The Witch Elm: A Novel Read online

  “You bollixes,” Tom said, red and grinning.

  “We’re only playing,” I said.

  “Play with someone else,” Susanna told us. “Jesus, I needed that.”

  “Mummy!” Sallie dashed across the grass and skidded to a stop in front of Susanna. “There are dolls in my shoes and I can’t get them out and Zach says if we leave them in there they’ll die!”

  “Let me see,” Susanna said. She scooped Sallie onto her lap, deftly whipped off one shoe, pulled out the inner sole and popped the doll into Sallie’s hand.

  “Whoa,” Sallie said, wide-eyed. “Cool.”

  Susanna did the same with the other shoe, wriggled them back onto Sallie’s feet and slid the kid off her lap. “There,” she said, “away you go,” and saw Sallie off with a light slap on the rear. Sallie galloped off down the garden, a doll held high in each hand, yelling, “Zach! Look! They’re out! HA-ha!”

  “That’ll shut Zach up,” Susanna said. “Do him good.”

  “Babes,” Leon said, leaning over to throw one elbow around Susanna’s neck and give her a big smacking kiss on the cheek. “I’ve missed you.” And over her head, to me: “I might have actually missed you, too.”

  * * *

  Finally—it can’t have been after nine o’clock, but it felt much later—the party, or whatever it was, broke up. I think my mother had some wistful idea that the five of us would cozy up in the living room for a late-night chat (“I could use a nightcap—Hugo, what happened to that odd bottle of stuff that we brought you from Sicily? Or Melissa, would you rather some—”), but my father—baggy-eyed, fumbling at a cufflink—put a stop to that: he needed to go to bed, he said gently but definitively, family was the best thing in the world but also the most tiring, and if the rest of us had any sense we would do the same. Hugo, with me and Melissa at his shoulder, waved from the top of the steps as the others got into their cars and drove off, chatter and laughter and car-door slams dissolving upwards into the dusky sky. I was glad of the dimming light; the day had exhausted me to the point where my leg was wobbling almost uncontrollably, and when I waved my hand flopped like spaghetti.

  At some point when I wasn’t looking, someone—one of my parents, presumably—had hauled our cases upstairs, which would have infuriated me if my head hadn’t been too full and whirling to have space for anything more, or if the Xanax had finished wearing off. Instead I let myself go along with Melissa’s wave of delight at seeing my old holiday room, which had been my father’s room when he was growing up and which was still more or less how I had left it the last time I’d stayed there, the summer before college— “Toby! did you draw this? I didn’t know you could draw . . . Oh, the fireplace, it’s beautiful, those flower tiles . . . Was this yours? You did not use to like Nickelback! . . . I love imagining you as a little five-year-old looking out this window . . . Oh my God, is this your school rugby jersey?”

  Through her eyes, the room lost the secretive, desiccated feel of some little-seen exhibit—too many years of sun fading streaks into the unmoving curtains, of the furniture legs wearing dents into their fixed spots on the floor—and took on a shy, bittersweet charm. As she skimmed around, she flicked things out of our cases—she had packed for me, so unobtrusively that I had barely realized what was happening—and glanced to me for permission to put them in place, here? here? so that by the time she came to rest the room was fresh and lively and ours, her hairbrush and my comb side by side on the old chest of drawers, our clothes neatly hung in the wardrobe with its cartoon-car stickers scraped patchily off the doors. “There,” she said, with a quick look at me, half pleased, half anxious. “Is that all OK?”

  “It’s great,” I said. I had been leaning against the wall, watching her, both because I enjoyed it and because I was too shattered to move. “Can we go to bed now?”

  Melissa sighed, satisfied. “Definitely. Bedtime.”

  “So,” I said, as she pulled her dress over her head—wonderful vintage dress, pale blue and twirly, it had spun among the shining oak and worn Persian carpets of the house as if it had been made for the place. “How was your day?”

