“What I do?”
“No.”
“Who I see?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t tell me anyway, would you? I mean if he did.”
István doesn’t say anything.
“I don’t know if I can trust you,” she says.
“Sure, you can trust me,” he says.
“You see, it’s the way you say things like that that makes me think I can’t.”
“The way I say things like?”
“Shooor, you can trrrust me,” she imitates, in a thickly accented voice.
He laughs, even though he actually feels slightly hurt at the way she made him sound.
In fact, as far as he can tell, she doesn’t do anything that she might want to hide from her husband, except drink too much sometimes, and he must know about that anyway.
She lights a cigarette, even though she’s not supposed to smoke in the car.
“You don’t mind?” she says, a few seconds later.
He just shakes his head.
The next day she says, “I’m sorry about yesterday.”
“That’s okay,” he says.
“I was drunk,” she says.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says again.
“Thank you for being so understanding,” she says.
They stop at some traffic lights on Park Lane.
He’s taking her to lunch with a friend of hers.
“Would you say you’re non-judgmental?” she asks him, as they move off again.
“Non-judgmental?”
“Yes.” She lights a cigarette and then lowers the window a little. “Would you?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“I think you are,” she says.
“Okay.”
When they arrive at the restaurant where she’s meeting her friend he asks her if she knows how long she’ll be.
She says she doesn’t.
He drives around trying to find somewhere to park. The wipers are going. Through the speckled windshield he looks at the wet streets of Covent Garden.
He leaves the Mercedes at the place on Shelton Street and then stands in Pret on St. Martin’s Lane, shaking off his small umbrella and looking at the sandwiches.
He sits in the window, on a tall stool, with a BLT.
When he’s finished it he takes his time over his Americano, watching people walk past in the rain outside.
Behind him there’s the noise of the lunchtime Pret.
He’s not the only man wearing a suit. There are quite a few of them in there, he notices, turning his head for a moment. That was one of the things that struck him about London when he first arrived here, central London in particular—how many people you see wearing suits. The streets are full of them. He’d never seen anything like it.
On the sidewalk outside he puts up his umbrella.
He’s not sure what to do now. He has to stay in the area. It might be hours though. A lot of the job is just waiting like this.
“We were at school together,” Mrs. Nyman says, when he picks her up at the Ivy an hour and a half later. She’s talking about the friend she’s just had lunch with, who’s apparently an artist of some sort.
“She’s really special,” Mrs. Nyman says. “I’m trying to get her a proper show.”
“Okay.”
“She’s not very good at self-promotion.”
“Okay.”
“She doesn’t seem to understand how important that aspect of it is.”
“No.”
“Anyway, I’m trying to get her a proper show.”
“Okay.”
“Karl knows some people. People with money to invest in that sort of thing.”
“Sure.”
She starts doing something on her phone, messaging someone or something—he hears the little popping sounds as she types with the thumb of the same hand that’s holding the phone while using the other hand to lift the cigarette to her mouth.
She says she wants to get him something, something to make up for how obnoxious she was when she was drunk the other day. Obnoxious—that’s the word she uses. He’s not familiar with it. It’s fairly obvious what it means though.
“It’s all right,” he says.
“No, I want to,” she says.
“Seriously, it’s all right,” he says.
“Let me do this,” she says.
They’re in Hermès on Bond Street and she’s holding a tie, holding it up to him to see how it looks.
“No,” he says.
“Please.”
“No,” he says again. “Thank you.”
He moves away, to a position nearer the door.
She spends another twenty minutes or so in the shop, looking at things while a sales assistant follows her around, answering her questions and passing things to another more junior sales assistant to set aside when she decides she wants them.
Still waiting near the door, István notices that the tie she wanted to get him is among the things she pays for at the end.
They’re in the Mercedes again when she hands him the stiff orange envelope. She leans forward and it appears next to his shoulder.
He hesitates before taking it.
There’s this moment when she’s holding it out and he hasn’t taken it yet, when he doesn’t know if he’s going to take it or not.
He takes it.
“Thanks,” he says.
She doesn’t say anything.
He puts it on the passenger seat and asks where they’re going.
It’s not actually the first present that she’s given him. There have been other things.
One day when he’s driving her somewhere, she tells him to stop.
He pulls over.
“Switch off the engine,” she says.
He does.
“Come and sit in the back with me,” she says.
“Why?” he asks.
“Because I want you to,” she says.
He gets out of the car and gets in again in the back.
It feels strange to be in the back, to see the world from that position. To see his own empty seat in the front.
“Yes?” he says.
“You know I’ve got the hots for you, don’t you,” she says.
The directness of it does surprise him.
“Yeah?” he says.
“Yeah?” she imitates, pitching her voice very low, and making him sound like some sort of idiot.
He smiles at her.
“Yeah,” she says.
“Okay,” he says, after quite a long silence.
“Why don’t you kiss me?” she says.
“I’m not sure that would be such a good idea,” he says.
“That’s a really annoying thing to say.”
“Still.”
They just sit there for a few seconds.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Don’t say that.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t say that,” she says again.
“Okay.”
“Take me home,” she says.
“Okay,” he says.
He drives her home in silence.
Soon after that they start having sex together, usually when her husband is out of London.
When they have sex it’s always in his apartment, at the top of the house, which is only accessible via the tradesmen’s entrance and the service stairs.
“Does your husband know about this?” he asks her, after she’s visited him up there a few times. He’s started to wonder if she and her husband have some sort of “arrangement.”
“Karl?”
“Yes.”
“No,” she says. “Of course not.”
“I’m not the first though, am I?”
“The first what?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do you mean am I in the habit of fucking the help?” she says.
“The help?”
“You don’t know that phrase?”
“No,” he says.
“It’s American,” she says. “It’s what they call their servants. It maintains an illusion of equality.”
“Okay.”
“You’re the first,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I hope you’re flattered.”
“Sure,” he says.
She puts her clothes on.
“See you tomorrow,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says.
He works out that she would only have been about twenty-five when she married her husband, who would have been fiftyish then.
She says it’s been “years” since she and her husband have had sex.