The Witch Elm: A Novel Read online

  “I’m going to bet on someone’s wife hooking up with the guy next door,” I said. The villainous nuns would have made better TV-movie fodder, but they sounded like a pretty big stretch to me. “Just playing the odds.”

  Hugo didn’t grin back; instead he gave me a long, thoughtful look. “Perhaps,” he said, turning his attention back to his food. “I’d like to think so, too. So much less uncomfortable to think about. But until I know, you see, I have to pursue all the avenues.”

  He ate with the thorough, methodical enjoyment of a laborer, leaning forwards over his plate. “I’m not a DNA specialist,” he said, between mouthfuls, “but I can make a decent fist of analyzing results—or at any rate better than someone like Mrs. Wozniak, who’s never done it before. She was born in 1945, and the percentage of matching DNA puts the McNamara connection two or three generations back. So we’re talking about somewhere between, say, 1850 and 1910. It would be easier if I had the census records, but . . .” An exasperated, familiar shrug. A combination of government logic, World War I paper shortage and fire destroyed basically all the nineteenth-century Irish census records; I had heard Hugo complain about it plenty of times before. “So I can’t just go and check if one of the ancestors was on the census with a wife and three children before he emigrated, or if someone vanishes from the home address and pops up in a Magdalene laundry, or if the next-door neighbor happened to be a McNamara. Instead I’m going at it sideways. Parish records, mostly, but I’ve also been checking the passenger lists of emigrant ships—”

  I was losing hold of the conversation—too many possibilities and tributaries, the words had stopped meaning much—but the run of Hugo’s voice was peaceful as a river. The standing lamp, on against the dim underwater light, gave the room a sanctified golden glow. Rain pattering at the windowpane, bindings worn at the edges. Bird-dropped twigs in the grate of the little iron fireplace. I ate and nodded.

  “Would you like to give me a hand?” Hugo asked suddenly.

  He had straightened up and was blinking hopefully at me. “Well,” I said, taken aback, “um, I don’t know how much use I’d be. It’s not really my—”

  “It’s nothing fancy. Just the same stuff you and your cousins used to help me with: going through records looking for the right names. I know it’s not very exciting, but it does have its moments—do you remember that nice Canadian whose great-grandmother turned out to have run off with the music teacher and the family silver?”

  I was trying to come up with a good excuse—I couldn’t read a news article without forgetting what was going on halfway through, what were the chances I could keep track of half a dozen names while I deciphered page after page of Victorian handwriting?—when I realized, duhhh, with a sharp prickle of shame: Hugo wasn’t charitably trying to keep the poor unfortunate gimp busy. He wanted to know the answer to Mrs. Wozniak’s mystery, and he didn’t have a lot of time to find it. “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, sure. Absolutely. That’d be great.”

  “Oh, marvelous,” he said happily, pushing his empty plate aside. “It’s been too long since I had company at this. Do you want anything else to eat, or shall we get stuck in?”

  We cleared the plates (“Oh, just put them in that corner for now, we’ll take them downstairs later”—I had a sharp flash of wondering whether Hugo had noticed my dragging leg and wanted to spare me the stairs, but his face was turned away from me as he stacked the tray, I couldn’t find anything there) and he set the printer to churn out a stack of ships’ manifests while he fixed me up with the armchair and the side table and a year-old phone bill to run down the pages so I wouldn’t miss a line. “Check all the names, won’t you, not just the ones marked as Irish? You never know, there could be an error, or someone could have found a way to pass himself off as English—being Irish wasn’t exactly an advantage back then . . .” When I wrote down the names I was looking for and put the piece of paper beside the stack, he didn’t comment. “Ah,” he said, turning his chair to his desk and pulling the laptop closer with a sigh of satisfaction. And then—exactly like when we were kids, blast from the forgotten past: “Happy foraging.”

