Flesh: A Novel

6

THE NEW SWIMMING POOL at Ayot St. Peter is finished in time for the summer holidays. There’s a week of hot, sunny weather at the end of June and they use it a lot.

Thomas, when his school term finishes in July and he joins them there, hardly uses it at all. Helen sometimes pesters him into putting in an appearance. Wearing a T-shirt and shorts, he sits in the shade with his phone and never stays long. He slips away and they only notice half an hour later that he isn’t there. He seems to spend most of the day upstairs in his room.

“What does he do in there all day?” István asks.

“I don’t know,” Helen says.

She goes down the steps into the pool. She’s very visibly pregnant now. She sits down in the water, on one of the middle steps.

“He’s got his phone,” she says. “His iPad. I don’t know.”

With slow, deliberate movements, she scoops water onto her shoulders.

“I don’t know what he does,” she says.

She hadn’t wanted the usual turquoise tiles for the pool. In the end they went for a sort of sagey tone, with Yorkstone around it to match the paving in front of the Baroque garden pavilion that was already there and that has now been turned into a pool house, with showers and toilets and a fridge full of drinks. To seclude the pool area and shelter it from the wind, she wanted those apple trees that are trained on wires or frames so that they form an almost two-dimensional screen of living vegetation.

“Pleached?” the landscape architect said to her.

“Is that the word?”

“I think that’s what you mean.”

He told her it would take about ten years to produce that effect to the size she wanted. She tried to find someone who could supply them already fully grown. It was surprisingly difficult, and in the end they had to find another solution.

After her slow swim, she steps out of the water.

István stands up and hands her a towel.

“Thank you,” she says.

He stretches on the lounger again and feels for his cigarettes. The wind tries to stop him lighting one and riffles the pages of his book. He’s reading Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by Alan G. Lafley and Roger Martin.

“You okay?” he asks her.

She looks like she’s worrying about something.

She nods, drying her neck.

“It’s true he shouldn’t spend all his time up there,” she says.

“Thomas?”

“It’s not good for him to spend so much time on his own.”

“No.”

“I suggested he invite a friend to stay.”

“Yeah?”

“He said he didn’t want to.”

“Okay.”

“Why don’t you do something with him?” she suggests.

“Yeah?” István says, not particularly trying to hide his surprise. “Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

She asks him to put some sunblock on her back, and undoes the strap of her bikini top to allow him to do it.

“So?” she says, while he’s doing that.

“So?”

“Why don’t you do something with him? Spend some time with him.”

“Do you think he’d want to do that?”

“What do you mean?”

“He doesn’t seem to like me much,” István says.

“He’s just wary of you,” Helen says.

“What does that mean?”

“He’s just not sure how to deal with you,” she says.

When he has finished her back he straightens up and wipes the excess sunblock onto his own shoulders.

“So?” she says.

“What?”

“Tommy.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’d really like you to spend some time with him,” she says. “The new Planet of the Apes film is on in Stevenage. He seemed interested in that.”

When István approaches him about seeing it, though, Thomas says he doesn’t want to.

Later in the summer, some friends of Helen’s stay. One of them is her friend the artist, who’s quite famous now. While she’s there, Helen asks her to spend some time with Thomas. She’s known him all his life.

She asks him about school, whether he likes it.

“It’s okay,” he says.

“It looks like an amazing place.”

“Yeah,” he says, without enthusiasm or surprise, as if people were always saying that about his school.

“What’s your favorite subject?” she asks him.

“I don’t know.”

“You must have some idea.” They’re sitting next to each other on the edge of the south front terrace where a few stone steps go down to the lawn.

“English, maybe,” he says.

“Okay. What are you doing?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“What are you studying? In English.”

“Oh,” he says. And then, sounding as if he’s worried he might not have understood exactly what she meant, “You mean last term?”

“For instance.”

“Hamlet,” he says.

“You were in that once, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” he says.

The two of them go sketching together a few times. He seems to like doing that, and Helen is pleased that it gets him out of the house, and away from his phone and his tablet. They sketch the follies of the garden—the little Greek temple, the obelisk at the end of the Long Walk, and the grotto with its pebble mosaics of nymphs and satyrs, secluded among willows and irises at the marshy end of the lake.

“How have you been spending the holidays?” she asks him, as they sit there in the shade with their pads.

He tells her that they went on a weeklong sailing trip in the Mediterranean.

