They agree that if Jacob still wants to leave the school at the end of the year they’ll start to look for a new one.
Then, only a week later, another national lockdown is announced “to prevent a medical and moral disaster.”
Again they spend it at Ayot St. Peter.
While the rain falls outside Helen and Jacob do puzzles on the long table in the library.
Helen has a whole stock of them, mostly famous paintings.
The question of Jacob changing school is put aside, or at least there doesn’t seem to be any point in talking about it now.
The lockdown stretches across Christmas.
They have a quiet one at Ayot St. Peter, just the three of them plus István’s mother.
On Boxing Day, they invite the Szymanskis to drink some mulled wine in the Old Stable Yard, although even that isn’t technically allowed.
Mr. Szymanski’s parents are there too, having arrived from the Baltic coast of Poland during the week or two in mid-December when the lockdown was temporarily eased. They’re stranded in Hertfordshire now and they look slightly dazed.
“They have a fish restaurant,” Mr. Szymanski explains to István as they stand in the yard.
“Okay,” István says. “I suppose it’s not open at the moment.”
“Only for takeaway,” Mr. Szymanski says.
“Okay,” István says. “Who’s looking after it while they’re here?”
“My sister,” Mr. Szymanski says.
“Okay,” István says.
Helen and Jacob start a new puzzle. It’s another painting.
István looks in in the late afternoon and sees them standing next to each other at the table, working on it. They’re nearly the same height now.
They don’t notice that he’s there.
He watches them for a minute or two and then leaves.
During the miserable weeks of early January Jacob sometimes goes for walks on his own. Although he’s not allowed to leave the estate it’s large enough for him to disappear for an hour or two at a time.
He’s just returned from one of his walks when István meets him on the south front terrace, where he’s standing outside having a vape.
“Hey,” he says.
Jacob doesn’t seem pleased to see him. His face looks very flushed and pink, though that might just be the cold.
“We were wondering where you’d got to,” István says.
“Just went for a walk.”
“Okay. Have you got something under your jacket?” István asks.
“No,” Jacob says.
He obviously does though, and István wonders why he would lie to him about it. “Yeah, you do,” he says.
Jacob doesn’t say anything.
He just turns even more red and looks alarmed.
“What is it?” István asks, meaning the thing under his jacket.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
Jacob is sort of edging away.
“What is it?” István asks again, smiling.
He puts out his hand as if he expects Jacob to show him whatever it is that he’s hiding.
Instead Jacob turns and runs.
“Hey!” István shouts, initially too surprised to move.
Unable to imagine what it might be that he’s hiding, and starting to worry about it now, István jogs after him.
Jacob is making for the woods. He’s having to run slightly awkwardly in order to keep whatever it is that he has under his jacket from falling out.
Suddenly feeling absurd to be pursuing his own son like this, István stops on the damp grass of the south lawn.
Jacob has reached the margin of the woods. Without looking back he passes into them and István sees him throw something. It’s hard to say what it is. It flashes for a moment among the nearly leafless trees. Jacob is still running—he didn’t stop or even slow down when he threw the thing, whatever it was. He threw it as he ran, and has now disappeared into the gloom.
Not knowing what to make of this and sort of disappointed by the whole incident, István walks toward the woods, with the vague intention of trying to find whatever it was that Jacob threw away. It’s late afternoon and already twilight. His breath hangs in the air in front of him. To the sound of crows, he searches among the brambles and stunted holly bushes that grow between the trees.
It’s surprisingly hard to locate the thing he’s looking for and he has more or less given up and is on his way back to the open grass of the south lawn when he finds it.
It’s a magazine. It has obviously spent a long time outside—sunlight has faded the front cover and the pages of the whole thing are stiffly crinkled, as if they have been thoroughly wetted and then dried again many times. He sees immediately that it’s soft porn. Naked women. He pages through it in the failing light under the trees. It seems clear, from its condition, that Jacob found it somewhere on the estate, in the woods or under the hedge next to the farmer’s track.
István isn’t sure what to do with it now. Whether he should just leave it where he found it, or dispose of it properly.
He’s not sure, either, if he should speak to Jacob about it.
When he tells Helen about the whole thing, later that evening, she looks amazed.
“You don’t think…” she says.
“What?”
“Does he…?”
“Does he?” István prompts.
“You know,” she says.
“Masturbate?”
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I mean, he’s only ten,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“How old were you when you…?” she asks, sounding worried.
“When I started masturbating?”
“Yes.”
István shrugs. “Twelve, thirteen,” he tells her.
She still looks distressed.
He says, “I’m sure he doesn’t.”
“Then why…?” Again she struggles to finish the question.
“Why what?”
“Why would he be interested in that magazine?”
“It just fascinates him,” István says. “He’s probably not even sure why himself.”
“Will you talk to him about it?”
“And say what?”
“I don’t know.”
“He was obviously embarrassed about it,” István says. “I don’t want to make him more embarrassed.”
He tells her how Jacob reappeared about half an hour after the incident, when it was already dark outside.
He had been wondering, he says, whether to say something about it then.
Jacob evidently didn’t want him to.
The incident had to be mentioned of course, and, pretending that he hadn’t found the magazine, István said, trying not to make it sound like a big deal, “What was that you were hiding?”
“Nothing,” Jacob said.
“You don’t want to tell me?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
During that exchange, Jacob wouldn’t look him properly in the eye.
Which made István feel sad.
He spends a lot of the evening thinking about it.
And also about his own life at that age, or slightly older.
Eleven, twelve, thirteen.
About the surprising new things his body wanted, and his inability to refuse it when it wanted them.
At that time even his dreams were about his own physicality, about his physical body and what was happening to it. He remembers dreaming of these black things like fat stalks of graphite erupting from the center of his chest at about the time that the first fine hairs appeared there, remembers waking up afraid and disgusted.
And all that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you’re left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you’re having are universal or entirely specific to you.
Perhaps it’s at that age, he thinks, that you first have the sense that you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing, because some part of you seems to lag the transformation of your body, and to be surprised by it in the way that an outside observer might be, so that you no longer feel entirely at one with your body as you always had until then, and it starts to make sense to talk about it as if it was something slightly separate from yourself, even while you seem more powerless than ever to deny it whatever it wants. Although actually at first there seems to be no reason to deny it what it wants, whenever it wants it. Like that afternoon he and two friends watched a porn film at one of the others’ apartments and ended up masturbating to it together. They hadn’t exactly planned to do that when they put the video on. They obviously all wanted to though, so why not? There was a sense that this was a pleasure like any other, only of another order of intensity and with this strange aspect of compulsion about it. That it might have its own special codes of behavior hadn’t yet occurred to them.