  It was very peaceful. In my spaced-out state, my mind couldn’t manage to snag on my problems or Hugo’s, or on anything really except the lines of type appearing like magic above the moving edge of the phone bill: Mr. Robt Harding 22 M Gent England, Miss S. L. Sullivan 25 F Spinster Ireland, Mr. Thos Donahue 36 M Farmer Ireland . . . The rhythm, once I found it, was hypnotic: three lines of the list, eyes swinging right to remind myself of the names I wanted, left again to the list for three more lines, tick tock tick tock, steady and solid as a pendulum. When I got down to steerage class, the passengers lost their titles and the occupations changed: Sarah Dempsey 22 F Servant Ireland, George Jennings 30 M Laborer Scotland, Patk Costello 28 M Ironmonger Ireland . . . I could have stayed there all day, all week, lulled by the quaint old terms—Hostler, Dye Sinker, Furman—only half-hearing the rain and the clicking of Hugo’s keyboard. It came as a shock when I heard the cheerful rat-a-tat-tat of the door knocker, downstairs, and—lifting my head notch by notch on my stiff neck, blinking at the reappearing room—realized slowly that the light had shifted; that that must be Melissa at the door; that I had spent hours like this, without either my concentration or my head or my eyes going to shite; that, for the first time in a long time, I was starving.

  * * *

  Somewhere during the evening before—while I was out on the terrace with my cousins?—Melissa and Hugo had apparently become friends. They had met before, at my family birthday party back in January, and had liked each other, but now all of a sudden they were easy as old pals, sharing in-jokes—Melissa pulling a bag of sweet potatoes out of one overloaded shopping bag to brandish it at Hugo, “Look, see? I told you!” and Hugo throwing back his shaggy head in a big crack of laughter; him resting a hand briefly on her shoulder as he passed her, the same way he did to me.

  “I like Hugo,” Melissa said, later, leaning against my bedroom window to look out at the garden. The bedroom light was off; she was only a silhouette against the faint colorless glow of the outside. “A lot.”

  “I know,” I said. I went to stand beside her. The rain was still going, a steady busy patter working away in the darkness. “Me too.”

  Melissa took one hand off the windowpane and held it out to me, palm up. I put my hand in hers and we stood there like that for a long time, watching the light from Hugo’s window illuminating a slanted rectangle of pale grass and weeds far below, the fine rain falling on and on through the beam and vanishing into the dark.

  * * *

  From there we slipped easily into a routine. Hugo would have breakfast ready when Melissa and I got up—“I wish he wouldn’t go to all that hassle,” I said, as Melissa and I got dressed to the smell of frying sausages curling up the stairs; “maybe I should—” but Melissa shook her head: “Don’t, Toby. Let him.” After I walked Melissa to the bus stop, Hugo and I would putter around for a bit—wanders around the garden, washing-up, laundry, showers (I hovered on the stairs while he took his, just close enough that I would hear the thud of him falling; I sometimes wonder if he did the same for me). Sometimes one of us would end up having a doze, on the sofa or if it was sunny in the hammock. At some point we would drift to his study and start foraging.

  Sunlight melting across the floorboards, smoky smell from the chipped blue teapot, small birds arguing in the ivy outside the open window. In our breaks Hugo told me long, absorbed stories about when he and his brothers were little (apparently my father had run away from home once, although only as far as the garden shed, where the other three had kept him supplied with food and sleeping bags and comics until he got bored enough to go back inside) or, in other moods, talked about his work. “The thing is,” he said once—turning from the cluttered desk, leaning his head back to massage his neck with one big hand—“it’s a different job now. I don’t mean all the computer stuf
f, the digitization; I mean the tone of it. People used to get in touch with me out of curiosity—they wanted to know the family history, they’d got as far as they could on their own, they were hungry for more. I was like a fairy godfather, dropping unexpected gifts into their laps: Look, here’s a copy of the letter your grandfather wrote to his sister during World War I! Look, here’s your great-grandmother’s birth certificate! A photo of the old family farm!”

