Flesh: A Novel

8

HE STILL DOESN’T QUITE have the hang of this.

The link in the email opens another window.

He needs to put in his password and then he’s offered “Join Meeting.”

A few moments later someone is there.

István apologizes for being late.

“No problem,” the man on the screen says. And then, “Do you want to turn your camera on?”

“Oh.” István looks for how to do that.

“That’s it,” the man says.

The main picture on the screen is the man, sitting there with some bookshelves behind him.

A smaller picture shows István himself, slightly silhouetted against the unrealistic brightness of a window.

“How are you?” the man asks.

“Yeah, okay,” István tells him. “I’m okay.”

“Do you want to talk about how you’re feeling?” the man suggests.

“Uh.” István looks down at his hands and then at the screen again and says, “Sure.”

There’s another silence and then István says, “Well, I’m feeling okay.” He has a quick suck on the vape he’s holding. “You know.”

“Sure.”

“Nothing special.”

“Okay,” the man on the screen says.

The man on the screen is Rafe.

He’s a therapist.

They’ve been doing this for about six months now.

It was part of the plea bargain deal. A straight guilty plea to common assault in exchange for a very large fine and a commitment to “seek treatment.”

Since last autumn “seeking treatment” has involved seeing Rafe once a week.

During the first sessions they talked mainly about Thomas, about what happened at the Gagosian gallery that night, and István’s feelings about it all.

Since then they have talked about other things as well. About István’s life more widely, about experiences from his past.

Every few weeks though, Rafe wants to talk about Thomas again.

He asks questions that are obviously designed to probe István’s feelings about Thomas.

István answers such questions warily.

“I don’t know,” he says.

Rafe wants more.

He doesn’t say anything.

He just waits.

“I don’t know,” István says again. “I suppose I feel…”

He feels hatred.

That’s what he feels.

He feels hatred that the passage of more than a year doesn’t seem to have diminished much. If anything, the opposite. He hates Thomas more now than he did a year ago. He holds him directly responsible for all the legal, social, and financial disasters that have afflicted his life since that night at the Gagosian.

There are moments when he definitely wishes he was dead.

He hasn’t seen him since that night.

Helen hasn’t seen him either.

He still won’t speak to her.

He and Rafe talk about that too sometimes, about the fact that Thomas won’t speak to Helen.

István says, “I mean, I know it’s painful for her.”

“How do you feel about it though?” Rafe asks.

István doesn’t answer that for a few seconds. And then he says, “About what exactly?”

Rafe is as patient as ever. “About the situation with Thomas.”

“You mean that he isn’t talking to her?”

“Well, that’s part of it.”

“I thought we were talking about that,” István says.

“We are,” Rafe confirms.

“So you want to know what I feel about that?”

“Okay.”

“Honestly I’m not sure,” István says, after another substantial silence, during which he once again lifts the vape to his mouth. “If I’m honest, in a way it’s easier for me that he’s not involved in our lives.”

“How do you mean easier?” Rafe wants to know.

“I mean… He was always a sort of disruptive influence in our lives.”

“Disruptive?”

“Emotionally.”

“Okay.”

“You see what I mean?”

Rafe nods.

“So yes, in a way it’s easier like this. You asked me how I felt,” István says.

“Yes.”

“I know it’s painful for Helen though,” he says.

“Sure.”

“So in a way I feel that too. Or it affects me.”

“Yes.”

They talk about it some more and then their time is up.

“End Meeting.”

István shuts the laptop.

There’s the distinctive quiet that follows the end of one of these things, the restoration of a solitude that was anyway only partly dispelled by the presence of someone else on the laptop screen.

He has a pull on the vape and then, wondering what to do, opens the French window and steps onto the stone paving outside.

He squints in the spring daylight.

It’s Wednesday afternoon.

They leave the Old Stable Yard and turn onto the dirt track that runs along the edge of the estate. The track runs very straight for nearly half a mile, with open fields on one side and trees on the other. István feels Jacob’s arms tighten around him as he pushes the quad bike toward its top speed. It jumps off humps in the track and smashes through shallow puddles with a sound that immediately seems far behind them. The engine sustains a single high-pitched note and the air feels hard and sharp on his face. What he likes about it is the way that the exhilaration and jeopardy of the speed fix him in the moment so that nothing else seems to exist.

It feels like a sort of freedom, a sort of escape.

It doesn’t last long.

Approaching the end of the straight section he has to slow down dramatically to turn.

“Okay?” he shouts over his shoulder.

He feels Jacob nod.

He’s still holding tight to him.

István enjoys the tightness of his arms around him, the feeling that they’re experiencing these moments of wordless purity together.

There’s another straight section toward the lake and they accumulate speed again.

“Hold on!” he shouts.

The engine howls.

At first they’re under trees.

In a sort of green tunnel.

And then suddenly the sky is above them, and the lake is there on their left.

And then it isn’t.

