That was when the doctor told him what it was they were waiting for.
He didn’t quite understand it even at the time.
“And when will that happen?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” the doctor said. “Maybe never, I’m afraid.”
He experiences, as he did the last time he was here and saw her like this, a feeling of immense solitude.
She is the one person, he thinks, who would be able to share his pain. Or who would at least understand the extent of the pain he was in, since she would be feeling the same thing herself.
And yet she doesn’t even know what happened that day in March.
He wakes on the sofa downstairs in the gray light of the very early morning.
He has a half memory of his mother telling him, at some point, to go upstairs to bed and of him telling her that he was fine where he was.
Now, waking, he has a terrible headache.
A terrible headache and terrible thirst.
He finds his way to the kitchen and drinks directly from the tap there.
The red digits of the oven clock tell him that it’s just after five in the morning.
For a moment he thinks he’s going to be sick.
He waits.
Nothing happens, except that he’s sweating quite heavily.
When nothing happens he wonders whether to put his fingers down his throat.
He doesn’t.
He just stands there for a while, staring at the empty sink.
Every day he thinks he’s going to stop doing this. It wasn’t supposed to be something that went on indefinitely, that was never how he thought of it, and every day when he wakes up he feels sure that this will be the day that he stops.
When evening arrives, though, he finds it very difficult to do anything else.
There just doesn’t seem to be any point in doing anything else.
There doesn’t seem to be any point in not drinking.
What exactly is he saving himself for?
It’s usually with that thought, or something like it, that he has his first drink.
When he’s drunk there’s a feeling that none of this is properly real, and that’s a feeling that helps. Without that for at least part of the time every day he doesn’t know what he’d do.
He knows that his mother is suffering too. For one thing she’s visibly aged. It strikes him one day, that she looks like an old woman now.
She seems to have taken on the management of the estate. It must help her somehow to do that, he thinks, when he wakes in the afternoon with a strange, transparent feeling and finds her at the long table in the library with a laptop open, poring over spreadsheets and documents.
“What are you doing?” he says from the door.
Without looking at him she tells him what she’s doing—something to do with a tenancy agreement or an insurance policy—and he stops listening almost immediately.
When he opens his eyes there’s a stranger looking down at him.
“Who are you?” he asks.
“I’m a doctor,” the man says.
István’s mother is there too, standing slightly farther away.
They’re in his room.
He’s not sure what time of day it is.
“What happened?” he asks.
“What do you remember?” the doctor says a few seconds later.
István thinks about it.
He remembers that he went out and walked in the rain.
It was raining.
And he went out and walked in it.
The doctor nods when he tells him that.
His mother just stands there looking worried.
And there’s someone else there too, nearer the door. A tall woman with reddish hair. It might be Mrs. Szymanski.
“What else do you remember?” the doctor asks him.
He remembers the rain soaking through his clothes, and the wet clothes hanging cold and heavy on him.
He wonders if it’s still raining.
For a moment he looks at the window.
It doesn’t seem to be.
It’s hard to tell though, because the curtains are almost fully drawn.
The light in the room is dim.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“You fell,” his mother tells him.
“I fell?”
“Yes,” his mother says.
The doctor nods.
István is looking up at him, almost up his nose.
His head, he notices, is throbbing with pain.
“When? Where?” he says.
His mother starts to explain that they found him on the steps of the Greek temple, that he must have slipped on the wet, slimy steps and hit his head on them or on one of the pillars of the temple.
He has no memory of any of that.
There’s just nothing.
He remembers the wet clothes.
And then being here, looking up at the doctor.
“When you didn’t come back we went to look for you,” his mother says.
She explains that she saw him walking away across the south lawn from her bedroom window at about eight in the morning.
When there was no sign of him two hours later, she and the Szymanskis went to look for him, she says.
It was still raining, they went with umbrellas.
Mrs. Szymanski found him.
“What time is it now?” István asks.
“Two in the afternoon,” the doctor says.
He says it without looking at his watch or anything.
He asks István to say the months of the year in reverse order, starting with December.
“December,” István says, not sure why he needs to do this. He tries to focus, which makes the pain in his head worse. There’s a dull pain everywhere inside his head, and a sharper more intense pain near the surface in one particular place. He says, “December. November. October. September.” He has to stop and think. “August. July. June. May. April. March. February. January.”
The doctor looks pleased.
He asks István who the prime minister is.
István tells him.
The doctor smiles and asks him a few more questions about how he’s feeling, whether he has a headache, whether he feels sick.
István says that he has a headache.
After shining a light in his eyes, the doctor tells him that he has a concussion, and that he should stay in bed for the rest of the day and take it easy for the next few days. He should let him know, he says, if his headache persists for more than twenty-four hours, or if he feels dizzy or nauseated.
“Okay,” István says.
“And he shouldn’t drink alcohol,” his mother says, as if it’s a point that she’s been wanting to make for a while.
“No,” the doctor agrees, with a friendly smile.
Then he leaves.
István’s mother and Mrs. Szymanski leave with him.
Mrs. Szymanski returns twenty minutes later with a tea tray.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
“Okay,” István says.
She says that she’ll change the bandage on his head later—the doctor explained to her how to do it.
István wasn’t even aware that he had a bandage on his head.
“Okay,” he says.
There’s something terrible about the way normality asserts itself. About the way that summer insists on happening. About the way the chestnuts blossom and Wimbledon takes place.
His mother talks to him about the estate, about various trivial things that need to be dealt with, and also about the larger matter of the Nyman trust fund.
She has spoken to Heath, the lawyer in London. She explained to him that she would be dealing with things until her son was able to take over again.
Heath was unsure about that at first. He wanted to hear it from István himself. So István phoned him and told him that his mother would indeed be handling things for a while. Heath sent him something to sign to make it official.
Once she has access to the documents, his mother spends a lot of time looking at what’s been going on with the trust fund.
She makes some adjustments. She tells István about them, tells him that she’s trying to maximize the income from the fund.
He doesn’t seem that interested, and after a while his mother sighs and says that in less than a year Thomas will inherit it all outright anyway.