“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.