“I don’t have a clue,” I said. This whole thing had an unreal tinge, a scene from some TV drama, carefully staged, the clan gathered in the drawing room to hear the patriarch’s dying wishes. “I mean, my dad loves this place, but . . . I haven’t talked to him about it.”
“Ed’s the sentimentalist,” Hugo said. “Deep down.” He rearranged his legs, carefully, nudging the weak one into place with his hand. “Here’s the thing. If the place stays in the family, what are you planning to do with it? Do any of you want to live here?”
We all looked at each other. I had a sudden unsettling vision of me in forty years, puttering around the Ivy House with a cup of lapsang souchong and a pair of knee-sprung cords.
“Well, I’m in Berlin,” Leon said. “I’m not saying that’s forever, or anything, but . . .”
“We might,” said Susanna, who had been having a complicated private exchange of glances with Tom. “We’d have to talk about it.”
“The inheritance tax would be pretty stiff,” Hugo pointed out. “Would you be able to pay it?”
This was feeling more and more surreal, Hugo’s calm businesslike tone as he sat there in the armchair discussing a time just a few months away when he wouldn’t exist any more, all of us going along like it was perfectly sane— The air tasted thick and sour, subterranean. I wanted to get out.
“We could sell our house,” Susanna said. “We should get enough.”
“Hm,” Hugo said. “The only thing is, that doesn’t seem very fair to the boys. It’s not as if I have anything else to leave them—certainly nothing that’s worth anywhere near as much as the house.”
“I don’t care,” Leon said. He was lounging in his corner of the sofa, too cool for school, but his fingers were drumming a tense fast rhythm on his thigh; he wasn’t any happier than I was. “Su can give me my share someday when she wins the lotto. Or not. Whatever.”
“Toby?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Way too many factors crashing into each other, my head felt like an old computer logjammed by too many programs running. “I haven’t— I never thought about it.”
“We could . . .” Tom said tentatively. For a savage instant I wanted to punch him in the gob, what was he doing shoving his nose into this conversation? “I mean, only if the guys were OK with it. It could belong to all three of them, and we could live here and pay the guys rent on their two-thirds?”
“If we wanted to live here,” Susanna said, with a swift warning side-glance at him. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Well, yeah. If. And obviously we’d need to work out all the—”
Out in the garden, Zach screamed. He and Sallie had been yelling off and on the whole time, but this was something else: this was a hoarse, raw shriek of pure terror.
Before I managed to register what I had heard, Susanna was on her feet and throwing herself out of the room. Tom was close behind her. “What the fuck—” Leon said, and then he and I and Melissa were up and after them.
Zach and Sallie were standing at the bottom of the garden. Both of them were rigid, arms out in shock, and by this time both of them were screaming, Sallie’s piercing inhuman high note rising above Zach’s ragged howls. My feet thumping on the ground, my breath loud in my ears. Wave of birds lifting from the trees. And on the bright green grass in front of Zach and Sallie a brown and yellow object that, although I had never seen a real one in my life, I understood without the need for a single thought was a human skull.
In my memory the world stopped. Everything hung motionless and weightless above the slowly turning earth, suspended in a vast silence that went on and on, so that I had time to take in every detail: Susanna’s red-gold hair frozen in mid-swing against the gray sky, Zach’s mouth wide, the slant of Leon’s body as he skidded to a stop. I was reminded, strangely, of nothing so much as the moment when I had flicked on the light in my living room and the two burglars had turned to stare at me. One blink, one glance to the side, and when you look again everything is different: the trees and the garden wall and the people all looked