“Sightseeing or whatever.”
“I don’t think so,” she says. “I think he’ll enjoy it.”
“Okay.”
They’re there for five days, staying at the Gritti Palace.
“Did you like it?” István asks Jacob when they get back.
“It was okay,” Jacob says.
“You weren’t bored?”
“Sometimes,” Jacob admits.
“What did you do?”
“Looked at things.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know. Pictures.”
“Tell me about it,” István says.
From what Jacob says István imagines him setting out from the hotel every morning and dutifully following Helen around.
“What did you like most?” he asks him.
The watery aspect of the place, it seems. The way that all aspects of life there involved waterborne transport. He tells István about an incident where two paramedics brought a person on a stretcher out of a building and loaded them into a kind of water ambulance, which then sped off under the bridges with a siren and everything.
The way he tells the story it’s obvious that he enjoyed watching that.
István smiles at him.
He tells him that he liked seeing that sort of thing when he first went there too.
“When did you first go there?” Jacob asks.
“Not that long ago,” István says. “About ten years ago.”
Jacob widens his eyes. “Ten years isn’t that long?” he says.
“No,” István says, smiling at him, “it isn’t.”
“Did you go with Mummy?”
“Yes.”
There’s a silence and then Jacob says, “We had pasta with squid ink.”
István laughs at the unexpectedness of it. “Yeah?”
Jacob nods.
“Was it good?”
“It was okay,” Jacob says.
“So,” István says, “back to school tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Jacob says.
He seems okay.
The idea doesn’t seem to distress him anyway, and István takes heart from that.
Then one evening a few weeks later Helen says to him, “I need to talk to you. About Jacob.”
“What is it?” István asks, pouring himself some whisky.
“He wants to change school,” Helen says.
“What?”
She says again, “He wants to change school.”
“Change school?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He isn’t happy where he is.”
“What do you mean not happy?”
“You know what I mean.”
“That’s still going on?”
“Of course it is.”
“Why of course?”
“It’s still a problem,” Helen says, sort of taking his point.
“That Toby kid?”
“Yes. I have tried speaking to his mother.”
“And?”
“She said that her son would never do something like that. I said unfortunately that wasn’t true. She sort of lost it when I said that.”
While she talks about a second unsuccessful attempt to engage with Toby’s mother István stares at his own fist, held directly in front of his mouth.
It might look, from the outside, as if he is thinking about something.
In fact he isn’t thinking.
There’s a kind of emptiness inside his mind.
“It should be this Toby,” he says finally, “who should change school.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Helen says.
“Why not?”
“It just isn’t.”
“I don’t want Jacob to change school.”
When he says that, Helen sighs. “I knew you’d have this attitude,” she says.
He looks at her. She seems almost angry. “What attitude?”
“That you’d try to stand in the way of it.”
“You think he should change school?”
“Yes, I do,” she says. “Why not? If he’s not happy there.”
“Why not?” István asks, in a tone of disbelief.
“Yes,” she says.
“Why not? It’s like… surrendering to them.”
Helen makes a sort of hissing sound.
“Isn’t it?” he wants to know.
“What do you even mean by that?”
“By what?”
“Surrendering.”
Instead of answering the question István says, “And what if the same thing happens at his new school?”
“It won’t.”
“You don’t know that. What if it does?”
“We’ll deal with it then.”
“I don’t want him to change school.”
“You want him to be miserable?”
“Fuck you,” he says.
“Seriously?”
“You know I don’t.”
“I don’t understand what your problem is,” she says.
“My problem is that I don’t want him to be driven out of the school where he is now.”
“Please don’t shout at me,” Helen says. And then, “That’s not what this would be.”
“Of course that’s what this would be.”
“I think that’s a strange way of looking at it.”
“Why?”
“I just do.”
“That’s what this would be,” he says.
He tries to explain to her what he thinks, which is that if Jacob leaves the school now, under these circumstances, he will always have to live with the fact that that happened. “Do you think that will be positive for his self-esteem?”
“I don’t think it will be positive for his self-esteem to stay where he is,” she says.
“Not if he doesn’t do something about it.”
“Like what? Tough it out?” she sarcastically asks, when he doesn’t say anything.
He ignores the sarcasm. “Yes,” he says. “Something like that.”
“Seriously? That’s what you want for him?”
“What?”
“That he just… puts up with it or whatever.”
“I want him to stand up for himself,” István says. “Don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“So?”
She sighs in a way that makes him think he might have got through to her. But then she says, “I think we’re probably past that point here. He’s really intimidated.” And when István is still silent, “I mean he’s terrified to go to school.”
“Terrified?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t see that.”
“He is.”
“I’ve taken him to school,” István says. “I don’t see that.”
“You don’t want to see it,” she says.
This is so obviously true that he doesn’t immediately answer.
“You don’t want to see it,” she says again.
And in fact he has seen it.
Or something like it.
There’s a long silence.
It might be raining outside in the dark. There’s a sort of whispering at the windows.
“I want to talk to him,” István finally says.
“About what?”
“The whole situation.”
“Okay,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says.
She nods.
“All right,” he says.
He looks at his watch and sees that it’s nearly eleven.
He’s not sure how he’s going to sleep after this.
He might have to take a Xanax, he thinks.
It’s been a while since he’s done that.
It’s Saturday tomorrow and there’s a sense that the weekend offers an opportunity to talk to Jacob. He wonders what he’s going to say to him. If it was easy to know what to say he would have done it already. As he thinks that, he’s moving across the room, quietly over the wide carpets, through the pools of light at each of the lamps, and he has already taken hold of the door handle when Helen says, “Please sleep with me tonight.”
They lie in the dark listening to the rain. It’s the first time they’ve slept together for quite a long time. They’re in her room. It’s nice to be there. It makes it easier somehow. After sex, which he thought at first was unlikely to happen, and which was tender and silent and familiar, he falls asleep quite easily, listening to the steady sound of the rain at the open window.
When he wakes again later the sound isn’t there anymore. There’s just silence. It’s so silent that he isn’t even sure if Helen is still there, somewhere next to him on the bed.
Half-asleep, tentatively, he puts out a hand, and then a foot.