  He poured the tea, held out a mug to me. “But now, with DNA analysis, it’s more complicated. People are coming to me because their analysis didn’t turn out the way they expected. ‘But I’m supposed to be a hundred percent Ashkenazi Jewish, why does this say twelve percent Irish? Why are my third cousins coming up as second cousins?’ They’re unsettled and they’re frightened, and what they want from me isn’t the lovely presents, any more; it goes much deeper. They’re afraid that they’re not who they always thought they were, and they want me to find them reassurance. And we both know it might not turn out that way. I’m not the fairy godfather any more; now I’m some dark arbiter, probing through their hidden places to decide their fate. And I’m not nearly as comfortable in that role.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I said. I didn’t want to minimize what he did, especially not now, but all of this seemed like a bit much, a streak of melodrama that I hadn’t spotted in Hugo before, and it made me uneasy. Any anomaly in Hugo unsettled me: just a quirk I’d never noticed, or the first step into some nightmare downslide? “I mean, they’re the same people, no matter what you find out.”

  That long look, thoughtful and interested, over his glasses. “It wouldn’t bother you? If you found out tomorrow that you were adopted, say, or that your grandmother was actually the child of some unknown man?”

  “Well,” I said. The tea was mouth-puckeringly strong—I’d lost count of the spoonfuls of tea leaves—but Hugo didn’t seem to have noticed and I wasn’t about to point it out. “Being adopted would bother me, sure. A lot. But if Gran’s mother shagged around . . . I mean, I didn’t know her; it’s not like I’ve got any respect for her to lose. And it doesn’t make any difference to me. So no, I wouldn’t care.”

  Hugo smiled. “Well, then,” he said, reaching for a biscuit, “you’ve got nothing to worry about. One look at your profile and anyone could tell you’re a Hennessy.”

  When Melissa came home we would put the work away and help her make dinner—exuberant, experimental dinners full of ingredients I didn’t know how to pronounce, let alone what to do with (galangal? teff?). Melissa was happy; I could see it, in the unguarded glow of her face when she looked up at me, the skip of her step between the cooker and the counter. Although it baffled me, I was glad of it: I knew she shouldn’t be there at all, shouldn’t be dealing with any of this, but I needed her, and that glow let me dodge the looming sense that I should really get her out of there. After dinner Hugo would light a fire in the living room—“I know it’s not a cold night,” he said simply, the first time, “but I love wood fires, and I can’t afford to wait for the winter”—and we would play rummy or Monopoly, among the faded red damask armchairs and old Italian engravings and worn Persian rugs that had been the same all my life, until Hugo got tired and we all went to bed. We mentioned Hugo’s illness only incidentally—planning for his appointments, passing his cane. What had happened to me never came up at all.

  Little rituals. Me brushing Melissa’s hair by the bedroom window, morning sun transforming it to pure light streaming through my hands. The neat tap of sheaves of paper on tables, me and Hugo squaring off edges before we got stuck into the day’s work. The debate over which CD to put on while we cooked dinner, No way, we had your French bistro whatever last night, it’s my turn! Looking back, I’m amazed by how quickly they took shape, those rituals, how solid and smooth and immutable they felt after only a few days; how quickly it came to feel as though we’d been there for years and would be there, all of us, for years more.

  It’s difficult to give a clear description of my state of mind during those weeks; even harder to imagine how it might have developed, if things hadn’t gone the way they did. It wasn’t that I was getting better, exactly. In some ways and to some extent, I was—the weird vision glitches had subsided a lot, so had the leaping at shadows, and although I couldn’t bear to have faith in this I thought the droop in my eyelid might be receding—but I was no nearer feeling like myself again, or even really like a human being. It was more that that didn’t seem to matter as much, at least not in any immediate way. Every day included plenty of things that should have sent me into a full-on spiral—mugs falling through my fingers to shatter on the floor, forgotten words leaving me gabbling—and yet I wasn’t a shaking wreck pacing my room and gnawing at my revenge fantasies; although I did feel like a meltdown was the only, the inevitable response, I also felt like it could wait till some other time. I suppose it was a bit like being mauled to rags by a savage animal, and then somehow dragging myself to a safe place and slamming the gates: I could still hear the animal padding and snuffling outside, I knew it had no intention of leaving and sooner or later I would have to go out there again, but at least for now I could stay in shelter.

