The Witch Elm: A Novel Page 12

  The ivy was still there, lush and glossy with summer, but the house was more dilapidated than it had been in my grandparents’ time; nothing dramatic, but there were rusty patches on the iron railings where the black paint had flaked away, the spiderweb fanlight was dusty and the lavender bushes in the snippet of front garden could have done with pruning. “Here we go,” I said, hefting our cases.

  Someone was standing in the open door. At first I barely recognized it as a person; stripped of substance by the bright sunfall through the leaves, flutter of white T-shirt, confusing gold swirl of hair, white brushstroke face and dense dark smudges of eyes, it had something illusory about it, as if my mind had conjured it from patches of light and shadow and at any moment it might break up and be gone. The smell of lavender rose up to meet me, spectrally strong.

  Then I got closer and realized that it was Susanna, holding a watering can and watching me, unmoving. I slowed down—I’d discovered that if I concentrated and kept it slow, I could sort of disguise the leg thing as an indolent, too-cool-to-care stroll. Even through the Xanax, the feel of her eyes on me made my jaw clench. I had to stop myself from reaching up to smooth down the hair over my scar.

  “Holy shit,” Susanna said, as we reached the bottom of the steps. “You made it.”

  “Like I said I would.”

  “Well. More or less.” One corner of her wide mouth quirked up in a smile I couldn’t read. “How’re you doing?”

  “Fine. No complaints.”

  “You got skinny. Watch out for my mum. She’s got a lemon poppyseed cake and she’s not afraid to use it.” When I groaned: “Relax. I’ll tell her you’re allergic.” And to Melissa: “It’s good to see you.”

  “You too,” Melissa said. “Susanna, is it really OK, me being here? Toby says he’s sure it’s fine, but—”

  “He’s right, it’s fine. Better than fine. Thanks for doing it.” She upended the watering can over the nearest lavender bush and turned back into the house. “Come on in.”

  I dragged our cases up the steps, gritting my teeth, and left them inside the door, and somehow, before I really knew what was happening, I was inside the Ivy House. Melissa and I followed Susanna over the familiar worn tiles of the hall—wayward breezes blowing everywhere, all the windows had to be open—and down the steps towards the kitchen.

  Voices rose up to meet us: my uncle Oliver’s emphatic declamation, a kid yelling in outrage, my aunt Miriam’s big throaty laugh. “Oh Jesus,” I said. Somehow it hadn’t even occurred to me. “Shit. Sunday lunch.”

  Susanna, up ahead, didn’t hear that or ignored it, but Melissa’s face turned to me. “What?”

  “On Sundays everyone comes here for lunch. I didn’t think—I haven’t gone in forever, and with Hugo sick, I never figured— Shit. I’m sorry.”

  Melissa squeezed my hand for a second. “It’s fine. I like your family.”

  I knew she hadn’t bargained for this any more than I had, but before I could answer we were into the big stone-flagged kitchen and the room hit me like a fire hose to the face. Hubbub of voices, the fly and strike of sunlight through the open French doors, meaty casserole smell catching the back of my throat and turning me somewhere between starving and nauseated, movement everywhere—I knew there could only be a dozen people there, maximum, apart from me and Melissa, but after months of near-solitude it felt like a football crowd or a rave, much too much, what had I been thinking? My father and Uncle Oliver and Uncle Phil all talking at once and pointing their glasses at each other, Leon leaning over the kitchen table on his elbows playing some hand-slap game with one of Susanna’s kids, Aunt Louisa dodging about clearing plates— After the silted-up debris and dust of my apartment the whole place looked unnaturally clean and colorful, like a stage set freshly constructed in preparation for this moment. I thought about grabbing Melissa and backing straight out of there, before anyone noticed we had arrived—

