The Witch Elm
Page 46
“She’s not here,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I didn’t bring umbrellas,” my mother said, leaning over me to peer out the window. “I knew there was something.”
“We’ll survive,” Oliver said. He looked awful, face sagging where he had lost weight, shaving cuts in the folds. “Not like we’ll be out in the cemetery.” He threw me a baleful look; apparently I was in his bad books about the cremation thing.
“But if it gets worse,” Miriam said, a little wildly. She was wearing a drapey black cape thing that, when she came out of their house into the wind, had looked like she was about to take off. “Waiting outside the church, there’s always all that standing around—”
“No worries,” the driver said peacefully, over his shoulder. “I’ve umbrellas in the boot if you need them. Ready for anything.”
“Well then,” Miriam said, triumphantly and obscurely. “There you go.”
No one had anything to say to that. Leon was still eyeing me. I turned my head away and looked out the window, at bare scrawny trees and boxy little houses whipping past.
The funeral home was spotless and neutral, nothing that could possibly make anyone feel any worse, every detail so discreet that it slid out of my mind the second I looked away. Off to one side of the room, shining in the tasteful soft light, was the coffin.
Hugo looked, bizarrely, more like himself than he had in months: hair smooth and neatly trimmed, cheeks filled out and ruddied by techniques I didn’t want to think about, the look of unruffled absorption he had worn when he was at work and on an interesting trail. A flash of memory hit me out of nowhere, Hugo bent over my finger with a needle and that same absorbed look, digging out a splinter. Cold sunny day and his hair all dark back then. Yes it will hurt but only for a moment—look, here it is, that’s a big one!
My father and the uncles, faces fixed in grim remote endurance, moved around shaking hands with people I half-recognized. A big bosomy woman cried, “Oh, Toby, you look dreadful, you must be devastated,” and enveloped me in a fragrant hug. I caught Leon’s eye over her shoulder and shot him a panicked stare; he mouthed Margaret, which wasn’t a lot of help. “Toby,” my father said quietly, in my ear. “Time to go.” It took me a moment to understand what he meant.
The sheer weight of the coffin was stunning. Up until then the day had felt completely unreal, just another bad dream to be stumbled through—I hadn’t even considered taking this on without Xanax—but the bite and grind of the wood into my shoulder was savagely, inescapably real. My leg shook and dragged, I couldn’t stop it, a jagged catch in the slow march, everyone watching— Sliding the coffin into the hearse, rain driving down my coat collar, I tripped and almost went on one knee on the tarmac. “Whoops,” Tom said, catching my arm. “Slippery out here.”
Ugly concrete church, long faux-homemade banners hanging everywhere, stylized images and smooth soundbites about harvests. It was fuller than I had expected, mostly older people—I recognized some of them, they had visited Hugo—and there was a constant muffled buzz of shuffling feet, coughs, murmurs. Over the gray heads I caught a flash of gold, and my heart leaped: Melissa had come.
Hymns rising in the cold air; only the old people knew the tunes, and their voices were too thin and ineffectual to fill the vast space overhead. The priest’s voice had that awful unctuous fall that they all pick up somehow. Wreaths propped at the foot of the coffin, candles guttering in a draft. Phil read out something from a sheet of lined paper, presumably a eulogy but his voice was hoarse and almost inaudible and the acoustics blurred it so that I caught only the odd phrase: always at the heart of our . . . went down to the . . . Something that made everyone laugh. We knew he would . . .
Hugo in firelight, looking up laughing from his book, hair falling in his eyes and a finger on the page to mark his place: Listen to this! Beside me my father was crying, silently and without moving a muscle. My mother had her fingers woven through his. “He was,” Phil said, louder and firmer, raising his head defiantly, “possibly the best man I have ever known.”
In the foyer afterwards—people milling about, everyone lining up to shake hands with my father and the uncles—I cast around wildly till I caught that gold flash again, and practically shoved people out of my way getting to Melissa.
She was on her own, pressed back against a wall by the crowds. “Melissa,” I said. “You made it.”
