Page 71 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Not that Auden despises the transparent and the obvious, not always. After four projects at Harcourt + Trask and several from his school days, his favorite design is still a lobby for a Chicago skyscraper that is unabashedly obvious. Initially the client had wanted something opulent, something Gilded Age that could nod to the other nineteenth century buildings nearby, but Auden and Isla Harcourt proposed something different altogether. Their design eliminated the first two floors of the building—currently tenantless anyway—and created a space that was almost breathtaking in its waste of useful city real estate. Doorways so tall they seemed to stretch up to the sky, a ceiling far enough up to create a near cathedral, all of it walled by glass and pale, pale stone.
When the client saw it, they immediately understood. The space was the opulence. The sheer immoderation of it was the ostentation they craved. Why create fussy cornices and coffers when one could prove the very same point with profligate absence?
It was a very pedestrian design, from an artistic standpoint. It wasn’t the kind of thing that landed one in Architectural Digest, no one was winning RIBAs for spacious lobbies, and Auden knew that. He liked it anyway.
It was space where there should be none, it was light where there should be weight, it was balance and echo and air when all around it was exhaust and din. It was a cathedral—or perhaps a castle—carved out of one of the world’s busiest, densest cities through nothing but vision. His vision at that, his and Isla’s.
So he’s probably too hard on the Harcourt + Trask offices. In their own modest way, they’re proving the same point. Here’s our second floor with a gaping hole in the middle because we can afford to waste Belgravia real estate, etc., etc. Not everything can be on such a scale as that cathedral of a lobby, not everything can be trying to change the world. (But God, why not?)
Normally he leaves around lunchtime Fridays to get to Thornchapel, but he’s staying late to finish up an email to Isla, updating her on a client call he had that morning. He’s officially nothing at Harcourt + Trask, just more bespectacled, leather-satchel-carrying grist for the mill, but even though he’s not a partner or a junior partner, he’s become Isla’s favorite employee. An immodest part of him knows it’s because he’s talented, at least more talented than the other young architects he works alongside, but he suspects it’s also because he volunteers to take on the shit work no one else wants to do.
Talk to municipal officials about a problem with the soil pipes? Auden will do it.
Field a call from a client angry about delays in building approval? Auden will do it.
Running copies for a meeting? Fixing a jam in the upstairs plotter printer? Coffee run?
Auden will do it.
He’ll never tell anyone this, but one of the proudest moments in his life came last year, right here in this office. It was the week of his father’s death, and he’d come in to arrange bereavement leave with Isla. She’d given him a hard look over her desk after he finished talking and said, “You never mentioned that your father was Ralph Guest.”
He initially had almost no reaction to this. He was exhausted that day, worn down from the last month of Ralph’s life, which had been a series of medical misadventures, one after the other, increasing in torment and scale, and there was no one but him to bear the brunt of it. No sibling, no mother. No aunts or uncles. Certainly no friends—Ralph had done a good enough job driving those off. And so when Ralph finally passed on and then Auden discovered his work still wasn’t done, that there were services to arrange and probate to handle and so many other miscellaneous and pointless tasks that nonetheless had to be carried out in the wake of a death, he wanted to lie down and sob.
Not because he missed his father, but because he missed sleep.
“I would have thought,” Isla mused then, looking at him in his rumpled clothes and even more rumpled hair, “that you would have traded on that more here. Certainly Trask would have wanted to curry favor with someone like your father. You could’ve had your own office, been on the way to being a junior partner already.”
That’s when the reaction came, a slow bristle that moved through his chest. “That’s not how I want my life to be.”
“No need for indignation, Auden. I find it quite refreshing, if I’m honest. The fact that I had no idea you were that kind of Guest speaks a lot, because I think you’re one of the best architects in this firm. And now you can know, completely and genuinely, that you won that opinion on your own merit and nothing else.”
Auden hadn’t been able to speak, the bristle in his chest replaced with something almost light, almost happy.
It was pride. Real, deserved pride. The kind he’d never been able to feel at school or even at Cambridge, because sure, he’d excelled in those places, but he’d excelled because he’d had every advantage along the way . . . And because the Guest name came with entitlements. The kind of entitlements that meant all success came easy—as easy as if it’d been purchased. It hadn’t been purchased, of course, nothing so gauche, but it had been implied, and in Auden’s world, implication was reality.
And so he’d taken the job at Harcourt + Trask precisely because he knew that Isla was Glaswegian and was newish to the London spheres his father was part of, and he’d applied and interviewed in utter secrecy and silence, so there could be no chance of his father catching wind of it and trying to pull strings. He’d wanted this one corner of his life to remain untainted, free of those insidious Guest implications.
He’d wanted, just once in his life, to earn something.
So anyway, he’s won Isla’s respect free and clear, and he tries never to jeopardize that, even when it means the occasional late day like today. It also means that he’s at his desk when Andrew Cremer, the family solicitor, calls.
“Guest,” Auden answers crisply, wedging the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he can finish typing the email.
“Mr. Guest,” Cremer says politely. “Do you have a minute?”
A very large part of him wants to drawl Does it matter? because they both know it doesn’t matter at all what Auden has time for. If Cremer needs him, then there’s nothing for it. Whatever it is must be done.
Auden manages—just barely—not to be a shit. He actually likes Cremer quite a bit; he knows that Cremer works hard to shield him from the ugliest and knottiest realities of being a Guest, and it’s not Cremer’s fault anything that reminds Auden of his father makes him instantly fifteen years old again. “Yes, Mr. Cremer,” he says heavily. “Anything you need.”
Cremer clears his throat. “It’s something rather unusual, Mr. Guest. There’s been . . . a delivery.”
“A delivery?”
“From your father.”
Auden’s hands go still over his keyboard. He’s still looking at the screen but he sees nothing. “My father’s dead.”
“Yes, sir,” Cremer says patiently. “Nevertheless, it is from him.”
