23. Won’t Somebody Think of the Golf #3
There are people perched on every spare inch of chintz.
Elderly men in lightweight fleeces fumbling with their phones, middle-aged women in thin padded gilets over sensible shirts holding glasses of wine and frowning, a handful of young people swathed in soft leggings and expensive cardigans with their heads together by the fire.
It smells like powdery roses, the scent coming from nowhere in particular.
‘Oh, Crispin,’ says one of the gilet women, getting up from her seat and coming to him.
Westby’s mum. She’s blonde, in her late forties, with a more sensible face and build than Briar might have expected; if she’s been Botoxed, it’s subtle, because she’s capable of frowning at her son like he’s somehow the biggest disappointment of the day. ‘You said you’d be here at three!’
‘It’s half past.’
‘It’s twenty to four, darling. Would you like some wine? I have no idea where Ellie is, she was faffing about with the bedrooms and she never came back.’
‘No thank you.’
‘Would any of your . . .’ She gestures to Briar and the others, implying friends but apparently finding that word wanting, ‘. . . like some wine? It’s a bit chewy, I’m afraid.’ Her gaze catches on Briar’s battered face, and she pauses for a fraction of a second before moving on.
‘No thank you, Mrs Westby,’ says Tate, which strikes Briar as weird, even though of course that’s her name.
One of the girls by the fireplace gets up and comes to greet them with vigorous handshaking.
She’s tall, blonde and sturdy, good bones; the kind of girl you can imagine hefting pails of milk, or smearing herself with blue paint and going to war with the Romans.
Briar reckons she’s chock-full of calcium, has never had a filling and could easily beat them in an arm wrestle.
Somehow, she’s Westby’s sister.
‘Hello,’ she says, as she shakes each of their hands in turn. ‘Hello, hello. I’m Amelia, you can call me Milly. Adams, good to see you. I don’t believe we’ve met, but you must be Watson. And you are . . . ?’
‘Briar,’ says Briar. ‘Jones.’
‘Very good, Jones. Good of you to be here. Mummy’s very pleased. You’re looking well, Crispin.’
One of the fleece-clad men looks up from the magnified text on his phone and frowns over the top of his glasses at Briar, who stands up slightly straighter.
If he doesn’t like Briar’s general appearance, pronouns are to be avoided at all costs here.
Luckily, they doubt any of these people will find the need to refer to them at all.
‘Do you get the golf in here, Bess?’ the fleece man asks Westby’s mum. ‘The Open?’
‘The one you want is tomorrow,’ someone else chimes in.
‘No, no, I’m sure it’s today - does anybody have the . . . how do we get it on?’
Mrs Westby shakes her head. ‘It’s in the other room, but the service is down.
The . . . satellite, or something, I don’t know.
Maybe it’s a cable, they hit something last week when they were digging up those trees.
There’s a radio somewhere. God, I must have spent two hours on the phone to those ghastly people.
Your father can always Inquire and get them straight to the point .
. . I’ll give them a ring now, as Ellie has apparently decided to take the afternoon off, and maybe you can do your . . . thing.’
‘Don’t be silly, Mummy,’ Westby says sharply. ‘It doesn’t matter about the Open.’
‘Well, Bernard wants to watch it. Where’s my phone? Milly, for God’s sake, can you help me?’
‘Pinny’s here now, have him do it.’
‘Not Pinny,’ Hadley repeats in hushed horror at the bottom of her voice, but still clearly audible from where Briar is standing.
‘Oh, sorry. That’s Crisp. We used to call him Pinhead,’ Milly says conspiratorially, and Hadley grins like a territorial monkey in response.
‘Milly, don’t be such a pain. Go and fetch Ellie, please, if you’re not going to be useful here. Have you eaten, Crispin? We’ve had lunch, but there’s some cheese and things,’ Mrs Westby says, fluttering her hands in the direction of the door.
Tate’s phone is buzzing incessantly in his pocket. He pulls it out and frowns down at it, and Briar mutters, ‘All okay?’
‘I made the mistake of texting my dad back when I got signal and now he wants me to do some work thing for him,’ Tate says. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
A very old man rouses himself from the depths of a wingback chair and points a melted-wax hand at Tate and Briar, who are standing next to each other. ‘What’s that one supposed to be?’ he says, in a quavering but very loud voice.
It’s unclear exactly what flavour of bigoted he’s being, but apparently Westby decides that this is their cue to leave.
As soon as they’re out of the room, Briar feels some of the tension leave their body. They hadn’t realised how instantaneously their jaw had clenched, their stomach had pretzelled, the sweat had beaded on the back of their neck; when they look at Westby, he grimaces back, full of understanding.
‘Like nuclear radiation,’ he says. ‘Or a carbon monoxide leak. You don’t even notice until it’s too late. Come on, let’s go and eat some cheese.’