The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  “A brain tumor. A few weeks back he was having trouble walking, so he went to the doctor, and a bunch of tests later: cancer.”

  “Jesus.” I turned in a circle, scrubbing my free hand through my hair. I couldn’t get a grip on this, couldn’t be positive whether Susanna had actually said what I thought she had or— “What are they doing about it? Did they operate yet?”

  “They’re not going to. They say the tumor’s too involved with his brain; it’s got tentacles everywhere, basically.” Susanna’s voice, level and clear. Even as a kid, she had always got harder to read in crises. I tried to picture her: leaning against one of the old brick walls of the Ivy House, sun scouring the clean pale angles of her face to translucence, ivy bobbing at her red-gold hair. Scent of jasmine, hum of bees. “And they say chemotherapy wouldn’t make much difference, so there’s no point in wrecking his quality of life for his last few months. They’re going to do radiotherapy. That might give him an extra month or two, or it might not. I’m working on getting a second opinion, but for now, that’s the story.”

  “Where is he? What hospital?” My room, the polluting smell of it, the soft patient ticking of the blinds in no obvious breeze—

  “He’s home. They wanted to keep him in, ‘in case of unforeseen developments,’ but you can imagine how that went.” I laughed, a startled, painful bark. I could see the exact drop of Hugo’s shaggy eyebrows, hear the mild, inflexible firmness with which he would put down that suggestion: Well, as far as I can tell, the main unforeseen development you’re worried about is me dropping dead, and I think I can do that much more comfortably at home. I promise not to bring you to court if I turn out to be wrong. Unless—

  “How is he? I mean—”

  “Like, apart from the whole dying thing?” That flick of a laugh again. “He’s OK. He can’t walk too well, so he’s got a cane, but he’s not in pain or anything. They said that might come later, or not. And his mind’s fine. For now, again.”

  I had been wondering why my aunts had quit leaving me voicemails, why my cousins’ texts had dried up. I had figured, with a hot scraped soreness, that it was because they were sick of me not answering and had decided not to bother any more. It came as a shock, cut with a bit of shame and a bit of outrage, to realize that it had had nothing to do with me.

  “So,” Susanna said. “If you want to see him, like while he’s still in decent enough shape to have conversations, you might want to go stay with him for a while.” And when I didn’t answer: “Someone needs to be there. He can’t keep living by himself. Leon’s going to fly over as soon as he sorts things with work, and I’ll come in as much as I can, but I can’t exactly dump the kids on Tom and move in.”

  “Oh,” I said. Leon was living in Berlin and didn’t come home a lot. It was dawning on me that this was actually serious. “Can’t your parents, or I mean maybe my parents could, or—”

  “They all have work. From what the doctors said, this could go to shit any time; he could collapse, or have a seizure. He needs someone there twenty-four-seven.”

  I wasn’t about to tell her that I might do much the same thing. The image of me and Hugo having synchronized seizures sent a jagged ball of laughter rising in my throat; for a second I was terrified I was going to burst into lunatic giggles.

  “It wouldn’t be actual nursing—if he needs that later on, we can get someone in. But for now it’s just being there. Your mum said you’re taking a couple of months off work—”

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll try and go.”

  “If you’re not well enough, then tell me and I’ll—”

  “I’m fine. That doesn’t mean I can just, just dump everything and move.”

  Silence on Susanna’s end.

  “I said I’ll try.”

  “Great,” Susanna said, “you do that. Bye.” And she hung up. I stood in the middle of my living room for a long time, phone held in mid-air, dust motes weaving through sunlight, kids screaming somewhere in excitement or terror.

  As Susanna had gathered, I had no intention of going anywhere. Even leaving aside the way I felt about the Ivy House, just making the decision seemed well beyond my capabilities, never mind actually doing it (how would I get there? how the hell would I even pack?), never mind looking after a dying man when I couldn’t even look after myself, never mind the daunting prospect of having to spend however long coping with my whole extended family bopping in and out—normally I got along great with every one of them, normally I would have been already throwing stuff into that holdall, but now . . . The thought of Susanna and the rest seeing me like this snapped my eyes shut.