Sober navy-blue dress that made her look paler and older, hair pulled back in a soft twist. There were mascara smears under her eyes where she had been crying, and it went straight to my heart; every cell of me was howling to put my arms around her, hold her tight while we sobbed into each other’s unfamiliar grown-up clothes.
“Toby,” she said, holding out both hands. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m really glad you came.”
“How are you doing?”
“I’m OK. Getting by.” Her hands in mine, so small and so cold, I almost breathed on them to warm them. “How are you?”
“I’m all right. Sad.”
Did she mean about Hugo, or about us? “Me too,” I said. And then, with a thump of my heart: “We’re going back to the house, afterwards. Come with us.”
“No. Thanks, thank you, but I can’t, I have to—” She was half a step too far back from me, as if she thought I was going to hug her or grab her or something, what the hell was that about? “I just wanted to come and tell you how sorry I am—and your family, them too. He was a wonderful man; I’m lucky that I got to know him.”
“Yeah. Me too.” I couldn’t bring myself to believe that this was it, good-bye, here in a crowded church foyer. I almost said it, the way I would have if this had been a normal breakup: Please can I call you, can we talk . . . It took everything I had to stop myself.
She nodded, biting down on her lips. “I should go find your dad,” she said, “before you have to leave for the, I don’t want to miss him—” Just for a second she squeezed my hands so tightly that it hurt, and then she slipped past me into the crowd, weaving through it deftly and delicately until even that flicker of gold was gone.
Hoist up the coffin again, back to the hearse, load it in—everyone but me seemed to know by instinct where to go and what cues to wait for; I did whatever my father did. Back into the car. “Those painkillers you had,” Leon said in my ear, when our parents were deep in discussion of what to do with the flowers. “Have you got any on you?”
“No,” I said.
“Back at the house?”
“Yeah. I’ll get you then.”
“Thanks,” Leon said. For a moment I thought he was about to say something else, but he just nodded and turned to stare out the window. The coffin had left a sharp line across the shoulder of his suit.
And, at last, the crematorium. It was a decorative chapel on the grounds of a cemetery: shining wooden pews, elegant arches and clean lighting, everything perfectly gauged and sympathetic. Scarlatti playing softly. More speeches. Phil crying, eyes closed, finger pressed across his mouth.
Hugo, testy, glancing over his shoulder at me sprawled on the study floor, pushing up his glasses with a knuckle: Toby if you’re just going to play with your phone then go somewhere else, you’re distracting the rest of us.
All day I had been steeling myself for the big moment: the wall opening wide, the slow measured slide of the coffin into the darkness; the clang of the heavy door behind it, the great muffled roar of fire. It had run through my dreams. Instead the lights over the coffin gradually dimmed, like a stage effect, and a curtain came to life and inched across the chapel, cutting off the coffin from view. Everyone took a long breath and turned towards each other, murmuring, shuffling out of their pews, buttoning coats.
I was so stunned that I stood there gaping, waiting for the curtain to open again, until my mother linked a hand through my elbow and turned me towards the
door. But wait, I almost said, hang on, we haven’t— Surely that had been the moment at the heart of the whole day, the reason for all the suits and hymns and handshakes and ritual, that moment was what all of it was about? Where had it gone? But before I could put words together my mother had steered me down the aisle and out the door.
In the car park Susanna was leaning against a wall, watching Zach and Sallie chase each other in circles through the spitting rain. Zach had found a stray lily and was whacking at Sallie with it; her laughter had a rising note of hysteria. “They wanted to come,” Susanna said. “I don’t know if I called it right. I figured if they need to do this, then OK; Tom’s parents can take them home if it gets to be too much. But the actual cremation—yeah, no.”
“There wasn’t anything scary,” I said. It was still playing over and over in my head, curtain closing demurely across the coffin, the end, off you go home. “You didn’t see it go into the furnace, or anything.” The open space of the cemetery gave the wind room to build momentum; it came charging across the car park and slammed into us like a solid object. Deep inside that grayish building, Hugo was burning to ash. The bemused crease between his eyebrows, his quick smile.
“Huh. I thought we’d see it.” She pulled her collar tighter. “They probably needed a run around anyway. Zach was getting fidgety.”
