He knocks on her door.
“Yes,” her voice says.
She puts down her book. “So?” she asks.
He shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says.
“You talked to him?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
He tells her, in summary, what the minister said.
“So will he help you?” she asks.
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
“I hope so.”
“He didn’t promise anything?”
“Not exactly. That’s not how things work here.”
He’s standing at the window looking down at the silent deserted street and the dark trees of Embankment Gardens on the other side of it. The air is heavy with moisture. The streetlamps have faint halos.
“Was everything okay here?” he asks.
“Of course,” his mother says.
“He went down okay?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, “that I wasn’t here.”
“I said you had important things to do. He understands that. He understands that you have important things to do.”
“Yeah,” István says. “I’m going to look in on him.”
“Okay.”
The night-light is on in Jacob’s room, filling it with strange shadows.
Stepping in, István wonders if it might be too warm in there, and indeed his son has thrown off the duvet.
He moves to the radiator and turns it down a little. He must have a word with the nanny about that, he thinks. She always puts it up too high.
At nine the next morning he walks to the office. It isn’t far from the house. It’s near the south end of Albert Bridge, quite high up in a modern building with views of the river in two directions. He stands in the lobby waiting for the elevator.
When he was putting together his first project, he took a single suite of rooms in the building. Then, as the business expanded, he added space until now he has a whole floor, the second from the top. There are about forty of them working there these days, and they’re negotiating to add the floor above, which they’ll need when they hire the new people to handle the Rainham project.
The Rainham project will be transformative, and for the last year or so he has devoted himself to it—acquiring the land, doing the designs, doing them again, sorting out the planning permissions, looking into various transport improvements, lining up the outside investors who will be needed—Roddy, an experienced project finance lawyer, was hired mainly to help with that—and dealing with all the other things that are necessary for an undertaking on this scale.
The elevator arrives at the eleventh floor.
“Morning,” he says to Rachel.
“Morning,” she says.
“How are you?” he asks her as he walks past. He has a takeout coffee in his hand.
She nods.
His own office is at the end of the corridor.
The most notable item in it is a large model of the Rainham project. He likes to look at it when he has a few minutes to spare.
He takes off his coat and lifts the lid from his coffee.
Noor will be in soon to go through his diary with him. He looks at his watch and decides he has time for a cigarette.
Sliding open the glass door he steps onto the terrace.
From up there, London shimmers into the distance. More immediately, the river takes the quiet autumn light and the gray trees of Battersea Park look like something from the model on the table inside. There’s a tranquil murmur of traffic. He lights his cigarette and has a sip of his coffee, thinking of his interaction with the minister last night. It was to do with the planning application for the Rainham project. Someone had messed that up by including some out-of-date numbers—in itself a trivial thing. The problem was that it meant the whole application would have to be put in again, which meant in turn that it would miss the deadline for escaping the new taxes, which would in turn mean additional millions in tax liabilities, enough to potentially put the entire project’s viability in question. For a few terrible days last month it seemed like the whole thing might actually fail. It was Roddy’s idea to try to speed up the planning process by speaking to the minister, to see if that sort of intervention from on high might push it through in time, and also to make a simultaneous donation to the minister’s party, to “help him look favorably on the matter,” as Roddy put it himself.
For Jacob’s seventh birthday Helen organizes a party and invites some of his friends from school. They had hoped to have it at least partly in the garden. The weather prevents that so it mainly happens in the second-floor drawing room, with most of the furniture pushed to the sides.
There are professional performers—singers and magicians—and a treasure hunt that takes in much of the lower part of the house.
Thomas is in London for the weekend and makes a short appearance. István didn’t even know he was around until he sees him at the food table—out of place among the excitedly lit-up children and increasingly tipsy parents (there’s champagne alongside the kids’ drinks, for those who want it, which is, in the end, almost everyone).
“Hello, Thomas,” István says.
“Hello,” Thomas says.
“You okay?”
Thomas nods.
“How’s Oxford?” István asks him.
“It’s okay,” Thomas says.
These days they don’t see each other very often. Even during the university vacations Thomas doesn’t spend much time in London, and when he does, he tends to keep to his own room on the fifth floor and is rarely seen in the other parts of the house.
After their encounter at the food table he soon disappears again and István finds himself talking to one of the mothers there, the attractive one he noticed earlier.
They eat cake together, standing near the open double doors that separate one half of the space from the other.
“I hope you haven’t got anything too valuable in here,” she laughs, as whooping seven-year-olds swoop and jostle around them.
“We took the most vulnerable stuff out,” István tells her.
“Very wise,” she says.
In the aftermath, István and Jacob wind down with some Lego—the large fire station set that was a present from one of his friends. Mostly it’s István doing it. “I want you to help,” he says. “I don’t want to end up doing it on my own.”
“Okay,” Jacob says.
“You said you wanted to do this.”
“I do want to.”
“Well, let’s do it, then.”
As per the instructions, they’re making the fire engine first.
István shows Jacob a red plastic piece and asks him to find two more like it, and Jacob starts to search.
He soon loses interest though.
After an initial phase of eagerly hunting for the pieces that they need, he silently detaches himself from the process until István, pausing for a moment, sees him sitting on a sofa and looking at something else entirely.
“Hey,” István says.
Jacob looks up.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m looking at this.”
“I thought we were doing this.”
Jacob puts down the thing he was looking at and half-heartedly joins István on the floor again, where the Lego pieces are scattered.
That’s the situation when Helen puts her head around the door. “Tommy and I are popping out for something to eat,” she says.
“Okay,” István says, without looking up from what he’s doing.
“Probably just Byron on King’s Road,” Helen says.
“I thought he was vegan,” István says.
“They have plant-based options.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want anything?”
“No, thanks.”
“We won’t be long.”
“Okay,” István says again.
She seems to be about to leave, and then she says, “It’s seven o’clock.”
“I know,” István says.
She means it’s time for Jacob to have his bath.