  And of course, underlying all that: it was Hugo; Uncle Hugo, dying. I wasn’t sure I could cope with that, not right now. All through my childhood he had been there, a constant as fixed and taken for granted as the Ivy House itself—even when my grandparents were alive he had lived there, the bachelor son leading his own peaceful existence parallel to theirs, gradually and without fuss slipping into the role of carer as they aged and then, when they died, back into his own well-worn contented rhythms. Hugo padding about in his sock feet with a book open in his hand, peering and swearing (“Well, hell’s bells and buckets of blood”) at the Sunday roast that never once in all my childhood did what was expected of it, putting paid to cousin-bickering with half a dozen brisk words (why hadn’t he done that to the doctors, informed them in that mild tone that allowed for no argument that of course it wasn’t incurable, nipped this nonsense in the bud?). The world was slippery and incohesive enough as it was; with him disintegrating, it might fly apart into a million pieces.

  I did get that I had a responsibility to at least go see him, but I couldn’t fathom how I was supposed to do it. The only possible way to get through this, on what minimal resources I had, seemed to be to pull my head deeper into my cave, slam everything shut as tightly as possible, take plenty of painkillers and refuse to even think about the whole thing until it was over.

  I was still standing there with the phone in my hand when the buzzer made me shy sideways: Melissa, with a massive cardboard pizza box and a funny story about how the Italian guy in the restaurant had been in genuine pain at the thought of putting pineapple on her half. And, since I couldn’t find a way to tell her what had just happened, I laughed and put my phone away and started on my pizza.

  But my appetite was gone again, and after one slice I gave up and told her. I expected shock, hugs, compassion—Oh Toby, that’s all you needed, are you OK? Instead Melissa surprised me by saying, instantly, “When are you going?”

  She looked like she was ready to jump up and start packing for me. “I don’t know,” I said, shrugging and focusing on my pizza. “Maybe in a few weeks. Depends on how I’m doing.”

  I thought for sure that would be the end of that, but out of the corner of my eye I could see Melissa sitting up very straight, cross-legged—we were on the sofa—pizza forgotten, one hand cupped in the other like a supplicant. She said, “You should really go. Like, right away.”

  “I know that.” I almost managed to keep the flash of irritation out of my voice. “If I can go, I’ll go. Right away.”

  “No. Listen.” The barely controlled urgency made me look at her. “That night, when your mother rang me—” A quick intake of breath. “It was five in the morning. I threw on clothes and got a taxi. No one knew what was going on. No one knew if you were going to—”

  Her eyes were too bright, but when I reached for her she put my hands aside. “Wait. I need to finish this, and if you hug me I’ll . . . I was in the taxi and I was screaming at the driver to go faster, actually screaming at him—I was lucky he was so nice, he could easily have put me out on the side of the road, but instead he just went faster. Everything dark, and no one on the roads, and we were going so fast the wind was roaring at the windows . . . And all I could think was that I couldn’t bear it if I was too late. If you woke up and wanted
me and I wasn’t there, and then . . . It was pure selfishness, I knew you probably wouldn’t even know whether I was there or not—I just couldn’t bear going through the rest of my life knowing I hadn’t been there when you needed me.”

  When she blinked, a tear ran down her face. I reached out and brushed it away with my thumb. “Shh. It’s OK; I’m right here.”

  This time she caught my hand and held on tight. “I know. But if you don’t go see your uncle, Toby, that’s what it’s going to be like. You’re so shaken up right now, it might not sink in till you’re feeling better, but by then it could be too late.” Squeezing my hand tighter, when I started to say something: “I know you can’t even think about what things will be like when you’re OK again. Believe me, I understand that. But I can. And I don’t want you to be left feeling that for the rest of your life.”

  It went straight to my heart, her total and ludicrous faith in me, in a future where I was OK again. I had to swallow back tears too—that would be just great, the two of us sitting on the sofa bawling into our pizza, like a pair of teenage girls watching Titanic at a sleepover.

