A flash of chagrin crossed Hugo’s face, but after a moment he nodded. “I suppose that’s a good idea. There’s some of yesterday’s casserole in the fridge, in the blue dish; I was just going to put it in the oven for a few minutes. Thank you.”
I hadn’t been planning on anything more ambitious than bread and cheese for lunch (making breakfast for Melissa and myself had been an adventure: she clearly hadn’t been keen on rooting around in Hugo’s kitchen, so I had spent what felt like an hour standing in the middle of the floor paralyzed by the question of what to get out first, the bread? the butter? mugs? plates? start the coffeemaker? and that was before I even got into the whole issue of remembering what was kept where), but somehow I got the casserole heated and found a tray to load up with the plates and cutlery and two glasses of water, and managed to very carefully balance the whole thing back up to Hugo’s study in an awkward curl of my right arm. It occurred to me, with a spurt of something between astonishment and hope, that the constant fatigue might not be yet another sign of how fucked up my brain was; it could be just because everything took about ten times more effort than normal.
The study hadn’t changed since I was a kid. Hugo was a genealogist, which I couldn’t imagine paid particularly well, but then with his lifestyle—no mortgage, no rent, no family, no expensive habits—I supposed it didn’t need to. His study had a Georgian writing desk, a fat battered leather armchair, dark oak floorboards, exuberant heaps of paper teetering on impractical surfaces; there were built-in bookshelves everywhere, crammed with huge leather-bound volumes stamped in ornate gold—Thom’s Irish Almanac and Official Directory, Pettigrew and Oulton’s Dublin Almanac—and odd knickknacks, a French carriage clock lacquered in a pattern of leaves and dragonflies, a corner of some ancient Roman plaque incised with a few stray letters, a little huddled rabbit carved from olive wood. Leon and Susanna and I had spent a fair bit of time there, as kids. Hugo used to let us pick up extra pocket money by helping him with his research, lying on our stomachs on the worn rug running our fingers down rows of wobbly old-fashioned type or beautiful near-illegible handwriting; Susanna, who had learned calligraphy at school, had a lucrative sideline drawing up frameable Celticky family trees for Americans. I had always liked the study. The lining of books wrapped it in an extra layer of silence, and the odd objects gave it a quality of low-level, mischievous enchantment; you expected a friendly mouse to poke its head out of a hole in the skirting board, or the clock to whirr and spin its hands backwards and strike thirteen. It reminded me a bit of Richard’s office, at the gallery. In fact—it had never occurred to me until that moment—Richard reminded me a bit of Hugo, all round. I wondered all of a sudden if that was why I had been so charmed by that first interview, why I had taken the job, why—a dizzying sense of things spiraling around me, shaping themselves into patterns I had no chance of keeping up with—why everything had unrolled the way it had.
“Ah,” Hugo said, looking up from his desk with a smile. “Lovely. Here—” He moved his laptop aside so I could put his plate on the desk. On the screen: scanned image of a yellowed form, 1883, marriage solemnized at the Parish Church in . . .
“You’re working,” I said, nodding at it.
Hugo looked at the laptop as if faintly surprised by its existence. “Well, yes,” he said. “I am. I did think about taking off on some mad fling through the South American jungle, or at least the Greek islands, but in the end I decided there’s a reason why I haven’t done that already. This suits me much better—whether I like to admit it or not. And besides”—his wide smile lightening his whole face—“I’ve got quite an interesting mystery going on, and I don’t want to go anywhere without seeing how it turns out.”
I sat in the armchair and pulled over the little side table to hold my plate. “What’s the story?”
“Ah,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “A few months ago a lady called Amelia Wozniak contacted me from Philadelphia, looking for help tracing her Irish roots. Which did sound a bit unlikely”—he laughed, polishing his glasses on a frayed edge of jumper—“until I found out her maiden name was O’Hagan. She’d done a certain amount of work herself, come up with a pretty comprehensive family tree as far back as the 1840s, in Tipperary, mostly. But then it all went a bit wonky.” He laid the glasses aside and took a large bite of the casserole. “Mm. This overnighted pretty well, don’t you think?— She submitted DNA to one of the big databases, and up popped a whole assortment of cousins in Clare who, according to her research, really shouldn’t have been related to her at all. McNamaras, and she hadn’t come across that name anywhere. So she called me in.”
“And?” As a kid I had never been particularly interested in Hugo’s “mysteries.” Leon and Susanna liked them, but I didn’t get the fascination: the answers weren’t going to change anything, there was never a throne or a fortune or anything at stake, what difference did it make? I had been involved purely out of companionability, and obviously for the extra cash.
“Well, I don’t know yet. One possibility is a non-paternity event: somewhere along the line a woman stepped out on her husband, or was raped, and with or without her husband’s knowledge raised the child as his.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Lovely.”
“Another possibility”—he was ticking them off on his fingers, fork waving—“is a second family. It happened quite a bit in those days, you know, with all the emigration. A man goes over to America to look for work, planning to send for his wife and children as soon as he’s saved up the passage money; but that’s easier said than done, next thing he knows it’s been years, he’s lonely, he doesn’t know what his children look like any more . . . So easy to fall for someone in your new world, so much easier not to mention that other life back in the old country—and before you know it you’ve got a skeleton in the family closet, safely hidden away for centuries, perhaps, until new technology comes along.”
I was trying to pay attention, but my mind had started sliding. Hugo was right, the casserole was good, rich with herbs and full of big hearty chunks of beef and potato and carrot. His feet stretched out in their worn brown wool slippers, could they be the same old ones? A line of dark wooden elephants marching along the mantelpiece, from largest to smallest, I didn’t remember those—
“And then there’s the possibility of a child who was given up, or kidnapped. Oh, not the nasty man in the white van”—at my startled look—“but Ireland even a couple of generations back wasn’t a good place to be an unmarried mother. So many of them ended up in those terrible homes for fallen women, the Magdalene Sisters, you know. Enormous pressure to give up the baby, not to wreck its life with the taint of your own sin. Very often the Sisters didn’t even bother with that, they simply abducted the child: told the mother it had died, sold it to a well-off American couple. Quite possibly kept the mother imprisoned for life, working in their laundry to expiate her sin.”
“I’m going to bet on someone’s wife hooking up with the guy next door,” I said. The villainous nuns would have made better TV-movie fodder, but they sounded like a pretty big stretch to me. “Just playing the odds.”