“Thanks,” she says.
He passes her an ashtray.
“Thanks,” she says.
“Maybe I should get a new job,” he says.
“No,” she says, as he knew she would. “I don’t want you to do that.”
In the morning she leaves and he stands at the open roof-window smoking a cigarette and wondering what to do.
And then her husband’s cancer comes back.
The strange thing is that on the surface nothing changes. Mr. Nyman looks tired. Otherwise he looks like he always does.
István drives him to Harley Street for some scans. It’s drizzling. The wipers are going. He drops him off and then, after finding somewhere to park, he stands in Pret, looking at the sandwiches. In the past he would have taken something like an All Day Breakfast, something with bacon in it. Now he finds himself more drawn to the vegetarian options. He has a smoothie too, one of the healthy-looking green ones.
When he picks him up afterward Mr. Nyman doesn’t say anything. He just takes his seat in the back of the Mercedes and sits there on the quilted leather, staring out the window.
“Cheyne Walk?” István asks.
“Yes,” Mr. Nyman says, his thoughts obviously elsewhere.
He says he wants to go to Ayot St. Peter and wait there for the results of the scans, which will take a few days. Helen asks if he wants her to go with him. He says he does, which surprises her. Since she doesn’t like using the helicopter, István drives them there.
It’s a tense weekend.
István hears shouting downstairs and a door slam.
Later Helen comes up to his room.
“What happened?” he asks.
“He’s losing it,” she says.
“How do you mean?”
“He’s impossible. Whatever I do is wrong. Whatever I say.”
“Well,” István says.
“He’s gone for a walk,” she says.
“It’s raining.”
“That’s what I told him.” She sits down on István’s bed. “I should have stayed in London,” she says.
He shrugs.
“I just annoy him,” she says. “I think it was one of those situations where I wanted to do the right thing by offering to come here, and he wanted to do the right thing by saying yes, but actually I didn’t want to come here and he doesn’t want me to be here.”
István grunts.
He shakes a cigarette loose from the packet.
The rain is ticking at the window. Outside, the hill on the other side of the lake is only half-visible.
“Do you want me to give you a blow job?” she asks.
He defers, for a moment, putting the cigarette in his mouth. “Seriously?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Okay,” he says.
On Monday morning there’s an unexpected phone call. Afterward the house is ominously quiet. Helen tells István that it was the doctor with bad news—the tumor is more advanced than they thought it was. It has already spread into the peritoneum, she says, and possibly further.
“What is the peritoneum?” István asks.
“Sort of the intestinal wall,” she says. “I’m not sure exactly. They want to operate as soon as possible though.”
“So we’re going back to London today?”
“Yes,” she says.
When her husband had the previous tumor removed, a few years earlier, the operation was done at a private hospital in Germany.
He says he wants to have this operation there as well.
“Are you sure?” she asks him as they drive back to London.
“Yes,” he says.
She says it might be simpler and quicker if he had it done in London.
“I want to have it done at Bad Trissl,” he says. “Why do you always have to argue with me about everything?”
“I’m not arguing.”
“Yes you are.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are. I want to have it done at Bad Trissl.”
“Okay,” she says. “If that’s what you want. Fine.”
“I understand why,” she says to István later. “Last time they operated, and everything was okay afterward. He wants that to happen again, in exactly the same way.”
“Sure.”
“He wants the same room in the hospital, the same doctor, everything.”
“Is that possible?”
“I don’t know.”
The arrangements are made and only a day or two later István drives him to Farnborough for his flight to Munich.
Helen stays in London for a few more days, until Thomas’s half-term starts. Then she and István pick him up from his boarding school.
“Daddy’s cancer has come back,” she says to him.
“Okay,” he says after a few moments.
“Yes,” she says, looking sad.
“Will he be okay?”
“The doctors think so,” she says.
“When did it come back?” Thomas asks.
“He got the results about a week ago,” she says.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to tell you on the phone,” she says.
“Why didn’t he tell me himself?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe he was embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?”
“Yes.”
“Embarrassed?” Thomas says again.
“Yes. People are embarrassed to be sick sometimes, darling,” she says.
The next day they fly to Germany to be with him when he has the operation. István drives them to London City Airport. Thomas wears headphones and stares out the window and doesn’t say anything. Helen speaks to her husband’s sister Mathilde on the phone.
“Aunt Mathilde says hi,” she says to Thomas when she has finished.
“Okay,” he says.
“She says she’s thinking of us.”
“Okay,” Thomas says.
István takes the suitcases—there are four, which seems a lot since they are only going to be away for a few days—to the Lufthansa Business Class check-in desk. Helen hands over her and Thomas’s passports to the man there.
“Okay,” she says, when the luggage is checked in.
“Okay,” István echoes.
She puts the passports into her handbag. “We’ll be back on Sunday,” she says, speaking to him as if he were just the driver. “I’ll let you know what time.”
“I hope it goes okay,” he says.
“I’m sure it will,” she says.
That evening she phones him from the Kempinski Vier Jahreszeiten hotel in Munich.
“I know this is weird,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says.
“This whole situation.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Me?”
She waits for him to say something.
“Sure,” he says. “You?”
“Yes, I’m okay,” she says.
She returns to England on the Sunday to take Thomas back to school and then two days later she flies back to Germany herself.
A few weeks pass, which she mostly spends in Germany.
Sometimes she appears in London for a few days and then disappears again.
When she’s in London she and István don’t see much of each other.
He doesn’t ask her questions about what’s happening.
For a while they almost sort of lose touch.
One morning she phones him from Munich and asks him to pick her up from London City that afternoon.
As he drives her to Cheyne Walk he asks her how things are and she tells him that the doctors in Germany want to do another operation, that the first one wasn’t entirely successful.
“Okay,” he says.
“They didn’t get all of it or something,” she says. “Or it seems there’s still something there anyway. They say they have to totally remove most of his lower intestine.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” István says.
“Yes,” she says.
He’s slightly surprised how upset she is.
It has always seemed to him that she had no significant feelings for her husband, that if she ever loved him she didn’t anymore.
She has said as much herself, more than once.
The thing is, it’s not as simple as that, he thinks.
Whatever word she wanted to use for it, or not use, there obviously was a significant emotional attachment there.
It was naive of him to think that it might be otherwise.
He seems to be the last person she wants to talk to about it though.
She has lunch with her friend the artist.
“Are you okay?” he asks her when he picks her up afterward at the River Café.
“Yes,” she says.
“Sure?”
“Yes,” she says again, wiping her eyes.
“If you want to talk to me,” he says.
“I don’t,” she says.
“Okay,” he says.
They drive back to Cheyne Walk in silence.
The next day she flies to Germany again, and there’s something so stiff and distant about the way they part at the airport that driving back into London he wonders if this is it, if the whole of the last year has just been a waste of time.