  Melissa turned to me, dress in her hands, and I was startled by the glow of happiness on her face. Melissa had always romanticized my family—she didn’t have much of a family life; her mother drank, not flamboyantly but with real dedication, and much of her childhood had been made up of isolation and damage control. To her, the cheerful chaos of my family and the Ivy House had been like something out of a fairy tale; she used to ask me for stories about them, listen enthralled with her fingers curled in mine. “It was lovely. They’re all so nice, Toby, it’s such a hard time for you all but they made me feel so welcome, like they’re genuinely glad to have me here— Did you know your aunt Miriam was in the shop, last year? She bought a set of those plates with the deer on them. She never realized it was me!”

  Yellow light from my little bedside lamp shone velvety on her cheek, the turn of her bare shoulder, the supple curve of her waist into her hip. Her hair was a golden haze. “Come here,” I said, reaching for her.

  She let the dress fall to the floor and kissed me back, strongly and joyfully. “What about you?” she asked, drawing away to look up at me. “Did you have a good day?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “And this is the best part of all.” I slid my hand down her back and pulled her closer.

  “Toby!”

  “What?”

  “Your uncle!”

  “We’ll be quiet.”

  “But he’s right behind that—”

  “Vewy vewy quiet. Like we’re hunting wascally wabbits.” And sure enough, she laughed and her body relaxed against mine.

  I had had girls up in that room before, and for some reason it was the first one who my mind went to—a breathless little blonde called Jeanette, we were fifteen and I’d given Hugo some story about a history project which in retrospect of course he hadn’t believed for a second—and although Jeanette and I hadn’t actually had sex or even come particularly close it felt the same, the giddy giggles muffled in each other’s neck, the breathtaking sense of bounding into something risky and marvelous, the frantic grabs for the headboard at every squeak, Shh! You shh! It wasn’t the first time Melissa and I had had sex since that night but it was the first time it had felt like the real thing, rather than some tense, unhappy, confused compulsion. Afterwards I lay on my back with Melissa’s hair fanned across my chest, listening to her soft contented breathing and gazing up at the familiar cracks running across the ceiling, and startled myself by thinking that this might actually have been a good idea.

  Four

  We woke early; my Ivy House bedroom, high above the garden, let in a lot more light than the one in my apartment. Melissa had work. I got up with her, made us breakfast—Hugo was still asleep, at least I hoped he was just asleep—and walked her to the bus stop. Then I made myself another cup of coffee and took it out onto the terrace.

  The weather had changed in the night; the sky was gray and the air was cool and still and saturated, ready to rain. The garden, beneath the great lines of trees, looked as if it had been abandoned for centuries. The big pots of geraniums on the terrace burned a crazed, frenetic red against it all.

  I sat down at the top of the steps and found my cigarettes (those I had managed to remember for myself, hiding them in my jacket pocket from Melissa). It had been a long time since I’d done anything like this, just sitting outside on my own, and it felt weird and exposed and risky in an inchoate way that made me twitchy. I smoked a cigarette with my coffee and buried the butt in a geranium pot.

  I didn’t feel like doing very much, or anything really. I’d actually slept properly, for the first time in months—logically I should have been much edgier at the Ivy House, seeing as it didn’t even have an alarm system, but somehow it was impossible to picture anyone breaking in, even if they could find the place—but ins
tead of energizing me it had left my mind smeared and foggy, incapable of getting a handle on anything. Already after ten minutes, though, I was too restless to sit still any longer. I could feel the terrible rhythm starting to pulse in my head, step and drag, step and drag, back and forth across my sweet old holiday room until Melissa came home.

  I went inside. Hugo was in fact alive, apparently: somewhere along the way he had surfaced, I could hear him in his study rattling computer keys and humming and occasionally saying severely, “Hm.” I tiptoed past his door and into my grandparents’ old bedroom.

  Patchwork quilt still on the bed, big jar of seashells from long-ago travels still on the mantelpiece, empty wardrobes and faint smell of lavender and dust. The rain had started, a light unobtrusive patter, its shadows down the windowpane mottling the sill and the bare floorboards. I stayed there for a long time, watching the drops merge and course down the glass, picking two and betting on their race to the bottom, the way I had when I was a kid.

