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.