The Witch Elm: A Novel Read online

  But now: they ran up the front steps two at a time, juggled multiple threads of conversation without missing a beat; Leon told scurrilous stories about nights out with bands I had actually heard of, Susanna had just dusted off her degree and got into a prestigious master’s program on social policy and was sparking with excitement about it; and then there was me. I was functioning fine, give or take, within my new miniature simplified world, but I knew perfectly well there was no chance I could handle even a single day in my old job or my old life. I envied them, hard and shamefully, and it felt against the natural order of things. It made it impossible for me to see their foibles and flaws with the old warm, amused tolerance. Stuff that a few months ago would have had me grinning, shaking my head, set my teeth on edge to the point where I could barely keep back a roar of rage. It was always a relief when they left, and Melissa and Hugo and I could slip back into our gentle, crepuscular world of rustling pages and card games and hot cocoa at bedtime, of delicate unspoken agreements and accommodations; of—and I only see it now, really, for the rare and inexpressibly precious thing it was—mutual, grave, tender and careful kindness.

  * * *

  Leon was right, though: Hugo was getting worse. It was subtle enough that most of the time we could almost convince ourselves it wasn’t happening. A sudden wild buckle of his leg, me or Melissa grabbing at his elbow, oops! mind the rug! but it was happening more and more often and there wasn’t always a convenient rug to blame. The dazed, tractionless gaze skidding around the room sometimes when his head came up from his work, What . . . ? what time is it? and then his eyes lighting on me with such a total lack of recognition that it took a lot not to back right out the door, to say instead Hey, Uncle Hugo, it’s almost three, want me to make the tea? and he would blink at me, coming back into his eyes little by little, and finally smile, Yes, I think we’ve earned it, don’t you? The occasional snap of irritability that verged on anger, out of nowhere—No, I don’t want more vegetables, I’m perfectly capable of serving myself, don’t rush me! The drag at one corner of his mouth, subtle enough to look like a wry deprecating quirk of expression, except that it didn’t go away.

  One evening he fell. We were in the middle of making dinner—empanadas, I can still smell the rich greasy mix of chorizo and onion suddenly hitting the back of my throat. We had Chopin waltzes playing, Hugo had gone upstairs to the toilet and Melissa and I were rolling out dough on the countertop and debating how big the disks should be, when we heard a confused scuffle, a thick terrible thud, a tumble and clatter; and then silence.

  We were out of the kitchen and calling Hugo’s name before my mind had time to understand what I had heard. He was half-sprawled on the stairs, white and wild-eyed, clutching the banisters with one hand. His cane was far below him and there was something awful about the flung angle of it, earthquake, invasion, everyone fled—

  Melissa got to him first, kneeling on the stairs beside him, hands on his arms to hold him down—“No, stay still. Don’t move yet. Tell me what happened.”

  Her voice was brisk and unfazed as a nurse’s. Hugo was breathing fast through his nose. “Hugo,” I said, catching up, trying to squeeze in beside him. “Are you OK? Does anything—”

  “Shh,” Melissa said. “Hugo. Look at me. Take a deep breath and tell me what happened.”

  “It was nothing. My cane slipped.” His hands were shaking violently and his glasses were askew halfway down his nose. “Stupid. I thought I had the hang of it by now, got careless—”

  “Did you hit your head?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’m fine, really I—”

  “What did you hit?”

  “My backside, obviously. I bounced down a few stairs, I’m not sure how many— And my elbow, that’s actually the worst— Ouch.” He tried to move his elbow, grimaced in pain.

  “Anywhere else?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “A doctor,” I said, finally coming up with a contribution to the situation. “We need to call a, or an ambulance, we—”

  “Wait,” Melissa said. Deftly, matter-of-factly, she ran her hands over Hugo, turn your head, bend your elbow, does that hurt? what about this? Her face was intent and detached, a stranger’s; her hands left smudges of flour like long-settled dust on his brown cords, his misshapen jumper. In the kitchen Chopin was still playing, the “Minute Waltz,” demented frenzy of trills and runs speeding on and on and I wanted savagely to make it shut up. Hugo’s breathing, fast and labored, was setting off some frantic alarm at the base of my brain. It took everything I had to stay there.