“Yes, your mum told me about that,” she says. They are both half-immersed in what they’re doing—the conversation moves forward slowly, with long pauses, to the sound of their scraping pencils.

“How was it?” she asks.

“It was all right,” he says.

She smiles at that. “It sounds amazing. And other than that?” she asks.

“We’ve mostly been here.”

“And what do you do here?”

He shrugs.

“Do you swim in the new pool?”

“Sometimes.”

“It’s very nice, isn’t it? The pool.”

“It’s all right.”

“I love the way they’ve used the old pavilion.” There’s a silence and then she says, “What else do you do?”

“Play tennis. Sometimes.”

“Yeah? Who do you play with?”

“My mother’s husband.”

“István?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like him?” She doesn’t seem particularly interested. She seems focused on her sketch.

“Not really.”

Again she speaks after a longish silence, and doesn’t seem particularly interested. “Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas says.

“He’s not unkind to you?” she asks.

“Not really.”

“So?”

After a long pause, Thomas says, “I don’t like the way he’s using my mother.”

“Using her?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean?”

There’s another longish pause. “I don’t think he loves her,” Thomas says.

The artist, still focused on her picture, sounds only mildly surprised when she says, “Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I think he just married her for her money.”

“Do you really think that?”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” the artist says. “I don’t know why he married her.”

When Thomas doesn’t say anything else for a few minutes, she asks to look at what he’s done.

He tilts the pad to show her.

“That’s nice,” she says.

As well as the artist and her partner, another friend of Helen’s is staying. She’s in the process of getting divorced. One day she and Helen are topless next to the pool. When they see István approaching from the direction of the house they cover themselves.

“Hi,” he says.

He lays his things down on the low table next to one of the wooden loungers and takes off his T-shirt. He deliberately took a lounger at some distance from them so that if they want to they can keep talking without feeling that he has to be included. Perhaps to additionally emphasize that, to indicate that there’s no need to include him, that in fact he doesn’t want to be included, he picks up his book.

He doesn’t open it though.

He just sits there behind his sunglasses, enjoying the feeling of the warm air on his skin, and looking at the mature beech trees whose upper halves, great windy masses of leaves, are flickering and glittering above the tall trellises that screen the pool area from the rest of the garden.

“What are you reading?” Helen’s friend asks him, across the unoccupied loungers between them.

He looks at the cover of the book as if to remind himself. “It’s called Playing to Win,” he says.

“What is it?”

“It’s about strategy.”

“Is it good?”

“Yeah, it’s quite good,” he says. “You know. In an American way. There’s a lot of bullshit in it. Some interesting things too.”

He puts the book down again and takes the small bottle of chilled water that he brought with him and swigs from it.

“He’s always reading books like that,” he hears Helen say.

Her friend sort of laughs, and they start talking to each other again.

After a few minutes István stands up and tests the water with his toes, aware of the voices of Helen and her friend at the other end of the pool.

There’s a wind that makes it slightly daunting, the idea of going into the cold water. The warming system isn’t on. They haven’t used it yet, except to test it on the day the pool was handed over. There was a feeling that, this being England, it was important to have the possibility of heating the water, otherwise they might end up using the pool for only a few weeks a year.

Some leaves and other floating debris have accumulated in one corner.

Mr. Szymanski usually fishes them out with his net.

It’s one of Mr. Szymanski’s jobs now, to do that.

For some reason he hasn’t this morning.

Maybe the half-naked women scared him off.

István squats in his trunks and, leaning down to the water, removes the debris with his hand.

He wonders what the Szymanskis make of these people, swanning around with almost no clothes on.

He wonders what they make of the two women sharing a bed, Helen’s friend the artist and that other woman who arrived with her. At first István thought they were just friends, but then, when Helen put them in the same room, he said to her, “Are they…?”

“Yes,” Helen said.

“Okay,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

“What?”

“That she was like that. Your friend.”

“Yes,” Helen said. “She’s like that.”

“Sure. Okay.”

“That’s okay with you, is it?”

“Sure,” he said.

He wonders what the Szymanskis make of it though. They must know about it. Mrs. Szymanski does the rooms. They’re quite religious, the Szymanskis, even though they’re also quite young. They go to the Church of the Holy Family in Welwyn Garden City every Sunday.

It’s nearly four when he leaves the pool area and walks back toward the house. About an hour earlier, the artist and her partner also showed up, and soon after that all the women had their tops off again.

Helen had spoken to him about this the day her friends arrived. She asked him if he minded if they did that.

