Melissa sighed, satisfied. “Definitely. Bedtime.”
“So,” I said, as she pulled her dress over her head—wonderful vintage dress, pale blue and twirly, it had spun among the shining oak and worn Persian carpets of the house as if it had been made for the place. “How was your day?”
Melissa turned to me, dress in her hands, and I was startled by the glow of happiness on her face. Melissa had always romanticized my family—she didn’t have much of a family life; her mother drank, not flamboyantly but with real dedication, and much of her childhood had been made up of isolation and damage control. To her, the cheerful chaos of my family and the Ivy House had been like something out of a fairy tale; she used to ask me for stories about them, listen enthralled with her fingers curled in mine. “It was lovely. They’re all so nice, Toby, it’s such a hard time for you all but they made me feel so welcome, like they’re genuinely glad to have me here— Did you know your aunt Miriam was in the shop, last year? She bought a set of those plates with the deer on them. She never realized it was me!”
Yellow light from my little bedside lamp shone velvety on her cheek, the turn of her bare shoulder, the supple curve of her waist into her hip. Her hair was a golden haze. “Come here,” I said, reaching for her.
She let the dress fall to the floor and kissed me back, strongly and joyfully. “What about you?” she asked, drawing away to look up at me. “Did you have a good day?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “And this is the best part of all.” I slid my hand down her back and pulled her closer.
“Toby!”
“What?”
“Your uncle!”
“We’ll be quiet.”
“But he’s right behind that—”
“Vewy vewy quiet. Like we’re hunting wascally wabbits.” And sure enough, she laughed and her body relaxed against mine.
I had had girls up in that room before, and for some reason it was the first one who my mind went to—a breathless little blonde called Jeanette, we were fifteen and I’d given Hugo some story about a history project which in retrospect of course he hadn’t believed for a second—and although Jeanette and I hadn’t actually had sex or even come particularly close it felt the same, the giddy giggles muffled in each other’s neck, the breathtaking sense of bounding into something risky and marvelous, the frantic grabs for the headboard at every squeak, Shh! You shh! It wasn’t the first time Melissa and I had had sex since that night but it was the first time it had felt like the real thing, rather than some tense, unhappy, confused compulsion. Afterwards I lay on my back with Melissa’s hair fanned across my chest, listening to her soft contented breathing and gazing up at the familiar cracks running across the ceiling, and startled myself by thinking that this might actually have been a good idea.
Four
We woke early; my Ivy House bedroom, high above the garden, let in a lot more light than the one in my apartment. Melissa had work. I got up with her, made us breakfast—Hugo was still asleep, at least I hoped he was just asleep—and walked her to the bus stop. Then I made myself another cup of coffee and took it out onto the terrace.
The weather had changed in the night; the sky was gray and the air was cool and still and saturated, ready to rain. The garden, beneath the great lines of trees, looked as if it had been abandoned for centuries. The big pots of geraniums on the terrace burned a crazed, frenetic red against it all.
I sat down at the top of the steps and found my cigarettes (those I had managed to remember for myself, hiding them in my jacket pocket from Melissa). It had been a long time since I’d done anything like this, just sitting outside on my own, and it felt weird and exposed and risky in an inchoate way that made me twitchy. I smoked a cigarette with my coffee and buried the butt in a geranium pot.
I didn’t feel like doing very much, or anything really. I’d actually slept properly, for the first time in months—logically I should have been much edgier at the Ivy House, seeing as it didn’t even have an alarm system, but somehow it was impossible to picture anyone breaking in, even if they could find the place—but instead of energizing me it had left my mind smeared and foggy, incapable of getting a handle on anything. Already after ten minutes, though, I was too restless to sit still any longer. I could feel the terrible rhythm starting to pulse in my head, step and drag, step and drag, back and forth across my sweet old holiday room until Melissa came home.
I went inside. Hugo was in fact alive, apparently: somewhere along the way he had surfaced, I could hear him in his study rattling computer keys and humming and occasionally saying severely, “Hm.” I tiptoed past his door and into my grandparents’ old bedroom.
Patchwork quilt still on the bed, big jar of seashells from long-ago travels still on the mantelpiece, empty wardrobes and faint smell of lavender and dust. The rain had started, a light unobtrusive patter, its shadows down the windowpane mottling the sill and the bare floorboards. I stayed there for a long time, watching the drops merge and course down the glass, picking two and betting on their race to the bottom, the way I had when I was a kid.
On the top floor the room where we had built our fort was a tumble of old furniture covered in dusty sheets, here and there a carved arm or a battered claw-foot poking out, dramatic festoons of cobweb in the high corners. In Susanna’s old room the bed was made up and there was a scattering of objects—stuffed rabbit splayed on the floor, Spider-Man mask and a tangle of small bright clothes on the dresser—that said she had been reviving the family tradition and dropping her kids with Hugo for a night here and there. Leon’s room was empty except for the stripped bed and a pile of what looked like folded curtains in one corner. This whole trip no longer felt like such a good idea. My own ghost was everywhere, muffling laughter in the fort, leaning over the banisters to call to Leon, sliding a hand up Jeanette’s top, agile and golden and invulnerable, utterly clueless about the anvil waiting to fall on his head and crush him to pulp. Outside the garden was lush and silent under the rain, leaves hanging with the weight of it, long grass bowed into hummocks and everything a luminous shadowless green.
I had been standing on the stairs for a while, staring at a painting on the wall (late-nineteenth-century watercolor, picnic by a lake, I couldn’t read the signature but I certainly hoped some ancestor had painted it rather than paying money for it), when Hugo’s study door opened.
“Ah,” he said, peering benignly at me over his glasses, apparently not at all surprised to find me standing there. “Hello.”
“Hi,” I said.
“I was about to make some lunch. It’s actually quite late, isn’t it, I got carried away . . . Will you join me? Or have you eaten?”
“OK,” I said. “I mean, no, I haven’t eaten. I’ll join you.”
I was moving aside to let him go ahead of me when I realized: the walking stick in his hand, the breath of preparation when he looked down the long flight of stairs. “I’ll make lunch,” I said. Here I was supposed to be at the Ivy House to help Hugo out. Some job I was doing. I could just hear Leon’s derisive snort of laughter: Knew it. “And bring it up here.”