It might have been an accident, it might have been deliberate, it might have been not quite either.
In any case Thomas is definitely dying.
His lungs have stopped working properly. Deprived of oxygen it will only be a matter of minutes before he dies.
István stands there watching him through the gap in the curtains.
He’s not sure what he feels.
Mostly a sort of emptiness.
After maybe another minute, he turns and walks toward the Bentley.
He unlocks it and sits at the wheel.
Something, however, makes it hard for him to start the engine and drive away, which is what he thought he was going to do.
He just sits there, staring out through the windshield at the mews.
He knows that every minute that passes makes it more likely that Thomas will die, alone in that empty room.
And still he sits there, not leaving, and not doing anything to help him either, just staring out through the windshield at the silent mews, with its single streetlamp throwing shadowy light onto the cobbles and the fallen leaves and the parked luxury cars.
He isn’t looking at those things though.
His thoughts are elsewhere, they are somewhere far away.
His hands are shaking as he lights a cigarette.
He has smoked about half of it when he takes out his phone.
He tells the paramedics the truth, more or less. That Thomas is his wife’s son, that he was there to see him, and that when he didn’t answer the door he looked in at the window and saw what had happened.
After forcing the front door the paramedics bring Thomas out on a stretcher.
“Is he?” István asks.
“He’s not dead,” one of them tells him.
István nods. He’s standing next to one of the potted miniature trees that flank the entrance of the house.
And in fact the mews has some life in it after all—from the doorways of some of the other houses, and from windows, people are looking out to see what’s happening, to see the paramedics load the stretcher into the ambulance with its silently flashing blue lights.
“He would have been, in a few more minutes,” the paramedic says to István. “Lucky for him you were here.”
“Maybe,” István says.
“Definitely,” the paramedic insists.
István asks him which hospital they’re taking Thomas to.
UCL, the man tells him. “You coming with us?” he wants to know.
István shakes his head.
He watches the ambulance drive away.
He wonders what to do now.
He isn’t sure what has happened here tonight.
By the time he arrives at Cheyne Walk it has started to rain.
Sitting on the sofa in the second-floor drawing room he phones his mother and tells her that he’s in London and won’t be back tonight.
“Okay,” she says.
When she asks him what he’s doing in London and he tells her what happened she is silent for a long time.
“Are you still there?” he finally asks.
“Yes,” she says. “I’m still here.”
She doesn’t say anything else though.
In his own room on the floor above he partially undresses and lies down on the bed.
It’s surprising that he isn’t hungry. He hasn’t eaten anything since lunch, which he had at Ayot St. Peter before driving to the hospital in Cambridge.
He opens the window and lights a cigarette.
It has already stopped raining. There’s just the sound of water dripping from the trees in the dark. He wonders again what it is that has happened tonight. He has a strange feeling that something very significant has happened, only he isn’t sure what.
In the morning he drives to University College Hospital, where they tell him that Thomas is still unconscious. They suggest that István, if he wants to see him, try again the next day.
When he does, however, he’s told that Thomas isn’t there anymore.
“Where is he?” he asks, surprised.
The nurse says that he transferred himself to another hospital, a private one.
“He’s awake, then?” István says. “Does he know what happened?”
“What happened?” the nurse says.
“How he got here.”
“Well, we told him that his father found him…”
“His father?”
“Yes.”
“I found him,” István says.
“Yes,” the nurse says.
“I’m not his father,” István tells her.
“Okay,” the nurse says. There’s an awkward moment. She says, “He seemed to know who we meant.”
“Where is he now?” István asks. “Which hospital?”
She doesn’t want to say at first, now that she knows that István isn’t Thomas’s father.
In the end, though, he persuades her to tell him.
It’s a place just outside London.
He drives there, through the suburbs and the autumn rain.
At reception they confirm that Thomas is a patient.
“Can I see him?” István asks, after explaining who he is.
They send someone to tell Thomas that István is there.
A few minutes later the person returns.
“I’m sorry,” they say to István. “He says he doesn’t want to see you.”
10
“SO YOU WORKED IN ENGLAND for some years?” the manager asks, looking at István’s CV.
“That’s right.”
“Why did you come back?”
“Family reasons,” István says.
The man seems satisfied with that, or at least he doesn’t ask anything else about it.
He asks what sort of work István did in England.
István says that he was a security driver, and that he also worked on the doors of nightclubs and other places.
When the man asks why he’s not looking for that sort of thing now—door work at a nightclub or whatever—István says it’s mainly about the hours.
“Anyway,” he says, “that’s more of a young man’s game.”
The store manager, who’s about his own age, nods with something like sympathy.
He’s looking at the CV again. He says, “And then for the last twelve years… what’s this?”
It’s true that the CV isn’t very explicit about the last twelve years. It just says “Self-employed.”
“I had my own business,” István explains.
The man wants to know more.
István tells him that it was a hospitality business, and that it failed during Covid.
“Yeah?”
István nods.
He’s already been through all this with the store’s head of security.
Neither the head of security nor the store manager seem entirely persuaded by him.
It’s not his age.
There are a lot of older men doing this sort of work.
It’s something else.
There’s something odd about him, they seem to feel, something that doesn’t quite fit.
As they both point out however, there’s a serious shortage of qualified staff these days and in the end they offer him the job anyway.
The store is the Media Markt in the town’s main shopping mall. He either works nine a.m. to six p.m. or noon to nine in the evening. Sometimes, when someone’s off sick, or leaves suddenly for another job, they ask him to do the full nine-to-nine shift, with double pay for the extra three hours. When they ask him to do that he usually agrees.
He wears a white T-shirt with a sort of black gilet over it, an earpiece in his ear, and a walkie-talkie attached to his waist.
There are five of them on the security team. István is the oldest, though not by much. Only Béla, the head of the team, is significantly younger than him. He’s about thirty and has an immaculately executed skin fade. It always looks like he had it done yesterday. He takes the work very seriously and organizes team meetings where he talks about “strategy” and “performance.”
The older men pretend to listen.
In fact, most of the time, there’s not a lot to do.
Either you’re out front or you’re looking at the screens. They take turns, the two of them who are on duty at any particular time. Even though you’re on your feet, it’s easier to be out front in a way. If you’re on the screens it’s harder to stay focused for long stretches.