The Witch Elm: A Novel Read online

  “Not really,” I said, grinning at her. “But that might be too much to ask.”

  She wrinkled her nose at me. “Disrespectful child. Are you calling me flaky?”

  Strands of pale hair falling out of her ponytail, streak of dirt on her cheek: she looked young, she looked like the dauntless laughing mother I had adored as a kid, whose direct blue gaze had been a sweet shot right to my heart. I’m sorry, I wanted to say, not for teasing her but for everything, for being an arsehole over the last few months and for the terror she must have felt and for her only child being such a spectacular disaster area. Instead I said, “Hey, if the shoe fits,” and she waved her hoe threateningly in my direction, and we stayed out there together, weeding, till my leg was wobbling and I could barely hide the exhaustion and Melissa called from the kitchen door to say dinner was ready.

  * * *

  My cousins were a different story. We did manage flashes of the old closeness, but too much of the time we just pissed each other off. They were different from how I remembered them, and not in good ways. I knew it had been a long time since we’d hung out together, people change and grow apart and yada yada yada, but I had liked them a lot better before.

  Leon had always been mercurial, so it took me a while to notice that there was more than that going on now: his moods weren’t just changeable, they were elaborately, deliberately layered and coded. I followed him out to the terrace for a smoke one afternoon—by this point I was pretty sure Melissa and Hugo both knew I had started smoking, but given everything else that was going on, I figured they were unlikely to stage an intervention. Leon had brought over cartons of fiery, complicated noodle dishes and spent lunch trying to convince Melissa, whom he liked, to move to Berlin—“All that stuff in your shop, the Germans would go mad for that, they love anything Irish—shut up, Toby, Melissa and I are having a conversation here. And oh my God, German guys. They’re all about seven feet tall and they don’t spend their entire lives in the pub, they actually do things, parties and nature walks and museums and— Tell me again, what do you see in this big ugly lump?”

  When I went out onto the terrace, though, he was sitting on the steps, a thin thread of smoke rising from one hand, not moving. It was late afternoon; the shadow of the apartment block was starting to slant across the garden, slicing it sharply into a bright half and a dark, small pale butterflies appearing and vanishing again like a magician’s trick as they flitted back and forth. “Hey,” I said, lighting my cigarette and sitting down beside Leon. “Quit trying to make my girlfriend dump me.”

  Leon didn’t turn. The hunch of his shoulders startled me; all the effervescent charm had fallen away like a dust sheet, leaving him a dense dark huddle on the steps. “He’s getting worse, you know,” he said.

  It took me a second to realize what he meant. “No he isn’t,” I said. I was already starting to wish I had stayed inside.

  Leon didn’t even look at me. “He is. Today when I came in, he said, ‘My goodness, it’s been a while!’ Big smile.”

  Leon had spent the whole afternoon there two days earlier. “He was joking,” I said.

  “He wasn’t.”

  There was a silence. “Are you staying for dinner?” I asked. “I think we’re making ravioli with—”

  “And his fucking leg,” Leon said. “Did you see him going down into the kitchen? Three stairs, and his leg was shaking like jelly. I didn’t think he was going to make it.”

  “He had radiotherapy yesterday. It tires him out. By tomorrow he’ll be stronger.”

  “No he won’t.”

  “Look,” I said. I really, badly wanted Leon to shut up, but I knew him well enough to keep that out of my voice. “I’m with him all the time. OK? I know the, the, the patterns. After radiotherapy, he’s worse for a day or two, then he gets better.”

  “A few more weeks and he’s not going to be able to manage on his own. What happens when you go home? Has anyone got anything planned? Home care, or hospice, or—”

  “I don’t know when I’m going home,” I said. “I might hang on here for a while.”

  That made Leon turn to look at me, leaning back like I was some bizarre creature that had suddenly appeared in his field of vision. “Seriously? Like how long?”

  I shrugged. “I’ll see as I go.” For the last few days I had been wondering, idly but persistently, how long Melissa would be on for staying at the Ivy House. I did have doubts about how much longer I could get away with convincing my family that the only thing wrong with me was an extra glass of wine or a fondness for painkillers, and the thought of any of them realizing just how fucked up I was made me flinch like someone jamming a finger into an open wound; in some ways I felt like I should get out soon, while I was still ahead. On the other hand, going back to my apartment and the panic button and the nightly horrors was unthinkable. “I’m in no hurry.”