  A cry of “Toby!” and my mother popped out of the mass of bodies, glad-faced, catching my hand and Melissa’s and talking nineteen to the dozen—I couldn’t take in a word—and that was it: we were trapped, too late to run for it. Someone shoved a glass into my hand and I took a big gulp, prosecco mimosa, I could have done with something a lot stronger but that would probably have been a bad idea with the Xanax and at least it was booze— Miriam throwing her arms around me, in a cloud of essential oils and hennaed hair, and congratulating me on the exhibition (“Oliver and I have been meaning to get to it, now that Leon’s home we can all go together, a family excursion—Hugo can come too, a bit of art would do him good— What happened to that boy who was all over your Facebook page? Grunger?”) and on being alive, which was apparently an indicator of my exceptional resistance to negative energy. Tom, Susanna’s husband, pumping my hand like we were at some kind of religious meeting and giving me a great big earnest smile full of empathy and encouragement and all kinds of good stuff that made me hope Susanna was banging his best friend. Oliver landing a back-slap that doubled my vision, “Ah, the wounded warrior! I’d say you gave as good as you got, though, am I right? I’d say there are a couple of burglars out there questioning their career choice—” and on and on, punctuated with belly-shaking chortles, until Phil must have caught my increasingly wall-eyed look because he cut in with some question about my opinion on the housing crisis, on which frankly I had had no opinion even before I got clocked on the head but at least it distracted Oliver. My mother regaling us with the saga of some byzantine department feud that had climaxed with one medieval-studies professor chasing another down a corridor, whacking at him with a sheaf of documents (“in front of the students! It was on YouTube within ten minutes!”)—she tells a story well, but my mind kept cutting in and out, skidding off on tangents (child’s drawing stuck to the fridge and I couldn’t work out what it was meant to be, dinosaur, dragon? had Leon had that platinum-streaked forelock last time I saw him, it looked ridiculous, he looked like a My Little Pony, could I have forgotten that? how was I going to lug Melissa’s and my cases up the stairs?) and by the time my mother finished the story I couldn’t remember how it had started. I laughed when Melissa did and talked as little as possible—the slur in my speech had faded a bit but not enough, unless I was super-careful I still sounded handicapped. The Xanax didn’t stop me from longing to get out of that room, to just about anywhere that didn’t have my mother’s eyes skipping to me too often and Leon elbowing me in the back every time he gestured; it just stopped me from imagining any conceivable way to do it.

  “I’m very glad you came,” my father said, suddenly at my shoulder. His sleeves were rolled and his hair was rucked up in tufts; he looked like he’d been there a long time. “Hugo’s been looking forward to seeing you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.” Getting to this point had taken so much concentration that I’d practically forgotten why I was there to begin with. “How’s he feeling?”

  “He’s all right. He had his first radiotherapy session on Wednesday and it’s left him a bit tired, but apart from that he’s himself.” My father’s voice was level, but the undercurrent of pain made me look at him properly. He seemed somehow thinner and puffy at the same time, a slight sag under his eyes and his jawline that I didn’t remember being there before, bones showing under the loose skin of his forearms. I had a sudden flash of deep, premonitory terror—it had never really hit me before that my father would get old, so would my mother, someday I would be hanging around their kitchen waiting for one of them to die. “You should go say hello.”

  “Right,” I said, downing my mimosa. Melissa had been nabbed by Miriam. “I probably should,” and I threaded my way through the press of bodies, flinching at every touch, towards Hugo.

  I had been dreading seeing him, pretty badly, actually—not out of squeamishness, simply because I had no idea what it might do to my head and I really couldn’t handle any more surprises. Hugo was the tallest of the four brothers
, well over six foot, with the wide-shouldered, rangy build of a hill farmer and a big, shaggy head with big, messy features, as if the sculptor had given the clay a rough general shape and left the detail for later. I had had nightmare visions of him emaciated, glassy-eyed, huddled in a chair with his long fingers picking fitfully at the covering blanket— But there he was at the old stove, stirring a chipped blue enamel saucepan, eyebrows down and lips pushed out in concentration. He looked so exactly like himself that I felt silly for having got all worked up.

  “Hugo,” I said.

  “Toby,” he said, turning to me, breaking into a smile. “How lovely.”

  I braced myself for his pat on the shoulder, but somehow it didn’t trigger the savage surge of repulsion that any non-Melissa physical contact set off in me. His hand was warm and heavy and simple as an animal’s paw or a hot-water bottle. “It’s good to see you,” I said.

