24. Briar Jones, Call Home
People trickle into the house all afternoon and well into the evening.
It’s a veritable who’s who of guys who should probably be in prison, usually trailing their birdlike wives, sometimes accompanied by a sociopathic child or two.
Briar understands these people to be close friends and relatives, although there are enough of them to fill a wedding venue.
Westby becomes a charming automaton; he greets the guests, asks after their business ventures, golf games and holiday islands, commiserates with them about the price of insuring vast houses, pours them whisky that smells like hay and old tables and makes gin and tonics for the girls.
In between, he warns Briar and the others who to avoid specifically: ‘That man is almost solely responsible for the famine of a small country, and if you talk to him, you will want to hit him. Whatever you do, don’t get stuck with the clergy.
And don’t tell my grandmother she’s here. Granny hates female vicars.’
It feels more like a Christmas party than anything else, people wandering from room to room with handfuls of snacks and glasses of port, reuniting with friends and neighbours and second cousins.
‘Are they using the Work?’ Briar asks Tate, as they all stand in the corner of the surprisingly modern, very white kitchen, watching Westby retrieve soda water from a fridge the size of a Jeep. ‘To stay calm?’
‘No,’ says Tate. ‘I told you. Nobody really bothers with Ease.’
‘They’re just naturally lobotomised,’ Hadley says.
‘Too much Town it might be when Briar is high enough to sit down on a chair without second-guessing how close it might be to a stranger, or when Hadley is invited to drink wine with the shiny brunettes on the rug by dint of being a fellow girl.
Either way, Briar hears more information about minor political dramas, stocks and shares ISAs and yoga retreats in one conversation than they’d thought could be contained in the whole world, although it’s peppered with sharp reminders that these are no ordinary posh people.
‘. . . and did you see how badly he fumbled Question Time? That was Sazzer in the back row, you could see his mouth moving, he was never particularly subtle . . .’
‘. . . Daddy’s been pretty stingy ever since he lost his favourite caddie, they always take instructions so literally - they shouldn’t make the lakes so deep, he had no idea the stupid man would just keep going . . .’
‘. . . there’s supposed to be a waiting list about two years long, our neighbours have been trying forever, but of course that was no problem at all once I got in the room with her . . .’
Briar’s surprised they’re talking so openly about the Work, but then, everybody here must be part of the fold. Eventually, they’re all drunk and stoned enough to feel nostalgic.
‘Can’t believe you made it to graduation, Crispy,’ says Will, trailing one hand back and forth on the rug as he lies with his other arm cushioning his head. ‘You cried so much when you were a pip.’
‘God, did he?’ one of the girl cousins says. She’s got bare, mirror-smooth legs tucked up underneath her, a big sporty jumper on over her slip dress. ‘Wish I’d seen that.’
‘You could have been less of a prick to me,’ Westby says to Will. ‘Might have eased the pain, having an ally in seventh.’
Will snorts. ‘Defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?
Anyway, you made it. I had this dreadful pip during Samaritans.
He didn’t cry, but he walked around like he’d just spent a week buried in a pillbox on the Western Front, thousand-yard stare, total nutjob.
Although Kipper said he’s a cape now. Can’t imagine how he managed that. ’
Briar’s ears perk up, even through the haze of weed. ‘Who?’
‘Weedy little guy. Sam? Jed? His dad’s actually on the board.’
‘Seb?’
‘Yeah, yeah. That was it.’ Will pinches his sloppily rolled joint between his fingers and gestures at Briar.
‘You know him, then? Does he still jump at loud noises? Had a real psychopathic bed-wetting energy, that one. Walked around muttering to himself. He actually tried to bite Kips once during his first Lent term, just because he tried to take this letter off him, this babyish thing with cartoon tractors.’
Cartoon tractors?
Briar had stationery like that. A gift from Sean on their tenth birthday. They specifically remember the blue-and-red striped border, the brown cab with the smiley face pulling a tiller. It must be a coincidence. Surely. Briar had never written Seb a letter.
Will is still talking. ‘Real liability. Actually, it was odd, he came back from the Christmas hols looking like he’d been hit by a car. Maybe that helped, because eventually he learned to shut up.’
Briar’s head is ringing with all this new information. ‘Hit by a car? At Christmas?’
‘Oh, well, not really a car. Beaten up. I get a drink with his brother sometimes when I’m in the city, and he said that it was so bad, his mother considered calling the police.’
‘But . . . who hit him?’ Not Bastian’s mum, obviously. His dad? Someone he knew from Temple? Someone from the village? Briar’s heart gallops. They’d always been the one to get between Seb and the bullies of the Herring Triangle.
‘No idea. He was fine before the hols, he served me dinner at the Christmas formal. Must be nearly time for the summer bash, right? Do they still throw one of the waitresses in the lake at the end?’
Will has already moved on to telling the story of some spiked consommé that had sent ten scholars to the hospital, and only Tate notices when Briar gets clumsily to their feet.
‘You all right?’ Tate says sleepily, tugging at the bottom of Briar’s cargos.
‘Mmm,’ Briar says. ‘Just need to check something.’
Outside, there’s a kind of sultry, summer wedding quality to the air.
It smells smoky and lush, warm earth and night-blooming flowers tucked somewhere out of sight.
Briar swipes away the notifications on their phone, the sporadic entries into the group chat that are almost all Kay sending samples from her carefully curated text post screenshot collection, and calls home.
‘Briar! What’s wrong?’ their mum says, picking up on the second ring, her voice distorted by the patchy signal. ‘I’ve been worried sick. God, I hate this. How did people have children in the old days, when they couldn’t call them? Did they just let them . . . go out? Free range? Surely not.’
‘You were a kid before everyone had phones.’
‘Oh, that’s different. Parents had more children then, so if a few died, you still had plenty to till the fields.’
‘In 1982?’
‘Mmm. Are you all right?’
‘Yeah,’ Briar says, fiddling with some lint in their pocket, scraping it into a ball with their fingernails and then flicking it into the gravel. ‘Look, you know when I didn’t get in? To Temple?’
Her tone shifts. ‘Yes.’
‘And I was really upset, and Bastian - Seb - sent me a letter.’
‘Yes,’ their mum says, with quick certainty. ‘What about it?’
‘So you remember the letter? Me reading it?’
She sounds odd when she says, ‘Yes? Of course I do, Briar. You tried to call him later, but he wasn’t home.’
Briar feels light-headed. Their high has soured completely, their palms sweaty. ‘I tried to call him? And . . . Mum, did I write him a letter back?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. I thought you’d make up, but after everything that happened at Christmas . . .’
‘At Christmas?’ Briar flounders. ‘What happened at Christmas?’
‘Well, you wouldn’t tell me,’ she says, sounding genuinely quite upset.
‘But it was obvious the two of you had an argument. It was dreadful afterwards, just as bad as when he left, all over again. I always wondered, but you didn’t want to talk about it, you were so .
. . depressed, Briar. It was frightening.
I didn’t know what to do with you, you were too young to be that angry, that sad.
And there was so much going on in the village, it was a bad time.
By the spring, I suppose you decided to move on. ’
Briar is rifling back through their memories, coming up short.
They remember spending weeks in bed, but that was after Bastian left the first time, and .
. . yes, maybe there was some more of that at Christmas, when he had the chance to make things right and chose to stay away.
But these other details are missing. The thought that their own mind would betray them so thoroughly is making them feel nauseous, throat stoppered with sick panic.
‘Are you all right?’ Briar’s mum says, fuzzy with static. ‘Briar, don’t you remember?’
‘No. I mean, I . . . I guess I forgot.’