by Meg Rosoff
I knew that Hugo would never in a million years have put himself in this position willingly. Practically his whole mission in life was to avoid Kit. With a start, I realised I had never seen them exchange a single word. I racked my brain. Not one. Was that even possible? How had I not noticed before?
My family, my poor deluded family, crowded around the boys in separate groups: Hope, Alex, Mum and me around Hugo; Mattie, Tamsin, Mal and Dad cheering Kit on. And just then I remembered the cormorant, the bird we’d probably given a heart attack, and Mal’s warning at the beginning of the summer not to crowd him to death. I looked at Kit, the golden skin and burnished hair, and all I could see of his beautiful mouth was a beak. The gold-flecked eyes looked small, beady and red. Instead of defined muscles and long legs, I saw the ragged black wings of the cormorant, the dark soul flapping. I blinked, and the bird disappeared.
Kit threw kisses to the crowd while Hugo stared at his racket, picking the strings. It was traditional to form two cheering squads, but this year we stood on opposite sides of the court, the Kit crew cheerful and chanting, Hugo’s gang quiet. Alex looked anxious. Perhaps hanging around with bats had given him the ability to hear portents. I put my hand on his shoulder.
‘It’s OK,’ I told him. ‘We’re going to win.’
‘We fucking well better,’ said Hope, and I glanced at her, but she was staring straight ahead, her mouth tense.
The players walked to the net and touched rackets briefly. Kit flipped a coin and Hugo called it. Heads. It came up tails. Kit’s serve.
I was too tense to breathe.
Kit’s game looked good and Hugo didn’t even bother trying to return the first serve. He just stood and watched it go by, and I panicked, worried he would throw the game, refuse to play. Or worse, that he’d be intimidated by his brother, bottle it.
He returned the second serve, but didn’t smash it, just went for the volley, a nice soft return to the centre of the court, straight and easy to Kit’s forehand. He played the rest of the game with a dead hand, stopping the balls, returning them as innocuously as if he were playing with Alex, letting Kit set them up to smash home. He watched them slice past him, didn’t run for the wide shots or lunge for the drops. Thirty-love. Forty-love. Game, Kit.
Kit’s cheering section went wild, and he threw his arms in the air for a little victory dance. Hugo stood expressionless at the centre of the court. It occurred to me that they’d never played each other before. Separate schools and a desire to avoid each other’s company – Kit may have been worried at the beginning, but I doubted it. Hugo didn’t figure in his plans. He certainly wasn’t worried now.
The serve went to Hugo who, with an almost lazy action, tossed the ball into the air, contracting and uncoiling his long frame beneath it in the action I’d admired so much, extending his arm to produce a lightning strike of a serve. With a startled expression, Kit got his racket on it, just, and Hugo sliced a lethal cross-court for the return. Kit sprinted for a messy thud that just cleared the net, and Hugo fired it back to the opposite corner. You barely saw Hugo move; his volley was clean and sharp as a blade, his face impassive. He seemed to hover on the balls of his feet. The rally went on, Kit sweating, running every ball into the ground, while Hugo barely exerted himself. I’d never seen anything like it. Hugo was smarter, quicker, more accurate. Not a movement wasted, not a foot astray. He played like a Zen master.
The rest of the set was a rout. Like Hope acting in A Doll’s House, Hugo appeared to do less and less. He didn’t run out of breath, he didn’t groan and sprint. He just served his deadly serve and ruthlessly, without emotion, won every point.
Game, Hugo.
Game, Hugo.
Game, Hugo.
Kit laughed it off, but as the set went on he grew tired and angry, slapping balls across the net without power, looking more and more frayed. In the final game, Hugo served into a rally that wouldn’t end. He returned each parry with a simple shot that even an exhausted, outclassed player could just about hit. So Kit continued to cover the court, panting and sweating and swearing as he tried to smash ball after ball at his brother and watched as each came back, with mechanical precision like balls lobbed out of a practice machine, one after another placed precisely where he could least reach, yet not so far that he could stop running.
