29. Presumably Consecrated Ground
Briar calls Bastian on the phone.
This seems like a relatively insane thing to do when they’re standing there, behind the stairs in Eden, waiting for somebody to pick up - but they’re not sure where things stand right now. Is it safe to go to Hawthorn and knock for him? What if Alistair’s there? Briar doesn’t want to find out.
A frightened-sounding young scholar picks up. ‘Hello?’
‘Can you get Wolfe for me please?’
‘Right away,’ says the boy, like a harried butler, and he leaves the phone hanging off the hook so that Briar can listen to the sounds of scholars laughing and talking as they walk past, until eventually, after so long Briar’s almost given up, they hear someone touching the receiver.
‘Hello?’ Bastian says, sounding very bored.
‘Hi.’
‘Oh.’ There’s a long pause, and then Bastian says, softer, ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ Briar says. ‘Listen, can I come there? I need to talk to you.’
Bastian’s answer comes at once. ‘No. Not the dorms. Can you - that office?’
Briar shakes their head, even though Bastian can’t see it. ‘No, my friends are all high and passed out in there.’
Another silence. ‘Do you know where the chapel is?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
The chapel is only a bit bigger than a regular country church, but whoever designed it trimmed every nook and cranny with the extravagance of a cathedral.
It’s Gothic revival like many of the other Victorian buildings at Temple, red brick with striking grey stone contrasts in the vaults and buttresses.
Everything that can have a botanical pattern or wrought iron embellishment does, and the ceiling is ridiculous, all in dark wood with a neat circle of ornate arches surrounding a central carving, looking like twenty-one doors to heaven.
It has a hint of the musky, yeasty smell that Briar associates with museums and art galleries from childhood trips to London, like something very old and dormant but somehow still sweating; as a kid, Briar always thought that it was the smell of antique blood on all the old weaponry and furniture, permeating through the glass of display cases.
Bastian is sitting in the second row of pews, around the corner in the transept.
It’s strange seeing him out of both uniform and formalwear; he’s wearing jeans and a black sweatshirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows with a kind of nonchalance and cool that Briar still can’t quite reconcile with the version of him that they knew, and his hair looks freshly washed and still damp, curling slightly at the ends where it brushes his shoulders.
He’s gazing up at the stained-glass windows like a saint begging for intersession as Briar approaches.
He stands up, but then doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself.
‘Well?’ he asks eventually. ‘You wanted to meet me.’
‘Yeah.’ Briar sits down in one of the pews, which is weird, but perhaps less weird than just standing there. ‘I like your hair.’
Bastian narrows his eyes. ‘Are you high?’
‘Oh.’ Briar considers this. ‘No. A bit. Not much. Hadley isn’t very generous with her drugs.’
‘And that’s . . . Watson,’ says Bastian. It’s weird hearing him say her name. Even walking the same halls it’s felt, all this time, like Bastian lives on another planet.
‘Yes.’
‘They weren’t being particularly kind to you,’ Bastian says, his gaze lingering on the crucifix as he sits back down. ‘Your friends. I hope they learned their lesson after last week. What they’ve been doing is extremely dangerous, and at least they have the Work. You have nothing.’
‘Not nothing. I have a walkie-talkie,’ Briar offers. ‘As of this morning. But I haven’t charged it yet.’
‘Congratulations.’ Bastian turns to look at Briar properly. ‘You know, I could order you to stop interfering with the Trials. To stay away from everything, just do your job. Force you to quit. Go home.’
‘Why don’t you, then?’
Bastian’s jaw clenches, and then he looks away again. He doesn’t want to use the Work on Briar any more unless it’s absolutely necessary. That much is clear, and to Briar’s advantage.
‘You could stop helping with the Trials,’ Briar counters. ‘I know it’s just how things are done, but you don’t have to be part of it.’
‘I can’t,’ Bastian says tersely. ‘It’s all I have.’
‘Bullshit.’
Bastian’s voice rises. ‘It’s not bullshit. My dad came here, my brothers, now . . . all my friends. My future. It’s all here.’
‘Choose a different future.’
‘Yes,’ Bastian snarls. ‘Like it’s just that easy.’
‘Honestly, I’m still just trying to make the connection between you and the guy who used to pick up dropped birthday balloons and carry them home in case they felt lonely.’
