“OK,” I said. “Fair enough.”
“Good. Thank you.” He searched for a bare patch of dirt and twisted out his cigarette in it. “I need to ask you another favor. I’d like to be cremated, and I’d like my ashes to be scattered here, in the garden. Could you see to it that that gets done?”
“You should have a,” I said. This conversation was becoming more and more unbearable, like some carefully calibrated form of torture that ratcheted up one precise notch every time I managed to catch my breath. I wondered idiotically if I could claim that I heard the phone ringing indoors, if I could pretend to fall asleep right there in mid-sentence, anything to make it stop. “You should have a will. To make sure. In case anyone argues about, you know, wants to do something different—”
“A will.” Hugo snorted bleakly. “I should, shouldn’t I. I’ve been telling myself every day: This week, I must get it sorted out this week, I’ll get Ed or Phil to recommend a good solicitor— And then I look at their faces and think, I can’t do that to them, not today, I’ll find a day when they’re in better form . . . And before I know it another week’s gone past. It seems that counselor woman in the hospital was right all along, wasn’t she? Denial. A part of me must have been still hoping.”
Until that moment, I’d forgotten all about asking Hugo what would happen to the house. It was the will stuff that brought it back. “The house,” I said. “If you’re making a— I mean, if you want to, to be here”—I made some kind of shapeless gesture at the garden—“then the house should stay in the family. Right?”
He turned his head and looked at me, a long intent look under those shaggy eyebrows. “Do you want it to?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I really do.”
“Hmf.” The eyebrows twitched. “I didn’t realize you were so attached to the place.”
“I didn’t either. I mean, maybe I wasn’t, I don’t know. It’s just . . . now. Being back here.” I had no idea how to explain myself. “I’d hate it to go.”
He was still looking at me; it was starting to make me itchy. “And your cousins? What do they think?”
“Yeah, them too. They’d really like to, to hang on to it. I mean, we’re not all trying to grab the house for ourselves, it’s not like that, at all—” The slight frown on his face, I had no clue what he was thinking— “Just, it’s the family home, you know? And they’re kind of worried that Phil would want to, like, sell it, not that he doesn’t care about it, but—”
“All right,” Hugo said abruptly, cutting me off in mid-gibber. “I’ll sort it out.”
“Thanks. Thank you.”
He took off his glasses and polished them on the hem of his shirt. His eyes, gazing unblinking out over the sunlit garden, looked blind. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d appreciate a few minutes to myself.”
“Oh. Right.” For a minute I hovered, dithering—was he pissed off with me? had I fucked up, offended him by talking about his death as a fait accompli? was he going to be able to get up without my help?—but he ignored me completely, and in the end I gave up and went inside.
* * *
?He was out there for well over an hour, just sitting, so still that the small birds foraging on the grass came within feet of him (I was hanging around the kitchen to keep an eye on him, staying well back from the windows). When he came in, though, he was brisk and a bit distant, impatient to get to work—he had done some incomprehensible DNA triangulation and turned up something on Mrs. Wozniak, more cousins or cousins’ cousins in Tipperary, he had explained it to me the day before but it hadn’t stuck. There was no mention of the conversation outside, and part of me wondered with a horrible sinking feeling whether he had forgotten the whole thing.
The next morning over breakfast, though, he announced cheerfully that Susanna’s lot and Leon would be coming over that afternoon. “Let’s make apple-and-walnut cake. Not the children’s favorite, I know, but it’s mine, and I think now and then I should be shameless about using the situation to get my own way. And”—with a flash of a smile at me—“apple-and-walnut cake is much less trouble than LSD, isn’t it?”
And so: Saturday afternoon, tea and cake in the living room. Warm smell of apples and cinnamon all through the house, still gray sky outside the windows. Tom earnestly explaining how he had finally got through to the most apathetic kid in his fifth-year history class, something improbable about Game of Thrones but it seemed to make him happy; Susanna and Melissa bonding over some new band they both liked, Leon rolling his eyes and offering to make them a playlist of real music, Hugo teasing us all for not appreciating the Beatles. It all looked like a nice cozy family afternoon, but this wasn’t in the routine and we all knew it; I could feel everyone wondering and waiting, covert question-mark glances zipping back and forth. I ignored them. I still had the nasty feeling that I had fucked up that conversation with Hugo, in some nebulous but important way, and everything was getting ready to go all wrong.
Susanna’s kids weren’t helping. Their attention span had lasted about as long as their cake, and by the time Tom and Leon cleared the plates Zach was buzzing around the living room like a hornet, nudging things with his toe and flicking bits of paper at people and joggling my elbow every time he passed. “Uncle Hugo!” he demanded. He was swinging off the back of Hugo’s chair by his armpits, like a chimpanzee. “Can I take out the demolition set?”
“Zach,” Susanna said sharply, from the sofa, where she and Melissa had been mooning over some phone video of their new pet band. “Get off Hugo’s chair.”
Zach made a violent barfing noise and collapsed onto the floor in disgust, narrowly missing Sallie, who was lying on her stomach pushing some toy around the rug and talking to herself. “Uncle Hugo,” he said, louder, from there. “Can I—”
Hugo turned, creakily, and reached down to lay a hand on his head. “Not now. I need to talk with your parents and the rest of this lot. You and Sallie go outside.”
“But—”
Hugo leaned over, beckoned till Zach knelt up, and whispered something in his ear. Zach’s face broke into a big grin. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Come on, Sal,” and he zoomed off towards the back garden with Sallie in his wake.
“What did you say to him?” Susanna asked, a little suspiciously.
“I told him there’s treasure hidden in the garden, and if they can find it they can keep it. Presumably it’s not even a lie; there must be all kinds of things out there that have been dropped over the years. They’ll be fine.” Hugo settled carefully back into his armchair. “I do need to talk to all of you. Susanna, would you mind getting Leon and Tom in here for a moment?”
Susanna went, darting one sharp unfathomable glance at me along the way. We settled obediently as schoolchildren, Melissa and me on one sofa, Leon and Susanna on the other, Tom planted in the armchair across from Hugo with his hands on his knees and a St. Bernard’s look of generalized faint worry on his face. A cool-edged breeze, and the sound of Zach yelling orders, strayed in through the open kitchen door.
“Toby pointed out to me,” Hugo said, “that we need to clarify what will happen to this house when I die.”
“Oh. I didn’t—” Melissa stood up. “I’ll keep an eye on Zach and Sallie,” she said to Susanna.
“No,” Hugo said, instantly and firmly, reaching out to touch her arm. “Stay, my dear. I need you to be here. You’re part of this too.” With a faint wry smile: “Whether you like it or not.” Melissa hesitated for a moment, unsure, but he gave her a smile and a tiny, reassuring nod, and she sat down again.
“Good,” Hugo said. “Now. Toby tells me that he and you two”—Susanna and Leon—“think this house should stay in the family. Is that right?”
Both their backs straightened. “I do,” Susanna said.
“Definitely,” Leon said.