They’re under trees again, speeding on in the cool green light until they arrive at the place where the surface of the track deteriorates and he has to slow down. There are some potholes here and he picks his way among them. The holes are full of water the same whitish color as the path and are sometimes difficult to spot. When he misses one there’s a splashing sound and the quad lurches and tilts.

And then he sees a fallen branch across their path and has to stop. He’s not surprised to see it. There was a storm overnight. Lying in bed, he heard the rain against the window and what seemed to be thunder, although he wasn’t sure about that at first.

He puts the quad into neutral and dismounts.

Walking feels strange and slow for a second or two. It feels strangely slow. It feels like those dreams where you move too slowly to prevent some looming disaster.

He stoops and takes hold of the wet black branch. It fell from a chestnut tree and still has a couple of immature flowers on it. They look much tougher, much more sinewy and businesslike, up close than they do high on the tree. He discards the branch into the weeds at the side of the path and walks back to the vibrating machine.

In helmet and eye shield, a whole plastic suit of armor, Jacob watches him. “Okay?” he asks.

István nods, wiping some slimy dirt from his hands.

He remounts and they pick up speed again until they arrive at the farmer’s field, where they turn left onto a muddy track marked with the imprints of tractor tires. As they move slowly along it, Jacob loosens his hold on his father’s torso and looks across the field. The approaching sound of the quad startles a flock of starlings out of the young wheat. They move, in unison, into the trees.

Jacob is pointing at them.

István, half aware of them in his peripheral vision, nods.

He doesn’t hear what Jacob is saying about them.

“Yeah,” he says as they turn onto the path that will take them back toward the house, accelerating through sparse woods and then parkland and then the more formal gardens.

When the house comes into view, he eases off the throttle.

He stops at the foot of the south front steps and kills the engine.

Sudden quiet.

And in the quiet the sad sound of a plane, somewhere above the clouds, descending toward Luton Airport. You don’t hear that much nowadays, which makes it more noticeable when it does happen.

He looks up.

There’s nothing to see.

Just bright clouds, and the sound of the plane somewhere inside them.

“Want to have a go?” he asks Jacob.

He means at driving the quad. It’s something he’s offered before. To his disappointment, Jacob has always sort of shied away from it.

“Have a go,” István says. “Don’t you want to?”

“All right,” Jacob says, though without much enthusiasm.

“Come on,” István says. “It’s fun.”

They switch positions so that Jacob is in front holding the handlebars and István is sitting behind him.

He explains how it works. It’s the 300 cc automatic Polaris, the smaller one. There’s also a more powerful manual Yamaha that István sometimes uses on his own—Helen won’t let him take Jacob on that one. She says it’s too dangerous.

Following his father’s instructions Jacob turns the key and then presses the start button.

“Okay,” István says. “Now pull the clutch handle.”

“Which one is that?”

“I showed you.”

“This one?”

“Yes.”

Jacob’s left hand tentatively squeezes it.

“Harder,” István says. “Don’t worry. Nothing will happen.”

Jacob squeezes it harder and the sound of the engine subtly alters.

“That’s it,” István says. “Now we need to put it into Low.”

“Okay.”

István indicates the gear shifter. It has five positions—Park, Reverse, Neutral, Low, and High.

Jacob takes hold of it and pulls it into the Low position.

“Okay,” István says. “Now release the clutch.”

When Jacob does that the quad immediately starts to move forward and István feels his son tense up.

“It’s okay,” he says, with a kind laugh.

“Okay.”

“You’re doing fine,” István tells him.

“Okay,” Jacob says again.

For a while they move along at little more than walking pace.

Then István says, “Give it some throttle. Just a bit.”

Jacob twists the throttle.

For a moment the engine snarls and the quad jerks forward. Then it slows again.

“That’s it. Bit more,” István says.

Jacob tries the throttle again, and more firmly this time, so that the quad sustains a slight increase in speed.

“That’s good,” István says, raising his voice above the louder engine noise. “Keep it straight.”

They’re still only doing about ten miles an hour.

“You remember what I told you about braking?” István asks.

“Yes,” Jacob says.

“What did I tell you?”

“Always start with the back wheels?”

“That’s right. Okay,” István says. “Try it now.”

It suddenly feels as if the quad is pulling a heavy trailer.

“Now add the front wheels,” István says.

Jacob is slightly too sharp with the front wheels and they both pitch forward on the seat as the bike stops.

“Okay,” István says. “That was fine.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Sure. You did fine.”

Jacob seems to have had enough though, and when István encourages him to have another go the next day he says he doesn’t want to.

István tells Helen about it.

She says, “If he’s not into it, he’s not into it.”

“Why isn’t he into it?”

“I don’t know. He just isn’t.”

“He should be.”

She laughs. “Why?” she says.

She seems depressed.

Always a more sociable person than him, she’s feeling the solitude and isolation of lockdown more than he is, he thinks.

She spends a lot of time “meeting” friends via Skype or Zoom or whatever. Sometimes they even do “parties”—each of them physically alone with their own personal bottle of wine, and the others on their laptop screens.

