The rest of the family came in and out. On Sundays there was lunch, and during the week Oliver or Louisa or Susanna drove Hugo to doctor’s appointments and radiotherapy sessions and physiotherapy; my mother and Miriam brought over armloads of shopping bags; my dad, sleeves rolled up, hoovered the rugs and scrubbed the bath. Phil played endless games of draughts with Hugo (and brought me the late birthday present Susanna had warned me about: an indescribable gilt construction that he informed me was my great-great-grandfather’s pocket-watch holder, and that I had no idea what I was supposed to do with). Leon brought over ultra-hip takeaways for lunch and stayed for the afternoon, making Hugo laugh with stories about the time he and Carsten had been landed with an up-and-coming ska-punk band spending a week on their living-room floor. Hugo’s friends came, too, more of them than I would have expected: dusty, courteous old guys who could have been antiques dealers or handymen or college professors, smile-lined women with confident walks and surprisingly elegant clothes. I always left them to it in the living room, but I could hear the voices coming up through the floor, absorbed and overlapping, punctuated by bursts of real laughter.
I liked it best when it was just the three of us, though, me and Melissa and Hugo. My dad and my uncles were so wretched that their misery stampeded into the house with them like some rampaging animal, upending all the delicate balances that Hugo and Melissa and I had constructed. My aunts were jumpy, losing weight, heads ceaselessly whipping back and forth as they tried to make sure everyone was OK. Louisa kept rearranging stuff, and under stress Miriam was turning into a parody of herself, covertly reiki-ing Hugo behind his back while he sat at the kitchen table obliviously eating apricots and Leon doubled over biting one knuckle in an extravagant cringe-mime, and Susanna and Melissa and I huddled over the cooker to hide the giddy giggles.
I was actually getting on better with my mother. Finding out she had covered for me with the family had shifted something; that terrible urge to pick fights with her was gone. She had too much sensitivity to try and do anything useful inside the house, so instead she went at the garden, dead-heading and weeding and cutting back for autumn. I didn’t really get the point—it wasn’t like Hugo cared whether the garden got scraggly—but I sometimes joined her anyway. I’m not a gardener; mostly all I did was follow her around with a bag, picking things up, but my mother is a sociable person and she seemed to like the company. Either she thought I was all better or she was putting in some superhuman effort of will, because she had quit trying to lure me home or buy me emotional-support guard poodles. Mostly we talked about books and her students and the garden.
“We’re getting there,” she said one afternoon. We were digging out the dandelions that had grown tall and muscular among the flowerbeds. It was still warm as summer, but the light was starting to shift, turning long and low and gold towards autumn. In the kitchen, Melissa and Hugo were starting on dinner; it was Melissa’s turn to pick the music, the Puppini Sisters’ version of “Heart of Glass” was bopping cheerfully through the open doors. “It’s not going to look like it did in your grandparents’ day, but it’ll do.”
“It’s looking good,” I said.
My mother sat back on her haunches, swiping hair back from her face with one arm. “I get that Hugo doesn’t care that much either way, you know,” she said. “But there’s nothing I can do, so I’m doing what I can.”
“He’ll be happy,” I said. “He hates dandelions.”
“And I feel like I owe this place. Even though it’s not my ancestral home.” She tilted her head back to look up at the house, shielding her eyes against the light. “It meant a lot to me, you staying here during the holidays.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
She made a face at me. “Not just because I wanted you out of the way so we could hang out in Sicily getting drunk on dodgy grappa. Although that too.”
“I knew it. Here you told us you were going to museums.”
My mother laughed, but only for a moment. “We worried about you being an only, you know,” she said, “your dad and I. We would’ve loved a couple more, but there you go. Your dad was just sad about you missing out on everything he’d had with his brothers, but I . . .”
She bent to the dandelions again, wiggled a long root carefully out of the ground and tossed it into the bag. “I worried that maybe you spent too much time being the center of the world,” she said. “Not that you were selfish, you’ve always been generous, but there was something . . . I thought it would be good for you to have Susanna and Leon as sort-of siblings, at least part of the time.” With a quick up-glance at me, questioning: “If that makes any sense.”
“Not really,” I said, grinning at her. “But that might be too much to ask.”
She wrinkled her nose at me. “Disrespectful child. Are you calling me flaky?”
Strands of pale hair falling out of her ponytail, streak of dirt on her cheek: she looked young, she looked like the dauntless laughing mother I had adored as a kid, whose direct blue gaze had been a sweet shot right to my heart. I’m sorry, I wanted to say, not for teasing her but for everything, for being an arsehole over the last few months and for the terror she must have felt and for her only child being such a spectacular disaster area. Instead I said, “Hey, if the shoe fits,” and she waved her hoe threateningly in my direction, and we stayed out there together, weeding, till my leg was wobbling and I could barely hide the exhaustion and Melissa called from the kitchen door to say dinner was ready.
* * *
?My cousins were a different story. We did manage flashes of the old closeness, but too much of the time we just pissed each other off. They were different from how I remembered them, and not in good ways. I knew it had been a long time since we’d hung out together, people change and grow apart and yada yada yada, but I had liked them a lot better before.
Leon had always been mercurial, so it took me a while to notice that there was more than that going on now: his moods weren’t just changeable, they were elaborately, deliberately layered and coded. I followed him out to the terrace for a smoke one afternoon—by this point I was pretty sure Melissa and Hugo both knew I had started smoking, but given everything else that was going on, I figured they were unlikely to stage an intervention. Leon had brought over cartons of fiery, complicated noodle dishes and spent lunch trying to convince Melissa, whom he liked, to move to Berlin—“All that stuff in your shop, the Germans would go mad for that, they love anything Irish—shut up, Toby, Melissa and I are having a conversation here. And oh my God, German guys. They’re all about seven feet tall and they don’t spend their entire lives in the pub, they actually do things, parties and nature walks and museums and— Tell me again, what do you see in this big ugly lump?”
When I went out onto the terrace, though, he was sitting on the steps, a thin thread of smoke rising from one hand, not moving. It was late afternoon; the shadow of the apartment block was starting to slant across the garden, slicing it sharply into a bright half and a dark, small pale butterflies appearing and vanishing again like a magician’s trick as they flitted back and forth. “Hey,” I said, lighting my cigarette and sitting down beside Leon. “Quit trying to make my girlfriend dump me.”
Leon didn’t turn. The hunch of his shoulders startled me; all the effervescent charm had fallen away like a dust sheet, leaving him a dense dark huddle on the steps. “He’s getting worse, you know,” he said.
It took me a second to realize what he meant. “No he isn’t,” I said. I was already starting to wish I had stayed inside.
Leon didn’t even look at me. “He is. Today when I came in, he said, ‘My goodness, it’s been a while!’ Big smile.”
Leon had spent the whole afternoon there two days earlier. “He was joking,” I said.
“He wasn’t.”
There was a silence. “Are you staying for dinner?” I asked. “I think we’re making ravioli with—”
“And his fucking leg,” Leon said. “Did you see him going down into the kitchen? Three stairs, and his leg was shaking like jelly. I didn’t think he was going to make it.”
“He had radiotherapy yesterday. It tires him out. By tomorrow he’ll be stronger.”
“No he won’t.”
“Look,” I said. I really, badly wanted Leon to shut up, but I knew him well enough to keep that out of my voice. “I’m with him all the time. OK? I know the, the, the patterns. After radiotherapy, he’s worse for a day or two, then he gets better.”
“A few more weeks and he’s not going to be able to manage on his own. What happens when you go home? Has anyone got anything planned? Home care, or hospice, or—”
“I don’t know when I’m going home,” I said. “I might hang on here for a while.”