I started to laugh. “Let’s have a bloody good cry,” Susanna joined in, and we all finished it together in style, cigarettes and bottle raised high: “And always remember the longer you live, the sooner you’ll bloody well die!”
A sound behind us, in the kitchen: cupboard door closing. After one horrified second all three of us collapsed with laughter simultaneously, as if we’d been sandbagged. Leon was doubled over, Susanna had choked on the wine and was whooping, banging herself on the chest; I felt tears run down my face. The laughter felt uncontrollable and terrifying as vomiting. “Oh, God,” Leon gasped. “Look at the coffin, with golden handles—”
“Shut up, Jesus, if that’s Hugo—”
“Wow,” Tom said, appearing in the doorway. “So this is where the real party is.”
We took one look at him and collapsed again. “What?” he said, bewildered. When none of us could answer: “Are you smoking something?”
The question was jocular, but just enough of a serious undertone sneaked through that Leon straightened up and gave him a wide-eyed paranoid look, hand to heart. “Oh my God. Does it show?”
Tom blinked at him. Tom is medium height and medium stocky and medium blond and medium handsome and extremely sweet, and he brings out the irresistible urge to warn him about drop bears and dihydrogen monoxide. “Um,” he said. “What . . . ? Like, what is it?”
“It’s just a bit of bingo,” Leon said. “Have you ever tried it?”
“Bingo?”
“Oh, you should,” I said. “I bet bingo would be the biggest thrill of your life.”
Tom—worried, eyebrows pulled down—was glancing back and forth between us and Susanna, who had hit the point where all she could manage was to flap a hand helplessly in his direction. “I don’t—”
“It’s totally legal,” Leon said reassuringly.
“Well,” I said.
“Well. More or less.”
“Do you want a hit?” I offered Tom my cigarette.
“Um, no thanks. Su,” Tom said, rubbing at his neck. “I mean, the kids. If they—”
This obliterated Susanna all over again. “Oh, they’re fine,” Leon said. “They’re miles away.” He waved to the kids.
“If they notice anything,” I said, “we’ll talk to them about it. Give them the facts. In today’s world, the sooner you educate your kids about bingo the better, right?”
“I guess. But I mean, I don’t think—”
I’d never really got Tom. When Susanna met him, in our first year of college, everyone was delighted. She had been having some kind of ornate teenage crisis over the past year and had first gone into emo mode, lank hair and oversized jumpers and no social life and lots of music about too-passionate spirits crushed by the cruel unfeeling world, and then done a 180 and turned into a full-on wild child, Alice-in-Wonderland clothes and pop-up clubs in secret locations, disappearing for weeks except for a handful of vague giggly texts from someone’s camper van in Cornwall and never handing in her essays. To me it all looked like standard teenage-girl stuff, but her parents were worried enough that Aunt Louisa kept buttonholing me to ask whether I thought Susanna was cutting herself (how would I know?) and whether I thought she took drugs (definitely, but then so did I), and I knew they had tried a few times to get her to see a therapist. Tom—sturdy, peaceful, pleasant, unremarkable in every way—seemed like the perfect antidote; once she got together with him, Susanna settled down and, almost overnight, went back to her old untroublesome well-behaved self. I didn’t bother developing much of a relationship with him, since I assumed she would move on once he had got her solidly back to normal, and I was completely gobsmacked when instead, before they had even finished college, they decided to get married. Within a couple of years they had two kids and much of their conversation revolved around toilet training and school choices and various other things that made me want to get a vasectomy and go on a coke binge. Basically, while Tom seemed like an OK guy, I didn’t see what he was still doing in our lives.
“You,” Susanna told us, finally getting her breath back. “Stop fucking with Tom. I like him.”
“We like him too,” I said. “Don’t we, Leon?”
“Looove him,” said Leon, giving Tom a lascivious lash-flutter.
“You bollixes,” Tom said, red and grinning.
“We’re only playing,” I said.
“Play with someone else,” Susanna told us. “Jesus, I needed that.”
“Mummy!” Sallie dashed across the grass and skidded to a stop in front of Susanna. “There are dolls in my shoes and I can’t get them out and Zach says if we leave them in there they’ll die!”
“Let me see,” Susanna said. She scooped Sallie onto her lap, deftly whipped off one shoe, pulled out the inner sole and popped the doll into Sallie’s hand.
“Whoa,” Sallie said, wide-eyed. “Cool.”
Susanna did the same with the other shoe, wriggled them back onto Sallie’s feet and slid the kid off her lap. “There,” she said, “away you go,” and saw Sallie off with a light slap on the rear. Sallie galloped off down the garden, a doll held high in each hand, yelling, “Zach! Look! They’re out! HA-ha!”
“That’ll shut Zach up,” Susanna said. “Do him good.”
“Babes,” Leon said, leaning over to throw one elbow around Susanna’s neck and give her a big smacking kiss on the cheek. “I’ve missed you.” And over her head, to me: “I might have actually missed you, too.”
* * *
?Finally—it can’t have been after nine o’clock, but it felt much later—the party, or whatever it was, broke up. I think my mother had some wistful idea that the five of us would cozy up in the living room for a late-night chat (“I could use a nightcap—Hugo, what happened to that odd bottle of stuff that we brought you from Sicily? Or Melissa, would you rather some—”), but my father—baggy-eyed, fumbling at a cufflink—put a stop to that: he needed to go to bed, he said gently but definitively, family was the best thing in the world but also the most tiring, and if the rest of us had any sense we would do the same. Hugo, with me and Melissa at his shoulder, waved from the top of the steps as the others got into their cars and drove off, chatter and laughter and car-door slams dissolving upwards into the dusky sky. I was glad of the dimming light; the day had exhausted me to the point where my leg was wobbling almost uncontrollably, and when I waved my hand flopped like spaghetti.
At some point when I wasn’t looking, someone—one of my parents, presumably—had hauled our cases upstairs, which would have infuriated me if my head hadn’t been too full and whirling to have space for anything more, or if the Xanax had finished wearing off. Instead I let myself go along with Melissa’s wave of delight at seeing my old holiday room, which had been my father’s room when he was growing up and which was still more or less how I had left it the last time I’d stayed there, the summer before college— “Toby! did you draw this? I didn’t know you could draw . . . Oh, the fireplace, it’s beautiful, those flower tiles . . . Was this yours? You did not use to like Nickelback! . . . I love imagining you as a little five-year-old looking out this window . . . Oh my God, is this your school rugby jersey?”
Through her eyes, the room lost the secretive, desiccated feel of some little-seen exhibit—too many years of sun fading streaks into the unmoving curtains, of the furniture legs wearing dents into their fixed spots on the floor—and took on a shy, bittersweet charm. As she skimmed around, she flicked things out of our cases—she had packed for me, so unobtrusively that I had barely realized what was happening—and glanced to me for permission to put them in place, here? here? so that by the time she came to rest the room was fresh and lively and ours, her hairbrush and my comb side by side on the old chest of drawers, our clothes neatly hung in the wardrobe with its cartoon-car stickers scraped patchily off the doors. “There,” she said, with a quick look at me, half pleased, half anxious. “Is that all OK?”
“It’s great,” I said. I had been leaning against the wall, watching her, both because I enjoyed it and because I was too shattered to move. “Can we go to bed now?”