“Don’t know,” Lucy says.
The ambulance men are bringing something down the stairs—a stretcher with a dark gray blanket over the person on it, even their face.
The people in the hall watch in silence.
There’s just the sound of the ambulance men’s bulky green work clothes rustling as they move.
The manager of the shelter is with them, and also someone else who might be a doctor.
Everyone watches as the men carry the stretcher out through the hall.
Thomas, just because he’s standing nearest to it, helps with the door, holding it open for them.
“Thanks,” one of the ambulance men says to him.
“That’s okay,” Thomas says.
After that the evening passes off more or less as normal, except that at first there’s an unusually hushed atmosphere.
Of course there’s a lot of talk about Steve and what he was like, and what people knew about him.
Very little, it seems.
There was nothing very special or memorable about him.
People speculate about how he died.
Nobody seems to know for sure.
They ask the manager of the shelter and she says she isn’t supposed to tell them.
“Was it suicide?” someone wants to know.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Do you think he killed himself?” Lucy asks Thomas.
“I don’t know,” he says.
When they’re leaving she asks him if he wants to get a drink. “After what happened,” she says, “maybe we need one.”
They go to the Bricklayers Arms.
Although it’s not a very nice pub it’s nearby, at the end of the street. People look at them when they walk in. They’re obviously students, and it’s not the sort of place where students normally go. Thomas feels slightly intimidated. He’s pleased that Lucy is there with him.
She asks him what he wants.
“Just a pint,” Thomas says.
She has a pint as well.
“Have you ever seen a dead body before?” she asks.
“Yes,” Thomas says.
“When?”
“When my father died.”
“Oh yeah,” she says. She already knows that his father is dead. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s all right,” Thomas says.
“I’ve never seen a dead body,” she says.
She has dyed hair, a nose stud, a round badge with FCK NZS on it pinned to the lapel of her jacket.
Her definition of NZS sometimes seems to include everyone who isn’t actually a Marxist. Thomas has never told her much about his family.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she says.
“Sorry,” he says, lowering his eyes.
“I have a boyfriend,” she says.
“Yeah, I know,” he says.
“So don’t look at me like that.”
“Sorry.”
“I like you,” she says.
He shrugs, embarrassed.
“You’re sweet.”
Outside on the pavement, next to some rough wooden tables, they part.
“See you on Wednesday,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says.
And then she’s off on her skateboard, shoving herself along with her foot.
It takes him half an hour to walk back to Merton Street.
Normally he would take a taxi but today he walks.
The others aren’t in.
Upstairs in his room he lifts a small wooden box down from a shelf that otherwise mostly holds expensive-looking art books. He knows he should smoke less weed. He never seems to arrive home these days without taking the fragrant little box down from the shelf, even in the middle of the afternoon. Even in the morning sometimes.
His mother phones.
She says she wants to talk to him and suggests that they have lunch at the Randolph on Saturday.
“What do you want to talk about?” he asks her.
“I’ll tell you on Saturday.”
“Is it important?”
“Not very,” she says.
“Tell me now,” he says.
“No,” she says. “On Saturday.”
When he arrives at the Randolph she’s already there.
He sees her sitting in the lounge looking at something on her phone, and he remembers how it was here that she told him that she and István were going to get married.
He was still at school at the time.
When she told him, he didn’t know what to say.
“Why?” he asked, as if that was the most obvious question.
“We’re in love,” she said.
He thinks he might have laughed at that point, out of shock and embarrassment.
“Why do you laugh?” his mother asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Is it funny?”
“No.”
“I know it must come as a surprise to you.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Are you upset?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Why would I be?”
The maitre d’ asks him if he wants a table and he points to his mother on the far side of the room.
She smiles when she sees him.
“Hi, darling,” she says.
There’s an embrace, the smell of her perfume.
“How are you?” she asks.
“I’m okay,” he says.
“Should we go in?” she suggests.
They’re taken to their table.
He thinks it might actually be the same one they sat at the day she told him that she and István were going to get married. He tries to put that out of his mind. “How are you?” he asks her.
“I’m fine,” she says, smiling at him. “I’m well.”
“Okay.”
She asks him about his studies.
He tells her that at the moment they’re doing court art in early modern Europe.
“That sounds interesting,” she says.
“It’s okay.”
“Tell me about it.”
He says that, for instance, they’re looking at the way political and economic elites used art as a means of justifying and legitimizing their authority.
“That’s very interesting,” she says.
“It’s okay,” he says again.
“And are you still doing the volunteer work?”
“Yes.”
“I think it’s so wonderful that you do that,” she says.
He shrugs.
“It makes me very proud, I have to say.”
“That’s not why I do it.”
“I know it isn’t. Of course not.”
She reaches across the table and puts her hand over his. She withdraws it a moment later when the waiter arrives and asks them if they’re ready to order.
They say they need another minute and turn their attention to the menu.
When the waiter appears again Helen asks for the grilled chicken with chanterelles and vin jaune while Thomas opts for the artichoke tagliatelle. The waiter inquires about drinks. Helen says she’ll have a glass of white.
The waiter turns to Thomas. “And for you, sir?”
“Just a Coke Zero.”
The waiter nods.
“Thanks,” Thomas says. “So what did you want to talk to me about?” he asks.
His mother looks nervous, he thinks.
He hopes that she’s going to tell him that she and István are getting divorced.
There would be a nice symmetry to that, with them sitting at this table next to the window with an oblique view, through the gray veil of the lace curtains, of Magdalen Street and the Martyrs’ monument.
It’s not that though.
“It’s to do with the family trust,” she says, sort of pulling at the edge of the tablecloth.
“What about it?”
“There’s something I need to tell you about it.”
“Yes?”
She tells him that the trust has, over the past few years, made a series of loans to István, effectively, and that all of the various property developments that István has done in that time have been financed by those loans.
Thomas is obviously shocked. “What do you mean?” he says. “How much are you talking about?”
“Not that much.”
“How much?”
“Until this year, about… about eighty million pounds,” she says.
“Eighty?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not that much?”
“Not in terms of the size of the fund.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“I don’t tell you about every little transaction.”