had been reviving the family tradition and dropping her kids with Hugo for a night here and there. Leon’s room was empty except for the stripped bed and a pile of what looked like folded curtains in one corner. This whole trip no longer felt like such a good idea. My own ghost was everywhere, muffling laughter in the fort, leaning over the banisters to call to Leon, sliding a hand up Jeanette’s top, agile and golden and invulnerable, utterly clueless about the anvil waiting to fall on his head and crush him to pulp. Outside the garden was lush and silent under the rain, leaves hanging with the weight of it, long grass bowed into hummocks and everything a luminous shadowless green.
I had been standing on the stairs for a while, staring at a painting on the wall (late-nineteenth-century watercolor, picnic by a lake, I couldn’t read the signature but I certainly hoped some ancestor had painted it rather than paying money for it), when Hugo’s study door opened.
“Ah,” he said, peering benignly at me over his glasses, apparently not at all surprised to find me standing there. “Hello.”
“Hi,” I said.
“I was about to make some lunch. It’s actually quite late, isn’t it, I got carried away . . . Will you join me? Or have you eaten?”
“OK,” I said. “I mean, no, I haven’t eaten. I’ll join you.”
I was moving aside to let him go ahead of me when I realized: the walking stick in his hand, the breath of preparation when he looked down the long flight of stairs. “I’ll make lunch,” I said. Here I was supposed to be at the Ivy House to help Hugo out. Some job I was doing. I could just hear Leon’s derisive snort of laughter: Knew it. “And bring it up here.”
A flash of chagrin crossed Hugo’s face, but after a moment he nodded. “I suppose that’s a good idea. There’s some of yesterday’s casserole in the fridge, in the blue dish; I was just going to put it in the oven for a few minutes. Thank you.”
I hadn’t been planning on anything more ambitious than bread and cheese for lunch (making breakfast for Melissa and myself had been an adventure: she clearly hadn’t been keen on rooting around in Hugo’s kitchen, so I had spent what felt like an hour standing in the middle of the floor paralyzed by the question of what to get out first, the bread? the butter? mugs? plates? start the coffeemaker? and that was before I even got into the whole issue of remembering what was kept where), but somehow I got the casserole heated and found a tray to load up with the plates and cutlery and two glasses of water, and managed to very carefully balance the whole thing back up to Hugo’s study in an awkward curl of my right arm. It occurred to me, with a spurt of something between astonishment and hope, that the constant fatigue might not be yet another sign of how fucked up my brain was; it could be just because everything took about ten times more effort than normal.
The study hadn’t changed since I was a kid. Hugo was a genealogist, which I couldn’t imagine paid particularly well, but then with his lifestyle—no mortgage, no rent, no family, no expensive habits—I supposed it didn’t need to. His study had a Georgian writing desk, a fat battered leather armchair, dark oak floorboards, exuberant heaps of paper teetering on impractical surfaces; there were built-in bookshelves everywhere, crammed with huge leather-bound volumes stamped in ornate gold—Thom’s Irish Almanac and Official Directory, Pettigrew and Oulton’s Dublin Almanac—and odd knickknacks, a French carriage clock lacquered in a pattern of leaves and dragonflies, a corner of some ancient Roman plaque incised with a few stray letters, a little huddled rabbit carved from olive wood. Leon and Susanna and I had spent a fair bit of time there, as kids. Hugo used to let us pick up extra pocket money by helping him with his research, lying on our stomachs on the worn rug running our fingers down rows of wobbly old-fashioned type or beautiful near-illegible handwriting; Susanna, who had learned calligraphy at school, had a lucrative sideline drawing up frameable Celticky family trees for Americans. I had always liked the study. The lining of books wrapped it in an extra layer of silence, and the odd objects gave it a quality of low-level, mischievous enchantment; you expected a friendly mouse to