“Is there any way of stopping that?” he asks her.
“No,” she says. “Unless he dies.”
She has started going to a Baptist church in Stevenage.
One Sunday she suggests that he join her.
“What have you got to lose?” she asks.
He doesn’t seem to have anything to lose.
It’s a modest red-brick church in a quiet part of Stevenage.
He finds somewhere to park and they walk in.
Inside, there’s obviously been some renovation work. It’s all very light and airy. White undecorated spaces. Hard-wearing gray carpet. It feels more like a conference center than a traditional church. They sit on molded plastic seats, facing a lectern from which a man in jeans and a T-shirt speaks to them. There’s also a drum kit up there and some sort of electric piano. The only thing to show it’s a church is a plain wooden cross on the wall.
The first week he just sits there, not even listening most of the time as the man in the T-shirt talks about the Bible.
The second week—when his mother persuades him to accompany her again—he does listen to some of it.
The third week he even joins in with some of the singing.
He understands, as he mouths the words, what’s happening here.
He desperately wants to believe that his son still exists—still exists in some actual sense, not just as a memory—and that what happened to him is somehow part of some larger plan or scheme, and not just a meaningless single event.
What these people believe seems to make that possible. He assumes that that’s what drew his mother here, or something like it. She has never shown any interest in this sort of thing until now. So he understands why she comes here and how it might help her.
He also understands, after a few weeks, that it won’t be able to help him.
He knows it’s not true, that’s the problem.
He wants to believe that his son still exists, and his desire to believe that is almost enough to make him believe everything else that he needs to believe in order to make that possible, but not quite. The part of him that knows those things aren’t true is just too strong for him to overcome.
Soon after that he starts drinking again. Sometimes when he’s drunk he has the feeling that he and Jacob will be reunited in the future. It’s not that he thinks they will actually meet again in any sort of afterlife or anything like that. He knows that they won’t. He knows that the only sense in which they will be reunited is that one day he will also revert to being insentient matter, and sometimes when he’s drunk that seems like a strangely comforting idea.
He tells Mrs. Szymanski about it.
She looks at him sadly. “You shouldn’t think like that,” she says.
He shrugs.
“Are you saying you want to die?” she asks him.
“I don’t know,” he says.
They talk quite a lot now.
Probably it started during those days in the early part of the summer when he was recovering from the concussion.
“What about you?” he asks her one day.
“What about me?”
“How are you?”
She laughs at that.
“Why do you laugh?”
She just shrugs. She’s ironing.
He’s still waiting for her to say something though.
“I don’t know,” she finally says.
“Are you happy?” he asks her.
“Not really,” she says.
“No?”
She shakes her head.
“Why not?”
She shrugs again.
He leaves it at that.
He is not, in fact, that interested in whether she is happy or not and why.
And she doesn’t seem to want to talk about it anyway.
Then a few days later she says, “You asked me why I wasn’t happy.”
“Yeah.”
She’s unloading the dishwasher. She keeps doing that while she tells him that she and her husband have been trying for a baby for years without success.
“I’m sorry,” István says.
“So,” she says. “Maybe that’s why.”
“I’m sorry,” István says again after a silence. “Have you tried IVF?” he asks.
“Of course,” she says.
“Okay.”
“It didn’t work.”
They talk about it for a while, or at least she does.
Eventually he stops listening.
“You’re not interested,” she says when she notices that.
“Sure I am,” he says.
She keeps talking. She says that she’s disappointed at how her life has turned out.
“Why?” he asks.
“I just am,” she says.
“Well,” he says, as if to point out that she’s not the only one.
They walk on the estate together. She talks about her husband. She says that her husband doesn’t seem to understand her, that she’s not sure whether the marriage will last.
“Do you want it to last?” István asks her.
When she just shrugs he asks her if she loves her husband.
“I don’t know,” she says. And then, “I think I love somebody else.”
“Oh yeah?”
She nods.
They’ve stopped walking and are standing on the path.
“Who’s that?” he asks, smiling at her.
“You,” she says.
He laughs, partly just with surprise.
“What?” she says.
“When did this start?” he asks her.
“I don’t know,” she says.
They have sex for the first time a few days later. He’s not sure why he does it. He thinks it might help him somehow.
Afterward he feels slightly disgusted with himself.
He tells her that he wishes they hadn’t done it.
Then a few days later they do it again.
And again a few days after that.
While they’re actually doing it, it feels like a sort of escape. There’s an oblivion there, and something satisfyingly like violence as well. It seems to give him something that violence would also give him, something physical and destructive, something that he seems to need.
She keeps saying that she loves him.
“Stop saying that,” he tells her.
“It’s true,” she says.
“No it’s not,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
At that moment, more than anything else, he just wishes that she wasn’t there, and while he smokes his cigarette and she wipes her eyes he promises himself that he’s not going to have sex with her again.
Then a few days later he does.
And it’s not just the physical need and the minute of oblivion that makes him do it, he thinks. It’s that in a way he actually enjoys the feelings of self-hatred that always follow his encounters with her.
He starts to hate her as well, and he finds a sort of enjoyment in that, too.
He finds a sort of enjoyment in hurting her, emotionally and sometimes even physically. “You’re hurting me,” she says as he squeezes her neck, and he understands that he was inflicting the pain on her deliberately and for his own pleasure, or at least for some form of satisfaction that it gave him.
He thinks he’s probably not as nice a person as he thought he was.
He’s probably not a very nice person at all.
He tells her that. “I’m not a very nice person,” he says.
She says that that isn’t true.
And something about the way she says it makes him want to hurt her even more.
Cambridge is plastered with wet leaves. He spends less than half an hour at the hospital and for most of that time he’s talking to the doctor, who sounds more pessimistic than she did before.
Afterward he’s in the Bentley and is about to start the engine when he sees a black BMW arrive at the hospital entrance.
It seems to be a hire limousine, delivering a visitor, and since it’s in his way and he’s unable to leave while it’s there, he keeps his eyes on it until someone emerges.
At first the person, seen from behind and across the width of the parking area, looks only vaguely familiar. It’s a young man, dressed mostly in black. Further obscuring his identity, he’s also wearing sunglasses, and has a beard.
There’s no doubt about it though.
It is Thomas.
The way he moves, as much as anything, makes István sure of that, even though he sees him for only a few seconds as he leaves his limo and enters the hospital.