He shrugged and said, “No. Why would I?”

“I just want to be sure you’ll be comfortable with it,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

“So it won’t make you uncomfortable?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

In fact they were quite shy about it when he was around. There seemed to be a feeling that there was safety in numbers and they tended to do it most often when all four of them were there, like now. And actually there was something almost intimidating about it then—or at least there was a feeling of not being allowed to look that was troublesome after a while because something very deep inside him wanted to look. It took a deliberate effort not to, and that effort became exhausting quite quickly so that in a way the situation did make him uncomfortable after all.

He does look, of course, without seeming to, and over the past few days, he’s taken fairly thorough stock of the situation. The artist’s partner has the nicest ones. She’s well aware of that and always seems to be the first to lose her top. (She’s also by some way the youngest of the four of them.) The artist herself has a somewhat unfortunate, saggy pair, to the extent that István finds himself sincerely admiring her unselfconscious willingness to show them. It doesn’t seem to matter to her what they look like, and there’s something attractive about that too. Helen’s are the largest, and probably would be even if she wasn’t pregnant. Her friend who’s getting divorced, on the other hand, has almost nothing there at all.

The sound of their laughter follows him along the path, on either side of which bees are visiting the bushy lavender.

He goes in at the garden room door and then down a cool, marble-floored passageway lined at intervals with stone busts until he arrives at the entrance hall of the house—an enormously tall space where the main stairs go up and paintings hang on the walls, one over the other, so that the highest ones are hardly visible from ground level. Mostly they seem to be portraits of eighteenth-century people, some of them with dogs or horses. He has no idea who they are, or what sort of lives they had. The paintings, he assumes, must have come with the house whenever Helen’s previous husband acquired the place.

Still smelling faintly of suncream, he is standing there in his flip-flops looking up at them when a voice says, “Hello.”

It’s Helen’s friend who’s getting divorced.

“Hey,” he says.

She’s wearing a T-shirt now, and sandals. Her hair is still damp.

“Which is your favorite?” she asks, standing next to him.

“My favorite?”

She nods.

“Of these pictures?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” he says. He looks at them and tries, without much enthusiasm, to identify the one he likes the most. “That one maybe?” he says, pointing.

“Yeah?”

“Maybe.”

“You’re obviously more sentimental than you look,” she says, smiling at him.

It hadn’t occurred to him that the picture he pointed to might be thought of as sentimental. Now he feels slightly embarrassed.

“So which is yours?” he asks, with a vague feeling of wanting to turn the tables on her.

“My favorite picture?”

“Yes.”

“None of these,” she says. There’s a picture in her room upstairs, she tells him, that she’s always loved.

She asks him if he wants to see it.

He hesitates for a moment and then says, “Yeah, all right.”

She’s already started up the stairs and he follows her.

The stairs divide and turn under a milkily translucent dome. Then there’s the upstairs corridor stretching to a window at the end. She stops at one of the doors and lets him go in first.

He doesn’t know this room.

“That’s it,” she says, shutting the door. “The one over the bed.”

“Okay,” he says.

It’s a landscape, quite small and dark. He’s not sure why she likes it so much.

“It’s nice,” he says.

“I love it.”

“So this is your room?”

“It is.”

He steps to the window and looks out—the old stable yard with the Szymanskis’ VW Polo parked outside their front door, and farther away some of the south lawn and part of the lake. It’s strange to see them from this unfamiliar angle.

She says, “I’m going to make a spliff. Do you want some?”

He’s not sure how to answer that.

He turns and sees her sitting in the middle of the wide bed.

She already has the equipment out from somewhere and her fingers are at work with the paper and tobacco, are holding the lighter flame to a small knob of hashish.

“It’s a view of Lake Como,” she says.

“The picture?”

“M-hm.”

“Okay.”

“That’s one of the reasons I like it.”

“All right.”

“Have you been there?” she asks.

“No,” he admits.

“You should go.”

“All right,” he says again.

To leave now would seem unfriendly, he thinks, and he sits on the only seat, a wing chair in faded yellow silk, and watches her as she finishes making the spliff.

He’s not sure if he should smoke any of it. Smoking that stuff often makes him feel disconnected from things in a way that he doesn’t like.

It’s different from being drunk, which also makes him feel disconnected from things and which he sometimes does like.

The difference is maybe that when he’s drunk he doesn’t care that he’s disconnected from things, it doesn’t seem to be a problem, whereas when he’s stoned it somehow does.

