While Mervyn busies himself at the drinks tray István looks at things. The pictures on the walls. The objects on the shelves.
Mervyn hands him a gin and tonic in a heavy glass and then flops down on one of the sofas and puts his feet—he has shed the Gucci loafers at some point—on an upholstered footstool.
Pointing the remote, he ignites the TV.
It’s golf again.
“The Open,” Mervyn explains.
“Yeah?”
“What Americans call the British Open.”
“Okay.”
István sits on an easy chair of rose-colored velvet from where he has a view of the screen. Mervyn sometimes explains what’s happening—who the players are, what the situation is. It’s surprisingly interesting once you know something about it. There’s a surprising tension to it, though the moments of tension, most often someone attempting to make an important putt, are followed by polite applause and interspersed with tranquil shots of trees and small lakes in a way that’s quite pleasant.
When Mervyn’s wife arrives home from work he makes a drink for her too, and second ones for himself and István.
“You look very smart,” she says to István.
He stood up when she came in and is now sort of hovering while Mervyn is engaged at the drinks tray.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Got a new job?” she asks, sitting down herself and squeezing one of her stockinged feet.
“In a manner of speaking,” Mervyn says, although the question wasn’t addressed to him.
“Oh yes?”
“We’re going to try and get István some more lucrative work,” Mervyn says, handing out the G&Ts. “Hopefully.”
“I’ll drink to that,” his wife says.
“Are you going to stay for supper?” Mervyn asks István.
“Is that okay?”
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.”
“Okay,” István says. “Thanks.”
While Mervyn watches the golf, István offers to help his wife in the kitchen.
“Mervyn’s been grooming you, has he?” she says.
“What’s that?” István asks.
She laughs. “I heard about your shopping trip,” she says.
“Yeah. Yes.”
“That must have been very embarrassing for you.”
“Yeah, a bit,” István admits, laughing uneasily himself.
He’s sitting at the kitchen table in his suit, slicing an onion for her.
She must be about fifty-five. She’s quite attractive, he thinks.
“You do look smart though,” she says.
“Okay.”
“Which is important.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“If you want to get ahead.”
He passes her the board with the onion on it and she says, “I’m impressed. Did you used to help your mother in the kitchen or something?”
“Yeah, sometimes,” he says.
“How sweet.”
As the onion starts to hiss in the pan she asks him to make her another gin and tonic and he goes through to the living room, where Mervyn is still embedded in the sofa with his feet up and the golf on the TV.
He looks tired.
István says that his wife wants another G&T.
“Sure,” Mervyn says. “Everything’s there. And make another for yourself if you want.”
“Do you want another?” István asks.
“I don’t think I will, thanks,” Mervyn says.
István leaves at nine o’clock and arrives home at half past ten.
Mervyn starts to put him up for work with his agency and soon he’s making quite a lot more money. Within a few months he has repaid Mervyn what he owes him. Not long after that he’s able to leave the house share where he’s lived for two years and move into a new apartment. It’s in Stratford, in a modern high-rise building. When he moves in, the building has only just opened. It has those mailboxes that look like safe deposit boxes in the entrance hall, and an elevator that doesn’t seem to move as it takes him up to the twelfth floor.
The apartment itself is small and austerely furnished. There’s a bedroom with tough gray carpet, and some chrome-plated free weights lying around. There’s a windowless bathroom with an excellent shower. There’s a balcony with a single uncomfortable-looking aluminium chair. The balcony faces west and sometimes half-recognizable landmarks of central London are visible in the haze.
He has his morning coffee out there. Brightness from the bland sky brings out pale shadows on the balcony and the wind shakes the improvised rattan partition that screens it from the neighbors’. He has never actually seen the neighbors. He just hears their voices sometimes.
5
HE GOES RUNNING IN BATTERSEA Park, his feet stirring the leaves that sometimes lie thick on the paths under the trees. He has a distinct memory of how, as a child, he used to like running through leaves like that, through heaps of dry brown leaves. Why was that so enjoyable? Something about the way the leaves didn’t impede you, but made a lot of noise.
A dog makes some pigeons take to the air. It’s one of the pack of them that the professional walkers are out with every morning. Until he lived in this part of London he didn’t even know that was a job people did, walking other people’s dogs.
He arrives back at the house with an island of sweat on his T-shirt front. The paved forecourt is separated from the public street by tall iron railings partly overgrown with wisteria that is starting to wither now. He pushes open the gate. The windows of the house reflect the gray day like the surface of a pond. He doesn’t use the main door. There’s another door at the side. There’s even a discreet sign, with an image of a pointing hand, and the words TRADESMEN’S ENTRANCE. He lets himself in there and walks up the service stairs to his small apartment at the top.
He has a shower.
He shaves.
He puts on his suit and tie.
It’s nearly nine when he brings the Mercedes around from the mews and waits for Mr. or Mrs. Nyman to need him.
He used to do quite a lot of work for them through the agency. Then they offered him a full-time job as their security driver.
Mr. Nyman is in his sixties. His wife is much younger, probably about forty. They seem to live quite separate lives and it’s fairly unusual for István to drive them anywhere together. Mr. Nyman in fact spends much of his time at their country house in Hertfordshire, and usually travels there by helicopter, so that István’s job for the most part involves driving Mrs. Nyman around London.
“Tell me about yourself István,” she says to him one day.
“About myself?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want to know?” he asks.
“Just something about you,” she says.
He’s at the wheel of the Mercedes, in slow-moving traffic on Piccadilly.
“Karl says you were in the army,” Mrs. Nyman says.
“Yes.”
“How was that?” she asks.
“How was that?” The traffic is moving again and he has to focus on it for a moment.
“Yes,” she says.
“It was…” He wonders what to say, what sort of answer she’s looking for. “It was okay,” he says.
“It was okay?”
“Yes.”
“What does that mean?” she asks.
“What does it mean?”
“Yes.”
“It means… it was okay.”
“What do you mean okay? What does that actually mean?” she says. “When you say It was okay you’re not actually saying anything, are you?”
“I’m not sure what you want to know,” he says.
“I want to know what it was like. Stop being so fucking evasive,” she says. “Are you always like this?”
“Like what?”
“Like this. Evasive.”
Their eyes meet in the mirror.
She’s obviously sort of joking and he doesn’t say anything else, he just smiles at her.
For a few minutes they travel in silence.
Then she says, still apparently joking, or half joking, “Does Karl ask you about me?”
“No,” he says.