‘That was you.’ This is said so loudly that it echoes off the arched ceiling above them.
‘No it wasn’t,’ says Briar, but then they pause. ‘Was it?’
‘I’m fascinated by this childhood you’ve concocted for both of us,’ Bastian says, snide now, the set of his mouth cruel. ‘Did we galivant with a drunk goat on the other side of a wardrobe? Did we sail a little wooden boat to an island with Mimsy and Titty?’
‘Titty?’ Briar says, distracted.
Bastian waves a dismissive hand. ‘That’s her name. In Swallows and Amazons.’
‘Titty,’ Briar repeats.
‘You’re missing the point.’
‘Well, apparently I’m missing a lot more than that.’ Bastian takes their meaning, mouth clamping shut. Briar puts one arm over the back of the pew, anchoring themself in place. ‘I’m just trying to understand how you ended up . . . like this.’
Bastian stands up very suddenly. It makes Briar jump.
‘Like what? Someone who can defend himself? Who isn’t nice just for the sake of it?
’ He shoves his hands in his pockets - although this, too, he manages to make elegant - and starts walking away towards the altar.
Briar scrambles to follow him. ‘I’m not who I was when I was ten years old, and I was never this boy you’ve invented.
Yes, I’m not a good person. This is not news to me.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is surviving. ’
‘Surviving? Right. Must be really hard to work out how you’re going to live. What if the housing market dips and nobody wants to buy your mansion? What if Canaletto landscapes go out of fashion? What are you going to do with just one private island?’
Bastian rolls his eyes. ‘It’s a boathouse and a lawn on a lake in the Midlands, you sound like an imbecile calling it a private island. And - and there are other kinds of survival.’
‘I know,’ Briar says, as they come to a stop. ‘Look, I know it must have been hard for you here, and I know that it’s . . . complicated.’
‘Why are you even saying all of this when you don’t even like me?’
Briar feels stunned. Genuinely baffled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not stupid, Briar. I know I’m everything you hate.
My family, the house, the money. Mons. I’m powerful, and you despise the way I use that power.
I see kids come through here just like I was, ten and scared and hopeful, and I ruin everything for them.
They’re terrified of me.’ He laughs humourlessly.
‘I mean, nobody in this school can even look me in the eye because I told them seven years ago that they were not permitted, and it held.’
‘I - wait, you did what?’
‘Just because for some inexplicable reason you’ve decided against your better judgement that you’d like to fuck me—’
‘Woah, wait,’ Briar says, holding up their hands in surrender. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I mean it. Clearly I’m not a perfect person either. When I say I want to know what happened here - I really want to know.’
Bastian eyes them suspiciously. ‘You do?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay.’ Bastian leans back against the altar, watching Briar intently. It’s probably sacrilegious, but he makes it look so good. ‘What do you want to know in particular?’
‘First of all, what the hell did you mean, nobody can look you in the eye?’
Bastian lets out a shaky breath through his nose and looks down.
‘I . . . I mean, just what I said. When I was a first-year, one of the very first things I did . . . It’s a Working for Subtlety, nobody ever really learns it, everybody here wants to be seen .
. . but I couldn’t stand any of them looking at me, being surrounded by all these strangers who wanted to know about me, especially without - well, it felt like being under siege.
I didn’t want anyone to be able to look at me, not properly, and . . . it worked. It’s still working.’
‘Are you serious? Nobody at Temple can look you in the eye? Can they see your face?’
‘I don’t know the exact parameters,’ Bastian snaps, but it’s undermined by how nervous his voice is.
‘I mean, I suppose they can. Snatches of it. But never all of it. It gets stronger and weaker depending on the day, sometimes I don’t think they can look at me at all.
It only applies to the scholars. Maybe some of the teachers. ’
‘Bastian,’ Briar says, incredulous, too horrified to be careful. ‘Aren’t you fucking Alistair Buckingham?’
Bastian takes a deep breath then, in and out like he’s absorbing a blow, letting something rise and subside inside him before he speaks. ‘If you think that requires eye contact I can only assume you’ve just been sitting around on your farm watching the tumbleweed blow past since I last saw you.’
‘Well, okay, no,’ says Briar, feeling briefly wrong-footed. ‘But . . . Alistair? Why? It doesn’t even seem like he’s very nice to you.’