“Do you want to start it?” she asks, holding out the finished spliff and in her other hand the lighter.

“No, you do it,” he says.

She leans for the ashtray and places it between her bare feet on the bed and then lights the spliff.

The window is already open.

From somewhere below they hear the voices of the Szymanskis, speaking Polish.

She has a few tokes and then holds out the spliff for him.

He stands to take it.

He’s not sure why he’s doing this.

He knows he probably shouldn’t.

After a few inhalations he’s already feeling it strongly.

The Szymanskis’ voices, still there, sound more immediate than they did, and also there are these weird moments when he thinks he’s able to understand what they’re saying, even though they’re still speaking Polish. They seem to be having some sort of argument.

In his own dealings with them there’s a slight edginess now, especially with Mr. Szymanski. When they both worked for Karl Nyman they were equals. Now in some significant sense they’re not, and quite how they should speak to each other, how they should interact, is something that they’re still working out.

The Szymanskis’ voices aren’t there anymore.

There are other sounds now.

He looks at Helen’s friend again.

She’s lying on her back on the bed, and looking at her he imagines, with the intense vividness of being stoned, fucking her there and then. It’s almost embarrassing, how vividly he imagines it.

He imagines pulling down her bikini bottoms and licking her.

He imagines pulling the T-shirt up to her shoulders as he fucks her.

“Do you want this?” he says, holding out the spliff. There’s still about half of it left.

She turns her head to look at him.

Then she lifts her hand and he passes it to her.

For a moment he wonders whether to actually do something, to stroke her leg or something like that.

“I should go,” he says.

She doesn’t speak for quite a few seconds. It’s like the silence stretches on and on. “Okay,” she finally says.

“Thanks for showing me the picture,” he says.

She laughs, he isn’t sure why.

“Okay,” he says, after what feels like another massively extended silence. “See you.”

He opens the door and leaves.

And just as when he was in there the whole world outside that room hardly seemed to exist, now that he has left it’s the opposite, and everything that happened in there, including the thoughts that he had, seems as vague and insubstantial as a half-forgotten dream.

His birthday happens while Helen’s friends are staying. She invites some other people too. Other friends of hers mostly. None of István’s own friends are there. She wanted him to invite some and though he said he would, in the end he didn’t. He spends most of the evening talking to the Italian hedge fund manager who owns the next-largest private house in the area.

He seems to be more at ease with the Italian than he is with Helen’s friends. The two of them have played tennis a few times and once István went to a poker evening over there. When she asked István why he liked the Italian, he told her that the man “respected” him—with the obvious implication that her own friends somehow didn’t. And it’s true that the Italian seems to find it easier to talk to him than most of her friends do. He has a way of speaking to him, she’s noticed, simply as one man to another, whereas her friends, when they make an effort with István, tend to overthink things in ways that make them seem patronizing and insincere.

She finds the Italian uninteresting herself, with all his talk of money and politics.

He’s waving a huge cigar around.

István has one too, she sees.

They’re standing next to a large stone planter in the shape of an urn with a spray of vegetation in it.

She catches István’s eye and smiles at him, and he lifts the hand holding the cigar in acknowledgment. The Italian also looks momentarily in her direction and then they pick up their talk again.

People are mostly standing at one end of the terrace, holding drinks and plates of finger food and talking, although some have wandered farther away, down an avenue of flaming torches that leads toward the disappearing lake. There’s a light show projected onto the mellow Palladian façade of the house and the DJ is playing ambient hip-hop, a warm wash of sound that sits nicely with the dusky light. Later he’ll do something more lively for the dancing.

When István opens his presents there’s oohing and aahing and occasional applause.

Helen has provided something for Thomas to give.

“Go on,” she says, sort of nudging him forward with it.

“Thank you, Thomas,” István says. “I wonder what this is?”

Some people laugh. As is obvious from its shape, the present is a tennis racket.

István has another sip of champagne and then starts on the paper.

“It’s a Bosworth Tour,” Helen says, when he has unwrapped it. “It improves performace by up to twenty percent.”

“Maybe you should use it, then,” István says to Thomas. Again some people laugh. “Only joking,” he says. He stands up and spreads his arms.

Thomas takes a single unwilling step forward and then just stands there stiffly and passively while István hugs him.

“Oh, for god’s sake give him a proper hug!” Helen shouts, through the embarrassed patter of applause.

“Why do you have to do this?” she says to Thomas when István has let him go. “It’s pathetic. Why can’t you just hug him? Is that too much to ask?”