  “Well, I didn’t do this to get you all here, but it’s a pleasant side effect. Does this look ready to you?”

  I looked into the saucepan. Creamy amber swirl with a smell straight out of my childhood, caramel and vanilla: Gran’s famous ice-cream sauce. “I think it needs a couple more minutes.”

  “So do I.” He went back to stirring. “Louisa kept insisting that I shouldn’t bother, but the children love it . . . And how are you? You’ve been having adventures of your own.” Tilting his head to examine my scar; when I tensed, he turned back to the stove immediately. “We have matching war wounds,” he said. “Although luckily yours is part of a very different story from mine. Does it hurt?”

  “Not much any more,” I said. Till he mentioned it, I hadn’t noticed the shaved patch and the raised red line on the side of his head, among the too-long salt-and-pepper hair.

  “Good. You’re young; you’ll heal well. And have you recovered?”

  That sharp skimming glance, from his gray eyes. None of us had ever been able to get anything past that glance. Sunday lunch, that glance sweeping across the cousins and catching on sixteen-year-old me expertly concealing a hangover: Hm. And later, in my ear, with a quirk of a smile: One fewer next time, I think, Toby. “Pretty much,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  “Disorientated,” Hugo said. “More than anything else. Which seems silly; I’m sixty-seven, after all, I’ve known for years that something like this could be sprung on me at any moment. But to have it become solid fact, and imminent, is inexpressibly strange.” He raised the spoon out of the sauce and inspected the long thread that trailed from it. “The counselor at the hospital—poor woman, what a job—did a lot of talking about denial, but I don’t think it’s that: I’m well aware that I’m dying. It’s that everything seems altered, in fundamental ways, everything from eating breakfast to my own home. It’s very dislocating.”

  “Susanna said something about radiotherapy,” I said, “didn’t she? Couldn’t that fix things?”

  “Only if it were combined with surgery—and probably not even then—but the doctor says that’s not a possibility. Susanna’s trawling the internet, researching the top specialists in order to get a second opinion, but I don’t think I can afford to put too much stock in that.” He pointed at the vanilla bottle, on the counter near me. “Could you pass me that? I think we could do with a drop more.”

  I handed it over. Propped against the counter beside it was my grandfather’s old silver-headed walking stick, ready to hand.

  “Ah,” Hugo said, catching the direction of my eyes. “Yes, well. I can’t manage the stairs without it any more; even walking is a bit of a problem, off and on. No more mountain hikes for me, I’m afraid. It seems like an odd thing to be bothered by, in the circumstances, but in some ways it’s the trivial things that are the most upsetting.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am.”

  “I know. I appreciate that. Could you put this back in the cupboard?”

  We stood there for a while, watching the rhythmic turn of the spoon in the saucepan. A soft breeze, rich with earth and grass, wandered in at the French doors; behind us, Leon’s voice rose to a punch line and everyone burst out laughing. The creases and sags of Hugo’s face gave him a dozen familiar expressions at once, made him unreadable.

  I felt as if there was some crucial question I should be asking him; some secret he knew that could change everything, illuminate the last terrible months and the ones to come in a new undreamed-of light that would turn them not just bearable but harmless, if only I knew how to ask. For a startling, vertiginous moment that was gone almost as soon as I recognized it, I found myself on the verge of tears.

  “There,” Hugo said, moving the pan off the heat. “That should do it. Really we should let it cool for a while, but—” Turning to the room: “Who’ll have ice cream?”

  * * *

  The whole afternoon was very strange. There was a bizarre festive quality to it—maybe just the overlay of all those remembered celebrations, maybe the fact that so many of us hadn’t seen each other in months or years. Bowls of curly blown yellow roses everywhere, the special silverware with some forgotten ancestor’s initials on the scuffed handles, Gran’s big-occasion emerald earrings swinging and sparking from Aunt Louisa’s ears; waves of laughter and ring of glass on glass, Cheers! cheers!