He doesn’t do anything like that himself.

Every few days he and Jacob video-call his mother through Messenger. She was in Budapest when the lockdown started and now she’s stuck there.

“How are you?” she asks Jacob.

“I’m okay,” he says.

“What have you been doing?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says vaguely.

“You must know,” she says.

He sighs and says, “Just hanging out.”

“What did you do today?” she asks.

“Today?”

“Yes.”

He has to think about it.

As usual he leaves before the end of the call and István and his mother finish up on their own.

“How are you?” she asks him.

“Yeah, okay,” he says.

“Helen?”

“She’s okay.”

They talk about Jacob.

“Is he okay?” István’s mother asks.

“Yes,” István says.

“He isn’t lonely?”

“I hope not.”

September.

The school time.

Summer’s end.

The leaves start to fall. First from the chestnuts and then from the planes.

They accumulate on the asphalt paths of Battersea Park.

They accumulate at Ayot St. Peter too, on the paths and lawns and on the tennis court. Mr. Szymanski uses the blower to clear them from the court.

István hears the sound of that as he shaves on Tuesday morning.

Even though the lockdown is over, he doesn’t have much work to do these days. He hardly ever visits the office in Battersea. He’s sort of lost interest in all of that. Since the failure of the Rainham project, and with everything locked down for much of the year, there isn’t a lot happening anyway. So that autumn he spends part of the time in London and part of it at Ayot St. Peter. Helen stays mostly in London during the week while Jacob is at school. One morning, on a day when István happens to be there, they’re having breakfast in the kitchen when the nanny appears and tells them that Jacob says he isn’t feeling well.

“What’s the matter?” Helen asks her.

“He says he’s not feeling well.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” the nanny says.

She obviously wants Helen to deal with the situation herself, and understanding that, Helen stands up and the two women leave.

István makes himself another coffee at the Marzocco machine.

Then he sits and looks at things on his phone until Helen reappears ten minutes later.

“Is he okay?” he asks her.

“He’ll stay at home today,” she says.

“Yeah?”

She nods.

“Why? Does he have a fever?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So what’s the problem?” he asks.

“He’s just not feeling a hundred percent,” Helen says.

“He’s not feeling a hundred percent?”

“No.”

“What does that mean?”

She doesn’t answer.

She’s on her phone now, talking to Samuel the driver. “Hello Sam?” she says. “Jacob’s staying home today.”

She’s still talking to him when István walks up to the fourth floor.

Jacob isn’t asleep or anything.

He’s sitting up in bed with a book. Some illustrated history of seafaring or something. He’s always looking at that book these days.

“Hey,” István says.

Perhaps with an effort to make his voice sound weak Jacob says, “Hi.”

“You not feeling okay?” István asks him.

Jacob just shakes his head.

“What’s up?”

Jacob shrugs.

“You feel sick or what?”

“No, I don’t feel sick.”

István places a hand on his son’s forehead. It feels maybe slightly warm, though not dramatically so.

“So what is it?” he asks.

“I just don’t feel okay,” Jacob says.

“You feel okay enough to read,” István points out.

Jacob lets the book fall out of his hands. “Not really.”

“No?”

He shakes his head.

“If you don’t feel well then you should sleep,” István tells him.

“Okay.”

After kissing him on the forehead, István turns off the light and leaves.

“He seems okay,” he says to Helen.

She’s in the bath.

He’s perched on the edge of the freestanding tub.

They’re in a phase of sleeping separately and he hasn’t seen her naked like this for a month or two.

He tapped on the door and asked if he could come in and she said yes. “I think he should go to school,” he says.

“He doesn’t want to,” Helen says.

“I know he doesn’t want to.”

“I told him he could stay at home today.”

“Why?”

She sighs.

“What is it?” he asks, suddenly aware that there is some particular thing.

She says, “There’s this kid at the school.”

“Yes.”

“He’s not very nice to Jacob.”

“What do you mean ‘not very nice’?”

“I don’t know exactly what happens,” she says. “Jacob’s frightened of him.”

“He’s frightened of him?”

“Yes.”

“Who is this kid?”

“His name’s Toby.”

“Do the teachers know about this?”

“I’ve spoken to Jacob’s form teacher.”

“And?”

“And she offered to talk to Toby about it.”

“Well?” István says.

“I said maybe she shouldn’t do that just yet.”

“Why?”

“I would prefer it if Jacob was able to sort this out on his own, without the teacher having to intervene.”

István stands up and turns to the window.

“I’m just not sure it will help in the long term to have the teacher talk to Toby,” Helen says.

“Who the fuck is this Toby?” István asks, still looking out the window.

“Just some kid.”

“Do you know him?”

“I know him by sight,” Helen says.

“What does he look like?”

“I don’t know. He looks normal.”

“Do you know his parents.”

“I see his mother sometimes.”

“What’s she like?”

“I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

István doesn’t say anything for a while.

He’s aware that there’s nothing he can actually do.