  “All right,” Melissa said in the end, settling back on her haunches. “I’m almost positive you haven’t done anything serious. Your elbow’s not broken, or you’d never be able to move it like that. Do you want to go to the ER? Or shall we get the doctor on call to come have a look?”

  “No,” Hugo said. He struggled to sit up straight. I grabbed his hand, much bigger than mine and so bony, skin sliding, he had lost weight and I hadn’t even noticed— “Honestly, I’m fine. Just a bit shaky. The last thing I need is more doctors. I just want to lie down for a bit.”

  “I really think you should get checked out,” I said. “Just in case—”

  His hand tightened in mine. With a flash of annoyance that was almost anger: “I’m an adult, Toby. If I don’t want to see a doctor, I won’t. Now help me stand up and get me my cane.”

  He was shaking too hard for the cane. We got him upstairs and into bed, one of us on each side with our shoulders braced under his arms, Chopin whirling and looping crazily in the background, the three of us tangled into one big ungainly creature moving with infinite care, up! OK, up again! Once he was settled, Melissa and I brought him a cup of tea and started making tinned chicken soup and toast for dinner. None of us wanted the empanadas any more.

  “He really didn’t do any damage, you know,” Melissa said, in the kitchen. “And it could have been just what he said: his cane slipped.”

  It hadn’t been, and I didn’t want to talk about that. I was pretty shaky myself; my heart was racketing, my body didn’t believe the emergency was over. “How did you know? How to check him over?”

  She stirred the pan of soup, caught a drop on her finger to taste. “I took a course, ages ago. My mother has falls sometimes.”

  “Jesus,” I said. I wrapped my arms around her from behind and kissed the top of her head.

  She took my hand off her waist, pressed it to her lips for a second and put it aside to reach for the herb shelf. The leftovers of that cool detachment still hung about her, and I wanted it gone; I wanted to take her to bed and strip it off with her clothes, burn it off like mist. “No, it’s good. You’d be surprised how many times it’s come in useful.”

  “Still,” I said. I had heard enough over the years to know that I would never be able to meet Melissa’s mother without wanting to punch her face in, but this was the first time I’d recognized the grim irony here: all Melissa’s childhood soaked up by taking care of her mother, she finally got away and found a guy who would take care of her instead, and all of a sudden, hey presto, she was right back in carer mode, only now she was stuck looking after two people instead of one. “This isn’t what you signed up for.”

  She turned to look at me, herb jar in her hand. “What isn’t?”

  “Being Hugo’s carer.”

  “I only checked him over.”

  “You’re doing a lot more than that.”

  Melissa shrugged. “I don’t mind. I’m not just saying that; I honestly, truly don’t mind. Hugo’s wonderful.”

  “I know. But this was only supposed to be for a few days.” We had been at the Ivy House for over three weeks by this point. Melissa had made a couple of trips to her place and mine, to pick up more clothes, but somehow the subject of moving back had never come up. “Maybe you shou
ld go home.”

  She leaned back against the counter, eyes scanning my face, soup forgotten. “Do you want me to?”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “I love you being here. It’s just that”—saying it to her felt like a commitment somehow, one I wasn’t sure I was ready to make, but it was too late—“I’ve been thinking I might stay on for a while longer.”

  Melissa’s whole face lit up. “Oh, I’ve been hoping you would! I didn’t want to ask— I know someone else could take over, but Hugo loves having you here, Toby. It means the world to him. I’m so glad— And of course I’ll stay. I want to.”

  “It’s one thing now,” I said. “But it’s going to get worse. And I don’t want you dealing with that.”

