“Carapaces,” Dr. Fairclough corrected him, sounding mortally offended.
Rhys Jones Bowen had a worryingly contemplative look. “Ooh, now that takes me back to my festivaling days. We used to say that was like the Somme.”
“Can we please drop the So—” I stopped. “Hang on, run that by me again.”
“Beetles,” Alex repeated, “have shells, so maybe we could do something—”
“Not you. Rhys.”
Rhys Jones Bowen had muted himself and was having a conversation with somebody off-screen. “What was that, Luc? Me? Oh. Right. The Somme. Yeah, like when I used to go festivaling, that was all mud and tents and loud noises, but it was a laugh, wasn’t it?”
And then, like Michael Caine at the end ofThe Italian Job, I had an idea. “That,” I said, sort of as its own sentence. “We’re going to do that.”
“A festival?” asked Rhys Jones Bowen.
“Yes.”
“About the Great War?” asked Alex.
“No.”
“Then what—”
“We’re going to pitch the earl a music festival. It’s going to be big. It’s going to be in a muddy field. It’s going to be alternative and edgy in exactly the kind of way that rich people will spend money on, and it’s going to be called”—the word slid into my brain like an unwelcome DM. A word so absurd it was perfect and so-so-wrong-it’s-right that it might, in fact, have been just plain right—“CRAPPstonbury.”
Chapter 14
“Hi, Luc,” said Bridge, hugging me one-armed because the other arm was full of baby. “You smell…rural. That’s not a new cologne, is it?”
I gingerly toed off my shoes before stepping onto the immaculate new carpet of the immaculate new hallway of the immaculate new house that Bridge shared with her immaculate if slightly less new family. “No, it’s manure.”
“Oh, thank God. I thought you were having a midlife crisis.”
“Hey, I am too young for this to be midlife.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I suppose it depends on when you die.”
A little voice at the back of my brain asked me, as it had a few times since those fucking posters, if it was sepsis. “Not until I’m old.”
“And you don’t think you’re halfway to old yet?”
“I…” My mouth flapped on its own for a moment. Oliver would have been able to say something clever and mathematical in this situation about how being halfway towards a thing wasn’t the same as being halfway towards a different thing that you wanted to happen at the end of the first thing. I wasn’t. Able to say that. “I’m not having a midlife crisis. Anyway, what kind of midlife crisis comes in the shape of a manure-themed cologne?”
“I don’t know.” Bridge backed off down the corridor andreversed into the living room. “But if anyone was going to have the kind of midlife crisis that comes in the shape of a manure-themed cologne, it would be you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “How are you doing? I mean, all of you. With the extra one.”
Bridge sat down in a well-sat-in chair. “Tom and I are fine. And so is Extra Welles-Ballantyne.”
“Sorry. How isAutumn?”
Glancing down at the blanket-wrapped bundle of human who was sleeping angelically against her boob area, Bridge cooed. “She’s the most wonderful baby in the world,whateverJames says.”
Ever since Autumn had joined what Bridge still insisted on referring to as our urban family, the WhatsApp group (currently called For He’s a Poly Good Fellow) had developed something of a…dynamic. The dynamic being that Bridge would mention that Autumn had done a baby thing, like smiling at her or making a cute gurgling noise, and James Royce-Royce would immediately respond by sharing an anecdote in which Baby J had done the same thing better, and at an earlier stage of development. And, if I hadn’t smelled faintly of manure, I’m sure I’d have handled this complex interpersonal situation with tact and finesse.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “He’s being a dick. I think he’s about two texts away from Priya snapping and telling him that his baby, like everybody’s baby, is completely normal and uninteresting, and that anything Baby J achieves in life will be because his parents were two affluent upper-middle-class white men.”
“That sounds really specific.”