It’s true what Helen says—in a situation like this only Jacob himself can take any action without making things worse.

The trouble is that the action Jacob has taken is to pretend to be ill so that he can stay at home.

Helen says, “If it doesn’t improve I’ll talk to the teacher about it again and get her to talk to Toby or to his parents.”

István is still standing at the window, looking out.

“Okay,” he says.

The next day he takes Jacob to school himself. They walk across the bridge and through the streets on the other side, Jacob wearing his Star Wars backpack while István carries the second bag, the one with his sports kit in it.

The school is red brick, and vaguely mock-Gothic. A neatly clipped hedge separates it from the street.

At the entrance István says, “Okay, have a good day.” He makes an effort to sound normal and upbeat. As they stand on the sidewalk in front of the entrance, though, he’s unable to help looking at Jacob worriedly as he tries to get a sense of what he’s feeling, and Jacob probably picks up on that. His face seems unusually neutral, as if he doesn’t want to give anything away.

István leans down and kisses his hair.

“See you,” he says.

Jacob puts a hand on his father’s arm for a moment and then walks in.

“Hey!” István shouts. “Your sports stuff.”

With his face twisted into a sort of smile now, Jacob hurries back for the cloth drawstring with his sports kit in it—his sneakers and shorts and the T-shirt with the school’s logo on it, the same one that’s on his jacket front.

István holds it out for him. “There.”

“Thanks.”

“Have a good day,” István says again, as if just saying it might make it more likely to happen, and then watches Jacob through the pointed arch of the entrance until he’s out of sight.

He turns and walks away.

He walks through quiet streets toward the river.

The idea that his son is afraid of something, that he’s suffering in some way, and that there’s not much he can do about it is very hard for him to deal with.

It’s just very painful to think about.

He wondered, yesterday, whether to speak to him about the situation.

He decided not to.

It wasn’t just that Helen had said that Jacob didn’t want him to know about it.

He thought as well that talking about it might just make it seem more significant.

Maybe, he thinks, it’s not actually that significant.

He wants to think that it’s not that significant.

He hopes, anyway, that the situation will just go away.

At half term, Helen takes Jacob to Venice. She says she wants to show it to him.

“Isn’t he too young for that?” István asks her.

“Too young?”

“I mean to enjoy something like that.”

“I don’t think so,” she says. And then, “Something like what?”

“Sightseeing or whatever.”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “I think he’ll enjoy it.”

“Okay.”

They’re there for five days, staying at the Gritti Palace.

“Did you like it?” István asks Jacob when they get back.

“It was okay,” Jacob says.

“You weren’t bored?”

“Sometimes,” Jacob admits.

“What did you do?”

“Looked at things.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know. Pictures.”

“Tell me about it,” István says.

From what Jacob says István imagines him setting out from the hotel every morning and dutifully following Helen around.

“What did you like most?” he asks him.

The watery aspect of the place, it seems. The way that all aspects of life there involved waterborne transport. He tells István about an incident where two paramedics brought a person on a stretcher out of a building and loaded them into a kind of water ambulance, which then sped off under the bridges with a siren and everything.

The way he tells the story it’s obvious that he enjoyed watching that.

István smiles at him.

He tells him that he liked seeing that sort of thing when he first went there too.

“When did you first go there?” Jacob asks.

“Not that long ago,” István says. “About ten years ago.”

Jacob widens his eyes. “Ten years isn’t that long?” he says.

“No,” István says, smiling at him, “it isn’t.”

“Did you go with Mummy?”

“Yes.”

There’s a silence and then Jacob says, “We had pasta with squid ink.”

István laughs at the unexpectedness of it. “Yeah?”

Jacob nods.

“Was it good?”

“It was okay,” Jacob says.

“So,” István says, “back to school tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Jacob says.

He seems okay.

The idea doesn’t seem to distress him anyway, and István takes heart from that.

Then one evening a few weeks later Helen says to him, “I need to talk to you. About Jacob.”

“What is it?” István asks, pouring himself some whisky.

“He wants to change school,” Helen says.

“What?”

She says again, “He wants to change school.”

“Change school?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He isn’t happy where he is.”

“What do you mean not happy?”

“You know what I mean.”

“That’s still going on?”

“Of course it is.”

“Why of course?”

“It’s still a problem,” Helen says, sort of taking his point.

“That Toby kid?”

“Yes. I have tried speaking to his mother.”

“And?”

“She said that her son would never do something like that. I said unfortunately that wasn’t true. She sort of lost it when I said that.”

While she talks about a second unsuccessful attempt to engage with Toby’s mother István stares at his own fist, held directly in front of his mouth.

It might look, from the outside, as if he is thinking about something.

In fact he isn’t thinking.

There’s a kind of emptiness inside his mind.

“It should be this Toby,” he says finally, “who should change school.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Helen says.

“Why not?”

“It just isn’t.”

“I don’t want Jacob to change school.”

When he says that, Helen sighs. “I knew you’d have this attitude,” she says.

