“And there was nobody else?” he asks her.
“No,” she says.
It might be true, he thinks. There’s something surprisingly innocent about her.
He meets his friend Claudiu in a pub near the Cheyne Walk house. It’s an unexpectedly scruffy place for the area, mainly frequented by builders who are working there, it seems. It’s one of those pubs without music. There’s just the sound of people talking, and sometimes laughing.
“How are you?” Claudiu asks.
“Yeah, okay,” István says.
For a while they talk about the old days in east London.
István asks after some of the others from that first house share. Claudiu is still in touch with a few of them. Tibi and Botond, Jerzy and the Lithuanian. They used to go out on Friday nights sometimes, to the General Havelock, or the Faces, or into the West End. They talk about some particularly memorable occasions, laugh about them.
“Those were fun times,” Claudiu says fondly.
István shrugs, sort of agreeing.
Claudiu himself doesn’t go out on the pull these days. He has a girlfriend now, he says.
She’s Irish apparently. She works in an office.
When he asks István about his own situation, whether he’s seeing anyone, István wonders whether to say anything about Helen Nyman. “Sort of,” he says.
“Sort of?”
István nods.
“What do you mean?” Claudiu asks.
István tells him what’s been happening.
“Your employer’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“You’re shagging her?”
“Yes.”
“How did that happen?” Claudiu wants to know.
István suggests they step outside for a smoke, and standing on the sidewalk in front of the pub he describes what happened in the Mercedes that day, when she told him she had “the hots” for him, and then how she appeared at his apartment a day or two later and he thought something like Actually, why not?
They laugh.
“What’s she like?” Claudiu asks him.
“She’s okay,” István says.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?” Claudiu is smiling at him.
“How d’you mean?”
“You know what I mean,” Claudiu says.
István sort of laughs again. “Yeah, she’s all right,” he says.
“How old is she?”
“Forty,” István says. “About forty.”
The fact is, he quite enjoys her visits. The sex is undeniably intense and exciting. Partly it’s that there’s this feeling of transgression, he thinks, the feeling that they shouldn’t be doing this. And that feeling is if anything intensified by the fact that he doesn’t actually find her particularly attractive, that he doesn’t even particularly want to have sex with her. In other words, the fact that he doesn’t particularly want to have sex with her somehow makes the sex more intense and exciting. He finds himself looking forward to it sometimes. And actually he does find her more attractive than he did at first. It’s interesting the way that happens, the way a certain amount of physical familiarity, of seeing someone every day, can make them seem more attractive. That has definitely happened with her.
Every morning he takes her son, Thomas, to school.
Thomas is usually late.
István waits in the idling limousine while leaves fall from the plane trees of Embankment Gardens.
Finally the front door of the house opens and Thomas appears in his school uniform tweed jacket and tie and walks across the stone paving of the forecourt.
“Morning,” István says, when Thomas opens the door of the Mercedes.
“Morning,” Thomas says.
“How are you?” István asks him.
“I’m okay,” Thomas says.
It only takes a few minutes to drive to the school, which is on Cadogan Square, in a tall red-brick house not dissimilar to the one that the Nymans live in on Cheyne Walk.
After dropping him there István tops up the Mercedes at the Texaco station on Sloane Avenue and then makes his way back to Cheyne Walk and waits for Helen Nyman to appear, usually after her personal trainer leaves at about ten.
There are things that happen at the same time every week. Every Tuesday, for instance, he takes her to Cottesmore Gardens in Kensington, to a modest white house with a tree in front of it. As the autumn wears on and the leaves fall from the tree the front of the house seems more exposed.
She’s always in there for exactly an hour.
“You probably want to know what happens in there,” she says one day, as they drive away afterward.
“If you want to tell me,” he says.
“It’s my therapist,” she says.
“Okay,” he says.
They arrive at Kensington High Street.
“What do you think of that?” she asks.
“What do I think?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know,” he says.
He wonders, as he drives, whether to tell her that he was in therapy himself for a while. It’s not something he normally tells people.
When he does she seems surprised.
He says so.
“I am,” she admits.
“Why?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t think we had that sort of thing in Eastern Europe?” he says, smiling at her in the mirror.
“It’s not that.”
“Okay.”
“Tell me more,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you want to tell me about it?” she asks.
“What about it?”
“If you don’t want to talk about it,” she says.
“I don’t mind talking about it,” he says.
He tells her that it was after his time in the army.
“I thought it might be that,” she says.
“It was just for a few months.”
“Did it help?”
“Yeah,” he says, “I suppose.”
“So this was in Hungary?” she asks, apparently not wanting to leave the subject now.
“Yes,” he says.
“What sort of therapy was it?”
He says he doesn’t know it in English.
She asks him to explain what sort of thing it involved, and as he drives he tells her something about it.
She says it sounds like it was probably some sort of cognitive therapy.
“Yeah, I think so,” he says.
“And it helped?” she asks.
“Yeah, it helped.”
“Were there meds?”
“Meds?”
“Were you on some sort of medication?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she says. And then, “Do you mind if I ask what?”
“Seroxat.”
“Are you still on it?”
“No,” he says. “I stopped it a few years ago.”
“Okay,” she says.
“You?” he asks.
“Meds?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes,” she says, lighting a cigarette. “Sometimes.”
Things are slightly different after that. Something is different between them. She seems to take him more seriously or something.
One sign of this is that she sometimes stays for longer after they have sex in his apartment.
One day, as they lie on the sofa listening to the rain intensifying on the roof-window, she asks him what he did when he first arrived in London. He tells her that he worked on the door of a strip club in Soho.
“A strip club?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know.”
“What strip club?”
“You won’t know it.”
He tells her the name. It makes her laugh. “What was that like?” she asks.
“It was okay,” he says.
She makes a face that means—That’s what you say about everything.
She asks him if he ever slept with any of the women who worked there.
“What sort of question is that?”
“Well, did you?”
“One,” he says.
“And?”
“And what?”
“What was it like?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was it good?”
“Yeah,” he says with a shrug.
She asks him what happened, exactly.
“Nothing much,” he says. They just had sex a few times and hung out together for a while. He explains that usually he didn’t interact much with the women who worked there. They didn’t take people like him very seriously, he says.