a slight sag under his eyes and his jawline that I didn’t remember being there before, bones showing under the loose skin of his forearms. I had a sudden flash of deep, premonitory terror—it had never really hit me before that my father would get old, so would my mother, someday I would be hanging around their kitchen waiting for one of them to die. “You should go say hello.”
“Right,” I said, downing my mimosa. Melissa had been nabbed by Miriam. “I probably should,” and I threaded my way through the press of bodies, flinching at every touch, towards Hugo.
I had been dreading seeing him, pretty badly, actually—not out of squeamishness, simply because I had no idea what it might do to my head and I really couldn’t handle any more surprises. Hugo was the tallest of the four brothers, well over six foot, with the wide-shouldered, rangy build of a hill farmer and a big, shaggy head with big, messy features, as if the sculptor had given the clay a rough general shape and left the detail for later. I had had nightmare visions of him emaciated, glassy-eyed, huddled in a chair with his long fingers picking fitfully at the covering blanket— But there he was at the old stove, stirring a chipped blue enamel saucepan, eyebrows down and lips pushed out in concentration. He looked so exactly like himself that I felt silly for having got all worked up.
“Hugo,” I said.
“Toby,” he said, turning to me, breaking into a smile. “How lovely.”
I braced myself for his pat on the shoulder, but somehow it didn’t trigger the savage surge of repulsion that any non-Melissa physical contact set off in me. His hand was warm and heavy and simple as an animal’s paw or a hot-water bottle. “It’s good to see you,” I said.
“Well, I didn’t do this to get you all here, but it’s a pleasant side effect. Does this look ready to you?”
I looked into the saucepan. Creamy amber swirl with a smell straight out of my childhood, caramel and vanilla: Gran’s famous ice-cream sauce. “I think it needs a couple more minutes.”
“So do I.” He went back to stirring. “Louisa kept insisting that I shouldn’t bother, but the children love it . . . And how are you? You’ve been having adventures of your own.” Tilting his head to examine my scar; when I tensed, he turned back to the stove immediately. “We have matching war wounds,” he said. “Although luckily yours is part of a very different story from mine. Does it hurt?”
“Not much any more,” I said. Till he mentioned it, I hadn’t noticed the shaved patch and the raised red line on the side of his head, among the too-long salt-and-pepper hair.
“Good. You’re young; you’ll heal well. And have you recovered?”
That sharp skimming glance, from his gray eyes. None of us had ever been able to get anything past that glance. Sunday lunch, that glance sweeping across the cousins and catching on sixteen-year-old me expertly concealing a hangover: Hm. And later, in my ear, with a quirk of a smile: One fewer next time, I think, Toby. “Pretty much,” I said. “How are you doing?”
“Disorientated,” Hugo said. “More than anything else. Which seems silly; I’m sixty-seven, after all, I’ve known for years that something like this could be sprung on me at any moment. But to have it become solid fact, and imminent, is inexpressibly strange.” He raised the spoon out of the sauce and inspected the long thread that trailed from it. “The counselor at the hospital—poor woman, what a job—did a lot of talking about denial, but I don’t think it’s that: I’m well aware that I’m dying. It’s that everything seems altered, in fundamental ways, everything from eating breakfast to my own home. It’s very dislocating.”
“Susanna said something about radiotherapy,” I said, “didn’t she? Couldn’t that fix things?”
“Only if it were combined with surgery—and probably not even then—but the doctor says that’s not a possibility. Susanna’s trawling the internet, researching the top specialists in order to get a second opinion, but I don’t think I can afford to put too much stock in that.” He pointed at the vanilla bottle, on the counter near me. “Could you pass me that? I think we could do with a drop more.”
I handed it over. Propped against the counter beside it was my grandfather’s old silver-headed walking stick, ready to hand.
“Ah,” Hugo said, catching the direction of my eyes. “Yes, well. I can’t manage