He looks at her. She seems almost angry. “What attitude?”

“That you’d try to stand in the way of it.”

“You think he should change school?”

“Yes, I do,” she says. “Why not? If he’s not happy there.”

“Why not?” István asks, in a tone of disbelief.

“Yes,” she says.

“Why not? It’s like… surrendering to them.”

Helen makes a sort of hissing sound.

“Isn’t it?” he wants to know.

“What do you even mean by that?”

“By what?”

“Surrendering.”

Instead of answering the question István says, “And what if the same thing happens at his new school?”

“It won’t.”

“You don’t know that. What if it does?”

“We’ll deal with it then.”

“I don’t want him to change school.”

“You want him to be miserable?”

“Fuck you,” he says.

“Seriously?”

“You know I don’t.”

“I don’t understand what your problem is,” she says.

“My problem is that I don’t want him to be driven out of the school where he is now.”

“Please don’t shout at me,” Helen says. And then, “That’s not what this would be.”

“Of course that’s what this would be.”

“I think that’s a strange way of looking at it.”

“Why?”

“I just do.”

“That’s what this would be,” he says.

He tries to explain to her what he thinks, which is that if Jacob leaves the school now, under these circumstances, he will always have to live with the fact that that happened. “Do you think that will be positive for his self-esteem?”

“I don’t think it will be positive for his self-esteem to stay where he is,” she says.

“Not if he doesn’t do something about it.”

“Like what? Tough it out?” she sarcastically asks, when he doesn’t say anything.

He ignores the sarcasm. “Yes,” he says. “Something like that.”

“Seriously? That’s what you want for him?”

“What?”

“That he just… puts up with it or whatever.”

“I want him to stand up for himself,” István says. “Don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

“So?”

She sighs in a way that makes him think he might have got through to her. But then she says, “I think we’re probably past that point here. He’s really intimidated.” And when István is still silent, “I mean he’s terrified to go to school.”

“Terrified?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t see that.”

“He is.”

“I’ve taken him to school,” István says. “I don’t see that.”

“You don’t want to see it,” she says.

This is so obviously true that he doesn’t immediately answer.

“You don’t want to see it,” she says again.

And in fact he has seen it.

Or something like it.

There’s a long silence.

It might be raining outside in the dark. There’s a sort of whispering at the windows.

“I want to talk to him,” István finally says.

“About what?”

“The whole situation.”

“Okay,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says.

She nods.

“All right,” he says.

He looks at his watch and sees that it’s nearly eleven.

He’s not sure how he’s going to sleep after this.

He might have to take a Xanax, he thinks.

It’s been a while since he’s done that.

It’s Saturday tomorrow and there’s a sense that the weekend offers an opportunity to talk to Jacob. He wonders what he’s going to say to him. If it was easy to know what to say he would have done it already. As he thinks that, he’s moving across the room, quietly over the wide carpets, through the pools of light at each of the lamps, and he has already taken hold of the door handle when Helen says, “Please sleep with me tonight.”

They lie in the dark listening to the rain. It’s the first time they’ve slept together for quite a long time. They’re in her room. It’s nice to be there. It makes it easier somehow. After sex, which he thought at first was unlikely to happen, and which was tender and silent and familiar, he falls asleep quite easily, listening to the steady sound of the rain at the open window.

When he wakes again later the sound isn’t there anymore. There’s just silence. It’s so silent that he isn’t even sure if Helen is still there, somewhere next to him on the bed.

Half-asleep, tentatively, he puts out a hand, and then a foot.

The foot finds her.

Some part of her.

He isn’t sure which part.

Mild air arrives from the window and also something like light, or a sort of thinner darkness anyway, something that makes the space of the huge room around him palpable without quite being visible.

He remembers now that as they were falling asleep she said something about Thomas.

She said that it wasn’t only Jacob—that she was worried about Thomas as well.

It was the last thing he wanted to hear and he didn’t really respond.

Instead he stood up and opened one of the windows, letting in the sound of the rain.

She was still talking about Thomas, her voice sort of murmuring sleepily in the dark, while he stood there at the window, looking out at the rain. Or not looking at it. Listening to it. It wasn’t visible. The garden was dark except for the red points of the security cameras.

She had seen Thomas.

That was what she was telling him.

For nearly two years she hadn’t seen him, he had been avoiding her.

Now she was saying that she had seen him, a few weeks before.

In the morning he opens his eyes and sees the Monet oil sketch on the wall. It was a present from her first husband. For their fifth wedding anniversary or something like that. Just a simple sketch of a beach scene, a few dozen brushstrokes, about the size of a piece of letter paper. Still, a Monet, and Karl Nyman probably paid a six-figure sum for it. It’s in a fairly ornate frame on the wall next to the bed and it’s the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes.

He’s alone in her bed now.

He wasn’t aware of her leaving it.

For quite a long time during the night, after the rain had stopped, he lay awake in the silence troubled by memories and then, when light had already started to appear at the windows, he finally fell asleep again and slept until a few minutes ago.

