The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  Leon lit another cigarette, without offering me one.

  “It’s just painkillers. I still get the odd headache from the concussion. No big deal. I just didn’t feel like coping with today and a headache at the same time.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Did anyone else notice?”

  He made a dismissive pfft noise. “Nah. Even if they did, they’ll just think you’re still shaken up. My mother says you need yoga classes to re-center your energy.”

  That pulled a snort of laughter out of me, and after a moment he gave a reluctant half grin. “Wonderful,” I said. “I’ll be sure and ask her for recommendations.”

  “Just be careful,” Leon said, glancing after Susanna and lowering his voice. The edge had gone out of his tone. “I had a friend who . . . well, anyway. All I’m saying is, whatever you’re taking, just because you get them from a doctor, that doesn’t mean they’re harmless little Smarties. Don’t get cocky.”

  “Who, me? Never.”

  Leon’s mouth twisted, but before he could say anything Susanna nipped back out the door, holding a bottle of wine. “Score,” she said. “We’re definitely going to need supplies. Your dad’s doing ‘Spancil Hill’ now, Leon.”

  “Oh Christ.”

  “I couldn’t get Melissa out,” Susanna told me. “Your mother’s got her arm around her.”

  “I should go in there,” I said, without moving.

  “She looks OK.”

  “She is OK. Melissa would be OK anywhere. That’s not the point.”

  “You won’t believe this,” Leon told Susanna. Flicking his chin at me: “He’s staying here.”

  Susanna sat down next to me on the steps, produced a corkscrew from her back pocket and held the bottle between her knees. “I know. I asked him to.”

  Leon’s eyebrows shot up. “You never said.”

  “Well, I didn’t think he’d actually do it. But”—a flash of a smile to me, as she wrestled with the cork—“looks like I underestimated him.”

  “It’s so easy to do,” Leon said, out to the garden.

  The cork came out with a pop. Susanna took a swig, with a relish that startled me—part of me still thought of her as an eight-year-old—and passed the bottle to me. “Ignore him,” she said to me. “He’s had a shit day.”

  “Haven’t we all,” I said. The wine was red, heavy and late-summery, and I could tell even before it hit my tongue that it was strong. “How are you doing?”

  “About how you’d expect,” Susanna said, tilting her head up and massaging the back of her neck. She had changed a lot less than Leon. Her hair was in a wavy chin-length tumble instead of the two thick childhood plaits or the graceless teenage flop, and her old bony plainness had settled into something arresting in its serene aura of permanence, its implication that she would look much the same in twenty years, or fifty; but having babies had softened her long-legged angularity only a little, she was wearing faded jeans and almost no makeup, and she still sat the way she had as a kid, cross-legged and unselfconscious. “Tom’s turning into the back-rub king. How about you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Well, I don’t have Tom’s back-rubs. But apart from that, I’m fine.” I caught Leon’s sardonic glance and ignored it.

  “Whatever that means right now,” Susanna said, reaching for Leon’s cigarette. Someone, presumably one of the kids, had drawn some kind of bug on her hand in purple marker. “Give me a drag of that.”

  “You can have your own. Here—”

  “I don’t want my own. I don’t want the kids seeing me smoking.”

  She was a bit drunk, too; now that I came to think of it, so was I. “Give me one,” I said to Leon. “I’ll share with Su.” The kids were down at the bottom of the garden poking something in the grass with sticks, and they didn’t appear to be taking any interest in us, but I’ve always been a little protective of Susanna, even though she’s only three months younger than me. I can remember being about five, picking her up around the chest with a mighty effort and waddling frantically away from the wasp that had been circling her. I lit the cigarette, took a deep drag and passed it to her.

  “My dad’s not fine,” she said, on a stream of smoke. “We were over there the other day and I walked in on him crying. Sobbing his heart out.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Yeah.” She glanced sideways at me. “He’s got some present for you. To make up for missing your birthday party. I think it might be some awful family heirloom. If it’s shit, be nice about it.”