It was pure hate, disguised as sport.
At the end of the set, Hugo stood silently in the centre of the court while Kit panted, hands on knees, furious. We cheered.
The second set was worse – or better. Hugo humiliated Kit, ran him down, destroyed his balance, ruined his confidence. Kit began missing easy shots, tripping over his own feet. At one point, he threw down his racket in fury. Hugo ignored him, playing on like an automaton. He never met his brother’s eyes, not once, until match point, when he took an extra moment, stared directly down the court at Kit, and then, carefully, with excruciating slowness, tossed the ball into the air and kissed it goodbye. There was no chance on earth that his brother would hit it. Kit watched it scream past with a strange expression on his face.
Hope and Alex and I jumped and hugged and ran on to the court and jumped and hugged Hugo, and he rewarded us with a small smile. He was sweating. And then behind his back we watched as Kit made up his mind, decided the only way to regain control of the situation was through détente, approached the net and stuck out his hand.
Hugo glanced at the hand, looked back up at Kit for a long moment, his pupils black, dilated. Then he turned and walked off court.
It was one of the best moments of my life. Fifty years from now it will still be one of the best moments of my life.
26
Mum and Hope were in our kitchen and, weirdly, Mum was weeping while Hope embraced her.
‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ Hope said.
Shouldn’t it be the other way around? I tiptoed out before either of them noticed.
Alex waylaid me by the kitchen door looking ashen. ‘The wedding’s off,’ he said, obviously waiting for me to say, ‘Oh my God! Why?’ Which I didn’t.
‘I know,’ was all I said, and Alex glared at me.
‘No you don’t,’ he said. ‘Nobody knew till just now.’
I nodded at him and as I walked away I heard him on the phone, knowing it would be Dad, caught on his way to the post office. I returned to the kitchen and this time Hope saw me, and with a tired look said, ‘You’d better sit down.’
I sat down, and she told me that Mal had come to her and said he couldn’t go through with it, which was fair enough, only there was more. He was in love with someone else.
Hope brushed the hair back from her face. She looked at me and frowned.
‘You knew?’ she said.
I didn’t answer.
‘Does Mattie know?’ I’d been thinking about Mattie, had already rationalised that she was well out of it, but of course she wouldn’t be feeling well out of it at all. Mattie and most of the rest of the human race would see the events pure and simply as betrayal. I doubted whether she’d even manage to spare much of a thought for Hope. But in this I was wrong.
Mattie entered the kitchen at that moment and walked straight up to Hope, embraced her and said, ‘He’s a shit, Hope. And Mal’s deluded. Like I was.’ Then she drew back and looked gravely at Hope and said, ‘I feel quite sorry for him, actually.’
Well, what do you know, that’s when I started to cry, because it was literally the first time that I realised how much I’d underestimated my sister. Theirs was the most graceful exchange of the whole miserable event, and a blind person could see that Hope was moved by it. Mum didn’t embrace Mattie. But she watched with a kind of furious pride.
Hope told us that Mal had gone to London to stay with a friend. He’d left Gomez behind, for now.
‘I asked him to go,’ she told us. I wondered how she stood it, keeping hold of Gomez, like Mal’s unwanted child.
A phone call was placed that evening to Florence, and she sent a car to fetch the boys. It arrived so
quickly that I wondered if she kept one on standby for just such emergencies. I heard later how she’d written a brief note to Hope saying she was terribly sorry but wouldn’t make it to the wedding. I guess no one bothered to ask, ‘What wedding?’
And here’s something else. None of the tears and unhappiness of people I loved meant as much to me as you might think, because despite everything, I kept thinking about Hugo, a slim shaft of light in the darkness.
27
Back in my tower I saw Hope walking down to the water. I didn’t have a lot of qualms about spying – but watching her cry felt wrong and I looked away.
I loved Hope, and I loved Mal, and I hoped Mal knew what he was doing, though it seemed pretty clear that he didn’t.
When the car did arrive, Hugo made himself scarce and Mum came through like a hero, saying he didn’t have to go right away and could stay with us till the dust settled. We didn’t see Kit go.
