He knew it, too. “I’ve been wanting to tell you,” he said to her—out of the blue, over our rummy game that evening, clutter of cards and mismatched mugs and biscuits on the coffee table, fire crackling merrily—“how glad I am to have you here. I know what a sacrifice it must be, and I don’t think there’s any proper way I can put it into words, what it’s meant to me. But I wanted to say it all the same.”
“I wasn’t sure I should come, at first,” Melissa said. She was curled on the sofa with her feet on my lap; I was keeping them warm with my free hand. “Showing up on your doorstep, in the middle of all this. And then just staying on. I’ve wondered dozens of times if I should get out of the way. But . . .” She turned up her palm to the room, a small gesture like releasing something: Here we are.
“I’m delighted you’re here,” Hugo said. “It’s made me very happy—both you yourself, and also the chance to watch Toby being all grown up and settled in a relationship. It’s like the weekends when I had Zach and Sallie: such a lovely progression from all those holidays when Toby and Susanna and Leon would come to stay. The next episode; life moving on. Probably this is fanciful, but I feel as if it’s given me just a glimpse into what it might have been like to have children of my own.”
The valedictory tone of all this was making me twitchy; I wanted the subject changed. “Why didn’t you?” I asked. Susanna and Leon and I had speculated on that a few times, over the years. I thought Hugo had better sense than to screw up his serene, ordered existence with a bunch of screaming brats; Susanna thought he had some mysterious semi-detached long-term relationship, maybe with a woman who lived abroad and only came to Dublin every couple of months; Leon, inevitably, thought he was gay, and that by the time the country had grown up enough for him to come out, he had felt like it was too late. Honestly, any of those would have made sense.
Hugo considered that, rearranging the cards in his hand. He had a blanket over his knees, like an old man, in spite of the fire and the fact that I had actually managed to get the radiators working. “If I’m truthful,” he said, “it’s hard to put my finger on it. Some of it was the oldest cliché in the book—I was engaged, she broke it off, I skulked back home to lick my wounds and swore off women forever. It would be easy to blame everything on that, wouldn’t it?” Glancing up at us, a fleeting smile. “But that happens to an awful lot of people, and mostly they get over it in a year or two. I did too, really—it’s not that I’ve been carrying a torch all these years—but by that time there were your grandparents getting older, your grandfather’s arthritis was getting worse, they needed someone to look after them; and I was right there, with no other responsibilities, while all the others had moved out and had wives and little ones . . . I suppose the truth is that I’ve never been a man of action.” That quirk of a smile again, eyebrow lifting. “A man of inertia, more like. Don’t rock the boat; everything will come right in the end, if you just let it . . . And every year, of course, it got harder to make any changes. Even after your grandparents died, when I could have done anything I wanted—traveled the world, got married, started a family—it turned out that there wasn’t really anything I wanted enough to make that leap.”
He picked out a card, examined it, tucked it back. “The thing is, I suppose,” he said, “that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath.” And looking up smiling, pushing his glasses up his nose: “And with all that philosophizing, I’ve forgotten whose go it was. Did I just put . . .”
His voice stopped. When the pause lasted too long I glanced up from my cards. He was staring at the door, wide-eyed, so intently that I whipped around to see if something or someone was there: nothing.
When I turned back Hugo was still staring. He licked his lips, again and again. “Hugo,” I said, too loudly. “Are you OK?”
One arm reached out, rigid, fingers grotesquely clawed.
I was off the sofa, cards scattering everywhere, mugs going over as I crashed past the coffee table. Melissa and I made it to him at the same time, threw ourselves on our knees beside him. I was afraid to touch him in case I made it worse. He was blinking and blinking; that distorted arm made great meaningless raking motions in front of him, so taut and determined they seemed almost deliberate.
So this was it: this sudden, one moment pushing up your glasses and considering the king of spades, the next moment gone. After the months of fear and tension and wondering, here it was, this quick and this simple. “An ambulance,” I said, although I knew they wouldn’t make it in time. My heart felt too huge for my chest. “You ring. Fast.”
“It’s a seizure,” Melissa said calmly. She was looking up into Hugo’s face, a light, firm hand on his shoulder. “He doesn’t need an ambulance. Hugo, you’re having a seizure. It’s all right; it’ll be over in a minute.”
No way to tell whether he had heard her. Raking, blinking. A line of spit trailed from one corner of his mouth.
It was a few seconds before I could take in that he wasn’t dying in front of us. “But,” I said. Some distant part of me remembered the shitbird neurologist’s lecture, small words and a disdainful headmaster gaze— “We’re supposed to call the ambulance anyway. For a first seizure.”
“It’s not the first. He’s been having them for a while now.” At my stunned look: “Those times when he’s staring into space and he doesn’t hear you for a minute? I thought you knew.”
“No,” I said.
“I told him to tell the doctors. I don’t know if he did.” She was stroking Hugo’s shoulder, a slow steadying rhythm. “It’s OK,” she said quietly. “It’s OK. It’s OK.”
Gradually the raking movement got looser and vaguer, till his arm fell on his lap, twitched a few times and lay limp. The lip-licking stopped. His eyes closed and his head lolled sideways, as if he had simply dozed off in his chair after dinner.
Merry pop and spit of firewood. Brown puddles of tea spreading across the coffee table, dripping onto the carpet. I was light-headed, my heartbeat running wild.
“Hugo,” Melissa said gently. “Can you look at me?”
His eyelids trembled. His eyes opened: bleary and drowsy, but he was seeing her.
“You had a seizure. It’s over now. Do you know where you are?”
He nodded.
“Where?”
His mouth moved as if he were chewing and for a dreadful second I thought it was beginning again, but he said—scratchy, slurred—“Living room.”
“Yes. How do you feel?”
His face was white and clammy; even his hands looked too pale. “Don’t know. Tired.”
“That’s all right. Just stay put for a bit, till you feel better.”
“Do you want some water?” I asked, finally coming up with something useful I could do.
“Don’t know.”
I hurried to the kitchen anyway and filled a glass at the tap, my hands shaking, water splashing everywhere. My face in the dark window over the sink was stunned stupid, mouth hanging open and eyes round.
When I got back to the living room, Hugo looked better: head up, some of the color back in his face. Melissa had found a paper napkin and was cleaning the trail of drool off his chin. “Oh,” he said, and took the glass in his good hand. “Thank you.”
“Do you remember what happened?” I asked.
“Not really. Just . . . everything looked strange, all of a sudden. Different. Frightening. And that’s all.” With an edge of fear that he couldn’t quite hide: “What did I do?”
“Not a lot,” I said easily. “A bit of staring, a few weird arm things. No movie-type flailing around, nothing like that.”
“Have you had ones like this before?” Melissa asked.
“I think so. Once.” Hugo took another sip of water, wiped the corner of his mouth where some of it had leaked out. “A couple of weeks ago. In bed.”
“You should have called us,” I said.
“I didn’t really realize. What had happened. And what could you have done?”
“Still,” Melissa said. “If it happens again, call us. Please?”
“All right, my dear.” He covered her hand with his for a moment. “I promise.”