  On the top floor the room where we had built our fort was a tumble of old furniture covered in dusty sheets, here and there a carved arm or a battered claw-foot poking out, dramatic festoons of cobweb in the high corners. In Susanna’s old room the bed was made up and there was a scattering of objects—stuffed rabbit splayed on the floor, Spider-Man mask and a tangle of small bright clothes on the dresser—that said she had been reviving the family tradition and dropping her kids with Hugo for a night here and there. Leon’s room was empty except for the stripped bed and a pile of what looked like folded curtains in one corner. This whole trip no longer felt like such a good idea. My own ghost was everywhere, muffling laughter in the fort, leaning over the banisters to call to Leon, sliding a hand up Jeanette’s top, agile and golden and invulnerable, utterly clueless about the anvil waiting to fall on his head and crush him to pulp. Outside the garden was lush and silent under the rain, leaves hanging with the weight of it, long grass bowed into hummocks and everything a luminous shadowless green.

  I had been standing on the stairs for a while, staring at a painting on the wall (late-nineteenth-century watercolor, picnic by a lake, I couldn’t read the signature but I certainly hoped some ancestor had painted it rather than paying money for it), when Hugo’s study door opened.

  “Ah,” he said, peering benignly at me over his glasses, apparently not at all surprised to find me standing there. “Hello.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I was about to make some lunch. It’s actually quite late, isn’t it, I got carried away . . . Will you join me? Or have you eaten?”

  “OK,” I said. “I mean, no, I haven’t eaten. I’ll join you.”

  I was moving aside to let him go ahead of me when I realized: the walking stick in his hand, the breath of preparation when he looked down the long flight of stairs. “I’ll make lunch,” I said. Here I was supposed to be at the Ivy House to help Hugo out. Some job I was doing. I could just hear Leon’s derisive snort of laughter: Knew it. “And bring it up here.”

  A flash of chagrin crossed Hugo’s face, but after a moment he nodded. “I suppose that’s a good idea. There’s some of yesterday’s casserole in the fridge, in the blue dish; I was just going to put it in the oven for a few minutes. Thank you.”

  I hadn’t been planning on anything more ambitious than bread and cheese for lunch (making breakfast for Melissa and myself had been an adventure: she clearly hadn’t been keen on rooting around in Hugo’s kitchen, so I had spent what felt like an hour standing in the middle of the floor paralyzed by the question of what to get out first, the bread? the butter? mugs? plates? start the coffeemaker? and that was before I even got into the whole issue of remembering what was kept where), but somehow I got the casserole heated and found a tray to load up with the plates and cutlery and two glasses of water, and managed to very carefully balance the whole thing back up to Hugo’s study in an awkward curl of my right arm. It occurred to me, with a spurt of something between astonishment and hope, that the constant fatigue might not be yet another sign of how fucked up my brain was; it could be just because everything took about ten times more effort than normal.

  The study hadn’t changed since I was a kid. Hugo was a genealogist, which I couldn’t imagine paid particularly well, but then with his lifestyle—no mortgage, no rent, no family, no expensive habits—I supposed it didn’t need to. His study had a Georgian writing desk, a fat battered leather armchair, dark oak floorboards, exuberant heaps of paper teetering on impractical surfaces; there were built-in bookshelves everywhere, crammed with huge leather-bound volumes stamped in ornate gold—Thom’s Irish Almanac and Official Directory, Pettigrew and Oulton’s Dublin Almanac—and odd knickknacks, a French carriage clock lacquered in a pattern of leaves and dragonflies, a corner of some ancient Roman plaque incised with a few stray letters, a little huddled rabbit carved from olive wood. Leon and Susanna and I had spent a fair bit of time there, as kids. Hugo used to let us pick up extra pocket money by helping him with his research, lying on our stomachs on the worn rug running our fingers down rows of wobbly old-fashioned type or beautiful near-illegible handwriting; Susanna, who had learned calligraphy at school, had a lucrative sideline drawing up frameable Celticky family trees for Americans. I had always liked the study. The lining of books wrapped it in an extra layer of silence, and the odd objects gave it a quality of low-level, mischievous enchantment; you expected a friendly mouse to poke its head out of a hole in the skirting board, or the clock to whirr and spin its hands backwards and strike thirteen. It reminded me a bit of Richard’s office, at the gallery. In fact—it had never occurred to me until that moment—Richard reminded me a bit of Hugo, all round. I wondered all of a sudden if that was why I had been so charmed by that first interview, why I had taken the job, why—a dizzying sense of things spiraling around me, shaping themselves into patterns I had no chance of keeping up with—why everything had unrolled the way it had.