  “Even if you think I’m talking rubbish, can you just trust me on this one thing? Please?”

  For my sake more than hers, I couldn’t tell her that this magical future wasn’t going to materialize. And with that realization something surged up in me, a confused reckless swirl of defiance and destructiveness: fuck it, everything was wrecked anyway, what the hell was I trying to salvage? why not go for broke, gun the motorcycle straight for the burning bridge, bring the whole doomed mess tumbling down? At least it would be my call this time; and at least it would make Melissa happy, and Hugo—

  Out of nowhere, before I even knew I was thinking it, I said, “Come with me.”

  The surprise stopped her crying; she stared at me, lips parted, hand loosening on mine. “What? You mean . . . like, for a visit?”

  “For a few days. Maybe a week. Hugo won’t mind. You got on great at my birthday thing.”

  “Toby, I don’t know—”

  “Why not? We’ve always had people in and out of that house. One time Dec had a fight with his parents and stayed for basically the entire summer.”

  “Yes, but now? Do you think your uncle really wants anyone but family around?”

  “It’s so big, he’ll barely even notice you’re there. I bet Leon brings his boyfriend, who, God, I can’t even remember his name. If he’s not a problem, neither are you.”

  “But—” My rush of giddy energy had caught her; she was almost laughing, breathless, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist. “What about work?”

  It was hitting me that maybe it hadn’t been a crazy thing to say, after all. Maybe with Melissa there, my small shining amulet, I could handle the Ivy House, maybe— “There’s a bus straight into town. It’d only add like ten minutes each way. Not even.” And when I saw her wavering: “Come on. It’ll be like a holiday. Only with shitty weather. And brain cancer.”

  I already knew she was going to say yes: to keep me like that, fired up about something, joking even, she would have said yes to almost anything. “I mean, I suppose—if you’re sure your uncle won’t—”

  “He’ll be delighted. I swear.”

  With a watery laugh, she gave in. “OK. But next year we’re going to Croatia.”

  “Sure,” I said, and a part of me almost meant it, “why not?” And before I knew it, Melissa was singing to herself as she tidied away the pizza things and I was pulling up Hugo’s phone number, and just like that, I was going back to the Ivy House.

  Three

  The drive to the Ivy House, that Sunday afternoon, felt a lot like an acid trip. It had been months since I’d been in a car or been anywhere much outside my apartment, and the sudden torrent of speed and colors and images was way more than I could handle. Patterns kept popping up everywhere, frenetic and pulsing, dotted lines leaping out at me from the road, strobing rows of railings zooming past, grids of apartment-block windows replicating themselves manically into the air; the colors were all too lurid and had a shimmering electronic zing that made my head hurt, and the cars were all going much too fast, whipping past us with a ferocious whoosh and smack of air that made me flinch every time. We were in a taxi—Melissa’s car was somewhere else or being fixed or something, she had explained but the explanation had been too complicated to stay in my head for any length of time—and the driver had the radio up loud, some talk show with a woman getting hysterical about being housed in a hotel room with her three kids while the host tried to make her cry harder and the taxi driver shouted an outraged running commentary over it all.

  “Are you OK?” Melissa asked in an undertone, reaching over to squeeze my hand.

  “Yeah,” I said, squeezing hers back and hoping she wouldn’t notice the cold sweat. “Fine.” Which was sort of true, at least on some levels. As soon as the initial rush of reckless abandon wore off I had started wondering what the fuck I had got myself into, but luckily I had managed to get an appointment with my GP and ask for a top-up on painkillers and a hefty Xanax prescription—which he had had no problem writing, after he skimmed my hospital records and I whipped out the full-color heartrending story of my sleep woes. I had zero intention of taking downers as long as I had to spend nights in my apartment, but I had made sure to swallow the first one right before we got into the taxi, so I would be good and spacey by the time we reached the Ivy House. It was kicking in: while the thought of walking in there like this still broke my heart, I found that I didn’t much care, which made a refreshing change.

  “Wait,” Melissa said suddenly, leaning forwards. “Isn’t the turn around here?”

