“No?”
“No.”
“What do you mean people like you?”
“People that worked there. On the door or whatever.”
“How long did you work there?”
“Few months.”
She asks him what else he did.
“Work?”
She nods.
“Various stuff,” he says.
It’s nearly dark.
He stands to switch on a light.
“Do you sleep with other women?” she asks him.
“You mean now?”
She nods.
“Sometimes,” he says.
“I hope you like… take precautions.”
“Of course.”
“Would you describe yourself as promiscuous?” she asks.
“Not really,” he says.
“Do you use those apps?”
“What apps?”
“You know—those apps.”
“Yeah. Sometimes.”
“How do they work?”
He explains.
“And what, you just have sex or what?”
“It depends,” he says. “Sometimes.”
“Is that what you want?” she asks.
“What?”
“Just sex.”
“It depends,” he says.
“On what?”
“The situation.”
“What about our situation?” she asks.
“What about it?”
“Forget it,” she says after a few seconds.
She puts her clothes on.
“See you tomorrow,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says.
It’s quite nice to have sex with her, and then to be alone.
He likes the moments just after she has left, when he pulls open one of the roof-windows and lets in the quiet roar of the traffic on the Embankment. That sound is always there, even in the middle of the night.
She’s lonely, he thinks.
Not that she spends much time actually alone. She has a full social life—a lot of lunches and launch parties and things like that—and she and her husband do quite a lot of entertaining as well. This seems to merge into his work interests, and István is often unsure, observing it from outside, whether a particular party is a private thing or a work thing or some mixture of the two. As far as he understands it, her husband inherited a small Swedish electronics company from his father, and in the decades since then has turned it into a very large electronics company.
Sometimes they entertain in the Cheyne Walk garden and from the windows of his apartment István is able to look down over the slates and see part of the lawn, the far end, where the stone steps go up to the shrubbery—for London, the garden is vast. People wander down that far sometimes, singly or in small groups, away from the main noise and activity on the terrace, and when they do he is able to see them.
On one such occasion he’s watching two people down there, a man and a woman, talking to each other and laughing about something, and it’s only after a few seconds that he sees that it’s actually them, Mr. and Mrs. Nyman. He finds it slightly shocking that he didn’t notice that immediately. It’s partly just that it’s twilight, and everything is indistinct. There’s something else though, he thinks, still watching them from his window. It’s that he has never seen them interacting like this before—talking sort of secretively to each other, and laughing at something together.
Her husband waves to someone who István can’t see, and a few moments later they’re joined by another man. As far as István is able to make out he’s about her husband’s age, and holding a drink. The three of them talk for a while—Helen does most of the talking and the men sometimes laugh at what she’s saying—and then they walk back toward the house and as they do that she does something else that István has never seen her do before—she touches her husband in an affectionate way. As they walk over the grass she puts her hand on his shoulder. And then they pass out of István’s field of vision, and a few minutes later he pulls the roof-window shut.
She says she’s going to the National Gallery.
“Are you meeting someone there?” he asks her.
“No,” she says.
He’s going with her, of course. That’s his job, to go to places with her. If she wants to look around the National Gallery, he’s supposed to be there with her.
At first she doesn’t say anything.
He follows her around at a slight distance, keeping his eyes open.
Their feet creak on the wooden floors.
The gallery is quite empty. It’s midmorning, and a weekday.
“What do you think of that?” she asks him.
“Sorry?”
He steps closer.
“What do you think of that?” she says.
“What do I think of it?”
“Yes.”
“Nice arse,” he says, after looking at the picture for a few moments. He knows it’s not the sort of answer she was looking for, and he’s vaguely aware that he was afraid of saying something stupid by accident, so he said something stupid on purpose.
She laughs in a way that’s difficult to interpret. “That’s all you have to say?” she says.
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s true.”
“What am I supposed to say?” he asks.
“What you see.”
“That is what I see.”
“Okay.”
“Sorry,” he says.
“It’s okay,” she says. “There’s no point talking about these things without honesty. About anything.”
He points out that quite a few of the pictures seem almost pornographic.
“That’s true,” she says.
She seems to think for a minute, and then she says, “Most of the things here are either devotional objects, or more or less pornographic, or social trophies, or some combination of those things.”
“Okay,” he says.
“What they all have in common is that they’re interesting to look at in some way. Or that’s the idea anyway.”
“Sure.”
They move on to the next room.
Pictures of eighteenth-century people.
Horses, dogs.
Houses and fields.
The people look proudly out at them as they walk past.
“Social trophies?” István suggests.
“Very much so,” she says.
They stop in front of one of the pictures.
“Social media, even,” she says. “Look at me, look at my land. Look at how successful I am.”
István leans in to see the picture’s title. “Mr. and Mrs. Andrews,” he says.
“Yes.”
They look at it together for a few more moments, and then move on to another room.
“I like the use of the color blue in that one,” István says, trying to enter into the spirit of it.
“The Titian?”
“That one,” he says, pointing.
“Yes, it’s nice,” she says.
They walk past some other pictures.
When she stops, he stops too.
He finds it hard to predict which ones she will stop in front of.
A table with lots of fancy objects on it. Also an ugly brownish skull.
“Why is that skull there?” he asks.
“Why do you think?” she says.
About half an hour later they leave the gallery and stand in the portico, smoking and looking at the people and pigeons in Trafalgar Square.
He only has one cigarette left. They’re sharing it. “Thanks for the art lesson,” he says, taking it from her.
“That’s okay,” she says.
He picks her husband up from Farnborough. It’s quite late.
“How was the flight?” he asks him.
“What?”
“How was the flight?”
Mr. Nyman just shrugs and makes a noise. He looks tired and obviously doesn’t feel like talking.
It takes nearly an hour to drive from Farnborough to Cheyne Walk.
“Good night,” István says when they arrive at the house.
“Yes, good night,” Mr. Nyman says, and István goes up to his apartment and microwaves a Waitrose Beef Stroganoff.
He sleeps with Thomas’s nanny. She’s Canadian, about twenty-five, and also lives in the house, in another small apartment at the top of the service stairs.
It just sort of happens.
One evening they arrive home at the same time.