shaggy eyebrows, hear the mild, inflexible firmness with which he would put down that suggestion: Well, as far as I can tell, the main unforeseen development you’re worried about is me dropping dead, and I think I can do that much more comfortably at home. I promise not to bring you to court if I turn out to be wrong. Unless—
“How is he? I mean—”
“Like, apart from the whole dying thing?” That flick of a laugh again. “He’s OK. He can’t walk too well, so he’s got a cane, but he’s not in pain or anything. They said that might come later, or not. And his mind’s fine. For now, again.”
I had been wondering why my aunts had quit leaving me voicemails, why my cousins’ texts had dried up. I had figured, with a hot scraped soreness, that it was because they were sick of me not answering and had decided not to bother any more. It came as a shock, cut with a bit of shame and a bit of outrage, to realize that it had had nothing to do with me.
“So,” Susanna said. “If you want to see him, like while he’s still in decent enough shape to have conversations, you might want to go stay with him for a while.” And when I didn’t answer: “Someone needs to be there. He can’t keep living by himself. Leon’s going to fly over as soon as he sorts things with work, and I’ll come in as much as I can, but I can’t exactly dump the kids on Tom and move in.”
“Oh,” I said. Leon was living in Berlin and didn’t come home a lot. It was dawning on me that this was actually serious. “Can’t your parents, or I mean maybe my parents could, or—”
“They all have work. From what the doctors said, this could go to shit any time; he could collapse, or have a seizure. He needs someone there twenty-four-seven.”
I wasn’t about to tell her that I might do much the same thing. The image of me and Hugo having synchronized seizures sent a jagged ball of laughter rising in my throat; for a second I was terrified I was going to burst into lunatic giggles.
“It wouldn’t be actual nursing—if he needs that later on, we can get someone in. But for now it’s just being there. Your mum said you’re taking a couple of months off work—”
“OK,” I said. “I’ll try and go.”
“If you’re not well enough, then tell me and I’ll—”
“I’m fine. That doesn’t mean I can just, just dump everything and move.”
Silence on Susanna’s end.
“I said I’ll try.”
“Great,” Susanna said, “you do that. Bye.” And she hung up. I stood in the middle of my living room for a long time, phone held in mid-air, dust motes weaving through sunlight, kids screaming somewhere in excitement or terror.
As Susanna had gathered, I had no intention of going anywhere. Even leaving aside the way I felt about the Ivy House, just making the decision seemed well beyond my capabilities, never mind actually doing it (how would I get there? how the hell would I even pack?), never mind looking after a dying man when I couldn’t even look after myself, never mind the daunting prospect of having to spend however long coping with my whole extended family bopping in and out—normally I got along great with every one of them, normally I would have been already throwing stuff into that holdall, but now . . . The thought of Susanna and the rest seeing me like this snapped my eyes shut.
And of course, underlying all that: it was Hugo; Uncle Hugo, dying. I wasn’t sure I could cope with that, not right now. All through my childhood he had been there, a constant as fixed and taken for granted as the Ivy House itself—even when my grandparents were alive he had lived there, the bachelor son leading his own peaceful existence parallel to theirs, gradually and without fuss slipping into the role of carer as they aged and then, when they died, back into his own well-worn contented rhythms. Hugo padding about in his sock feet with a book open in his hand, peering and swearing (“Well, hell’s bells and buckets of blood”) at the Sunday roast that never once in all my childhood did what was expected of it, putting paid to cousin-bickering with half a dozen brisk words (why hadn’t he done that to the doctors, informed them in that mild tone that