He listens while István tries to explain what happened. The way he describes it, he was subjected to intolerable provocation. That’s what he stresses. The provocation.
“He said we were stealing from him—that just isn’t true.”
“Why didn’t you just ignore it, then?” Roddy asks.
“I don’t know,” István says. It’s something that he asked himself many times during the long, sleepless night that he spent in the police station. “It would have looked like I accepted what he was saying. And some of the things he said after that.”
“Like what?”
“Like… I don’t want to… He said some horrible things.”
Roddy waits for him to tell him what Thomas said.
István finds himself unable to do that.
The words, when he opens his mouth to say them, seem too painful and humiliating to say out loud.
Even so, his own actions are hard for him to understand.
The violence with which he threw himself on Thomas and knocked him to the floor.
He finds it hard to believe that he did that now.
Roddy is still waiting for him to say something.
Instead he just sits there with tears in his eyes.
Perhaps embarrassed, Roddy looks away again, and after wiping his eyes on a paper napkin, István finishes his breakfast.
It takes a few minutes and then he asks the other question that’s been on his mind all night. “Is it possible to keep this quiet?”
“It happened in a room full of journalists,” Roddy says. “It’s already all over the internet.”
István’s face is expressionless as he takes that in.
There’s another long silence.
“So where does this leave us?” he asks.
Roddy sighs. “Honestly?” he says. “I think we’re finished.”
They share a taxi as far as Cheyne Walk and then Roddy takes it on to Fulham, or wherever it is that he lives.
István lets himself into the house.
There’s no sign of Helen.
His mother tells him that she hasn’t seen her since yesterday.
“She hasn’t been home?” he asks.
“I don’t think so.”
He tells her what happened at the Gagosian gallery, and that he spent the night in a police station.
Then he takes a Xanax and sleeps until the middle of the afternoon.
There’s still no sign of Helen.
While he’s in the shower, though, a message arrives from her friend the artist saying that she’s with her. That’s all the message says. Helen is with me.
He doesn’t answer it. He gets dressed and leaves the house and walks across the Albert Bridge.
After about ten minutes he arrives at Jacob’s school, where some other parents are already standing outside.
He joins them and waits for his son to appear.
8
HE STILL DOESN’T QUITE have the hang of this.
The link in the email opens another window.
He needs to put in his password and then he’s offered “Join Meeting.”
A few moments later someone is there.
István apologizes for being late.
“No problem,” the man on the screen says. And then, “Do you want to turn your camera on?”
“Oh.” István looks for how to do that.
“That’s it,” the man says.
The main picture on the screen is the man, sitting there with some bookshelves behind him.
A smaller picture shows István himself, slightly silhouetted against the unrealistic brightness of a window.
“How are you?” the man asks.
“Yeah, okay,” István tells him. “I’m okay.”
“Do you want to talk about how you’re feeling?” the man suggests.
“Uh.” István looks down at his hands and then at the screen again and says, “Sure.”
There’s another silence and then István says, “Well, I’m feeling okay.” He has a quick suck on the vape he’s holding. “You know.”
“Sure.”
“Nothing special.”
“Okay,” the man on the screen says.
The man on the screen is Rafe.
He’s a therapist.
They’ve been doing this for about six months now.
It was part of the plea bargain deal. A straight guilty plea to common assault in exchange for a very large fine and a commitment to “seek treatment.”
Since last autumn “seeking treatment” has involved seeing Rafe once a week.
During the first sessions they talked mainly about Thomas, about what happened at the Gagosian gallery that night, and István’s feelings about it all.
Since then they have talked about other things as well. About István’s life more widely, about experiences from his past.
Every few weeks though, Rafe wants to talk about Thomas again.
He asks questions that are obviously designed to probe István’s feelings about Thomas.
István answers such questions warily.
“I don’t know,” he says.
Rafe wants more.
He doesn’t say anything.
He just waits.
“I don’t know,” István says again. “I suppose I feel…”
He feels hatred.
That’s what he feels.
He feels hatred that the passage of more than a year doesn’t seem to have diminished much. If anything, the opposite. He hates Thomas more now than he did a year ago. He holds him directly responsible for all the legal, social, and financial disasters that have afflicted his life since that night at the Gagosian.
There are moments when he definitely wishes he was dead.
He hasn’t seen him since that night.
Helen hasn’t seen him either.
He still won’t speak to her.
He and Rafe talk about that too sometimes, about the fact that Thomas won’t speak to Helen.
István says, “I mean, I know it’s painful for her.”
“How do you feel about it though?” Rafe asks.
István doesn’t answer that for a few seconds. And then he says, “About what exactly?”
Rafe is as patient as ever. “About the situation with Thomas.”
“You mean that he isn’t talking to her?”
“Well, that’s part of it.”
“I thought we were talking about that,” István says.
“We are,” Rafe confirms.
“So you want to know what I feel about that?”
“Okay.”
“Honestly I’m not sure,” István says, after another substantial silence, during which he once again lifts the vape to his mouth. “If I’m honest, in a way it’s easier for me that he’s not involved in our lives.”
“How do you mean easier?” Rafe wants to know.
“I mean… He was always a sort of disruptive influence in our lives.”
“Disruptive?”
“Emotionally.”
“Okay.”
“You see what I mean?”
Rafe nods.
“So yes, in a way it’s easier like this. You asked me how I felt,” István says.
“Yes.”
“I know it’s painful for Helen though,” he says.
“Sure.”
“So in a way I feel that too. Or it affects me.”
“Yes.”
They talk about it some more and then their time is up.
“End Meeting.”
István shuts the laptop.
There’s the distinctive quiet that follows the end of one of these things, the restoration of a solitude that was anyway only partly dispelled by the presence of someone else on the laptop screen.
He has a pull on the vape and then, wondering what to do, opens the French window and steps onto the stone paving outside.
He squints in the spring daylight.
It’s Wednesday afternoon.
They leave the Old Stable Yard and turn onto the dirt track that runs along the edge of the estate. The track runs very straight for nearly half a mile, with open fields on one side and trees on the other. István feels Jacob’s arms tighten around him as he pushes the quad bike toward its top speed. It jumps off humps in the track and smashes through shallow puddles with a sound that immediately seems far behind them. The engine sustains a single high-pitched note and the air feels hard and sharp on his face. What he likes about it is the way that the exhilaration and jeopardy of the speed fix him in the moment so that nothing else seems to exist.