“Nah, not a little shit. You were only messing; you never worried about getting in trouble—you always talked your way out of it anyway—so I don’t think you got that Leon worried about it a lot. By the time my dad got home Leon was in a total panic, and he took one look at my dad and yelled, ‘Toby ate the mints out of your desk drawer!’ Do you seriously not remember?”
I thought I did, sort of, maybe. Leon’s open mouth and his hands uselessly scrabbling to piece broken edges together, Susanna picking fragments of glass out of the rug, me breathing clouds of extra-strong mint as I watched—except surely I had gone to find glue, I had tried to help, hadn’t I? “Sort of,” I said. “What happened in the end?”
“You talked your way out of that one, too.” Wry glance over her shoulder. “Of course. The adorable sheepish grin and ‘Oh, I was pretending I was you, Uncle Phil, I was going to sit at your desk and write a brief saying it was against the law for my teacher to give homework, but I know you always need to eat lots of mints when you write briefs . . .’ And Dad laughed, and then of course he couldn’t give out. I have to say, though, you put him in a good enough mood that he didn’t actually get too pissed off about the barometer. So it all worked out in the end.”
“So what’s your point?” Another screech from the living room, Jesus— “You think if Leon, if I wind him up, he’s going to, what? Sic the cops on me?”
Susanna shrugged, deftly ripping clingfilm. “Well, not on purpose. But he’s not thinking straight. If you get him scared and pissed off enough, who knows what he might come out with. So you probably want to bear that in mind, and lay off him. Because you might not be able to talk your way out of that one.”
“Oh come on.” I laughed; she didn’t react. “He wouldn’t. This isn’t kids with mints; this is real shit. Leon knows that.”
Susanna turned, a bowl in each hand, and gave me a straight look on her way to the fridge. She said, “You know, Leon doesn’t always like you that much.”
What? “Well,” I said, after a moment. “That’s not my problem, either.”
Susanna’s eyebrow went up, but before she could say anything Tom stuck his head in the door. “Hey,” he said cheerily. “Come back in, you have to hear this, your dad was telling us about—” And then, his eyes going past us to the garden: “Oh Jesus. Su. Look at that.”
Zach was getting up from a full-length fall, or maybe a dive, into their trench. He was grinning and coated from head to toe in muck. Sallie wasn’t much better. She pulled a length of muddy hair in front of her face and examined it with interest. “Mummy!” she yelled. “We’re dirty!”
“Holy shit,” Susanna said. “That’s impressive.”
“How are we going to get them home? The car’s going to be—”
“Bath,” Susanna said. “And there’s spare clothes upstairs. We’ll have to carry them up, or they’ll get muck all over— Kids! Enough dirt for today!”
Zach and Sallie did the predictable bitching and begging, until finally Su and Tom scooped them up at arm’s length and lugged them towards the stairs, Sallie giggling and pawing muddy streaks onto Susanna’s cheeks while Susanna laughed and tried to dodge, Zach giving me a blank stare over Tom’s shoulder and reaching out to swipe a nice set of fingermarks right down the sleeve of my white T-shirt. “Well that looks fun,” Leon said, sliding past them into the kitchen. “Not. Shit, did I miss cleaning up?”
“Yep.”
“Oopsie.” Fingertips to rounded mouth. He was medium drunk. “I totally meant to help, I swear. But your dad is a funny, funny fucker. You thought we got up to stuff behind our parents’ backs? We were amateurs. This one time, right, they dressed up their neighbors’ dog as—”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that one.” My dad actually hated that story, I couldn’t remember why. If he was digging it out, he was getting desperate. “And all the other ones.”
“Ooo,” Leon said, shaking the ice in his glass and giving me a look that, under the drunken glaze, seemed surprisingly sharp. “Who rattled your cage?”
“I’m just not in the mood.”
“Was Susanna saying things?” And when I didn’t answer: “Because I love her to bits, but OMG, when she wants to she can be the biggest headwrecker—”
“No,” I said, and I brushed past him and headed back to the living room to find Melissa and see if she had any ideas about how to make all these people go away.
* * *
?The Sunday lunch, the hours in Hugo’s study, the evenings in front of the fire: to a passing glance, Hugo and Melissa and I would have looked like we’d fallen effortlessly back into our routine. Hugo had even got a step further with Mrs. Wozniak’s McNamara mystery: he had tracked down the new crop of cousins, one of whom had turned out to have a whole bunch of some ancestor’s illegible nineteenth-century diaries that we spent hours trying to decipher, mostly coming up with bitchy rants about stew quality and the guy’s mother-in-law. “Ah,” Hugo said with satisfaction, pulling up his chair to the stack of small battered volumes: yellowed pages, faded ink, brown leather binding rubbed at the edges. “I’m so much more at home with the old-school stuff. Centimorgans and megabases are all very well, but the software cuts out so many of the irrelevancies, and I like the irrelevancies. Give me a good messy old document that needs hours with a fine-tooth comb, and I’m a happy man.”