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?”