Thomas doesn’t say anything.

He disappears soon after that.

Helen keeps her own present to the end, knowing that it will be a hard act to follow. When there’s nothing else left she hands István a small package and he tears carefully at the wrapping while she waits, looking nervous.

There’s an expectant hush.

“This is very well wrapped,” István says, laughing, as he struggles with it.

“Should I help?” she asks.

“No,” he says.

A few seconds later he has it open.

“Whoa,” he says when he sees what it is. “Seriously?”

“I found it at auction,” she says. “In Geneva.”

“Wow.”

“I had to bid quite aggressively,” she says.

“I bet you did,” he says.

There’s sustained applause while István stands and kisses and then hugs her.

“Thank you,” he says, as if they were alone together.

She just nods.

The next morning, she knocks on Thomas’s door.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

Even though it’s nearly noon, Thomas’s room is dim and stuffy. He’s sitting on the bed doing something on his phone.

“For what?” he says.

“You know what,” she says. “How I spoke to you last night.”

Thomas doesn’t say anything. He’s still looking at his phone.

“I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that,” she says. “Not in front of everybody. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay”

“Thank you.”

Heavily pregnant, still panting slightly from the stairs, she sits down on the end of the bed.

She puts out a hand toward him.

He looks up for a moment but doesn’t take it.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

He shrugs.

“Talk to me.”

“About what?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“Why wouldn’t you hug István yesterday?”

The way he looks at her when she says that makes her understand that it would be easier to stop talking about it.

Even so, she says, “Why wouldn’t you hug him?”

“I didn’t want to.”

“Why not?”

When he doesn’t answer that, when he just looks at his phone again, she says, more impatiently, “Why can’t you just accept that this has happened?”

“What?”

“That he’s part of our family now.”

“Our family?”

“Yes,” she insists.

There’s a tense silence.

“What’s he done to you?” she says. “That’s what I don’t understand. What has he done to you? He wanted to be friends with you. I know he did.”

“It’s not what he’s done to me,” Thomas says.

“What then?”

“It’s what he’s done to you.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think you know.”

“No, I don’t,” she says.

“Whatever,” he says.

When Helen’s friends leave the house feels empty for a few days. István finds that he slightly misses the sound of tipsy female laughter on the terrace in the evening, and the sense he had, when the four women were there, that, as the only man, he had a sort of harem.

On the other hand, he enjoys having solitude at the pool again.

While the Szymanskis are at the Church of the Holy Family on Sunday morning he swims naked, sharing the water with a few floating leaves and then stretching himself on a lounger and letting the sun slowly dry him.

“Hello,” Helen’s voice says, and for a moment he feels marginally, and pleasantly, more aware of his own nakedness, stretched out on the lounger under the empty sky.

He still has his eyes shut.

He murmurs something.

“Are you and Tommy going to play tennis?” she asks.

“No,” he says.

For a while he and Thomas played tennis most days. That’s stopped now. There was no discussion about it, no actual decision. István was away in London for a few days and that was it—the first morning after his return they didn’t meet at the court and there was an unspoken understanding that they never would again. István always won anyway, when they played. Toward the end Thomas stopped even pretending to try. His aim didn’t seem to be so much to win himself as to show that he didn’t care that István was winning. It was like he was trying to undermine the value of winning itself with his indifference, so that it was almost as if there were two different games being played, one in which the aim was to win at tennis, which István himself was still playing, and another in which the aim was to mock and devalue that objective, to deny its validity as an achievement, which Thomas was playing, and it seemed obvious to István that the reason Thomas was playing that second game was that he had no hope of winning the first one—and that in that sense the two games were really a single game, the second being just a continuation of the first by other means.

Helen doesn’t seem to have noticed any of that though.

Her friends were around, she had other things to think about.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Sure,” István says, still lying there with his eyes shut. For a few seconds neither of them speaks. There’s the sound of the wind in the trees. Then he says, “You?”

“M-hm.”

He’s not sure whether she’s standing, or whether she has sat down on one of the other loungers.

“Do you have any plans for today?” she asks.

“Plans? No.”

“I thought we might have a pub lunch,” she says.

“Okay,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Sure.”

“The Red Lion?” she suggests.

“Sure,” he says.

“I’ll ask Tommy if he wants to come.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, I know he won’t.”

“No.”

“I still have to ask.”

“Yeah.”

“I think.”