  “As long as you’re here, I’m here. Oops—” She whirled around to the soup, which had started to hiss and foam ominously, and turned down the gas. “This is ready. Did you put the toast on?”

  “It’s not just Hugo,” I said, with incredible difficulty; the words hurt coming out. “You’ve done a fair bit of taking care of me, this last while.”

  That made her smile at me, over her shoulder. “I like taking care of you.”

  “I don’t like you having to do it. I hate it. Specially what with your mother.”

  “That’s not the same thing,” Melissa said instantly, turning from the cooker, and there was an absolute, iron inflexibility to her voice that I’d never heard there before. “You didn’t do this to yourself. Any more than Hugo did. It’s completely different.”

  “It comes to the same thing, though. This isn’t what you should be doing. When we’re eighty, sure, but now . . . you should be out dancing. Going to festivals. Having picnics. Sun holidays. All the stuff we—” My voice shook. I’d had this conversation in my head a thousand times, but I’d never had the strength to do it out loud and it was just as tough as I’d thought it would be. “This isn’t what I want for you.”

  “Well, if I could pick anything in the world, this isn’t what I’d want for you, either,” Melissa said matter-of-factly. “But it’s what we’ve got.”

  “Believe me, this isn’t what I want for myself, either. Jesus, this is just about the last thing—” My stupid voice cracked again. “But I don’t have a choice. You do.”

  “Course I do. And I want to be here.”

  All this unruffled composure wasn’t what I was used to from Melissa—I had held her while she freaked out about Niall the pathetic semi-stalker, for God’s sake, when she burst into tears over refugee kids on the news or starved puppies on Facebook—and it was kind of disconcerting. When I’d had this conversation in my head, I had been the steady one, comforting her.

  “I want you to be happy,” I said. “And there isn’t a way for that to happen while you’re here. While you’re”—I had to take a breath for this—“while you’re with me. I’m supposed to make your life better. Not worse. And I think, I really think I used to do that. But now—”

  “You absolutely make my life better. Silly.” She reached out to put a hand to my cheek, kept it there, small and warm. “And so does being here. It’s not just because of Hugo that I’m glad we’re staying, you know. Being here is—” A quick breath of a laugh. “It’s been so good for you, Toby. You’re getting better. Maybe you don’t notice it yet, but I do. And that’s the happiest thing that could happen to me.”

  In my head this conversation had always ended with good-bye, with her going weeping back up into the sunlight like Orpheus, leaving me alone to dissolve into the thickening dark. That didn’t really seem to be on the cards. The shift left me feeling very strange, light-headed and deflated all at once, scrabbling for footholds. I couldn’t find a way to explain to Melissa all the things she had all wrong. “No,” I said, pressing her hand against my cheek. “Listen. You don’t—”

  “Shh.” She tiptoed to kiss me, a proper kiss, hands clasping at the back of my neck to pull me close. “Now,” she said, smiling, when she leaned away. “We need to feed Hugo or he’ll faint from hunger, and then you will have something to worry about. Put the toast on.”

  * * *

  By the next morning, Hugo seemed fine; stronger than he had in days, actually, humming as he puttered around the living room looking for some book he wanted to reread and was sure he’d seen just a couple of years ago. I went out to the bottom of the garden—I had taken to drifting down there for my cigarettes, so we could all keep pretending I didn’t smoke—and lay on the grass under one of the trees. Outside my patch of shadow the sun was blinding; gold coins of light spilled over my body, grasshoppers zizzed everywhere, yellow poppies bobbed.

  I felt like talking to Dec, or even better, Sean. I hadn’t actually spoken to either of them since that visit in the hospital; they had kept the texts coming, and I had even managed to text them back once or twice, but that was as far as things had gone. I was starting to notice that I missed the pair of bollixes. When I had finished my smoke I rolled over onto my stomach and pulled out my phone.

  Sean picked up almost instantly, and there was an urgency to his “Hello?” that startled me. “Dude,” I said. “How’s tricks?”

