple,’ says Westby, clearly appalled. ‘No offence, Watson.’
‘I’m not talking to him,’ says Hadley. ‘So none taken.’
Briar is startled by this frank acknowledgement of her romantic situation. So it isn’t just common-room gossip - she really is ‘dating a plod’, as that vile scholar had said. Or, she was. Briar is hopeful that it might stay in the past tense.
Westby shakes his head. ‘The point is, we’ve got some great footage, and that has to be enough. You’re going to get Jones killed.’
‘Oh, they’ll be fine.’ Hadley leans back in her chair, eyes glittering.
Briar can’t tell if she really thinks they’re safe, or if she doesn’t care either way, as long as she gets what she wants.
She’s hard to figure out. Westby loves the Work, Tate is going to Cambridge - they both have something to lose if things go awry at Temple, futures inextricably linked to the school.
But if Hadley is going to RADA, maybe she’s happy to let all of this burn in the rear-view before she embarks on the rest of her life.
‘Rich fucking rewards await, West. Justice and retribution. If Briar gets up close and personal, if Wolfe likes them enough to keep Buck at bay, we could blow this thing wide open. You know what Mons are like, they travel in a pack and don’t associate with the proles, even at their parties.
Imagine having a man on the inside.’ She looks to Briar.
‘A gender-neutral man on the inside, obviously.’
‘It’s entirely unnecessary.’
‘Why don’t you let Briar decide?’ Hadley shoots back.
Westby fixes her with a look. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Let’s.’
‘Oh, fuck off, West,’ Hadley says, suddenly annoyed. Tate, the peacemaker, raises his glass again.
‘To Jones,’ he says. ‘For risking life and limb and face. Sorry about your face, Briar.’
Briar tentatively raises their glass despite a general embarrassment at being toasted, and then the others do too, and in short order the argument is abandoned, the wine slipping away with the evening until the whole thing feels forgotten.