“Check all the names, won’t you, not just the ones marked as Irish? You never know, there could be an error, or someone could have found a way to pass himself off as English—being Irish wasn’t exactly an advantage back then . . .” When I wrote down the names I was looking for and put the piece of paper beside the stack, he didn’t comment. “Ah,” he said, turning his chair to his desk and pulling the laptop closer with a sigh of satisfaction. And then—exactly like when we were kids, blast from the forgotten past: “Happy foraging.”
It was very peaceful. In my spaced-out state, my mind couldn’t manage to snag on my problems or Hugo’s, or on anything really except the lines of type appearing like magic above the moving edge of the phone bill: Mr. Robt Harding 22 M Gent England, Miss S. L. Sullivan 25 F Spinster Ireland, Mr. Thos Donahue 36 M Farmer Ireland . . . The rhythm, once I found it, was hypnotic: three lines of the list, eyes swinging right to remind myself of the names I wanted, left again to the list for three more lines, tick tock tick tock, steady and solid as a pendulum. When I got down to steerage class, the passengers lost their titles and the occupations changed: Sarah Dempsey 22 F Servant Ireland, George Jennings 30 M Laborer Scotland, Patk Costello 28 M Ironmonger Ireland . . . I could have stayed there all day, all week, lulled by the quaint old terms—Hostler, Dye Sinker, Furman—only half-hearing the rain and the clicking of Hugo’s keyboard. It came as a shock when I heard the cheerful rat-a-tat-tat of the door knocker, downstairs, and—lifting my head notch by notch on my stiff neck, blinking at the reappearing room—realized slowly that the light had shifted; that that must be Melissa at the door; that I had spent hours like this, without either my concentration or my head or my eyes going to shite; that, for the first time in a long time, I was starving.
* * *
Somewhere during the evening before—while I was out on the terrace with my cousins?—Melissa and Hugo had apparently become friends. They had met before, at my family birthday party back in January, and had liked each other, but now all of a sudden they were easy as old pals, sharing in-jokes—Melissa pulling a bag of sweet potatoes out of one overloaded shopping bag to brandish it at Hugo, “Look, see? I told you!” and Hugo throwing back his shaggy head in a big crack of laughter; him resting a hand briefly on her shoulder as he passed her, the same way he did to me.
“I like Hugo,” Melissa said, later, leaning against my bedroom window to look out at the garden. The bedroom light was off; she was only a silhouette against the faint colorless glow of the outside. “A lot.”
“I know,” I said. I went to stand beside her. The rain was still going, a steady busy patter working away in the darkness. “Me too.”
Melissa took one hand off the windowpane and held it out to me, palm up. I put my hand in hers and we stood there like that for a long time, watching the light from Hugo’s window illuminating a slanted rectangle of pale grass and weeds far below, the fine rain falling on and on through the beam and vanishing into the dark.
* * *
From there we slipped easily into a routine. Hugo would have breakfast ready when Melissa and I got up—“I wish he wouldn’t go to all that hassle,” I said, as Melissa and I got dressed to the smell of frying sausages curling up the stairs; “maybe I should—” but Melissa shook her head: “Don’t, Toby. Let him.” After I walked Melissa to the bus stop, Hugo and I would putter around for a bit—wanders around the garden, washing-up, laundry, showers (I hovered on the stairs while he took his, just close enough that I would hear the thud of him falling; I sometimes wonder if he did the same for me). Sometimes one of us would end up having a doze, on the sofa or if it was sunny in the hammock. At some point we would drift to his study and start foraging.
Sunlight melting across the floorboards, smoky smell from the chipped blue teapot, small birds arguing in the ivy outside the open window. In our breaks Hugo told me long, absorbed