  “Sure.”

  “Because I don’t think he could handle even one more tiny— Zach!” Susanna called across the lawn, to where Zach was clambering up into a big wych elm. “Get out of that tree! How many times have I told you?”

  “We used to climb those trees all the time,” I pointed out. Zach was pulling himself farther up the tree, totally ignoring her.

  “Right, and then you fell out of that exact one and broke your ankle, you were in a cast for— Zach! Get down right now. Do I have to come over there?”

  Zach dropped from a branch, did an exaggerated slump with his head thrown back to inform his mother what a moron she was, and then charged off across the grass to hassle Sallie.

  “He’s a little bollix sometimes,” Susanna said. “And Tom’s parents don’t help. They let him get away with anything, and when they see us making him behave, they’re all, ‘Oh, leave him alone, boys will be boys!’ And you know what Hugo’s like, ‘Just let them run wild, they’ll turn out fine in the end’—which was great when it was us, but it’s not as much fun from the other side.”

  I didn’t point out that that part of the problem, at least, was likely to take care of itself fairly soon. I wasn’t interested in discussing Zach’s issues. “I can’t even remember the last time I saw your dad,” I said.

  I realized almost instantly, from the surprised silence, that I had put my foot in it. I rummaged frantically in my mind for whatever I was missing; all I could come up with was calling Uncle Phil when I got completely hammered and lost my wallet at some teenage disco and Hugo wasn’t answering his phone, the wry look on his face in the car as he advised me to be very quiet on my way into my house, but obviously I had seen him since then—

  “But they were here at Christmas,” Susanna said. “Remember? They gave Zach that dagger thing, and he stabbed the sofa?”

  “Oh,” I said. The sharp, intent way she was looking at me, like something was just dawning on her, made my gut clench. “Duh. I guess my mind was on other stuff at Christmas, I had like a lot on at work? and all the Christmases kind of blur together, right, specially since a lot’s happened—” Leon snorted, just loudly enough to be obvious. The sofa-stabbing didn’t sound like the kind of thing that would blur easily.

  “You,” Susanna said, with finality, “are drunk.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I really am.” I was so grateful to her for the out, so pierced by her infinitely kind and innocent world where nothing worse than a few mimosas could possibly be wrong with anyone’s mind, I could have cried.

  “Give me that,” Leon said, reaching for the bottle. “You’ve had plenty.” The arch of his eyebrow at me said What with the other stuff.

  “I have, yeah. And I’m planning to have plenty more.”

  “Melissa’s such a lucky girl. Is she staying here too?”

  I shrugged. My heart was hammering: sooner or later I was going to really fuck up, say or do something so moronic that no amount of naïveté could gloss over it, I should never have come here— “For a few days, yeah.”

  “Doesn’t want you out of her sight?”

  “What can I say, dude. She likes my company. Your guy didn’t make it, no?”

  “Carsten’s got a job. He can’t just take off whenever he feels like it.”

 
“Ooo. He sounds important.”

  “I wish this was over,” Leon said, suddenly and fiercely. “I know that’s awful, but I do. What are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to pretend it’s not happening? There should be a manual.”

  “I bet in some cultures there is,” Susanna said, taking the bottle off him. “Rituals you do, when someone’s dying. Chants. Dances. Burning herbs.”

  “Well, I wish I lived there. Shut up”—to me, when I rolled my eyes—“I do. What you’re supposed to do after someone dies, that’s all mapped out, wakes and funerals and wreaths and the month’s-mind mass. But the part where you’re waiting for them to die is at least as bad, and there’s fuck-all to tell you how to do that.”

  “Speaking of when it’s over,” Susanna said. “Does anyone know what happens to the house, afterwards?”

  There was a small, intricate silence. Leon pulled a stem of jasmine off the wall and spun it between his fingers, not looking at either of us.

