They must have been twelve or something when that happened. Only a year or two older than Jacob is now. And within just a year or two after that it was already a strange and embarrassing thing to think about. There was this feeling of did that really happen? In only a year or two it had become unthinkable to do something like that, to share that experience in such an innocent way, to treat it like any other form of pleasure.
“What are you thinking about?” Helen asks him.
“Nothing,” he says.
He sits in the kitchen with a small whisky and his Kindle.
Jacob is also there, drawing.
He’s been drawing for some time, while the rain falls outside.
He’s at the table, while István occupies the old green Chesterfield near the Aga.
Occasionally he looks in Jacob’s direction, and seeing how happily absorbed he seems to be in what he’s doing, he doesn’t say anything.
Finally, on a trip to the cupboard to pour another small measure of Macallan thirty-year-old, he says, “What are you drawing?”
Jacob pauses.
He withdraws his hands so that István can look at what he’s done.
Whatever it is, it’s surprisingly detailed and intricate.
“So what is this exactly?” István asks, leaning down to look at it more closely.
It seems to be a city with waterways instead of roads—a sort of futuristic Venice. Venice is obviously the inspiration anyway.
István is slightly in awe of all the thought that has gone into it, and of the skill and delicacy with which it has been drawn.
He has a sip of whisky as he surveys it.
“I’m hungry,” Jacob says.
“Okay,” István says. “Want something to eat?”
“Yes,” Jacob says.
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
István puts down his glass on the corner of the long oak table and opens the fridge.
“Eggs?” he suggests.
“Okay,” Jacob says.
István asks him how he wants them.
“I don’t mind,” Jacob says, drawing again.
“Scrambled?”
“Okay.”
“How many?”
After a longish, thoughtful pause Jacob says two.
“This might be sort of supper,” István tells him, mixing the eggs with a fork.
“Okay.”
“Do you want some toast with them?”
“Okay.”
“Some salad?”
“No thanks.”
“I want you to have some salad.”
“Okay.”
While he makes the eggs Jacob continues to work on his drawing.
The two of them go for walks, in their Wellingtons and puffer jackets.
They walk as far as the village. Lights are on in the old parsonage, which is occupied by some successful TV producer now. Helen seemed to know who it was.
On the way back, as it starts to drizzle, they talk again about getting a dog.
It’s something they’ve been thinking about on and off for years.
They’ll do that this spring, they decide.
Probably a brown Labrador.
For a while they talk about possible names, their breath showing on the dull air as they walk.
Jacob suggests Kurt.
“Kurt?” István says, surprised.
“Yeah.”
“You think so?”
“I think it’s a good name for a dog,” Jacob says.
“Maybe it is,” István agrees.
They take the shortcut across the field and when they arrive home their boots are heavy with mud.
It’s announced that schools in England will reopen on Monday, March 8.
That’s in just over a week.
They decide to stay at Ayot until the seventh, since in most respects the lockdown is still in place.
Jacob obviously isn’t looking forward to going back to school.
They don’t talk about it much.
It’s a sensitive subject.
A few days before they return to London, Helen sits down with him to discuss how he feels about it.
He isn’t very forthcoming.
She and István talk about it afterward.
It pains István to think that his son might be afraid of going back to school.
In fact he doesn’t.
On the Friday, Helen takes him with her to Welwyn Garden City to pick up some things from Waitrose and there’s an accident as they’re driving back along Homerswood Lane. A fox darts out, Helen swerves to avoid it and skids into the path of an oncoming van.
You don’t know what to do when something like that happens
The shock is so great
He just sits on a chair
He ends up sitting there all night
9
HE DRIVES TO THE HOSPITAL in Cambridge. There’s highway for twenty minutes, and then small roads. The whole journey takes an hour.
Between Foxton and Harston he pulls over and pisses among some trees at the side of the road.
He’s needed to do that since he left the highway twenty miles ago.
While he does it, while he shakes his dick at a tree trunk, two or three vehicles pass behind him. He zips himself up. Clouds glint in the sky. There’s a smell of compost, of sweet decay, from a ditch.
He sits in the Bentley again, its interior cluttered with empty drinks cans and receipts from service stations, and looks over his shoulder as he pulls out.
Not long after Harston the suburbs of Cambridge start, and soon after that he arrives at the hospital.
“I’m here to see my wife,” he says to the woman in reception.
She asks him for his name and then invites him to have a seat.
They’re in a sort of atrium. It’s a private hospital. He sits there looking at his hands while a water feature makes a trickling sound.
After a few minutes a doctor approaches him. He doesn’t think he knows this doctor. She isn’t the one he dealt with in March and April, although they may have spoken on the phone.
She asks him when he was last here.
Telling her, he feels embarrassed that it’s been so long.
The doctor smiles sympathetically, and says she understands. She’s much younger than he is.
“How is she?” István asks.
“She’s pretty much the same,” the doctor says.
They’ve moved her. She’s not in the same room that she was in last time. A nurse shows him to the one she’s in now and then leaves him and shuts the door.
He sits down next to the bed.
The ventilator makes quite a lot of noise. It’s attached to that transparent plastic thing in her mouth. There are smaller tubes going into her nose as well, and into her arm.
As the doctor said, her condition is the same as it was when he was last here, more than a month ago. The same as it has been since they put her into this state.
He doesn’t entirely understand why they did put her into this state. Something to do with the pressure in her skull. They said they had to do it to save her life.
Now they’re waiting for something. He isn’t sure what. One of the doctors asked him if he knew what happened to Michael Schumacher, and when he said that he did, the doctor told him that the situation was similar to that.
“What does that mean?” István asked.