  In spite of the familiarity, though, there was something off-kilter about it all. People were doing the wrong things, those earrings on Louisa, Tom instead of Hugo laying out the ice-cream bowls while Hugo—a sudden gray layer of fatigue veiling his face—sat at the kitchen table, nodding at whatever Tom was gabbling about; two little blond kids who weren’t us running around among people’s legs making airplane noises and grabbing stuff off each other, Susanna quelling them with a glare exactly like the one Louisa used to throw at us; and there I was with another mimosa in my hand, nodding while my uncle Phil meandered on about the ethics of corporate tax breaks. It felt like being in one of those horror films where unspeakable entities take over the supporting characters’ bodies but not quite well enough, our hero spots the slip-ups and tumbles to the plot unfolding under his very nose— At first this was just unsettling, but as the afternoon wore on and on (the ice cream and caramel sauce, coffee, liqueurs, I didn’t want any of it and it just kept on coming) it set off an awful, swelling riptide deep inside me. Louisa bearing down on me with a gargantuan chunk of lemon poppyseed cake and a determined eye, Susanna smoothly intercepting her with a shocked “Mum! Toby’s allergic!,” Melissa gallantly vowing that lemon poppyseed was her favorite, Oliver blowing his nose cacophonously into a vast handkerchief and glowering darkly at the roses: they all looked utterly alien, these people who were supposed to be my nearest and dearest, collections of jerking limbs and colors and gurning faces that added up to nothing at all, certainly nothing to do with me. Every jostle of my elbow or movement in the corner of my eye made me leap like a spooked horse, and the constant adrenaline spikes and plummets were exhausting. I could feel that vortex opening at the base of my brain, the tension starting to build like a storm front in my spine. I had no idea how I was going to get through the rest of the day.

  Somehow the plates were cleared and rinsed and loaded into the dishwasher, but no one seemed to be leaving; instead we all moved into the living room, and someone made a fresh round of mimosas. Everyone was knocking them back a little too hard. Leon was reenacting a spectacular face-off between a drag queen and a punk that he swore he’d seen in a Berlin club and that had my mother and Tom and Louisa in gales of laughter, Leon, she didn’t! Oh God, stop, my stomach hurts . . . I caught a glimpse of my father knuckling his eye and looking utterly exhausted, but the next moment Miriam turned to him and he snapped into animation, smiling down at her as he said something that made her hoot and whack his arm. Phil was leaning in at Susanna, talking too fast and gesticulating so forcefully that he rocked back and forth a little on his feet with the momentum. The high-ceilinged room jumbled all the voices into gibberish and
the whole thing had a precarious, unmoored feel to it, a knees-up in some Blitz-time basement as bombs whistled overhead, the hilarity brittle as an ice sheet and on the verge of skidding wildly out of control, that’s the spirit, faster and higher and faster until boom! all gone!

  I couldn’t stand it any more. I glanced about for Melissa, but she was ensconced on one of the sofas with Hugo, deep in conversation; there was no way we could slip unobtrusively away. I went back down to the kitchen, ran myself a glass of cold water and took it out onto the terrace.

  After the babble of noise and color inside, the garden had a stillness that was almost holy. The thing I always forget about the Ivy House garden, the one that catches me afresh every time, is the light. It’s different from anywhere else, grained like the bleached light in an old home movie of summer, as if it were emanating from the scene itself rather than entering from any outside source. In front of me the grass stretched on and on, overgrown, rough with tall ragweed and bright with poppies and cornflowers; under the trees, the patches of shadow were pure and deep as holes in the earth. Heat shimmered over it all.

  Voices, clear as robins’, making me jump. There were children playing, down at the bottom of the garden: one swooping crazy patterns on a rope swing, flicking in and out of existence as it arced from shadow to light and back again, one rising out of the long grass with hands held high and wide to scatter something. Thin brown limbs in ceaseless movement, white-blond hair shining. Even though I knew they were Susanna’s kids, for a sliding second I thought they were two of us, Leon and Susanna, me and Susanna? One of them called out, sharp and imperious, but I couldn’t tell whether it was meant for me. I held my glass against my temple and ignored them.