  “I mean, it might not come to that,” Susanna said. “We’re getting a second opinion. But if.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Is it not a bit early to, to go divvying up his stuff?”

  Both of them ignored that. Leon said, “Granddad and Gran’s will said Hugo gets to live here.”

  “And then what?”

  “You mean,” Leon said, “is it going to be sold.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not if I get a say in it.”

  “Well, obviously,” Susanna said, with a touch of exasperation. “What I’m asking is if anyone knows whether we do get a say. If it goes to our dads, and they want to sell it and split the money . . .”

  Another silence, this one longer. This whole issue had never occurred to me, and I had no idea what I thought about it. It sounded like Susanna and Leon were not just set on hanging on to the place but also taking it for granted that I felt the same way, although I had no idea what they thought we would do with it: rent it out? share it, all of us together in one great big happy commune, taking turns to cook lentils and tie-dye organic hemp? A few months back I would have been all for selling up—any fraction of the house would have been a big step towards that white Georgian overlooking the bay—but now that whole daydream stabbed like a humiliating joke, it made me feel like one of those deluded caterwaulers babbling about superstardom on The X Factor. It was made worse by the paranoid sense that the other two were thinking things I wasn’t in on, invisible signals zipping back and forth past my face like insects; I felt like an unwanted outsider, like they would be happier if I made some vague excuse and went inside, or even better if I hauled my bags into another taxi and drove straight back to my apartment.

  “Can’t you ask your dad what the story is?” Leon said to Susanna. He had taken his lighter out and was flicking the flame at the jasmine stem, blowing it out when it caught.

  “Why can’t you ask yours?”

  “Because you’re closer to yours.”

  “Just because we live in the same country doesn’t mean we’re close.”

  “It means you see him. Which makes it an awful lot easier to casually slip the question into conversation, oh by the way Dad, do you happen to know—”

  “Hello? You’re right here. You’re actually living with yours.”

  Leon blew out the jasmine viciously. “Which means I’ve got more than enough on my plate right now, thanks, without—”

  “And I don’t?”

  “Why don’t you do it?” Leon said to me. “You’re just sitting there, assuming one of us will—”

  I was finding this bickering weirdly comforting, actually, with its familiarity and its implication that I wasn’t the persona non grata here, that maybe everyone was just stressed and out of joint. “I’m living with Hugo,” I pointed out. “I can’t exactly ask him: hey, Hugo, just wondering, when you kick the bucket—”

  “You could ask your dad.”

  “You’re the one who brought it up. If you’re so desperate to know—”

  “You’re not?”

  “Of course he’s not,” Susanna said. “Duh.”

  “What’s the big deal?” I demanded. “We’ll find out when he dies, what difference does it—”

  “If he dies—”

  “All right,” Leon snapped. “I’ll do it.”

  Both of us turned to look at him. He shrugged, against the wall. “I’ll ask my dad.”

  “OK,” Susanna said, after a moment. “You do that.”

  He dropped the jasmine on the terrace and twisted his heel on it. “I will.”

  “Wonderful,” Susanna said. “So we can quit bickering. I have to listen to that all day long; I don’t want to do it too. Is Oliver still going?”

  I cocked an ear towards the door. “Yep. ‘She Moved Through the Fair.’”

  “Jesus,” Leon said, rubbing a hand over his face. “Give me that bottle back.”

  Susanna let out a breath precariously near to laughter or tears. “Last night she came to me,” she sang softly, “my dead love came in . . .”

  Oliver’s voice, eroded to veil-thinness by distance, fell on hers like an echo. My dead love came in . . . Out over the grass, among the Queen Anne’s lace and the leaves.

  “Oh, perfect,” Leon said, and tilted the bottle to his lips. “Let’s all see how morbid we can get.”