It must be nine o’clock, or even later.

Outside the sun is shining and the room is quite light and he’s looking at the small Monet without seeing it and wondering if he dreamed those things about Thomas.

That he has a drug problem now.

That after some sort of overdose incident Mathilde put him into the Priory.

That when Helen visited him there a few weeks ago he said he didn’t want to see her and sent her away.

Did he dream those things?

He doesn’t think so.

He looks at the Monet. A beige beach under a gray sky. Some figures on the beach, one of them holding a parasol.

As he looks at it he hears voices from the garden—the nanny’s sharp voice putting a question, twice, in exactly the same tone each time, and then, after a pause, Jacob’s listless answer.

The sounds draw him back to the present.

To the fact that it’s Saturday morning.

That he has to talk to Jacob today.

He sits up and as he does that another sound starts—the sound of the shower in Helen’s en suite.

She must be in there.

Probably she left the bed only a short while ago herself.

He moves around the room picking up his clothes from where he left them last night, and when he leaves a minute later the sound of the shower is still going on.

It’s nearly four o’clock in the afternoon when he finally knocks on Jacob’s door.

“How are you?” he asks him.

Jacob is sitting at his desk doing something on his laptop. “Fine,” he says.

“What are you doing?”

“Playing Minecraft.”

“Okay.”

István stands at his shoulder looking at the screen.

“How long have you been playing it?” he asks.

Jacob shrugs.

“Since after lunch?” István asks.

“Maybe.”

“I think you should turn it off now.”

Jacob’s screen time is supposed to be limited to two hours a day.

He sighs and finishes up.

“Do you want to go for a walk in the park?” István asks as he’s doing that.

“No.”

“It’s nice out.”

“I don’t want to.”

“So what are you going to do?”

Jacob shrugs.

He’s still sitting at his desk facing the now-dead laptop screen.

István is still standing behind him.

He says, “Mummy says you want to change schools.”

He says it without any sort of plan of what to say next. “Is that true?” he asks.

“No,” Jacob says.

“No?”

Jacob shakes his head.

“That’s what she said. Did you say that to her?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“What did you say?” There’s a silence. It’s obvious that neither of them is enjoying this. “That you’re not happy at school?” István asks.

Jacob doesn’t deny that.

He just sort of shrugs again.

It makes István feel very sad suddenly that this conversation is taking place at all, that it needs to take place. He says, “Mummy said you’re having trouble with some of the other kids. Or one of them.”

“What do you mean trouble?”

“I don’t know.” There’s another silence. “Is it true?”

Jacob is staring fixedly at a particular point on his desk.

István tries to help him. “Mummy said this kid’s name is Toby.”

Jacob just keeps staring.

“You can talk to me about it,” István says.

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

“You talk to Mummy about it.” There’s another silence. “You don’t mind that she told me what you said to her?”

“No.”

“She told me you wanted to change school.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“That’s what she told me.”

After a few moments Jacob says, “She asked me if I wanted to.”

“Okay.” Jacob’s phone pings as some sort of notification arrives. They both ignore it. István says, “And what did you say?”

“I said I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“So maybe you do? Want to change school.”

“Maybe.”

“Why? Because of this Toby?”

Jacob doesn’t say anything.

István sits down on his son’s bed.

There’s yet another long silence, during which Jacob’s phone pings again.

István isn’t sure what to say.

He feels helpless.

He feels as well that a space has opened up between himself and his son. A year ago there wasn’t anything that Jacob wouldn’t talk to him about, in the way that it’s obvious that he doesn’t want to talk to him about this.

He says, “What does Toby do? Do you want to tell me about it? He’s just not very nice to you or what?”

István knows Toby by sight now. He’s a normal-looking kid. Maybe even slightly shorter than Jacob.

“Does he hurt you? I mean physically.”

“Not really,” Jacob says.

“Not really?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

Jacob doesn’t say anything.

“What does he do, then?” István asks.

“I don’t know.”

“He says nasty things?”

Again Jacob doesn’t answer the question.

“Are you scared of him?”

There’s another silence, which István takes as a yes.

He says, “Why are you scared of him?”

“I don’t know,” Jacob says, after yet another long silence.

Slightly anguished now, István says, “When did this start?”

“I don’t know,” Jacob says.

“Has he been there all the time?”

“What do you mean?”

“Since you started school.”

“No.”

“No?”

Jacob shakes his head.

“When did he arrive, then?” István asks.

“Last year.”

“Last year?”

“Yes.”

“And are other people scared of him too?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do they want to leave the school?”

There’s another silence.

“It’s very important to stand up for yourself,” István says.

“I know.”

“That’s very important in life.”

“I know.”

“That you don’t let people push you around.”

“I know.”

“I know it’s not always easy.”

They agree that if Jacob still wants to leave the school at the end of the year they’ll start to look for a new one.

Then, only a week later, another national lockdown is announced “to prevent a medical and moral disaster.”

Again they spend it at Ayot St. Peter.

