The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  * * *

  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, and it would have made no difference to anything at all.”

  Another pact broken: we never talked about the fact that he was dying. I had no idea what to say. This conversation felt bad, threatening in ways I couldn’t catch hold of. I lit myself a new cigarette and we sat there, watching sycamore helicopters spin through the air.

  “Susanna rang,” Hugo said, eventually. “Her Swiss specialist fellow had a look at my file. He agrees with my doctors: there’s nothing more that can be done.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said, flinching. “Shit.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “I really believed I wasn’t getting my hopes up,” Hugo said. He wasn’t looking at me; he was watching the smoke of his cigarette curl out into the sunlight. “I really did.”

  I could have punched Susanna. Selfish little bitch, so in love with her seat on the high horse, her self-righteous victim bullshit about evil doctors, she had put Hugo through this when anyone with half a brain would have known it was pointless— “That was a shitty thing for Susanna to do,” I said. “A fucking stupid fucking shitty thing.”

  “No, she was right. In principle. The specialist said that, in around three-quarters of the cases that come his way from these parts, he actually does disagree with the original doctors and recommend surgery—mostly it isn’t a cure, the cancer comes back sooner or later, but it gives people an extra few years . . . I just happen to be in the wrong quarter. Something to do with the location of the tumor.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again.

  “I know.” He took a final deep drag on the cigarette and put it out in the dirt. His thick locks of hair shifted as he bent, showing the bald spot on the side of his head where the radiotherapy waves had gone in or out. A blur of leaf-shadows and sunlight whirled over his thin-worn shirt. “Could I have another one of these?”

  I found him another smoke. “I should try everything,” he said. “Speed, LSD, the lot. Heroin. There wasn’t much of anything around when I was young; I smoked hash a few times, didn’t really take to it . . . Do you suppose Leon would know where to get LSD?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. The thought of babysitting Hugo on an acid trip was mind-boggling. “He probably wouldn’t know anyone in Dublin.”

  “Of course not. And I probably wouldn’t take it anyway. Ignore me, Toby. I’m babbling.”

  “We’d like to stay here,” I said. “Me and Melissa. As long as . . . as long as we’re any use. If you’ll have us.”

  “What am I supposed to say to that?” A sudden harsh burst of bitterness in Hugo’s voice, his head going back— “I know, I should be thanking you on my knees—yes, I should, Toby, the thought of leaching away the last of my life in some hellish hospital— And of course I’m going to say yes, we both know that, and of course I’m grateful beyond words, but I would have liked to have a choice. To invite you to stay on because I love having you both here, rather than because I’m in desperate need. I would like”—voice rising, the heel of his hand slamming down hard on a tree root—“to have a bloody say in some of this.”

  “Sorry,” I said, after a moment. “I didn’t mean to . . . like, force your hand. Or anything. I just thought—”

  “I know you didn’t. That’s not what I’m talking about. At all.” Hugo rubbed a hand over his face. The surge of energy had ebbed out of him as suddenly as it had come, leaving him slumped against the tree. “I’m just sick and tired of being at the mercy of this thing. Having it make all my decisions for me. It’s eating my autonomy as well as my brain, eating me right out of existence in every way, and I don’t like it. I would like . . .”

  I waited, but he didn’t finish. Instead, when at last he took a breath and straightened: “I would love to have you stay on,” he said, clearly and formally. He was looking out at the garden, not at me. “You and Melissa both. On condition that you promise me you’ll feel free to change your minds. At any point.”

  “OK,” I said. “Fair enough.”

  “Good. Thank you.” He searched for a bare patch of dirt and twisted out his cigarette in it. “I need to ask you another favor. I’d like to be cremated, and I’d like my ashes to be scattered here, in the garden. Could you see to it that that gets done?”

  “You should have a,” I said. This conversation was becoming more and more unbearable, like some carefully calibrated form of torture that ratcheted up one precise notch every time I managed to catch my breath. I wondered idiotically if I could claim that I heard the phone ringing indoors, if I could pretend to fall asleep right there in mid-sentence, anything to make it stop. “You should have a will. To make sure. In case anyone argues about, you know, wants to do something different—”

  “A will.” Hugo snorted bleakly. “I should, shouldn’t I. I’ve been telling myself every day: This week, I must get it sorted out this week, I’ll get Ed or Phil to recommend a good solicitor— And then I look at their faces and think, I can’t do that to them, not today, I’ll find a day when they’re in better form . . . And before I know it another week’s gone past. It seems that counselor woman in the hospital was right all along, wasn’t she? Denial. A part of me must have been still hoping.”

  Until that moment, I’d forgotten all about asking Hugo what would happen to the house. It was the will stuff that brought it back. “The house,” I said. “If you’re making a— I mean, if you want to, to be here”—I made some kind of shapeless gesture at the garden—“then the house should stay in the family. Right?”

  He turned his head and looked at me, a long intent look under those shaggy eyebrows. “Do you want it to?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I really do.”

  “Hmf.” The eyebrows twitched. “I didn’t realize you were so attached to the place.”

  “I didn’t either. I mean, maybe I wasn’t, I don’t know. It’s just . . . now. Being back here.” I had no idea how to explain myself.
“I’d hate it to go.”

  He was still looking at me; it was starting to make me itchy. “And your cousins? What do they think?”

  “Yeah, them too. They’d really like to, to hang on to it. I mean, we’re not all trying to grab the house for ourselves, it’s not like that, at all—” The slight frown on his face, I had no clue what he was thinking— “Just, it’s the family home, you know? And they’re kind of worried that Phil would want to, like, sell it, not that he doesn’t care about it, but—”

  “All right,” Hugo said abruptly, cutting me off in mid-gibber. “I’ll sort it out.”

