“Oh my God, you’re a little fucking ray of sunshine,” Leon snapped. “Do you know that?”
“Just saying. Ignore me if you want.” She spread out the flowers on the counter. “Who brought these?”
“Some woman in a red hat,” I said. “Julia Something.”
“Juliana Dunne? Tall, with dark curly hair? I think she and Hugo had a thing going for a while, back when we were kids.”
“They did not,” Leon said. He was sitting on a countertop, picking at a bowl of nuts and swinging one heel against a cupboard door. I wanted to tell him to stop, but in this mood it would only have made him worse.
“They totally did. They had this huge fight, one time when we were like fourteen—well, Hugo didn’t fight exactly, because Hugo, but he actually raised his voice, and Juliana was yelling, and then she stormed out and slammed the door. That’s a couple fight.” To me: “Remember that?”
“Not really,” I said. The whole thing sounded unlikely. I had a paranoid moment of wondering if Susanna was making it up to fuck with my head.
She rolled her eyes, slicing stems. “Oh, you. I swear by the next week you’d forgotten it ever happened. Typical: anything you feel bad about just falls straight out of your head. We were up in Leon’s room, and they were in the hall? And we commando-crawled out onto the landing to eavesdrop? And then Juliana slammed out and we were holding our breaths, waiting for Hugo to go, but he looked up and snapped, ‘I hope the three of you have had your entertainment for the day,’ and then he went back into the kitchen and banged the door. And we were so ashamed of ourselves we stayed upstairs for the rest of the evening, and all we had for dinner was this Mars bar Leon had stashed somewhere. You seriously don’t remember that?”
“I don’t,” Leon said flatly, rummaging through the nut bowl.
“Maybe,” I said. It did sound sort of familiar, the more I thought about it—dust from the landing rug tickling my nose, Susanna’s quick breathing next to my ear; the three of us, afterwards, sitting on Leon’s floor staring guiltily at each other— “I guess so. Sort of.”
“Huh,” Susanna said. Her glance at me had an unexpected sharp assessment that reminded me unpleasantly of Detective Martin. But before I could say anything she turned away, rapping Leon across the knuckles with a flower—“Quit doing that, other people like the cashews too, plus it’s disgusting”—and they were off into another round of bickering.
Susanna was there because she had taken Hugo to radiotherapy—his last session, which somehow came with a shock of betrayal, the doctors blandly waving good-bye and turning away as the quicksand pulled him under; according to Susanna they had tried to push hospice care, but Hugo had shut that right down. I wasn’t sure what Leon was doing there. He was around a lot more these days, bouncing in with sushi just when Hugo and Melissa and I were in the middle of cooking dinner, hovering around the study half the morning tinkering with Hugo’s knickknacks, flopping down on the floor and searching name lists for all of five minutes before popping up like a meerkat with some conversation opener, OhmyGod did my mother tell you she wants to learn the violin, it’s going to be horrendous, I bet the neighbors sue, I’ll have to go back to Berlin I don’t even care what the police think . . . Toby you know my friend Liam from school, well I ran into him yesterday turns out he’s editing this new magazine it’d be the perfect place for a piece on Melissa’s shop . . . There was a feverish, manic quality to it all that made me wonder if he was on something, although uppers seemed like an odd choice in the circumstances. “He’s having a difficult time,” Hugo said, when the door knocker banged yet again and I made some exasperated comment about ignoring him until he went away. “He’s highly strung to begin with, and all this at once . . . He’ll be fine in the end. Just bear with him meanwhile.”
Which was more or less what Susanna said, too, except in less comforting terms. She and I were in the kitchen, cleaning up after Sunday lunch—which was getting more of a lunatic vibe every time: no one had managed to come up with new theories to replace the Civil War informer