  “Ah,” Hugo said, looking up from his desk with a smile. “Lovely. Here—” He moved his laptop aside so I could put his plate on the desk. On the screen: scanned image of a yellowed form, 1883, marriage solemnized at the Parish Church in . . .

  “You’re working,” I said, nodding at it.

  Hugo looked at the laptop as if faintly surprised by its existence. “Well, yes,” he said. “I am. I did think about taking off on some mad fling through the South American jungle, or at least the Greek islands, but in the end I decided there’s a reason why I haven’t done that already. This suits me much better—whether I like to admit it or not. And besides”—his wide smile lightening his whole face—“I’ve got quite an interesting mystery going on, and I don’t want to go anywhere without seeing how it turns out.”

  I sat in the armchair and pulled over the little side table to hold my plate. “What’s the story?”

  “Ah,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “A few months ago a lady called Amelia Wozniak contacted me from Philadelphia, looking for help tracing her Irish roots. Which did sound a bit unlikely”—he laughed, polishing his glasses on a frayed edge of jumper—“until I found out her maiden name was O’Hagan. She’d done a certain amount of work herself, come up with a pretty comprehensive family tree as far back as the 1840s, in Tipperary, mostly. But then it all went a bit wonky.” He laid the glasses aside and took a large bite of the casserole. “Mm. This overnighted pretty well, don’t you think?— She submitted DNA to one of the big databases, and up popped a whole assortment of cousins in Clare who, according to her research, really shouldn’t have been related to her at all. McNamaras, and she hadn’t come across that name anywhere. So she called me in.”

  “And?” As a kid I had never been particularly interested in Hugo’s “mysteries.” Leon and Susanna liked them, but I didn’t get the fascination: the answers weren’t going to change anything, there was never a throne or a fortune or anything at stake, what difference did it make? I had been involved purely out of companion
ability, and obviously for the extra cash.

  “Well, I don’t know yet. One possibility is a non-paternity event: somewhere along the line a woman stepped out on her husband, or was raped, and with or without her husband’s knowledge raised the child as his.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Lovely.”

  “Another possibility”—he was ticking them off on his fingers, fork waving—“is a second family. It happened quite a bit in those days, you know, with all the emigration. A man goes over to America to look for work, planning to send for his wife and children as soon as he’s saved up the passage money; but that’s easier said than done, next thing he knows it’s been years, he’s lonely, he doesn’t know what his children look like any more . . . So easy to fall for someone in your new world, so much easier not to mention that other life back in the old country—and before you know it you’ve got a skeleton in the family closet, safely hidden away for centuries, perhaps, until new technology comes along.”

  I was trying to pay attention, but my mind had started sliding. Hugo was right, the casserole was good, rich with herbs and full of big hearty chunks of beef and potato and carrot. His feet stretched out in their worn brown wool slippers, could they be the same old ones? A line of dark wooden elephants marching along the mantelpiece, from largest to smallest, I didn’t remember those—

  “And then there’s the possibility of a child who was given up, or kidnapped. Oh, not the nasty man in the white van”—at my startled look—“but Ireland even a couple of generations back wasn’t a good place to be an unmarried mother. So many of them ended up in those terrible homes for fallen women, the Magdalene Sisters, you know. Enormous pressure to give up the baby, not to wreck its life with the taint of your own sin. Very often the Sisters didn’t even bother with that, they simply abducted the child: told the mother it had died, sold it to a well-off American couple. Quite possibly kept the mother imprisoned for life, working in their laundry to expiate her sin.”