Oh God, stop, my stomach hurts . . . I caught a glimpse of my father knuckling his eye and looking utterly exhausted, but the next moment Miriam turned to him and he snapped into animation, smiling down at her as he said something that made her hoot and whack his arm. Phil was leaning in at Susanna, talking too fast and gesticulating so forcefully that he rocked back and forth a little on his feet with the momentum. The high-ceilinged room jumbled all the voices into gibberish and the whole thing had a precarious, unmoored feel to it, a knees-up in some Blitz-time basement as bombs whistled overhead, the hilarity brittle as an ice sheet and on the verge of skidding wildly out of control, that’s the spirit, faster and higher and faster until boom! all gone!
I couldn’t stand it any more. I glanced about for Melissa, but she was ensconced on one of the sofas with Hugo, deep in conversation; there was no way we could slip unobtrusively away. I went back down to the kitchen, ran myself a glass of cold water and took it out onto the terrace.
After the babble of noise and color inside, the garden had a stillness that was almost holy. The thing I always forget about the Ivy House garden, the one that catches me afresh every time, is the light. It’s different from anywhere else, grained like the bleached light in an old home movie of summer, as if it were emanating from the scene itself rather than entering from any outside source. In front of me the grass stretched on and on, overgrown, rough with tall ragweed and bright with poppies and cornflowers; under the trees, the patches of shadow were pure and deep as holes in the earth. Heat shimmered over it all.
Voices, clear as robins’, making me jump. There were children playing, down at the bottom of the garden: one swooping crazy patterns on a rope swing, flicking in and out of existence as it arced from shadow to light and back again, one rising out of the long grass with hands held high and wide to scatter something. Thin brown limbs in ceaseless movement, white-blond hair shining. Even though I knew they were Susanna’s kids, for a sliding second I thought they were two of us, Leon and Susanna, me and Susanna? One of them called out, sharp and imperious, but I couldn’t tell whether it was meant for me. I held my glass against my temple and ignored them.
The garden had the same look of low-level unkemptness as the front of the house, but that wasn’t new. For a city garden it’s enormous, well over a hundred feet long. It’s lined along the side walls with oak trees and silver birches and wych elms, behind the rear laneway by the back of an old school or factory or something—adapted into a hip apartment block during the Celtic Tiger—five or six stories high; all that towering height gives the place a secret, sunken feel. Gran was the gardener; in her time the garden was artfully, delicately crafted till it felt like somewhere out of a fairy tale, slyly revealing its delights one by one as you earned them, look, behind this tree, crocuses! and over here, hidden under the rosemary bush, wild strawberries, all for you! She died when I was thirteen, less than a year after my grandfather, and since then Hugo had loosened the reins a lot (“Not just laziness,” he told me once, smiling out the kitchen window at the summer confusion of growth; “I prefer it running a bit wild. I don’t mean dandelions, they’re just thugs, but I like getting a glimpse of its true colors”). Gradually plants had strayed and tangled, long tendrils of ivy and jasmine trailing from the wall of the house, tumult of green leaves on the unpruned trees and seed-heads poking up among the long grass; the garden had lost its enchanted air and taken on a different quality, remote and self-possessed, archaeological. Mostly I felt that I had liked it better before, but that day I was grateful for the new version; I was in no mood for whimsical charm.
The smaller kid had caught sight of me. She stood for a while examining me from amid the Queen Anne’s lace, swaying a handful of stems back and forth with absentminded persistence. Then she drifted over.