I rang Dec, but he didn’t answer. I left a voice message: “Hey, you fucking idiot. Please tell me you’re not in the middle of a makeup shag. I’m at my uncle Hugo’s. Sean says he’s going to call round next week. You should come too. Give me a bell.”
I like to imagine that, if things had gone differently, Melissa and I would have stayed and stayed, at least as long as Hugo was alive, maybe longer. Sean and Dec would have come down for that visit (Hugo blinking and smiling, My goodness, both of you all grown up, I’ll have to stop thinking of you as scruffy teenagers with an overdeveloped sense of mischief—although I hope you’ve still got that . . .) and stayed for a long leisurely barbecue, all of us stretched on the grass, slagging Dec about that time back in fifth year when Susanna’s friend Maddie spent an entire evening hitting on him and he never even noticed. The steady aplomb with which Hugo was facing death would have raised me to some kind of enlightened state wherein I would have realized that what had happened to me was not only survivable but surmountable, just a rough grain of sand in the ocean of life. My cousins and I would have got each other through the tough times—black humor, arms around shoulders, long drunken late-night talks—and come out the other end sadder but closer, our old childhood bond reforged and bright again. Melissa would have coaxed me into going to physical therapy. At some point I would have got my hands on a ring and gone down on one knee among the Queen Anne’s lace, and we would have run up to the house hand in hand to give Hugo the news, a star of promise in the encroaching darkness, the line continuing, irrepressible life spinning on. And in the end I would have hired some estate agent to sell the apartment for me, without ever setting foot in it again, and headed off to that white Georgian house on the bay. Of course it didn’t play out that way, at all; but sometimes, when I badly need rest, I like to pretend that it could have.
* * *
As things turned out, this lasted for just under four weeks. On the Friday morning I was in the garden again, having a smoke under the trees. It was starting to be autumn, yellow birch leaves trickling down to land in my lap, elderberries turning purple so that small birds flew over to give them experimental pecks, a cool clean tinge to the blue sky. Someone was using a lawn mower, far enough away that it was just a comfortable homey buzz.
When the shape caught my eye I nearly jumped out of my skin: a lopsided bulk blurry amid the slanting light, coming towards me slow and inexorable as a messenger through the tall grass. It took me a second to realize it was Hugo, leaning heavily on his cane. I jammed out my cigarette and swept some dirt over it.
“May I join you?” he asked, when he reached me. He was a little out of breath.
“Sure,” I said. My heart was still hammering and I wasn’t sure what was going on. Hugo never came out to me in the garden; catching me smoking would have violated one of the unspoken pacts that kept our delicate balance working. “Have a seat.”
He lowered himself jerkily onto the grass—biting his lip and bracing himself with the cane, one sharp shake of his head when I held out a hand to help him—and arranged himself leaning back against an oak tree, legs out in front of him. “Give me a cigarette,” he said.
After a startled second I fished out my packet, handed him a cigarette and flicked the lighter for him. He inhaled deeply, eyes closed. “Ahhh,” he said, on a long sigh. “My goodness, I’ve missed that.”
“You used to smoke?”
“Oh God, yes. The hard stuff: Woodbines, a pack a day. I quit twenty years ago—partly because you lot had started staying here and it didn’t seem like a good example to set, but mostly for my health. Which turned out to be the wrong call, didn’t it?” I couldn’t tell whether the twist in his half smile was bitterness or just the drag at the side of his mouth. “I could have spent those twenty years happily smoking my head off,