“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.”