  Susanna hummed a few bars of some tune I couldn’t put my finger on, till Leon let out a snap of laughter and sang along, in a tenor that was surprisingly rich coming out of someone so slight: “Isn’t it grand, boys, to be bloody well dead? Let’s not have a sniffle—”

  I started to laugh. “Let’s have a bloody good cry,” Susanna joined in, and we all finished it together in style, cigarettes and bottle raised high: “And always remember the longer you live, the sooner you’ll bloody well die!”

  A sound behind us, in the kitchen: cupboard door closing. After one horrified second all three of us collapsed with laughter simultaneously, as if we’d been sandbagged. Leon was doubled over, Susanna had choked on the wine and was whooping, banging herself on the chest; I felt tears run down my face. The laughter felt uncontrollable and terrifying as vomiting. “Oh, God,” Leon gasped. “Look at the coffin, with golden handles—”

  “Shut up, Jesus, if that’s Hugo—”

  “Wow,” Tom said, appearing in the doorway. “So this is where the real party is.”

  We took one look at him and collapsed again. “What?” he said, bewildered. When none of us could answer: “Are you smoking something?”

  The question was jocular, but just enough of a serious undertone sneaked through that Leon straightened up and gave him a wide-eyed paranoid look, hand to heart. “Oh my God. Does it show?”

  Tom blinked at him. Tom is medium height and medium stocky and medium blond and medium handsome and extremely sweet, and he brings out the irresistible urge to warn him about drop bears and dihydrogen monoxide. “Um,” he said. “What . . . ? Like, what is it?”

  “It’s just a bit of bingo,” Leon said. “Have you ever tried it?”

  “Bingo?”

  “Oh, you should,” I said. “I bet bingo would be the biggest thrill of your life.”

  Tom—worried, eyebrows pulled down—was glancing back and forth between us and Susanna, who had hit the point where all she could manage was to flap a hand helplessly in his direction. “I don’t—”

  “It’s totally legal,” Leon said reassuringly.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Well. More or less.”

  “Do you want a hit?” I offered Tom my cigarette.

  “Um, no thanks. Su,” Tom said, rubbing at his neck. “I mean, the kids. If they—”

  This obliterated Susanna all over again. “Oh, they’re fine,” Leon said. “They’re miles away.” He waved to the kids.

  “If they notice anything,” I
said, “we’ll talk to them about it. Give them the facts. In today’s world, the sooner you educate your kids about bingo the better, right?”

  “I guess. But I mean, I don’t think—”

  I’d never really got Tom. When Susanna met him, in our first year of college, everyone was delighted. She had been having some kind of ornate teenage crisis over the past year and had first gone into emo mode, lank hair and oversized jumpers and no social life and lots of music about too-passionate spirits crushed by the cruel unfeeling world, and then done a 180 and turned into a full-on wild child, Alice-in-Wonderland clothes and pop-up clubs in secret locations, disappearing for weeks except for a handful of vague giggly texts from someone’s camper van in Cornwall and never handing in her essays. To me it all looked like standard teenage-girl stuff, but her parents were worried enough that Aunt Louisa kept buttonholing me to ask whether I thought Susanna was cutting herself (how would I know?) and whether I thought she took drugs (definitely, but then so did I), and I knew they had tried a few times to get her to see a therapist. Tom—sturdy, peaceful, pleasant, unremarkable in every way—seemed like the perfect antidote; once she got together with him, Susanna settled down and, almost overnight, went back to her old untroublesome well-behaved self. I didn’t bother developing much of a relationship with him, since I assumed she would move on once he had got her solidly back to normal, and I was completely gobsmacked when instead, before they had even finished college, they decided to get married. Within a couple of years they had two kids and much of their conversation revolved around toilet training and school choices and various other things that made me want to get a vasectomy and go on a coke binge. Basically, while Tom seemed like an OK guy, I didn’t see what he was still doing in our lives.

  “You,” Susanna told us, finally getting her breath back. “Stop fucking with Tom. I like him.”

  “We like him too,” I said. “Don’t we, Leon?”

  “Looove him,” said Leon, giving Tom a lascivious lash-flutter.