  The rest of the family came in and out. On Sundays there was lunch, and during the week Oliver or Louisa or Susanna drove Hugo to doctor’s appointments and radiotherapy sessions and physiotherapy; my mother and Miriam brought over armloads of shopping bags; my dad, sleeves rolled up, hoovered the rugs and scrubbed the bath. Phil played endless games of draughts with Hugo (and brought me the late birthday present Susanna had warned me about: an indescribable gilt construction that he informed me was my great-great-grandfather’s pocket-watch holder, and that I had no idea what I was supposed to do with). Leon brought over ultra-hip takeaways for lunch and stayed for the afternoon, making Hugo laugh with stories about the time he and Carsten had been landed with an up-and-coming ska-punk band spending a week on their living-room floor. Hugo’s friends came, too, more of them than I would have expected: dusty, courteous old guys who could have been antiques dealers or handymen or college professors, smile-lined women with confident walks and surprisingly elegant clothes. I always left them to it in the living room, but I could hear the voices coming up through the floor, absorbed and overlapping, punctuated by bursts of real laughter.

  I liked it best when it was just the three of us, though, me and Melissa and Hugo. My dad and my uncles were so wretched that their misery stampeded into the house with them like some rampaging animal, upending all the delicate balances that Hugo and Melissa and I had constructed. My aunts were jumpy, losing weight, heads ceaselessly whipping back and forth as they tried to make sure everyone was OK. Louisa kept rearranging stuff, and under stress Miriam was turning into a parody of herself, covertly reiki-ing Hugo behind his back while he sat at the kitchen table obliviously eating apricots and Leon doubled over biting one knuckle in an extravagant cringe-mime, and Susanna and Melissa and I huddled over the cooker to hide the giddy giggles.

  I was actually getting on better with my mother. Finding out she had covered for me with the family had shifted something; that terrible urge to pick fights with her was gone. She had too much sensitivity to try and do anything useful inside the house, so instead she went at the garden, dead-heading and weeding and cutting back for autumn. I didn’t really get the point—it wasn’t like Hugo cared whether the garden got scraggly—but I sometimes joined her anyway. I’m not a gardener; mostly all I did was follow her around with a bag, picking things up, but my mother is a sociable person and she seemed to like the company. Either she thought I was all better or she was putting in some superhuman effort of will, because she had quit trying to lure me home or buy me emotional-support guard poodles. Mostly we talked about books and her students and the garden.

  “We’re getting there,” she said one afternoon. We were digging out the dandelions that had grown tall and muscular among the flowerbeds. It was still warm as summer, but th
e light was starting to shift, turning long and low and gold towards autumn. In the kitchen, Melissa and Hugo were starting on dinner; it was Melissa’s turn to pick the music, the Puppini Sisters’ version of “Heart of Glass” was bopping cheerfully through the open doors. “It’s not going to look like it did in your grandparents’ day, but it’ll do.”

  “It’s looking good,” I said.

  My mother sat back on her haunches, swiping hair back from her face with one arm. “I get that Hugo doesn’t care that much either way, you know,” she said. “But there’s nothing I can do, so I’m doing what I can.”

  “He’ll be happy,” I said. “He hates dandelions.”

  “And I feel like I owe this place. Even though it’s not my ancestral home.” She tilted her head back to look up at the house, shielding her eyes against the light. “It meant a lot to me, you staying here during the holidays.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  She made a face at me. “Not just because I wanted you out of the way so we could hang out in Sicily getting drunk on dodgy grappa. Although that too.”

  “I knew it. Here you told us you were going to museums.”

  My mother laughed, but only for a moment. “We worried about you being an only, you know,” she said, “your dad and I. We would’ve loved a couple more, but there you go. Your dad was just sad about you missing out on everything he’d had with his brothers, but I . . .”

  She bent to the dandelions again, wiggled a long root carefully out of the ground and tossed it into the bag. “I worried that maybe you spent too much time being the center of the world,” she said. “Not that you were selfish, you’ve always been generous, but there was something . . . I thought it would be good for you to have Susanna and Leon as sort-of siblings, at least part of the time.” With a quick up-glance at me, questioning: “If that makes any sense.”