the taxi, so I would be good and spacey by the time we reached the Ivy House. It was kicking in: while the thought of walking in there like this still broke my heart, I found that I didn’t much care, which made a refreshing change.
“Wait,” Melissa said suddenly, leaning forwards. “Isn’t the turn around here?”
“Shit,” I said, sitting up straight. “That one, that left—”
We had missed it; the taxi driver had to do a U-turn, with plenty of sighs and grunts. “Jaysus,” he said, ducking his head to peer down the road. “Never even knew this was here.” He sounded miffed, as if the street had insulted his professional expertise.
“Down at the far end,” I said. Hugo’s road has that effect; it gives the impression of being there only on alternate Thursdays or to people with the mysterious talisman in their pockets, invisible the rest of the time and instantly forgotten once you leave it. Mainly it’s the proportions, I think; the road itself is much too narrow for its tall, terraced Georgian gray-bricks and its double line of enormous oaks and chestnuts, making it easy to miss from the outside and giving the inside its own micro-climate, dim and cool and packed with a rich unassailable silence that comes as a shock after the boil of city noises. As far as I could tell it had been inhabited entirely by old couples and fiftysomething women with scruffy dogs ever since I was born, which seemed demographically unlikely, but I had never seen a single kid there except me and my cousins and later Susanna’s kids, and the only teenage parties had been ours.
“Here,” I said, and the taxi pulled to a stop in front of the Ivy House. I fumbled to pay fast before Melissa could take our suitcases from the boot, I got them out somehow (left elbow hooked through the handle, right hand hauling furiously), and then the taxi had ground through a multi-point turn and zoomed back up the road and we were standing on the pavement outside the Ivy House, next to our cases, like lost tourists or like travelers coming home.
The house’s official name is Number 17; one of us—Susanna, I think—called it the Ivy House when we were little because of the thick drifts of ivy that practically covered all four stories, and it stuck. My great-grandparents (from prosperous Anglo-Irish families, lots of solicitors and doctors) bought it in the 1920s, but by the time I came along it was my grandparents’. They had raised their four sons there, the younger three had moved out and got married and had kids of their own, but the house was still the family hub: Sunday lunch every week, birthday celebrations, Christmases, parties that wouldn’t fit in our own suburban houses or gardens; by the time Leon and Susanna and I were seven or eight, our parents were dropping us at the Ivy House for large chunks of the holidays so the three of us could run wild together, under our grandparents’ and Hugo’s benign neglect, while our parents drove around Hungary in camper vans or headed off around the Mediterranean on someone’s boat.
Those were wonderful times, idyllic times. We got up when we felt like it, made ourselves bread-and-jam breakfast and had the run of the place, dawn till bedtime, occasionally answering the call to a meal and then running off again. In a top-floor spare room we built a fort that started with a few bits of discarded plywood and grew, over months, into a multi-level structure that we spent endless afternoons capturing back and forth and fitting out with spyholes and trapdoors and a contraption that dumped a bucketful of rubbish on the enemy’s head. (There was a password, what was it? incunabula, vestiary, homunculus, something like that, some esoteric word that Susanna had picked up God knows where and chosen for its musty, incense-trailing mystique rather than because she had any clue what it meant. It bothers me more than it should, that I’ve forgotten it. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I’ve tried using up the night by scrolling down page after page of online dictionaries, hoping something jumps out at me. I suppose I could try ringing Susanna and asking her, but I prefer not to come across as that crazy guy any more than I really have to.) We rigged a spiderweb of pulleys across the garden so we could shuttle stuff between trees and windows; we dug a