While the rain falls outside Helen and Jacob do puzzles on the long table in the library.

Helen has a whole stock of them, mostly famous paintings.

The question of Jacob changing school is put aside, or at least there doesn’t seem to be any point in talking about it now.

The lockdown stretches across Christmas.

They have a quiet one at Ayot St. Peter, just the three of them plus István’s mother.

On Boxing Day, they invite the Szymanskis to drink some mulled wine in the Old Stable Yard, although even that isn’t technically allowed.

Mr. Szymanski’s parents are there too, having arrived from the Baltic coast of Poland during the week or two in mid-December when the lockdown was temporarily eased. They’re stranded in Hertfordshire now and they look slightly dazed.

“They have a fish restaurant,” Mr. Szymanski explains to István as they stand in the yard.

“Okay,” István says. “I suppose it’s not open at the moment.”

“Only for takeaway,” Mr. Szymanski says.

“Okay,” István says. “Who’s looking after it while they’re here?”

“My sister,” Mr. Szymanski says.

“Okay,” István says.

Helen and Jacob start a new puzzle. It’s another painting.

István looks in in the late afternoon and sees them standing next to each other at the table, working on it. They’re nearly the same height now.

They don’t notice that he’s there.

He watches them for a minute or two and then leaves.

During the miserable weeks of early January Jacob sometimes goes for walks on his own. Although he’s not allowed to leave the estate it’s large enough for him to disappear for an hour or two at a time.

He’s just returned from one of his walks when István meets him on the south front terrace, where he’s standing outside having a vape.

“Hey,” he says.

Jacob doesn’t seem pleased to see him. His face looks very flushed and pink, though that might just be the cold.

“We were wondering where you’d got to,” István says.

“Just went for a walk.”

“Okay. Have you got something under your jacket?” István asks.

“No,” Jacob says.

He obviously does though, and István wonders why he would lie to him about it. “Yeah, you do,” he says.

Jacob doesn’t say anything.

He just turns even more red and looks alarmed.

“What is it?” István asks, meaning the thing under his jacket.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

Jacob is sort of edging away.

“What is it?” István asks again, smiling.

He puts out his hand as if he expects Jacob to show him whatever it is that he’s hiding.

Instead Jacob turns and runs.

“Hey!” István shouts, initially too surprised to move.

Unable to imagine what it might be that he’s hiding, and starting to worry about it now, István jogs after him.

Jacob is making for the woods. He’s having to run slightly awkwardly in order to keep whatever it is that he has under his jacket from falling out.

Suddenly feeling absurd to be pursuing his own son like this, István stops on the damp grass of the south lawn.

Jacob has reached the margin of the woods. Without looking back he passes into them and István sees him throw something. It’s hard to say what it is. It flashes for a moment among the nearly leafless trees. Jacob is still running—he didn’t stop or even slow down when he threw the thing, whatever it was. He threw it as he ran, and has now disappeared into the gloom.

Not knowing what to make of this and sort of disappointed by the whole incident, István walks toward the woods, with the vague intention of trying to find whatever it was that Jacob threw away. It’s late afternoon and already twilight. His breath hangs in the air in front of him. To the sound of crows, he searches among the brambles and stunted holly bushes that grow between the trees.

It’s surprisingly hard to locate the thing he’s looking for and he has more or less given up and is on his way back to the open grass of the south lawn when he finds it.

It’s a magazine. It has obviously spent a long time outside—sunlight has faded the front cover and the pages of the whole thing are stiffly crinkled, as if they have been thoroughly wetted and then dried again many times. He sees immediately that it’s soft porn. Naked women. He pages through it in the failing light under the trees. It seems clear, from its condition, that Jacob found it somewhere on the estate, in the woods or under the hedge next to the farmer’s track.

István isn’t sure what to do with it now. Whether he should just leave it where he found it, or dispose of it properly.

He’s not sure, either, if he should speak to Jacob about it.

When he tells Helen about the whole thing, later that evening, she looks amazed.

“You don’t think…” she says.

“What?”

“Does he…?”

“Does he?” István prompts.

“You know,” she says.

“Masturbate?”

“Yes.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I mean, he’s only ten,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“How old were you when you…?” she asks, sounding worried.

“When I started masturbating?”

“Yes.”

István shrugs. “Twelve, thirteen,” he tells her.

She still looks distressed.

He says, “I’m sure he doesn’t.”

“Then why…?” Again she struggles to finish the question.

“Why what?”

“Why would he be interested in that magazine?”

“It just fascinates him,” István says. “He’s probably not even sure why himself.”

“Will you talk to him about it?”

“And say what?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was obviously embarrassed about it,” István says. “I don’t want to make him more embarrassed.”

He tells her how Jacob reappeared about half an hour after the incident, when it was already dark outside.

He had been wondering, he says, whether to say something about it then.

Jacob evidently didn’t want him to.

The incident had to be mentioned of course, and, pretending that he hadn’t found the magazine, István said, trying not to make it sound like a big deal, “What was that you were hiding?”

