“Shit,” I said, sitting up straight. “That one, that left—”
We had missed it; the taxi driver had to do a U-turn, with plenty of sighs and grunts. “Jaysus,” he said, ducking his head to peer down the road. “Never even knew this was here.” He sounded miffed, as if the street had insulted his professional expertise.
“Down at the far end,” I said. Hugo’s road has that effect; it gives the impression of being there only on alternate Thursdays or to people with the mysterious talisman in their pockets, invisible the rest of the time and instantly forgotten once you leave it. Mainly it’s the proportions, I think; the road itself is much too narrow for its tall, terraced Georgian gray-bricks and its double line of enormous oaks and chestnuts, making it easy to miss from the outside and giving the inside its own micro-climate, dim and cool and packed with a rich unassailable silence that comes as a shock after the boil of city noises. As far as I could tell it had been inhabited entirely by old couples and fiftysomething women with scruffy dogs ever since I was born, which seemed demographically unlikely, but I had never seen a single kid there except me and my cousins and later Susanna’s kids, and the only teenage parties had been ours.
“Here,” I said, and the taxi pulled to a stop in front of the Ivy House. I fumbled to pay fast before Melissa could take our suitcases from the boot, I got them out somehow (left elbow hooked through the handle, right hand hauling furiously), and then the taxi had ground through a multi-point turn and zoomed back up the road and we were standing on the pavement outside the Ivy House, next to our cases, like lost tourists or like travelers coming home.
The house’s official name is Number 17; one of us—Susanna, I think—called it the Ivy House when we were little because of the thick drifts of ivy that practically covered all four stories, and it stuck. My great-grandparents (from prosperous Anglo-Irish families, lots of solicitors and doctors) bought it in the 1920s, but by the time I came along it was my grandparents’. They had raised their four sons there, the younger three had moved out and got married and had kids of their own, but the house was still the family hub: Sunday lunch every week, birthday celebrations, Christmases, parties that wouldn’t fit in our own suburban houses or gardens; by the time Leon and Susanna and I were seven or eight, our parents were dropping us at the Ivy House for large chunks of the holidays so the three of us could run wild together, under our grandparents’ and Hugo’s benign neglect, while our parents drove around Hungary in camper vans or headed off around the Mediterranean on someone’s boat.
Those were wonderful times, idyllic times. We got up when we felt like it, made ourselves bread-and-jam breakfast and had the run of the place, dawn till bedtime, occasionally answering the call to a meal and then running off again. In a top-floor spare room we built a fort that started with a few bits of discarded plywood and grew, over months, into a multi-level structure that we spent endless afternoons capturing back and forth and fitting out with spyholes and trapdoors and a contraption that dumped a bucketful of rubbish on the enemy’s head. (There was a password, what was it? incunabula, vestiary, homunculus, something like that, some esoteric word that Susanna had picked up God knows where and chosen for its musty, incense-trailing mystique rather than because she had any clue what it meant. It bothers me more than it should, that I’ve forgotten it. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I’ve tried using up the night by scrolling down page after page of online dictionaries, hoping something jumps out at me. I suppose I could try ringing Susanna and asking her, but I prefer not to come across as that crazy guy any more than I really have to.) We rigged a spiderweb of pulleys across the garden so we could shuttle stuff between trees and windows; we dug a pit and filled it with water and used it as a swimming hole, even when it degenerated into a mud wallow and we had to rinse each other off with the garden hose before we could go indoors. When we got older—when we were teenagers, after my grandparents had died—we would lie out on the grass after dinner, drinking illicit booze and talking and laughing as the owls called in the darkening sky and Hugo moved back and forth across the lit windows. Often there were other people there with us—it was true, what I’d told Melissa: Sean and Dec and the rest of my mates were always in and out, so were the others’ mates, sometimes for afternoons, sometimes for parties, occasionally for weeks. At the time I took the whole scenario for granted as a happy near-necessity of life, something everyone should have and what a shame that my friends had somehow missed out, but at least they could share mine. It’s only now, much too late, that I can’t help wondering if it was ever really so simple.
The ivy was still there, lush and glossy with summer, but the house was more dilapidated than it had been in my grandparents’ time; nothing dramatic, but there were rusty patches on the iron railings where the black paint had flaked away, the spiderweb fanlight was dusty and the lavender bushes in the snippet of front garden could have done with pruning. “Here we go,” I said, hefting our cases.
Someone was standing in the open door. At first I barely recognized it as a person; stripped of substance by the bright sunfall through the leaves, flutter of white T-shirt, confusing gold swirl of hair, white brushstroke face and dense dark smudges of eyes, it had something illusory about it, as if my mind had conjured it from patches of light and shadow and at any moment it might break up and be gone. The smell of lavender rose up to meet me, spectrally strong.
Then I got closer and realized that it was Susanna, holding a watering can and watching me, unmoving. I slowed down—I’d discovered that if I concentrated and kept it slow, I could sort of disguise the leg thing as an indolent, too-cool-to-care stroll. Even through the Xanax, the feel of her eyes on me made my jaw clench. I had to stop myself from reaching up to smooth down the hair over my scar.
“Holy shit,” Susanna said, as we reached the bottom of the steps. “You made it.”
“Like I said I would.”
“Well. More or less.” One corner of her wide mouth quirked up in a smile I couldn’t read. “How’re you doing?”
“Fine. No complaints.”
“You got skinny. Watch out for my mum. She’s got a lemon poppyseed cake and she’s not afraid to use it.” When I groaned: “Relax. I’ll tell her you’re allergic.” And to Melissa: “It’s good to see you.”
“You too,” Melissa said. “Susanna, is it really OK, me being here? Toby says he’s sure it’s fine, but—”
“He’s right, it’s fine. Better than fine. Thanks for doing it.” She upended the watering can over the nearest lavender bush and turned back into the house. “Come on in.”
I dragged our cases up the steps, gritting my teeth, and left them inside the door, and somehow, before I really knew what was happening, I was inside the Ivy House. Melissa and I followed Susanna over the familiar worn tiles of the hall—wayward breezes blowing everywhere, all the windows had to be open—and down the steps towards the kitchen.
Voices rose up to meet us: my uncle Oliver’s emphatic declamation, a kid yelling in outrage, my aunt Miriam’s big throaty laugh. “Oh Jesus,” I said. Somehow it hadn’t even occurred to me. “Shit. Sunday lunch.”
Susanna, up ahead, didn’t hear that or ignored it, but Melissa’s face turned to me. “What?”
“On Sundays everyone comes here for lunch. I didn’t think—I haven’t gone in forever, and with Hugo sick, I never figured— Shit. I’m sorry.”