?So when I say that I was lucky to have the Ivy House, I don’t mean that in some airy-fairy abstract way, ooh so lucky! to have such a lovely pretty place in my life! For better or for worse, the Ivy House saved me, in the most concrete of ways. If I hadn’t gone back there that summer, I’d still be pacing my apartment all night, getting skinnier and paler and twitchier by the month, having long muttered conversations with myself and never answering my phone; that or else—which seemed like a better and better idea as the weeks wore on—I would be dead.
Susanna rang me on an evening in mid-August, daylight lasting and lasting, barbecue smell and gleeful kid-game shouts filtering in even through my closed windows. The voice message she left—“Ring me back. Now”—sparked enough curiosity in me that I actually did; considering the low level of hassle she had given me over the past few months, I was pretty sure she didn’t want to pressure me about moving home or make sure I was eating.
“How’re you doing?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said. I had the phone a few inches from my mouth, hoping the slurring wouldn’t come across. “Still kind of sore in places, but I’ll live.”
“That’s what your mum said. I wasn’t sure—you know how she always puts a positive spin on stuff. But I didn’t want to bug you.”
The rush of gratitude to my mother caught me off guard—she had actually done it, covered for me like I had asked her to, she hadn’t spread out the full extent of my wreckage for them all to pick and cluck over. “Nah, she’s right. It sucked for a while there, but it could’ve been a lot worse. I got lucky.”
“Well, good for you,” Susanna said. “I hope they catch the bastards.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Listen,” she said, tone shifting. “I’ve got bad news. Hugo’s dying.”
“What?” I said, after a second of total blankness. “Like, now?”
“No, not now now. But this year, probably. No one wanted to tell you yet, in case it upset you or something. Which . . .” A flick of unreadable laughter. “So I’m telling you.”
“Wait,” I said, struggling up from the sofa. The galvanizing rush of anger at the rest of my family was distracting; I made myself shove it aside for later. “Hang on. Dying of what?”
“A brain tumor. A few weeks back he was having trouble walking, so he went to the doctor, and a bunch of tests later: cancer.”
“Jesus.” I turned in a circle, scrubbing my free hand through my hair. I couldn’t get a grip on this, couldn’t be positive whether Susanna had actually said what I thought she had or— “What are they doing about it? Did they operate yet?”
“They’re not going to. They say the tumor’s too involved with his brain; it’s got tentacles everywhere, basically.” Susanna’s voice, level and clear. Even as a kid, she had always got harder to read in crises. I tried to picture her: leaning against one of the old brick walls of the Ivy House, sun scouring the clean pale angles of her face to translucence, ivy bobbing at her red-gold hair. Scent of jasmine, hum of bees. “And they say chemotherapy wouldn’t make much difference, so there’s no point in wrecking his quality of life for his last few months. They’re going to do radiotherapy. That might give him an extra month or two, or it might not. I’m working on getting a second opinion, but for now, that’s the story.”
“Where is he? What hospital?” My room, the polluting smell of it, the soft patient ticking of the blinds in no obvious breeze—
“He’s home. They wanted to keep him in, ‘in case of unforeseen developments,’ but you can imagine how that went.” I laughed, a startled, painful bark. I could see the exact drop of Hugo’s shaggy eyebrows, hear the mild, inflexible firmness with which he would put down that suggestion: Well, as far as I can tell, the main unforeseen development you’re worried about is me dropping dead, and I think I can do that much more comfortably at home. I promise not to bring you to court if I turn out to be wrong. Unless—
“How is he? I mean—”
“Like, apart from the whole dying thing?” That flick of a laugh again. “He’s OK. He can’t walk too well, so he’s got a cane, but he’s not in pain or anything. They said that might come later, or not. And his mind’s fine. For now, again.”
I had been wondering why my aunts had quit leaving me voicemails, why my cousins’ texts had dried up. I had figured, with a hot scraped soreness, that it was because they were sick of me not answering and had decided not to bother any more. It came as a shock, cut with a bit of shame and a bit of outrage, to realize that it had had nothing to do with me.
“So,” Susanna said. “If you want to see him, like while he’s still in decent enough shape to have conversations, you might want to go stay with him for a while.” And when I didn’t answer: “Someone needs to be there. He can’t keep living by himself. Leon’s going to fly over as soon as he sorts things with work, and I’ll come in as much as I can, but I can’t exactly dump the kids on Tom and move in.”
“Oh,” I said. Leon was living in Berlin and didn’t come home a lot. It was dawning on me that this was actually serious. “Can’t your parents, or I mean maybe my parents could, or—”
“They all have work. From what the doctors said, this could go to shit any time; he could collapse, or have a seizure. He needs someone there twenty-four-seven.”
I wasn’t about to tell her that I might do much the same thing. The image of me and Hugo having synchronized seizures sent a jagged ball of laughter rising in my throat; for a second I was terrified I was going to burst into lunatic giggles.
“It wouldn’t be actual nursing—if he needs that later on, we can get someone in. But for now it’s just being there. Your mum said you’re taking a couple of months off work—”
“OK,” I said. “I’ll try and go.”
“If you’re not well enough, then tell me and I’ll—”
“I’m fine. That doesn’t mean I can just, just dump everything and move.”
Silence on Susanna’s end.
“I said I’ll try.”
“Great,” Susanna said, “you do that. Bye.” And she hung up. I stood in the middle of my living room for a long time, phone held in mid-air, dust motes weaving through sunlight, kids screaming somewhere in excitement or terror.
As Susanna had gathered, I had no intention of going anywhere. Even leaving aside the way I felt about the Ivy House, just making the decision seemed well beyond my capabilities, never mind actually doing it (how would I get there? how the hell would I even pack?), never mind looking after a dying man when I couldn’t even look after myself, never mind the daunting prospect of having to spend however long coping with my whole extended family bopping in and out—normally I got along great with every one of them, normally I would have been already throwing stuff into that holdall, but now . . . The thought of Susanna and the rest seeing me like this snapped my eyes shut.
And of course, underlying all that: it was Hugo; Uncle Hugo, dying. I wasn’t sure I could cope with that, not right now. All through my childhood he had been there, a constant as fixed and taken for granted as the Ivy House itself—even when my grandparents were alive he had lived there, the bachelor son leading his own peaceful existence parallel to theirs, gradually and without fuss slipping into the role of carer as they aged and then, when they died, back into his own well-worn contented rhythms. Hugo padding about in his sock feet with a book open in his hand, peering and swearing (“Well, hell’s bells and buckets of blood”) at the Sunday roast that never once in all my childhood did what was expected of it, putting paid to cousin-bickering with half a dozen brisk words (why hadn’t he done that to the doctors, informed them in that mild tone that allowed for no argument that of course it wasn’t incurable, nipped this nonsense in the bud?). The world was slippery and incohesive enough as it was; with him disintegrating, it might fly apart into a million pieces.