to us and a mug steaming in his hand. “It’s incredible how fast they work,” he said. “That tree’ll be gone by lunchtime. Two hundred years, and: poof. I don’t know whether it’s terrifying or impressive.”
“The faster they get it down,” Melissa pointed out, aiming for cheerful, “the sooner they’ll go away.”
“True, of course. There’s porridge on the cooker, and coffee.”
Melissa poured our coffee; I scooped porridge into bowls and threw in handfuls of blueberries. I was having trouble struggling up out of the Xanax, viscous fog dragging at my mind and my limbs, and the cops prowling the garden like a pack of feral dogs in the corner of my eye were more than I could handle; I wanted to get out of that room as fast as possible.
“Hugo,” I said. “Do you want porridge?”
Hugo hadn’t turned from the doors. “I spent a while looking up wych elms, last night,” he said, between sips of coffee. “I’d never thought much about them before, but it seemed inappropriate to know nothing about them now, somehow. Did you know that the Greeks believed there was one at the gates of the Underworld?”
“No,” I said. The combats woman stuck her head out of the tent and said something, and the cops all vanished inside, ducking in one by one like clowns into a clown car. “I didn’t know that.”
“They did. It sprang up where Orpheus stopped to play a lament after he’d failed to rescue Eurydice. ‘In the midst,’ Virgil says, ‘an elm, shadowy and vast, spreads its aged branches: the seat, men say, that false Dreams hold, clinging beneath every leaf.’”
Melissa shivered, a small violent movement that made her clench the coffee mugs harder. “Lovely,” I said. “I feel better about this one being cut down.”
“Apparently ‘the decoction of the bark of the root fomented, mollifieth hard tumors,’” Hugo informed us. “According to Culpeper’s Complete Herbal. I suppose I should try it, seeing as I’ll have plenty of root bark to hand, but I’m not sure how to decoct or foment, never mind how I would get it in there to do the mollifying. The elm also ‘cureth scurf and leprosy very effectually.’ If you should ever need it to.” I wondered if I could turn around and go back to bed.
The tree surgeon fired up the chainsaw. “Goodness,” Hugo said, wincing. “I think that’s our cue to leave.”
* * *
I thought it would have been fairly obvious that Sunday lunch wasn’t a good plan, but around noon people started showing up, my parents (my mother hauling a plant pot containing an enthusiastic sapling as big as she was: “Red oak, he says it’s fast-growing so there won’t be a horrible gap for long, and in autumn the leaves should be wonderful—”), Phil and Louisa (bags of Marks & Spencer food), Leon and Miriam and Oliver (an enormous and disorganized bouquet), thank God Susanna had apparently decided to keep her lot away. I couldn’t tell whether they were all there because they thought they were providing emotional support, or because they needed to see for themselves what was going on, or just out of Pavlovian reflex: Sunday, Hugo’s, go! It felt like the doorbell never stopped ringing, everyone in turn crowding to the French doors to gape out at the carnage—huge branches strewn across the grass, sawdust flying, white-suited figures going up and down stepladders—and go through the same round of inevitable exclamations and questions, oh no look at the tree!! did they find anything else in there? they look awfully sinister, don’t they, those white outfits— do they know who it is yet?
Finally they had all satisfied their curiosity, or else the bursts of noise from the chainsaw got too much for them, and we could move to the living room. Obviously we were expected to come up with lunch, but there was no way in hell I was going to cook up a nice roast or whatever in that kitchen, and Hugo and Melissa clearly felt the same way. We dug through the shopping bags and dumped baguettes, cheese, ham, tomatoes and whatever else on the dining-room table, along with all the clean plates and forks we could find.
The room had a skittery, unsettled fizz to it. None of us had any idea what we were supposed to be thinking or feeling or saying in a situation like this one, and everyone had seized, with a messy combination of relief and shame, on the chance of focusing on something