  “What about work? Are you not going back?”

  “I am back. I’m doing stuff from here.” I hadn’t been in touch with Richard in months; I had no idea whether I still even had a job. “They know the story. They’re fine with me working from home for a while.”

  “Huh,” Leon said, eyebrows still up. “Lucky you. Then what happens when it gets to be more than you can handle? No”—lifting a hand, when I started to say something—“I’m actually not being bitchy. You’ve been a trouper, I appreciate it more than I can tell you, and I apologize from the bottom of my heart for saying you wouldn’t be able for it. OK? But are you on for, I don’t know, lifting Hugo out of the bath? What about wiping his arse? Giving him his pain meds every four hours, day and night?”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said. My voice was rising, I heard it but couldn’t stop it. “None of this has actually happened, Leon. Can I worry about it when it does, yeah? If it does? Is that OK with you?”

  “Not really, no. Because when it does get to be too much for you, there needs to be a plan all ready to go. You can’t just walk out and leave him to look after himself till—”

  “Then make a fucking plan. I don’t care what it is. Just leave me out of it.”

  I expected Leon to snap my head off, but he gave me one unfathomable look and turned back to his smoke. The shadow had inched farther across the garden and the butterflies were gone, which to me in that mood seemed gratuitously and cheaply symbolic. I finished my cigarette as fast as I could and crushed it out under my shoe.

  “I asked my dad,” Leon said suddenly. “About what happens to this place.”

  “And?”

  “I had it wrong. It’s not just Hugo’s to live in; Gran and Granddad left it to him, straight up. Oldest son.” He ground out his cigarette on the step. “So the question is what Hugo’s will says. If he has one.”

  His eyes had slid sideways to me. “Oh hell no,” I said. “I’m not asking him.”

  “You were going on about how you spend all that time with him, you know him so well—”

  “And you were going on about how you’ve got a life in Berlin and God forbid you should have to move back here. What do you care if—”

  “Do you actually want the place sold?”

  “No,” I said, swiftly and definitely, startling myself. After the last few weeks, losing the Ivy House was unthinkable. “God, no.”

  “Hugo wouldn’t, either. You know he wouldn’t. But my dad says Phil and Louisa are all gung-ho about it: give Su and Tom a few bob for the kids’ education, for a better house, all that stuff. Susanna doesn’t want it, but try telling them that. And Phil’s the next oldest. Hugo could easily leave it to him, and boom, gone. If you talk to Hugo, you can explain that. Make sure he leaves it to someone who’ll hang on to it.”

  “OK,” I said, after a moment. “OK. I’ll talk to him.”

  Leon went back to staring at the garden, arms clasped around his knees like a kid. “Make it soon,” he said.

  I bu
ried my cigarette butt in the geranium pot and went inside, to Hugo and Melissa looking up smiling from the old photo album he had dug out to show her. But it was too late: my head was pounding savagely and there was no way I could face an evening of ravioli and rummy and chitchat, watching Leon watch Hugo’s every move. I said something about a headache, went upstairs and took a Xanax and a couple of painkillers—fuck Leon, anyway—and went to bed with the pillow over my head.

  Susanna had got a lot pricklier, too. She had been a sweet kid, earnest and bookish and quirky—sometimes to the point of cluelessness; I had spent a fair bit of our teenage years explaining to her why she needed to make an actual effort with clothes and hair and whatever, unless she wanted the shit slagged out of her—with an unexpected sharp sense of humor. In spite of the various shifts she had gone through since then, a part of me was still expecting that kid, and it came as an unpleasant surprise when that wasn’t what I got at all.

  “I’ve got hold of the guy,” she said, one afternoon, in the kitchen. She had just taken Hugo to his radiotherapy session; he had come back exhausted and shaky, and we had helped him into bed and were making tea and buttering scones to take up to him. “For the second opinion. He’s in Switzerland, but he’s the guy for this cancer, worldwide. I rang him up and he says he’ll take a look at Hugo’s file.”

  “I thought like three doctors had already seen him,” I said. “At the hospital.”

