None of us slept well, though. Over and over, I twisted looking for a comfortable position and caught the dark shine of Melissa’s open eye, or was jolted out of a half-doze by the creak of a floorboard or the close of a drawer through the wall, in Hugo’s bedroom. At some point I got out of bed, too restless to stay still another second, and went to the window.
Yellowish city-dark clouds, no stars, one golden rectangle of light in the towering wall of the apartment block. The wind had died down to a covert stirring in the ivy. Uncanny blue-white glow like a will-o’-the-wisp, below me: one of the uniformed cops, I couldn’t tell which, was leaning against an oak tree, wrapped in a big overcoat, doing something on his phone. On the other side of the garden, there was a fresh, shocking gap in the silhouette of the treeline: the wych elm’s whole crown was gone, only the trunk left, thick stubs of branches poking out obscenely. It should have looked pathetic, but instead it had a new, condensed force: some great malformed creature, musclebound and nameless, huddled in the darkness waiting for a sign.
I fumbled in a drawer as quietly as I could for my Xanax stash, and swallowed one dry. “Are you OK?” Melissa asked softly.
“Fine,” I said. “Just checking that Chief Wiggum isn’t pissing in the flowerbeds,” and I slid back into bed beside her.
Six
The cops and the tree surgeon and the rest of the posse were back in the garden bright and early on Sunday morning, eating doughnuts and drinking out of thermoses (“See?” I said to Melissa, at our bedroom window, “thermoses”) and squinting up through fine drizzle at a thick gray sky. I wondered how hard it would have to rain to make them go away.
We got dressed before breakfast, instead of going down in our bathrobes—no pretty little hair-brushing ritual today, Melissa gave her hair a fast going-over and pulled it back in a ponytail. In the kitchen Hugo was at the French doors, also dressed except for his slippers, his back to us and a mug steaming in his hand. “It’s incredible how fast they work,” he said. “That tree’ll be gone by lunchtime. Two hundred years, and: poof. I don’t know whether it’s terrifying or impressive.”
“The faster they get it down,” Melissa pointed out, aiming for cheerful, “the sooner they’ll go away.”
“True, of course. There’s porridge on the cooker, and coffee.”
Melissa poured our coffee; I scooped porridge into bowls and threw in handfuls of blueberries. I was having trouble struggling up out of the Xanax, viscous fog dragging at my mind and my limbs, and the cops prowling the garden like a pack of feral dogs in the corner of my eye were more than I could handle; I wanted to get out of that room as fast as possible.
“Hugo,” I said. “Do you want porridge?”
Hugo hadn’t turned from the doors. “I spent a while looking up wych elms, last night,” he said, between sips of coffee. “I’d never thought much about them before, but it seemed inappropriate to know nothing about them now, somehow. Did you know that the Greeks believed there was one at the gates of the Underworld?”
“No,” I said. The combats woman stuck her head out of the tent and said something, and the cops all vanished inside, ducking in one by one like clowns into a clown car. “I didn’t know that.”
“They did. It sprang up where Orpheus stopped to play a lament after he’d failed to rescue Eurydice. ‘In the midst,’ Virgil says, ‘an elm, shadowy and vast, spreads its aged branches: the seat, men say, that false Dreams hold, clinging beneath every leaf.’”
Melissa shivered, a small violent movement that made her clench the coffee mugs harder. “Lovely,” I said. “I feel better about this one being cut down.”
“Apparently ‘the decoction of the bark of the root fomented, mollifieth hard tumors,’” Hugo informed us. “According to Culpeper’s Complete Herbal. I suppose I should try it, seeing as I’ll have plenty of root bark to hand, but I’m not sure how to decoct or foment, never mind how I would get it in there to do the mollifying. The elm also ‘cureth scurf and leprosy very effectually.’ If you should ever need it to.” I wondered if I could turn around and go back to bed.
The tree surgeon fired up the chainsaw. “Goodness,” Hugo said, wincing. “I think that’s our cue to leave.”
* * *
?I thought it would have been fairly obvious that Sunday lunch wasn’t a good plan, but around noon people started showing up, my parents (my mother hauling a plant pot containing an enthusiastic sapling as big as she was: “Red oak, he says it’s fast-growing so there won’t be a horrible gap for long, and in autumn the leaves should be wonderful—”), Phil and Louisa (bags of Marks & Spencer food), Leon and Miriam and Oliver (an enormous and disorganized bouquet), thank God Susanna had apparently decided to keep her lot away. I couldn’t tell whether they were all there because they thought they were providing emotional support, or because they needed to see for themselves what was going on, or just out of Pavlovian reflex: Sunday, Hugo’s, go! It felt like the doorbell never stopped ringing, everyone in turn crowding to the French doors to gape out at the carnage—huge branches strewn across the grass, sawdust flying, white-suited figures going up and down stepladders—and go through the same round of inevitable exclamations and questions, oh no look at the tree!! did they find anything else in there? they look awfully sinister, don’t they, those white outfits— do they know who it is yet?
Finally they had all satisfied their curiosity, or else the bursts of noise from the chainsaw got too much for them, and we could move to the living room. Obviously we were expected to come up with lunch, but there was no way in hell I was going to cook up a nice roast or whatever in that kitchen, and Hugo and Melissa clearly felt the same way. We dug through the shopping bags and dumped baguettes, cheese, ham, tomatoes and whatever else on the dining-room table, along with all the clean plates and forks we could find.
The room had a skittery, unsettled fizz to it. None of us had any idea what we were supposed to be thinking or feeling or saying in a situation like this one, and everyone had seized, with a messy combination of relief and shame, on the chance of focusing on something other than Hugo. Everyone had a theory. Miriam was telling my mother, at ninety miles a minute, about Celtic boundary rituals and human sacrifice, although it wasn’t clear how she thought the Celts would have got a skull into a two-hundred-year-old tree; my mother was countering with something about the Victorians’ complicated relationship with vigilante justice. Leon—not eating, hyper to the point where I wondered whether he had got his hands on some speed—was winding Louisa up with an ornate story about a local hurler who had sold his soul to the devil, via an improbable ceremony, in exchange for champion-level skill (“No, I swear, I heard it years ago, just no one knew where the skull had landed—”), while Louisa gave him a jaded look and tried to decide whether to call him on it. Even my father, who as far as I knew hadn’t strung together more than two sentences since Hugo got sick, was earnestly explaining to Melissa just how far a fox could drag a heavy object.
I wasn’t as into this as the rest of them. I wasn’t really capable of seeing detectives as an intriguing distraction, and the fact that the others had that luxury was making me feel increasingly sour and left out. Phil and Louisa had brought Camembert, which was stinking up the whole room. My appetite was gone again.