  “Fuck me,” Sean said, and it was only with the rush of glad relief in his voice that I got it: when my number came up he had been scared shitless, that I was ringing to say good-bye, that it was my parents ringing to break the news— It occurred to me that I had been kind of a dick to Sean and Dec. “The man himself. What’s the story?”

  “Not a lot. You?”

  “Grand. Jesus, dude, I haven’t talked to you in— How’re you doing?”

  “Fine. I’m down at my uncle Hugo’s. He’s sick.”

  “He OK?”

  “Not really, no. It’s brain cancer. He’s got a few months.”

  “Ah, shit.” Sean sounded genuinely upset; he had always liked Hugo a lot. “Man, I’m sorry to hear that. How is he?”

  “OK, considering. He’s at home. He’s kind of weak, but nothing too bad so far.”

  “Tell him I was asking for him. He’s a good man, Hugo. He was good to us.”

  “You should come over,” I said; I hadn’t known I was going to say it till I heard the words. “He’d love to see you.”

  “You sure?”

  “Definitely. Come.”

  “I will. Audrey and I are going to Galway for the weekend, but I’ll come first thing next week. Will I bring Dec?”

  “Do, yeah. I’ll ring him. How’s he getting on? Jenna stab him yet?”

  “Fucking hell.” Sean blew out a long breath. “Like six weeks ago, yeah? when they’ve been back together about five minutes? she decides they need to move in together. I tell Dec he’d be bloody insane to do it, which he totally agrees with. Right up until Jenna throws a screaming wobbler and says he’s just using her for sex, and somehow by the end of the conversation Dec’s decided he has to prove she’s wrong by moving in with her.”

  “Oh Jesus. We’ll never see him again. She won’t let him out the door.”

  “Wait. It gets better. So they go apartment-hunting together, right? They pick out a nice little place in Smithfield, put down the security deposit and the first month’s rent, few grand. Dec gives notice on his place. And a week later—”

  “Oh no.”

  “Yeah. She breaks it to him that she was just punishing him for toying with her feelings, she’s got no intention of moving in with him, in fact she’s dumping him. Bye.”

  “Shit,” I said. “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s not great. I’ve been trying to get him out for a few pints, but he says he can’t be arsed. You ring him. He’ll do it for you.”

  I rang Dec, but he didn’t answer. I left a voice message: “Hey, you fucking idiot. Please tell me you’re not in the middle of a makeup shag. I’m at my uncle Hugo’s. Sean says he’s going to call round next week. You should come too. Give me a bell.”

/>   I like to imagine that, if things had gone differently, Melissa and I would have stayed and stayed, at least as long as Hugo was alive, maybe longer. Sean and Dec would have come down for that visit (Hugo blinking and smiling, My goodness, both of you all grown up, I’ll have to stop thinking of you as scruffy teenagers with an overdeveloped sense of mischief—although I hope you’ve still got that . . .) and stayed for a long leisurely barbecue, all of us stretched on the grass, slagging Dec about that time back in fifth year when Susanna’s friend Maddie spent an entire evening hitting on him and he never even noticed. The steady aplomb with which Hugo was facing death would have raised me to some kind of enlightened state wherein I would have realized that what had happened to me was not only survivable but surmountable, just a rough grain of sand in the ocean of life. My cousins and I would have got each other through the tough times—black humor, arms around shoulders, long drunken late-night talks—and come out the other end sadder but closer, our old childhood bond reforged and bright again. Melissa would have coaxed me into going to physical therapy. At some point I would have got my hands on a ring and gone down on one knee among the Queen Anne’s lace, and we would have run up to the house hand in hand to give Hugo the news, a star of promise in the encroaching darkness, the line continuing, irrepressible life spinning on. And in the end I would have hired some estate agent to sell the apartment for me, without ever setting foot in it again, and headed off to that white Georgian house on the bay. Of course it didn’t play out that way, at all; but sometimes, when I badly need rest, I like to pretend that it could have.