  Susanna pulled open the fridge and rummaged for the butter. “They have. So one more won’t hurt.”

  “So a fourth opinion. What do you want a fourth opinion for?”

  “In case the first three were shit.”

  I was at the sink, filling the kettle; all I could see was her back. “How many are you planning to get? Are you going to keep chasing doctors till one of them tells you what you want to hear?”

  “Just this one.” A cool skim of a glance at me, as she turned back to the counter. “How come you don’t like the idea?”

  What I didn’t like was the implication that Hugo’s doctors might have missed a trick. It raised the horrible possibility that mine might have done the same thing, left something undone that could have magicked me straight back to normal if only they had bothered— “I just don’t want Hugo getting his hopes up for nothing.”

  “Better than having him give up when he doesn’t need to.”

  “What do you think is going to happen? This Swiss guy is going to come back and say hey, surprise, he doesn’t have cancer after all?”

  “No. But he might come back and say hey, we could try surgery and chemo after all.”

  “If there was any chance of that, I think at least one of the first three guys would have mentioned it.”

  “They’re all buddies. They’re not going to contradict each other. If the first one says there’s nothing they can do—”

  “I was in the same hospital,” I said, “and my doctors were great. They did absolutely everything anyone could have done. Everything.”

  “Good. I’m glad. I’m sure they did.”

  I had just taken out the tea bags before the teapot and I couldn’t work out what to do with them while I looked for it, and I really wasn’t in the mood for that cool flat tone. I knew I should probably be encouraging her, or at least I should prefer all this no-stone-unturned stuff to Leon’s doom and gloom, but what I actually wanted was for everyone to fuck off and leave us alone. “So why are you looking for a fourth opinion?”

  “Because,” Susanna said, buttering half a scone with one hard neat sweep, “Hugo’s not you. He’s sixty-seven, and he’s obviously not some rich powerful big shot—he doesn’t even have health insurance, did you know that? He’s been going public. And let’s face it, he’s vague enough and scruffy enough that if you weren’t paying a lot of attention, you could easily write him off as a batty old loser. At least he’s a guy and he’s white and he’s got a posh accent, so he’s got those going for him, but still: just because they went all out for you, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to pump the same resources into some half-senile old geezer who’s probably going to die soon anyway.”

  The rush of anger took me by surprise. “Well that’s just bullshit,” I said, after a moment where I couldn’t even talk. “For fuck’s sake, Su. You seriously think they’re deliberately letting Hugo die, just because he’s old and scatty and not a millionaire? These are doctors. I don’t know what kind of social-justice-warrior shite you’ve been reading, but their job is to make people better, if they can. Which sometimes they can’t. That doesn’t mean they’re evil villains rubbing their hands and looking for ways to fuck up people’s lives.”

  Susanna pulled the teapot out of a cupboard, whipped the tea bags out of my hand and dropped them in. “Remember when Gran got sick?” she asked. “Horrible stomach pain, for weeks, all bloated up? She went to her GP three times, she went into the ER twice, and they all said the same thing: constipation, go home and take a nice senna tablet, good girl. No matter how many times she told them that wasn’t it.”

  “So they made mistakes. They’re human.” I didn’t actually remember any of this. I had been thirteen, head humming with girls and friends and rugby and bands and school; I had visited Gran at least a couple of times a week while she was sick, used my pocket money to buy her favorite fruit-and-nut chocolate as long as she could eat and her favorite yellow freesias when she couldn’t, but I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to all the ancillary stuff.

  “Basically,” Susanna said, “they took one look at Gran and decided she was just a batty old lady looking for attention. Even though ten seconds of actually listening to her would’ve told them she wasn’t like that at all. You know what it took before they bothered to even check for stomach cancer? My dad finally went in and gave her GP a massive bollocking. Then he sent her for tests. And by that time it was too late to do anything useful.”

  “It might have been too late anyway. You don’t have a clue.”