“Nothing,” Jacob said.

“You don’t want to tell me?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

During that exchange, Jacob wouldn’t look him properly in the eye.

Which made István feel sad.

He spends a lot of the evening thinking about it.

And also about his own life at that age, or slightly older.

Eleven, twelve, thirteen.

About the surprising new things his body wanted, and his inability to refuse it when it wanted them.

At that time even his dreams were about his own physicality, about his physical body and what was happening to it. He remembers dreaming of these black things like fat stalks of graphite erupting from the center of his chest at about the time that the first fine hairs appeared there, remembers waking up afraid and disgusted.

And all that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you’re left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you’re having are universal or entirely specific to you.

Perhaps it’s at that age, he thinks, that you first have the sense that you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing, because some part of you seems to lag the transformation of your body, and to be surprised by it in the way that an outside observer might be, so that you no longer feel entirely at one with your body as you always had until then, and it starts to make sense to talk about it as if it was something slightly separate from yourself, even while you seem more powerless than ever to deny it whatever it wants. Although actually at first there seems to be no reason to deny it what it wants, whenever it wants it. Like that afternoon he and two friends watched a porn film at one of the others’ apartments and ended up masturbating to it together. They hadn’t exactly planned to do that when they put the video on. They obviously all wanted to though, so why not? There was a sense that this was a pleasure like any other, only of another order of intensity and with this strange aspect of compulsion about it. That it might have its own special codes of behavior hadn’t yet occurred to them.

They must have been twelve or something when that happened. Only a year or two older than Jacob is now. And within just a year or two after that it was already a strange and embarrassing thing to think about. There was this feeling of did that really happen? In only a year or two it had become unthinkable to do something like that, to share that experience in such an innocent way, to treat it like any other form of pleasure.

“What are you thinking about?” Helen asks him.

“Nothing,” he says.

He sits in the kitchen with a small whisky and his Kindle.

Jacob is also there, drawing.

He’s been drawing for some time, while the rain falls outside.

He’s at the table, while István occupies the old green Chesterfield near the Aga.

Occasionally he looks in Jacob’s direction, and seeing how happily absorbed he seems to be in what he’s doing, he doesn’t say anything.

Finally, on a trip to the cupboard to pour another small measure of Macallan thirty-year-old, he says, “What are you drawing?”

Jacob pauses.

He withdraws his hands so that István can look at what he’s done.

Whatever it is, it’s surprisingly detailed and intricate.

“So what is this exactly?” István asks, leaning down to look at it more closely.

It seems to be a city with waterways instead of roads—a sort of futuristic Venice. Venice is obviously the inspiration anyway.

István is slightly in awe of all the thought that has gone into it, and of the skill and delicacy with which it has been drawn.

He has a sip of whisky as he surveys it.

“I’m hungry,” Jacob says.

“Okay,” István says. “Want something to eat?”

“Yes,” Jacob says.

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

István puts down his glass on the corner of the long oak table and opens the fridge.

“Eggs?” he suggests.

“Okay,” Jacob says.

István asks him how he wants them.

“I don’t mind,” Jacob says, drawing again.

“Scrambled?”

“Okay.”

“How many?”

After a longish, thoughtful pause Jacob says two.

“This might be sort of supper,” István tells him, mixing the eggs with a fork.

“Okay.”

“Do you want some toast with them?”

“Okay.”

“Some salad?”

“No thanks.”

“I want you to have some salad.”

“Okay.”

While he makes the eggs Jacob continues to work on his drawing.

The two of them go for walks, in their Wellingtons and puffer jackets.

They walk as far as the village. Lights are on in the old parsonage, which is occupied by some successful TV producer now. Helen seemed to know who it was.

On the way back, as it starts to drizzle, they talk again about getting a dog.

It’s something they’ve been thinking about on and off for years.

They’ll do that this spring, they decide.

Probably a brown Labrador.

For a while they talk about possible names, their breath showing on the dull air as they walk.

Jacob suggests Kurt.

“Kurt?” István says, surprised.

“Yeah.”

“You think so?”

“I think it’s a good name for a dog,” Jacob says.

“Maybe it is,” István agrees.

They take the shortcut across the field and when they arrive home their boots are heavy with mud.

It’s announced that schools in England will reopen on Monday, March 8.

That’s in just over a week.

They decide to stay at Ayot until the seventh, since in most respects the lockdown is still in place.

Jacob obviously isn’t looking forward to going back to school.

They don’t talk about it much.

It’s a sensitive subject.

A few days before they return to London, Helen sits down with him to discuss how he feels about it.

He isn’t very forthcoming.

She and István talk about it afterward.

It pains István to think that his son might be afraid of going back to school.

In fact he doesn’t.

On the Friday, Helen takes him with her to Welwyn Garden City to pick up some things from Waitrose and there’s an accident as they’re driving back along Homerswood Lane. A fox darts out, Helen swerves to avoid it and skids into the path of an oncoming van.