“They must have changed things in the last while. We saw Granny’s coffin go in, didn’t we? And Granddad’s?”
“Granny and Granddad were buried,” Susanna said. “Up there.” A flick of her chin towards the cemetery, crowded headstones stretching on and on, rise after rise of them. “Don’t you remember?”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
“I fucking hate this year,” Susanna said suddenly. She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and headed off across the tarmac towards the kids.
* * *
The food-and-reminiscence part was at the Ivy House. I had been dreading it—invading crowd, noise, meaningless chitchat—but actually it was such a relief to be home that I almost slid down into a heap on the hall floor. Instead I went up to my room, took another Xanax and leaned my forehead against the cool wall for a long time.
When I went back down the house was packed and buzzing. I went looking for Leon—I had a couple of Xanax in my jacket pocket for him—but he was telling some story in a corner of the living room, surrounded by old people. My mother and the aunts were passing around wineglasses that had materialized from somewhere, along with platters of whimsical miniature sandwiches involving brioche buns and improbable ingredient combinations and fiddly bits of greenery. Zach had found an unsupervised plateful on a side table and was licking every sandwich and putting it back. “Toby,” my mother called over—I was still standing in the doorway, trying to work out what I was supposed to be doing about any of this—“I’m running out of white. Could you find a couple more bottles?”
There was already a sizable cluster of empty wine bottles in one corner of the kitchen. My father was at the table, peeling back clingfilm from another massive platter of winsome little sandwiches. “Good turnout,” I said, which was what everyone in the church foyer had kept saying to everyone else.
He didn’t look up. “Do you know what I’ve lost count of?” he asked. “The number of people who’ve asked about Hugo smoking. ‘Did he smoke?’ ‘But, but, I thought he didn’t smoke?’ Which of course he didn’t, not in the last twenty years at any rate, and anyway it wouldn’t be remotely relevant if he had; this type of cancer isn’t linked to smoking. It’s just a, a, a random vicious bastard. Hugo just had bad luck; a bad roll of the dice. But we’re so desperate, aren’t we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it. People genuinely can’t take it in that someone could die of cancer without bloody well smoking.”
The platter was overloaded; without the clingfilm holding them in place, cascades of sandwiches kept falling off. He tried to poke them back in. “I mean, Miriam for God’s sake, and she knew Hugo how long, thirty-odd years? not just some acquaintance—she’s spent the last few months gabbling away about toxins from red meat and processed foods, and people who do yoga every morning and live to be a hundred, and I don’t know what the hell she thinks she’s on about but at this point I can hardly stand being in the same room with her.”
His hands were trembling; the sandwiches wouldn’t go right, he kept fumbling them. “Here,” I said. “I’ll do those.”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “And these detectives. Do you have any idea what they’ve got planned? How much they’re going to tell the media?”
“No. I haven’t seen them.”
“Because if everything comes out, those same people, the ones with the smoking, they’re going to be absolutely convinced that Hugo died of cancer because he killed this boy. A punishment from God, or karma, or negative brainwaves from guilt, or—no, let’s be honest, they won’t even think it through that far, will they, they’ll just make some vague mindless self-satisfied assumption. And nothing in the world will change their minds. And I know it doesn’t make any difference to Hugo, but it’s so bloody frustrating—” The sandwiches tumbled back onto the table. “And these, damn these things—”
I collected them and started stacking. My father leaned back against the sink and wiped his hands down his face. I couldn’t tell whether he thought Hugo had actually done it. There was no way I was going to ask him.
“I keep telling myself it could have been so much worse,” he said. “You should remember that, too. For someone who’d had such a terrible piece of luck, Hugo was lucky. All the things the doctors warned us about: dementia, pain, seizures, incontinence, paralysis. He didn’t have to go through any of that. Or”—he pressed his fingertips into his eyes—“with the way things were going, jail.”
“He wanted to be at home,” I said. I couldn’t hold it back. “Not in that shithole.”
