Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty-Six
Hugo Chadwick
Hugo pulled the car door closed, hearing the familiar clunk of the Range Rover’s framework.
She’d done it again. Edith. Made him feel as though he were the devil incarnate.
And the hot chocolate – what the hell was she putting in them, he wondered?
Every sip he took felt like he was on the cusp of some great inner discovery, but whatever it was, it eluded him.
Clearly it had been a mistake to give her his copy of Proust. But it didn’t matter, he knew so many of the lines off by heart and couldn’t deny the uncanny similarity.
When Proust tastes the tea in which he’d soaked the madeleine, a memory evades him and with every subsequent sip becomes more obscure.
‘The potion is losing its magic,’ he said aloud, quoting the author.
He put the key in the ignition and drove off without any apparent destination in mind.
Half an hour later he found himself pulling up at the gates of the cemetery.
He hadn’t visited in a long time and even then had made a point of never coming alone.
The rain was falling more heavily now and his shoes crunched along the gravel pathway.
He thought about returning to the car for the umbrella he kept in the boot.
He stopped momentarily, looked back at the car park then returned his gaze to the path where his brother lay buried.
Hugo knew that if he got back to the car he would get inside and drive away.
On he walked, until he came to the headstone bearing Stéphane’s name.
His instinct was to harden himself to the reality of it.
The cemetery was full of people who had once been brothers, fathers, sons, daughters, mothers.
It was a fact of life and something you just had to get on with.
And yet these thoughts did not sound like his own.
He crouched down and began to clear away the dead flowers that had probably been left by his father some time ago.
‘You were always his favourite,’ Hugo said, speaking to his brother for the first time since he’d died.
He could feel it happening again. A memory, just on the edge of his subconscious. Proust’s illuminating words came back to him.
It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself.
Somewhere deep inside, Hugo understood that his survival this past few years had relied heavily on him keeping the truth from himself. It seemed preposterous now, here, at the graveside, that this had ever worked. But grief can do strange things to a person.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, the words escaping his mouth like a desperate prayer.
His stomach began to quiver and he thought he would be sick, but all that came out were unshed tears.
Tears he hadn’t permitted himself to cry at the morgue, the funeral – not even when his mother had asked over and over what had happened that night.
It was a stupid party that Hugo hadn’t even wanted to go to in the first place.
Stéphane had been seeing some model and was getting invited to all of these celebrity events.
These kinds of things always had free champagne and free drugs.
Hugo could see his brother was changing, getting wasted most nights, and had once even crashed his car.
‘This is a wake-up call,’ Stéphane assured Hugo at the time.
But it wasn’t long before he was partying again.
Hugo trailed along, like some kind of useless bodyguard, trying to keep his brother out of trouble.
But that night, they argued. Hugo stormed out and next thing he knew the police were at his door, saying Stéphane had been found dead at the scene.
‘Scene? What scene?’ he’d asked.
‘On the bathroom floor in the nightclub. Asphyxiation,’ the policewoman said.
Hugo shook his head. He didn’t understand.
‘He choked on his own vomit,’ the other officer supplied.
Hugo had pulled in every favour he could to have the story changed in the media.
‘A heart attack’, the headlines read. Yes, Stéphane had been so young, yet of course these things happen.
But the coroner’s report didn’t lie, so his parents knew the truth, and even though they never said it, Hugo knew they blamed him.
Rightly or wrongly, they needed somewhere to vent their anger and Hugo was the only one left.
Until they turned on each other and then Seraphine became ill.
And Hugo had been trying to atone for it ever since.
‘The stupid thing is,’ he said, his tears subsiding, ‘I must have thought that if I tried hard enough, it would make a difference. Like I could somehow change the outcome, bring you back.’ He wiped his nose and pushed his soaking wet hair off his forehead before sitting down on the wet grass beside his brother. ‘But you’re not coming back, are you?’
* * *
Hugo wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but the rain had eased off and the clouds were breaking to reveal patches of sky overhead.
‘Maybe I can’t change the past, Stéphane, but there’s a chance I can change someone’s future. And my own, too. There’s a family, good people, you know? Our ancestor betrayed them in the past. Papa would have me betray them again, but…’
He looked to the sky and wondered if he had the nerve within him to turn all of this around.
‘There’s this girl, Edith. I think you’d like her. She lives with this family and – I don’t know – there must be a reason we met on that very street. Like we were both drawn there.’
It felt so good talking to his brother again, like embracing a long-lost friend. He’d never really allowed himself to grieve. It was only now that he began to realise how much he missed his older brother’s guidance.
‘Maman was right. At first, I wasn’t sure if she was just imagining the whole thing, but I searched in the archives. There was an old article in the newspaper that spoke of the wife of Monsieur Moreau and how she was taken by the Nazis.’
Hugo had hardly believed his eyes when the local resident they quoted in the piece was Monsieur Arnaud Chauvel.
Arnaud said it was a stain on the good people of Rue de Paris and that he was glad this woman’s true identity had been revealed and that she had consequently been ‘dealt with’.
‘As for Monsieur Moreau,’ Arnaud went on to say, ‘his kind are not welcome on our street, either.’ Hugo felt sickened that he could be remotely related to this person.
For so long now, he’d worried that he had lost his soul, but he could see now what a soulless man truly looked like.
‘All of these years I’ve been overcompensating – trying to be you! I haven’t been doing such a good job of it, to be honest.’ Hugo smiled. ‘But if I don’t stand up for what I believe in now, I may lose what little of myself I have left.’
He looked at the headstone, his brother’s name engraved along with two dates like bookends. You were given a finite amount of time and whatever you didn’t manage to accomplish within those dates would remain forever undone. Something within Hugo was galvanised. He knew what he had to do.