  “Yeah, it might’ve. Or it might not. That’s not the point. Move.” She leaned across me, grabbed up the kettle and poured the tea, roughly enough that a few drops of water splashed onto the countertop. “The point is, if your doctors went all out for you, great. But not everyone gets to live in the same world as you.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” I said. “Listen to yourself. It’s not like they have a, have some, some—” I knew exactly what I meant, couldn’t find the words to get it into Susanna’s head, bit down hard on the inside of my lip— “They don’t have some secret score card where they take points off you for having a skanger accent or being over sixty-five, and then you only get as much treatment as your points can buy. That’s ridiculous. You’re going to have to trust that they’re doing their best.”

  Susanna had the tray ready. She started tidying around it: crumbs swept into her hand and flung into the bin, milk and butter shot into the fridge, door flicked shut, deft economical movements with a snap to them.

  “Having Zach wasn’t fun,” she said. Her voice was very level, but there was a tightly controlled undercurrent to it. “The consultant did some stuff to me—I mean, I’ll spare you the details, but basically there were a few options and I really didn’t agree with the one he wanted to go with. So I said no. And he told me, quote, ‘If you try to get feisty with me, I’ll get a court order and send the police to your door to bring you in.’”

  “He was winding you up,” I said, after a startled second.

  “He was dead serious. He told me all about the times he’d done it to other women, in detail, to make sure I knew he wasn’t winding me up.”

  “Jesus,” I said. I wanted to know what the fuck Tom had been doing while someone talked to his wife like that. Presumably he had been nodding inoffensively and pondering which cringeworthy baby-carrier to schlep the kid around in. “Did you file a complaint?”

  Susanna turned, butter knife in hand, and
gave me an incredulous stare. “About what?”

  “He can’t do that.”

  “Of course he can. If you’re pregnant, you don’t have the right to any say about your health care. He could do whatever he wanted to me, whether I agreed to it or not, and it would be totally legal. Did you seriously not know that?”

  “Well,” I said. “I mean, in theory he could. But in practice, I really doubt it works out like—”

  “It works out exactly like that. I should know. I was there.”

  I didn’t particularly want to get into a fight about this, plus I felt like we were getting a little off topic here, given that Hugo was unlikely to be pregnant. “That consultant was a shithead,” I said. “I’m really sorry that happened to you. And I can totally see why you’d be gun-shy about doctors. But just because you ran into a bad one, that doesn’t mean—”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Susanna said. She threw the butter knife into the sink with a clatter, picked up the tea tray and left.

  * * *

  Normally I would have handled that conversation a lot better. After all, it wasn’t like Susanna had transformed into an entirely different person; she had always liked getting up in arms about injustices, real and imagined, and I’d never done anything but roll my eyes cheerfully and let it go. The same with Leon: he had always been a moody little bollix, I knew better than to let it get to me, normally I would have walked off and left him to it long before his mood could rub off on me. Now, apparently, minor variations on their usual bullshit had the power to knock me sideways.

  It’s tempting to blame it on the stress of Hugo dying, or on the cracks, neurological or psychological or whatever, from that night, but if I’m honest I think it was a lot more mundane and pathetic than that. The truth, I suppose, is that I envied Leon and Susanna. The sensation was so unfamiliar that it took me a while to recognize it; I’d spent my life taking it for granted that, if anything, it was the other way around. Social stuff had always come easily to me—not that I was some charismatic leader type, but I was always effortlessly part of the cool crowd, invited to everything, secure enough in my footing that Dec had been accepted into the fold in spite of his accent and his glasses and his atrocious rugby skills, simply because he was my friend. Leon had spent school as the kind of kid who got regular wedgies, and while Susanna (in our sister school, next door) hadn’t exactly been a reject, she and her friends had been a bunch of generally ignored Lisa Simpson types who did stuff like selling handmade candles to raise money for homelessness or Tibet or something; if the two of them got included in anything remotely cool, it was because of me. Even once we grew up, Leon had dropped out of college after a year and ricocheted around the world picking some crop or other in Australia and living in a squat in Vienna and never holding on to a job or a boyfriend for longer than a year or two, and Susanna had turned into Mrs. Stay-at-Home Mummy and spent her time pureeing green beans or whatever, while I had got straight on track for a snazzy career and pretty much the perfect life. It honestly wasn’t that I looked down on them, ever—I loved them, I wanted them to have every good thing in the world—just that I was aware, in the back of my mind, that if they were to compare their lives with mine, mine would come out on top.