  “Shit,” I said, sitting up straight. “That one, that left—”

  We had missed it; the taxi driver had to do a U-turn, with plenty of sighs and grunts. “Jaysus,” he said, ducking his head to peer down the road. “Never even knew this was here.” He sounded miffed, as if the street had insulted his professional expertise.

  “Down at the far end,” I said. Hugo’s road has that effect; it gives the impression of being there only on alternate Thursdays or to people with the mysterious talisman in their pockets, invisible the rest of the time and instantly forgotten once you leave it. Mainly it’s the proportions, I think; the road itself is much too narrow for its tall, terraced Georgian gray-bricks and its double line of enormous oaks and chestnuts, making it easy to miss from the outside and giving the inside its own micro-climate, dim and cool and packed with a rich unassailable silence that comes as a shock after the boil of city noises. As far as I could tell it had been inhabited entirely by old couples and fiftysomething women with scruffy dogs ever since I was born, which seemed demographically unlikely, but I had never seen a single kid there except me and my cousins and later Susanna’s kids, and the only teenage parties had been ours.

  “Here,” I said, and the taxi pulled to a stop in front of the Ivy House. I fumbled to pay fast before Melissa could take our suitcases from the boot, I got them out somehow (left elbow hooked through the handle, right hand hauling furiously), and then the taxi had ground through a multi-point turn and zoomed back up the road and we were standing on the pavement outside the Ivy House, next to our cases, like lost tourists or like travelers coming home.

  The house’s official name is Number 17; one of us—Susanna, I think—called it the Ivy House when we were little because of the thick drifts of ivy that practically covered all four stories, and it stuck. My great-grandparents (from prosperous Anglo-Irish families, lots of solicitors and doctors) bought it in the 1920s, but by the time I came along it was my grandparents’. They had raised their four sons there, the younger three had moved out and got married and had kids of their own, but the house was still the family hub: Sunday lunch every week, birthday celebrations, Christmases, parties that wouldn’t fit in our own suburban houses or gardens; by the time Leon and Susanna and I were sev
en or eight, our parents were dropping us at the Ivy House for large chunks of the holidays so the three of us could run wild together, under our grandparents’ and Hugo’s benign neglect, while our parents drove around Hungary in camper vans or headed off around the Mediterranean on someone’s boat.

  Those were wonderful times, idyllic times. We got up when we felt like it, made ourselves bread-and-jam breakfast and had the run of the place, dawn till bedtime, occasionally answering the call to a meal and then running off again. In a top-floor spare room we built a fort that started with a few bits of discarded plywood and grew, over months, into a multi-level structure that we spent endless afternoons capturing back and forth and fitting out with spyholes and trapdoors and a contraption that dumped a bucketful of rubbish on the enemy’s head. (There was a password, what was it? incunabula, vestiary, homunculus, something like that, some esoteric word that Susanna had picked up God knows where and chosen for its musty, incense-trailing mystique rather than because she had any clue what it meant. It bothers me more than it should, that I’ve forgotten it. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I’ve tried using up the night by scrolling down page after page of online dictionaries, hoping something jumps out at me. I suppose I could try ringing Susanna and asking her, but I prefer not to come across as that crazy guy any more than I really have to.) We rigged a spiderweb of pulleys across the garden so we could shuttle stuff between trees and windows; we dug a pit and filled it with water and used it as a swimming hole, even when it degenerated into a mud wallow and we had to rinse each other off with the garden hose before we could go indoors. When we got older—when we were teenagers, after my grandparents had died—we would lie out on the grass after dinner, drinking illicit booze and talking and laughing as the owls called in the darkening sky and Hugo moved back and forth across the lit windows. Often there were other people there with us—it was true, what I’d told Melissa: Sean and Dec and the rest of my mates were always in and out, so were the others’ mates, sometimes for afternoons, sometimes for parties, occasionally for weeks. At the time I took the whole scenario for granted as a happy near-necessity of life, something everyone should have and what a shame that my friends had somehow missed out, but at least they could share mine. It’s only now, much too late, that I can’t help wondering if it was ever really so simple.