Tamsin was up at the barn so it was supper-time before she heard the news. It barely seemed to register at first, which convinced me once and for all that for her the real world – the world without horses – was just some sort of shadowland.
‘Why would he do that?’ she asked eventually, and no one quite knew which ‘he’ she was talking about, though it didn’t really matter. Either way, there was no answer.
Over the days that followed, Hugo and I spent most of our time together. Alex often appeared, uncharacteristically silent, grabbing Hugo’s arm and refusing to let go. Hugo didn’t seem to mind being grabbed by Alex.
It took Hope two days to contact everyone on the guest list, cancel the caterers and shut up the house, and then she took Gomez and left, having talked just to Mum and Dad, who reported that she was sorry not to say goodbye personally to the rest of us but she sent her love. She didn’t take the wedding outfit. I asked Mum what she was going to do with it and she looked at me in surprise. I guess she hadn’t had time to think about it.
The house vibrated with shock, and everyone tiptoed around as if someone had died. Mum seemed even worse hit than Hope, and burst into tears every so often over not very much. As for Mattie, she rose from the ashes of her glorious love affair like a phoenix.
‘He made me much more unhappy than happy,’ she said. ‘It was like being possessed.’
I knew what she meant.
We didn’t talk about it openly because of Hugo; we didn’t want to cause him pain. Family opinion had pivoted and everyone felt thoroughly guilty, having been so wrong about both brothers, for so long.
It was Hugo who broached the subject the next night at dinner.
‘I’m sorry,’ he announced in an almost formal manner. ‘I’m sorry for my brother’s behaviour. And I’m sorry still to be here to remind you of it. We’ve ruined everything. Your summer.’ He paused. ‘And Hope’s life.’
Mum put her arms around Hugo and hugged him like a child. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said, adding sternly, ‘Hope’s life isn’t ruined – imagine marrying an actor! It was a lucky escape.’
Hugo suffered the embrace for a minute, then pulled away. ‘I knew it would go horribly wrong because when Kit’s around it always does. But I couldn’t stop it.’ His face seemed to sag. ‘I wanted to, I thought it was only Mattie he would hurt …’ He looked at Mattie. ‘I don’t mean only. It mattered so much. I tried.’ The look he gave her touched me deeply; it was full of sorrow.
‘You did,’ Mattie said, and shrugged. ‘It’s OK, Hugo. I appreciate that you tried. But I’m OK. And what’s done is done.’
And I thought: the Scottish play. That makes a nice change.
Hugo looked exhausted.
‘Anyway,’ Tam said. ‘Nobody could have predicted.’
This could not have been less true. Hugo predicted. He’d warned me numerous times. And even if he hadn’t, I should have known, and might have too, if I hadn’t been so flattered by the attention. Wanted it so much to be real.
Mum suggested that whoever felt like it should go for a walk. Mattie got up and they went off together. In all this mess, she didn’t get as much attention as she should have; it wasn’t just Hope’s heart dragged through the mud. But she bore it with dignity and we all thought the same thing at the same time, that it was time to stop treating her like a child.
None of them consoled me, of course. No one knew. Except for Hugo, whose consolation took the form of friendship. And against all odds I was consoled.
Malcolm was gone. It was the last any of us saw of him for a long time. He went on to do Hamlet but the reviews were not kind.
We didn’t go.
28
Hugo refused to go back to LA. His mother didn’t want him, though you’d never guess from her weeping protests.
‘I don’t mind if you stay here,’ Mum said. Come and be part of a family was what she meant.
So he joined us, kind of. You couldn’t rag him or ask how he felt, and instead of bickering and taking sides in every argument like the rest of us, he’d just back off. But he was the truest person I ever met and any triumph I felt at recognising Kit’s treachery was eclipsed by missing Hugo’s value from the start.
Mal’s affair with Kit didn’t last. He regained custody of Gomez but didn’t contact any of us. He was probably too ashamed.