  “Thanks. Thank you.”

  He took off his glasses and polished them on the hem of his shirt. His eyes, gazing unblinking out over the sunlit garden, looked blind. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d appreciate a few minutes to myself.”

  “Oh. Right.” For a minute I hovered, dithering—was he pissed off with me? had I fucked up, offended him by talking about his death as a fait accompli? was he going to be able to get up without my help?—but he ignored me completely, and in the end I gave up and went inside.

  * * *

  He was out there for well over an hour, just sitting, so still that the small birds foraging on the grass came within feet of him (I was hanging around the kitchen to keep an eye on him, staying well back from the windows). When he came in, though, he was brisk and a bit distant, impatient to get to work—he had done some incomprehensible DNA triangulation and turned up something on Mrs. Wozniak, more cousins or cousins’ cousins in Tipperary, he had explained it to me the day before but it hadn’t stuck. There was no mention of the conversation outside, and part of me wondered with a horrible sinking feeling whether he had forgotten the whole thing.

  The next morning over breakfast, though, he announced cheerfully that Susanna’s lot and Leon would be coming over that afternoon. “Let’s make apple-and-walnut cake. Not the children’s favorite, I know, but it’s mine, and I think now and then I should be shameless about using the situation to get my own way. And”—with a flash of a smile at me—“apple-and-walnut cake is much less trouble than LSD, isn’t it?”

  And so: Saturday afternoon, tea and cake in the living room. Warm smell of apples and cinnamon all through the house, still gray sky outside the windows. Tom earnestly explaining how he had finally got through to the most apathetic kid in his fifth-year history class, something improbable about Game of Thrones but it seemed to make him happy; Susanna and Melissa bonding over some new band they both liked, Leon rolling his eyes and offering to make them a playlist of real music, Hugo teasing us all for not appreciating the Beatles. It all looked like a nice cozy family afternoon, but this wasn’t in the routine and we all knew it; I could feel everyone wondering and waiting, covert question-mark glances zipping back and forth. I ignored them. I still had the nasty feeling that I had fucked up that conversation with Hugo, in some nebulous but important way, and everything was getting ready to go all wrong.

  Susanna’s kids weren’t helping. Their attention span had lasted about as long as their cake, and by the time Tom and Leon cleared the plates Zach was buzzing around the living room like a hornet, nudging things with his toe and flicking bits of paper at people and joggling my elbow every time he passed. “Uncle Hugo!” he demanded. He was swinging off the back of Hugo’s chair by his armpits, like a chimpanzee. “Can I take out the demolition set?”

  “Zach,” Susanna said sharply, from the sofa, where she and Melissa had been mooning over some phone video of their new pet band. “Get off Hugo’s chair.”

  Zach made a violent barfing noise and collapsed onto the floor in disgust, narrowly missing Sallie, who was lying on her stomach pushing some toy around the rug and talking to herself. “Uncle Hugo,” he said, louder, from there. “Can I—”

  Hugo turned, creakily, and reached down to lay a hand on his head. “Not now. I need to talk with your parents and the rest of this lot. You and Sallie go outside.”

  “But—”

  Hugo leaned over, beckoned till Zach knelt up, and whispered something in his ear. Zach’s face broke into a big grin. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Come on, Sal,” and he zoomed off towards the back garden with Sallie in his wake.

  “What did you say to him?” Susanna asked, a little suspiciously.

  “I told him there’s treasure hidden in the garden, and if they can find it they can keep it. Presumably it’s not even a lie; there must be all kinds of things out there that have been dropped over the years. They’ll be fine.” Hugo settled carefully back into his armchair. “I do need to talk to all of you. Susanna, would you mind getting Leon and Tom in here for a moment?”

  Susanna went, darting one sharp unfathomable glance at me along the way. We settled obediently as schoolchildren, Melissa and me on one sofa, Leon and Susanna on the other, Tom planted in the armchair across from Hugo with his hands on his knees and a St. Bernard’s look of generalized faint worry on his face. A cool-edged breeze, and the sound of Zach yelling orders, strayed in through the open kitchen door.

  “Toby pointed out to me,” Hugo said, “that we need to clarify what will happen to this house when I die.”

  “Oh. I didn’t—” Melissa stood up. “I’ll keep an eye on Zach and Sallie,” she said to Susanna.

  “No,” Hugo said, instantly and firmly, reaching out to touch her arm. “Stay, my dear. I need you to be here. You’re part of this too.” With a faint wry smile: “Whether you like it or not.” Melissa hesitated for a moment, unsure, but he gave her a smile and a tiny, reassuring nod, and she sat down again.

  “Good,” Hugo said. “Now. Toby tells me that he and you two”—Susanna and Leon—“think this house should stay in the family. Is that right?”

  Both their backs straightened. “I do,” Susanna said.

  “Definitely,” Leon said.

  “And you’re worried that Phil and Louisa might sell it, if it were to go to them.”

  “They would,” Susanna said. “All this stuff about giving the kids advantages.”

  Hugo cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t want advantages?”

  “We’re fine. It’s not like we’ll be out on the street without that money. The kids don’t need fancy holidays or sailing lessons or a massive house with a cinema room. I don’t even want them to have that crap. But my parents don’t listen.”

  Hugo glanced at Tom, who nodded. “Your parents,” he said to Leon. “How do they feel about it?”

  Leon shrugged. “My dad’s not mad about the idea of this place going. But you know what he’s like. If Phil turns up the pressure . . .”

  “Oliver will give in, in the end,” Hugo said. “Yes. And yours, Toby?”

  “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?”