My dad raised his head and looked at me. His eyes were red and swollen, and someone with magenta old-lady lipstick had given him a big kiss on the cheek. “He chose to ring the detectives, you know,” he said. “It’s not like they came after him. Yes, probably he assumed he would be coming home; but he must have known there was a possibility he wouldn’t. And he did it anyway. I have to believe that he had his reasons, and he thought they were good ones.”
I couldn’t tell whether there was a message in there, or a question, carefully layered so I could ignore it if I chose. “I guess,” I said. The sandwiches looked OK. I went to the fridge for the wine.
“I don’t know whether he would have talked to me about it,” my father said, “if he’d had time. I hope that he would have.”
The fridge was jammed; I had no idea how to get anything out without the whole lot falling on top of me. “He didn’t say anything to me,” I said.
“Hey,” Susanna said, coming in with Sallie clamped onto her skirt. She was wearing a well-cut little black dress and heels, with her hair brushed sleek; she looked tall and striking and unexpectedly elegant. “That old guy in the saggy tweed jacket just lit up a pipe. Mum and Miriam are freaking out and getting into a whole thing over who should tell him to take it outside, but I figure feck it, pipe smoke isn’t even on our top hundred worries list today. As long as he has an ashtray—Sal, let go for a sec, I need to—” She pulled herself up, one knee on the counter, to grab a cracked bowl from a high cupboard shelf. “This’ll have to do. Who is that guy, anyway?”
“I think that’s Maurice Devine,” my father said, rubbing his neck with a grimace. “Social historian. He used to help Hugo out when people wanted more in-depth things. Reports. Whatever you call them. It’s incredible, how many people showed up. I didn’t realize Hugo was so—”
“It’s a great turnout,” Tom said with an air of originality, sticking his head in the door. “Su, have you got that ashtray? He’s using the fireplace, and your mum’s about to lose the plot altogether.”
“Any more sandwiches out there?” Oliver demanded, over Tom’s shoulder.
“On the way,” my father said, and he straightened up and carefully picked up the tray and followed them out to the living room.
* * *
That day felt like it lasted weeks. But finally, finally, the sandwiches and the reminiscences had all been got through, the guests had trickled away, Susanna and Tom had swept the yawning complaining kids off home, my father and the uncles had cried while they picked out a memento each, my mother and the aunts had (over my protests) tidied everything up and loaded the dishwasher and wiped down the dining-room table and debated at length over who should return the glasses to the caterers and God help me hoovered the entire downstairs, and I had the house to myself again.
I didn’t cry for Hugo, over the next few days. This felt shameful, a spit in the face of everything he had done and yet another marker of just how fucked up I was, but I couldn’t do it. I actually tried—put on his favorite Leonard Cohen album, broke open a leftover bottle of wine and thought about everything he had lost, the fact that I would never see him again, all of it—but nothing happened. His absence was enormous and tangible, as if a part of the house was gone, and yet on an emotional level his death didn’t seem to exist.
My mother had been right about the detectives only keeping their mouths shut through the funeral. Two days later it was all over the news websites, via a neatly worded press release: Hugo Hennessy, the man in whose garden the remains of eighteen-year-old Dominic Ganly had recently been found, had died of natural causes; detectives were not pursuing any other lines of inquiry in connection with the case. The websites padded this out with lavish bumph about Dominic’s rugby achievements, generic quotes from classmates, and whatever info on Hugo they could scrounge up, some bits more accurate than others. One website had misheard and had Hugo down as a gynecologist, which led to frenzied hysteria in the comments section when someone wondered if he had been performing kitchen-table abortions and Dominic had threatened to report him after Hugo operated on his girlfriend. Within hours this had turned into fact, to the point where even a correction from the website didn’t change people’s minds (So what it doesn’t take a Dr.!!! And we already no he was a murderer not much of a stretch 2 think he wd murder babies as well! He got off 2 litely shd be rotting in jail and a bunch of angry red emojis). The other comments sections weren’t much better (“Oh, God, comments sections,” Susanna said; “cesspits. Never read them”): the general consensus seemed to be that it was deeply suspicious that Hugo had never married, and that he had murdered Dominic after Dominic rejected his advances.