The following summer Hope had the house on the beach to herself. She had a new friend, called Tomas, who visited in August. He was not an actor and we decided to like him for at least as long as Hope did. Hugo stayed in our house. Mattie spent most of her time revising. Tamsin leased Duke again. Alex and Dad registered three species of bat they’d never seen before on the beach.
Mum dyed Hope’s wedding dress indigo, altered the shoulders, and wore it herself to the opera.
As for me, I drew pictures, went swimming, hung around with Hugo. We talked about art school and what we might do someday.
When the impulse arose, I surveyed the beach through my telescope and sometimes did sketches of what I saw. If the day happened to be clear, I saw seals and sailing boats and cargo ships and storms with forked lightning and vertical dark streaks of rain in the distance. I saw a cormorant standing black and ragged against the sky. And occasionally, when my eyes were closed, I glimpsed slivers of my own future. Sometimes silver, sometimes dark.
Time would tell.
29
Two years later I joined a squat in south London with no heat, hardly any roof and a revolving cast of friends and friends of friends, some of whom were relatively sane. We were accomplished scavengers and knew how to get everything for free – transport, furniture, appliances, paint. We creamed off the discarded riches of London’s best markets and ate like kings.
I learned to drive, install plumbing and find free studio space, then froze all winter when the building was condemned. We wore charity shop and army surplus clothes (quilted Austrian militia trousers, a Romanian naval coat and Soviet fake-fur hat) because they were cheap and warm, and we demonstrated against the government in our spare time.
My studio mate and I often went to the local cafe when we could no longer feel our fingers; we’d sit and drink tea and talk about fixing up his van and going to Spain for the winter so we wouldn’t die of cold. But none of that really mattered when the world felt like a place in which anything could happen.
One January afternoon, I sat in the cafe watching shivering locals hurrying through the streets to get home, when a large, mournful basset hound waddled past, and lo and behold there was Mal at the other end of the lead. I jumped up and banged on the window and when he saw me, his face lit up like a beacon.
He bustled inside, stamping and rubbing his hands, and the owner pointed to a sign saying No Dogs, but who could hold out against the mighty reproach of those rheumy brown eyes?
‘Gomez!’ I was so happy to see Mal but Gomez was less controversial so I greeted him first. He was not a dog given to enthusiasm but he suffered mine.
I stood up, and we just stared at each other smiling. Three years is a long time t
o hold a grudge. For Hope’s sake, no one ever said how much we missed him but we did. Maybe she did too.
I ordered more tea and we sat down.
‘You look good,’ Mal said, and I told him I was, good and cold, my future still in doubt but whose future wasn’t? I told him what I was doing, where I lived, about Mattie going to medical school and Alex still chasing bats. I told him about Mum’s latest opera and how no one did The Big Sail any more.
After an awkward pause he said, ‘And how’s Hope?’
Don’t ever lose Hope.
‘Fine,’ I told him. Still with Tomas.
He said nothing.
‘Do you miss her?’
He looked at me. ‘Every hour of every day. Even now I’m not sure what happened. It was like falling under a spell. When I woke up, the kingdom had vanished.’ Mal shook his head.
‘Kit Godden happened. He’s probably out destroying fresh lives as we speak.’
Mal raised an eyebrow. ‘I do manage to stagger on somehow. Bloodied but unbowed.’
I guessed. ‘Shakespeare?’
‘Tut!’ he said. ‘William Ernest Henley. Eighteen ninety or thereabouts so you’re only off by a few centuries.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. Blah-blah-blah etcetera and so on, Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Stirring stuff.’
‘The bludgeonings of chance. That’s nice.’
‘Not nice, surely.’ A contemptuous frown. The old Mal.
‘So … I guess you wouldn’t do it again.’
He flinched. ‘What do you think?’ Then looked at me sharply. ‘And you?’
Clever old Mal. ‘I probably would. I’m not great at saying no.’
He laughed. ‘At least you’re honest.’
We sipped our tea, both thinking how we’d sleepwalked into the same mirage. A shameful connection.
‘That bloody boy,’ Mal said at last, and shook his head.