“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
“I fucking hate this year,” Susanna said suddenly. She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and headed off across the tarmac towards the kids.
* * *
?The food-and-reminiscence part was at the Ivy House. I had been dreading it—invading crowd, noise, meaningless chitchat—but actually it was such a relief to be home that I almost slid down into a heap on the hall floor. Instead I went up to my room, took another Xanax and leaned my forehead against the cool wall for a long time.
When I went back down the house was packed and buzzing. I went looking for Leon—I had a couple of Xanax in my jacket pocket for him—but he was telling some story in a corner of the living room, surrounded by old people. My mother and the aunts were passing around wineglasses that had materialized from somewhere, along with platters of whimsical miniature sandwiches involving brioche buns and improbable ingredient combinations and fiddly bits of greenery. Zach had found an unsupervised plateful on a side table and was licking every sandwich and putting it back. “Toby,” my mother called over—I was still standing in the doorway, trying to work out what I was supposed to be doing about any of this—“I’m running out of white. Could you find a couple more bottles?”
There was already a sizable cluster of empty wine bottles in one corner of the kitchen. My father was at the table, peeling back clingfilm from another massive platter of winsome little sandwiches. “Good turnout,” I said, which was what everyone in the church foyer had kept saying to everyone else.
He didn’t look up. “Do you know what I’ve lost count of?” he asked. “The number of people who’ve asked about Hugo smoking. ‘Did he smoke?’ ‘But, but, I thought he didn’t smoke?’ Which of course he didn’t, not in the last twenty years at any rate, and anyway it wouldn’t be remotely relevant if he had; this type of cancer isn’t linked to smoking. It’s just a, a, a random vicious bastard. Hugo just had bad luck; a bad roll of the dice. But we’re so desperate, aren’t we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it. People genuinely can’t take it in that someone could die of cancer without bloody well smoking.”
The platter was overloaded; without the clingfilm holding them in place, cascades of sandwiches kept falling off. He tried to poke them back in. “I mean, Miriam for God’s sake, and she knew Hugo how long, thirty-odd years? not just some acquaintance—she’s spent the last few months gabbling away about toxins from red meat and processed foods, and people who do yoga every morning and live to be a hundred, and I don’t know what the hell she thinks she’s on about but at this point I can hardly stand being in the same room with her.”
His hands were trembling; the sandwiches wouldn’t go right, he kept fumbling them. “Here,” I said. “I’ll do those.”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “And these detectives. Do you have any idea what they’ve got planned? How much they’re going to tell the media?”
“No. I haven’t seen them.”
“Because if everything comes out, those same people, the ones with the smoking, they’re going to be absolutely convinced that Hugo died of cancer because he killed this boy. A punishment from God, or karma, or negative brainwaves from guilt, or—no, let’s be honest, they won’t even think it through that far, will they, they’ll just make some vague mindless self-satisfied assumption. And nothing in the world will change their minds. And I know it doesn’t make any difference to Hugo, but it’s so bloody frustrating—” The sandwiches tumbled back onto the table. “And these, damn these things—”
I collected them and started stacking. My father leaned back against the sink and wiped his hands down his face. I couldn’t tell whether he thought Hugo had actually done it. There was no way I was going to ask him.
“I keep telling myself it could have been so much worse,” he said. “You should remember that, too. For someone who’d had such a terrible piece of luck, Hugo was lucky. All the things the doctors warned us about: dementia, pain, seizures, incontinence, paralysis. He didn’t have to go through any of that. Or”—he pressed his fingertips into his eyes—“with the way things were going, jail.”
“He wanted to be at home,” I said. I couldn’t hold it back. “Not in that shithole.”
My dad raised his head and looked at me. His eyes were red and swollen, and someone with magenta old-lady lipstick had given him a big kiss on the cheek. “He chose to ring the detectives, you know,” he said. “It’s not like they came after him. Yes, probably he assumed he would be coming home; but he must have known there was a possibility he wouldn’t. And he did it anyway. I have to believe that he had his reasons, and he thought they were good ones.”
I couldn’t tell whether there was a message in there, or a question, carefully layered so I could ignore it if I chose. “I guess,” I said. The sandwiches looked OK. I went to the fridge for the wine.
“I don’t know whether he would have talked to me about it,” my father said, “if he’d had time. I hope that he would have.”
The fridge was jammed; I had no idea how to get anything out without the whole lot falling on top of me. “He didn’t say anything to me,” I said.
“Hey,” Susanna said, coming in with Sallie clamped onto her skirt. She was wearing a well-cut little black dress and heels, with her hair brushed sleek; she looked tall and striking and unexpectedly elegant. “That old guy in the saggy tweed jacket just lit up a pipe. Mum and Miriam are freaking out and getting into a whole thing over who should tell him to take it outside, but I figure feck it, pipe smoke isn’t even on our top hundred worries list today. As long as he has an ashtray—Sal, let go for a sec, I need to—” She pulled herself up, one knee on the counter, to grab a cracked bowl from a high cupboard shelf. “This’ll have to do. Who is that guy, anyway?”
“I think that’s Maurice Devine,” my father said, rubbing his neck with a grimace. “Social historian. He used to help Hugo out when people wanted more in-depth things. Reports. Whatever you call them. It’s incredible, how many people showed up. I didn’t realize Hugo was so—”
“It’s a great turnout,” Tom said with an air of originality, sticking his head in the door. “Su, have you got that ashtray? He’s using the fireplace, and your mum’s about to lose the plot altogether.”
“I’ll talk to her,” Susanna said, straightening her skirt. To my dad on her way past, tapping her cheekbone: “Lipstick, right there. Tom’s mum got you.”
“Any more sandwiches out there?” Oliver demanded, over Tom’s shoulder.
“On the way,” my father said, and he straightened up and carefully picked up the tray and followed them out to the living room.
* * *
?That day felt like it lasted weeks. But finally, finally, the sandwiches and the reminiscences had all been got through, the guests had trickled away, Susanna and Tom had swept the yawning complaining kids off home, my father and the uncles had cried while they picked out a memento each, my mother and the aunts had (over my protests) tidied everything up and loaded the dishwasher and wiped down the dining-room table and debated at length over who should return the glasses to the caterers and God help me hoovered the entire downstairs, and I had the house to myself again.