“And you’re worried that Phil and Louisa might sell it, if it were to go to them.”
“They would,” Susanna said. “All this stuff about giving the kids advantages.”
Hugo cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t want advantages?”
“We’re fine. It’s not like we’ll be out on the street without that money. The kids don’t need fancy holidays or sailing lessons or a massive house with a cinema room. I don’t even want them to have that crap. But my parents don’t listen.”
Hugo glanced at Tom, who nodded. “Your parents,” he said to Leon. “How do they feel about it?”
Leon shrugged. “My dad’s not mad about the idea of this place going. But you know what he’s like. If Phil turns up the pressure . . .”
“Oliver will give in, in the end,” Hugo said. “Yes. And yours, Toby?”
“I don’t have a clue,” I said. This whole thing had an unreal tinge, a scene from some TV drama, carefully staged, the clan gathered in the drawing room to hear the patriarch’s dying wishes. “I mean, my dad loves this place, but . . . I haven’t talked to him about it.”
“Ed’s the sentimentalist,” Hugo said. “Deep down.” He rearranged his legs, carefully, nudging the weak one into place with his hand. “Here’s the thing. If the place stays in the family, what are you planning to do with it? Do any of you want to live here?”
We all looked at each other. I had a sudden unsettling vision of me in forty years, puttering around the Ivy House with a cup of lapsang souchong and a pair of knee-sprung cords.
“Well, I’m in Berlin,” Leon said. “I’m not saying that’s forever, or anything, but . . .”
“We might,” said Susanna, who had been having a complicated private exchange of glances with Tom. “We’d have to talk about it.”
“The inheritance tax would be pretty stiff,” Hugo pointed out. “Would you be able to pay it?”
This was feeling more and more surreal, Hugo’s calm businesslike tone as he sat there in the armchair discussing a time just a few months away when he wouldn’t exist any more, all of us going along like it was perfectly sane— The air tasted thick and sour, subterranean. I wanted to get out.
“We could sell our house,” Susanna said. “We should get enough.”
“Hm,” Hugo said. “The only thing is, that doesn’t seem very fair to the boys. It’s not as if I have anything else to leave them—certainly nothing that’s worth anywhere near as much as the house.”
“I don’t care,” Leon said. He was lounging in his corner of the sofa, too cool for school, but his fingers were drumming a tense fast rhythm on his thigh; he wasn’t any happier than I was. “Su can give me my share someday when she wins the lotto. Or not. Whatever.”
“Toby?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Way too many factors crashing into each other, my head felt like an old computer logjammed by too many programs running. “I haven’t— I never thought about it.”
“We could . . .” Tom said tentatively. For a savage instant I wanted to punch him in the gob, what was he doing shoving his nose into this conversation? “I mean, only if the guys were OK with it. It could belong to all three of them, and we could live here and pay the guys rent on their two-thirds?”
“If we wanted to live here,” Susanna said, with a swift warning side-glance at him. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Well, yeah. If. And obviously we’d need to work out all the—”
Out in the garden, Zach screamed. He and Sallie had been yelling off and on the whole time, but this was something else: this was a hoarse, raw shriek of pure terror.
Before I managed to register what I had heard, Susanna was on her feet and throwing herself out of the room. Tom was close behind her. “What the fuck—” Leon said, and then he and I and Melissa were up and after them.
Zach and Sallie were standing at the bottom of the garden. Both of them were rigid, arms out in shock, and by this time both of them were screaming, Sallie’s piercing inhuman high note rising above Zach’s ragged howls. My feet thumping on the ground, my breath loud in my ears. Wave of birds lifting from the trees. And on the bright green grass in front of Zach and Sallie a brown and yellow object that, although I had never seen a real one in my life, I understood without the need for a single thought was a human skull.
In my memory the world stopped. Everything hung motionless and weightless above the slowly turning earth, suspended in a vast silence that went on and on, so that I had time to take in every detail: Susanna’s red-gold hair frozen in mid-swing against the gray sky, Zach’s mouth wide, the slant of Leon’s body as he skidded to a stop. I was reminded, strangely, of nothing so much as the moment when I had flicked on the light in my living room and the two burglars had turned to stare at me. One blink, one glance to the side, and when you look again everything is different: the trees and the garden wall and the people all looked like themselves, but they were made of some new and alien material; the world looked unchanged, and yet somehow I was standing in an entirely different place.
Five
Susanna swooped Sallie onto her hip, grabbed Zach’s arm in the same movement and hustled the pair of them back up the garden, talking firm reassuring bullshit all the way. Sallie was still screaming, the sound jolting with Susanna’s footsteps; Zach had switched to yelling wildly, lunging at the end of Susanna’s arm to get back to us. When the kitchen door slammed behind them, the silence came down over the garden thick as volcanic ash.
The skull lay on its side in the grass, between the camomile patch and the shadow of the wych elm. One of the eyeholes was plugged with a clot of dark dirt and small pale curling roots; the lower jaw gaped in a skewed, impossible howl. Clumps of something brown and matted, hair or moss, clung to the bone.
The four of us stood there in a semicircle, as if we were gathered for some incomprehensible initiation ceremony, waiting for a signal to tell us how to begin. Around our feet the grass was long and wet, bowed under the weight of the morning’s rain.
“That’s,” I said, “that looks human.”
“It’s fake,” Tom said. “Some Halloween thing—”
Melissa said, “I don’t think it’s fake.” I put my arm around her. She brought up a hand to take mine, but absently: all her focus was on the thing.
“Our neighbors put a skeleton out,” Tom said. “Last year. It looked totally real.”
“I don’t think it’s fake.”
None of us moved closer.
“How would a fake skull get in here?” I asked.
“Teenagers messing around,” Tom said. “Throwing it over the wall, or out of a window. How would a real skull get in here?”
“It could be old,” Melissa said. “Hundreds of years, even thousands. And Zach and Sallie dug it up. Or a fox did.”
“It’s fake as fuck,” Leon said. His voice was high and tight and angry; the thing had scared the shit out of him. “And it’s not funny. It could have given someone a heart attack. Stick it in the bin, before Hugo sees it. Get a shovel out of the shed; I’m not touching it.”
Tom took three swift paces forwards, went down on one knee by the thing and leaned in close. He straightened up fast, with a sharp hiss of in-breath.
“OK,” he said. “I think it’s real.”
“Fuck’s sake,” Leon said, jerking his head upwards. “There’s no way, like literally no possible—”
“Take a look.”
Leon didn’t move. Tom stepped back, wiping his hands on his trousers as if he had touched it.
The run down the garden had left my scar throbbing, a tiny pointed hammer knocking my vision off-kilter with every blow. It seemed to me that the best thing we could do was stay perfectly still, all of us, wait till something came flapping down to carry this back to whatever seething otherworld had discharged it at our feet; that if any of us shifted a foot, took a breath, that chance would be lost and some dreadful and unstoppable train of events would be set in motion.
“Let me see,” Hugo said quietly, behind us. All of us jumped.