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.”
But it wasn’t the same. Hugo was getting worse: not the final downslide, not yet, but it was getting close enough that its form was starting to coalesce, we could see the hulking outline of what it would be when it finally stepped out of the shadows. Melissa and I were doing more and more of the cooking—Hugo couldn’t stand for longer than a few minutes, couldn’t grip a knife strongly enough to cut anything tougher than butter, we found ourselves tacitly planning meals (stir-fries, risotto) that wouldn’t force him to sit at the table sawing clumsily away. When Phil called round they didn’t play draughts any more, and it took me longer than it should have to understand why not. There were times when I would become aware that the quiet rhythms of movement from Hugo’s side of the study had stopped, and when I glanced up I would see him staring into space, hands limp on his desk. Once I sat watching him like that for fifteen minutes; when I couldn’t stand it any longer and said, “Hugo?” it took me three tries before he finally turned—infinitely