He sits up and places his long feet on the Yorkstone. The gray-greenish water sways in the pool, trying and failing to reflect the proper forms of things. For a second he feels dizzy. He lets it pass and then opens his eyes again. His dick looks small and smooth between his thighs. He lifts his watch from the table and squints at it.

“What time do you want to leave?” he asks her.

“In about an hour?” she says.

At the end of September István’s mother arrives. He picks her up from the airport in the Bentley and drives her to the house. Most of the drive is on the highway, then there are country roads for a few minutes. When they arrive he shows her up to her room. “I hope this will be okay,” he says.

With a sort of satisfaction, she looks out one of the windows and takes in the view of the south lawn and the lake.

“Do you want to say hi to Helen?” he asks her.

“Yes,” she says.

They go downstairs and find Helen doing yoga.

Helen and his mother hug and exchange smiles—his mother doesn’t speak much English, so there isn’t much to say.

“I’m sorry,” Helen says, meaning how she’s dressed, in sweaty sports stuff.

“It’s okay,” István’s mother says.

She seems to quite like Helen, though there’s a wariness in the way she interacts with her that’s not entirely explicable in terms of the linguistic difficulties.

She is anyway an undemanding houseguest.

She spends much of the time sitting with a book, either in a wicker chair on the terrace when the weather allows, or in her room.

At meals she eats quietly, answering politely when Helen asks her things and István translates as necessary.

She has few questions herself.

She makes no specific demands.

She and István take walks in the garden together, and spend a day in Cambridge, and on one occasion he takes her for lunch at the Red Lion.

Thomas of course is away at school and she only sees him when he spends a weekend at Ayot St. Peter. He’s there for little more than twenty-four hours and for much of that time he isn’t in evidence. He appears at meals and that’s about it.

He leaves on the Sunday afternoon.

The next morning after breakfast István knocks on his mother’s door.

“Yes,” says her voice from inside.

She’s on the chaise longue, with a book.

“Yes?” she says.

“You had breakfast?” István asks her.

She says that she has.

Then, after marking the page, she puts down her book and asks him to shut the door.

From the way she does it he knows that there’s something specific and important that she wants to talk to him about.

He shuts the door and turns to her again.

“What is it?”

“Thomas doesn’t like you,” she says.

For a few moments he doesn’t say anything, perhaps surprised that she was able to see that after spending probably less than an hour in total in Thomas’s presence. Then he says, “Yes, I know. Is it that obvious?”

“Yes, it is,” she says.

“Okay.”

“Doesn’t that worry you?” she asks.

“Worry me?”

“Yes.” She looks at him for a few more seconds and then says, “You told me that his father left everything to him.”

Thoughtful and serious now, István sits down on the end of the chaise longue. “Yes,” he says. “He gets it when he’s twenty-five.”

“Everything?”

“Yes.”

A window is open and from somewhere outside there’s the sound of Mr. Szymanski using a leaf blower.

“Until then Helen looks after it for him,” István says.

“She can do what she wants with it?” his mother asks. “The money or whatever it is.”

“It’s mostly shares.”

“She can do what she wants with it?”

“No, not whatever she wants. There’s a lawyer in London.”

He and Helen have been over this a few times. Whenever Helen wants to do anything—sell shares or other assets, make a new investment—she has to talk to the lawyer in London. “To make sure it’s in line with the terms of the trust,” István says to his mother.

“Her first husband really left her nothing for herself?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s strange, isn’t it?”

“Maybe.”

“Why not? Why didn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” István says.

He doesn’t tell her about the incident in Munich in which Karl’s sister saw István’s stuff in Helen’s suite and obviously suspected something. That she might have said something to Karl about it seemed entirely possible.

István’s mother is still looking straight at him.

He says, “She has the income from the… shares or whatever. She can do what she wants with that. Until Thomas is twenty-five. Then he gets that too.”

His mother says, “So what happens then, when Thomas is twenty-five?”

“Well, I told you—”

“No, what happens to Helen? Specifically. If she was left nothing herself.”

“I don’t know. I suppose the idea is that he’ll look after her.”

“Is that the idea?”

“I suppose.”

“And will he?”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“And you?” she says. “Will he look after you?”

He stands up and goes to one of the windows. A cloud has covered the sun. The water of the lake looks dark and still.

“Have you thought of that?”

“Yes, I’ve thought of that,” he says. Which is true, although it’s also true that he has more often avoided thinking about it.

There’s a long silence.

“You need to do something,” she says.

“I know,” he says.