She’s drunk.
She asks him if he wants another drink in her apartment.
The next morning she says to him, “That was a mistake.”
“Okay,” he says.
He walks across the landing to his own apartment and has a shower.
It’s a rainy Sunday.
He likes the sound of the rain on the roof-windows, especially in the morning on a day when he doesn’t have to go anywhere.
He enjoyed his night with the Canadian nanny. He doesn’t feel that it was a mistake himself. He would have been okay with seeing her again, if she had wanted to. That she doesn’t want to is okay as well. He has this feeling, with women, that it’s hard to have an experience that feels entirely new, that doesn’t feel like something that has already happened, and will probably happen again in some very similar way, so that it never feels like all that much is at stake. There’s often this feeling of—Yes, I like you, but I like other people as well. It’s not even that I like them more. It’s just that I don’t like them less. So to be with any one person feels like an arbitrary thing, and that arbitrary feeling has started to undermine any lingering sense that there might be a particular person that he’s somehow meant to be with.
Later in the afternoon the rain stops and he decides that he will go out after all.
He’s not sure where he’s going.
He’s just walking through Chelsea.
He ends up walking quite far.
He has an eggs Benedict at a place near Sloane Square, and then walks up to Harvey Nichols and tries on a blue overcoat that he’s had his eye on.
Looking at himself in the full-length mirror, he wonders what Helen will say the first time she sees him in it.
She will say something.
She always says something.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” she says.
“I think about you, too,” he says.
“It’s like I’m addicted to thinking about you,” she says.
He smiles at her.
“It’s like I don’t do anything else these days.”
He smiles at her, and lights a cigarette.
“It’s absurd. What did I used to do? I don’t know. That sort of feeling of addiction, that’s what love is, I think,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Isn’t it?”
“Maybe.”
“I love you,” she says. “That’s what I’m trying to say. There, I’ve said it.”
He opens his mouth to speak and she says, “No, don’t say anything.”
He hadn’t actually known what he was about to say.
“Don’t say anything,” she says again.
“Okay,” he says.
“I’m going to leave now.”
“Will I see you tomorrow?” he asks.
“Why wouldn’t you?” she says.
“Okay,” he says.
He notices that her hand is shaking as she opens the door.
In fact he doesn’t see her the next day. As it often has been this autumn, the weather is too overcast and wet for her husband to use the helicopter and István has to drive him to the house in Hertfordshire. It’s near a village called Ayot St. Peter. Her husband then asks him to stay the night there, as he has to go back to London the day after that.
The rain pelts against the windows of the house.
Mr. Nyman watches horse racing on TV, and makes phone calls.
Later István drives into Stevenage to pick up a Chinese takeout for him, and while he’s there he sends her a text message saying that her husband has asked him to stay the night.
She sends back a sad face.
The next morning he walks around the lake on the sodden path. He smokes a cigarette in the little Greek temple at the top of the hill.
When he returns to the house and looks at his phone there are two new messages from her.
He puts down the phone without sending anything back, and shaves in the bathroom next to the room where he slept on the third floor.
While he’s shaving another message arrives.
He stands at the window in the bathroom, his face still partially covered with shaving foam, wondering what to do.
She hasn’t sent him messages like this until now. They definitely imply the existence of a new situation between them and he’s aware that if he sends her something similar it will have the effect of signaling his acceptance of that new situation, undefined as it is.
He is still standing at the bathroom window with his phone in his hand, looking out.
The bathrooms here are just like rooms—they have Persian carpets on the floor (though admittedly old, slightly threadbare ones) and the sort of furniture normally found in living rooms. From the window of this one there’s a view of the wide lawn sloping down to the lake, and on the other side of the water the hill with the little Greek temple among the trees.
I’m thinking of you too
He sends it.
Then he finishes shaving and puts on his suit and tie and goes downstairs.
Her husband is having breakfast. “Morning,” he says when István knocks and enters the dining room.
Mrs. Szymanski the housekeeper is there too, pouring him some more coffee.
István asks what time he was thinking of returning to London.
“In a couple of hours?” Mr. Nyman says. He’s wearing a dark blue polo-neck and looking at a newspaper while he eats.
“Okay,” István says.
“About eleven,” Mr. Nyman says.
It’s actually more like twelve when he emerges from the house, followed by Mr. Szymanski with his things.
Her friend the artist has an exhibition at a fashionable gallery. Helen was somehow instrumental in making it happen, and she and her husband attend the private view.
They leave at about eight o’clock.
“Thank you for coming,” she says to her husband as István drives them home.
“That’s all right,” Mr. Nyman says. He has taken hold of the handle over the window and is looking out at the streets of Shoreditch while dingy orange light moves across his ageing but still handsome face.
“What did you think of the work?” she asks him.
“Not much,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t think much of it.”
“I thought it was excellent,” she says.
Her husband laughs.
“Why are you laughing?”
“What do you mean it was excellent?” he says.
“I thought it was.”
“In what way was it excellent?”
“In lots of ways.”
“It was absurd.”
“No it wasn’t.”
“Yes it was. Any normal person would agree with me.”
“That’s such a stupid thing to say,” she says. “What do you mean any normal person?”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Nyman says. Then something occurs to him. “Like István, for instance. What did you think of it, István?”
“That is so patronizing,” she says.
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is.”
“Why? What’s wrong with being normal?”
“You don’t have to answer that, István,” she says.
“You don’t want him to answer because you know he’ll agree with me,” Mr. Nyman says.
“What did you really think of it?” she asks him the next day.
István shrugs. “Strange,” he says.
“It didn’t say anything to you?”
“Say anything to me?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” he says.
“I just want to know how it affected you,” she says. “I know it’s quite dark. That’s another reason Karl didn’t like it. He doesn’t like dark stuff.”
“Okay.”
“He just doesn’t want to go there. He’s afraid of it. Especially since he had cancer.”
“Yeah?” István says.
“Yes,” she says. “A few years ago.”
“What sort?”
“Colon,” she says. “He had an operation to remove it. He’s okay now.”
The following Friday, she asks him if he wants to have a swim in the pool. There’s a swimming pool in the basement of the Cheyne Walk house. It’s the first time that István has seen it.
As they hold on to the side with slicked-back hair and smooch he gets a hard-on and they pull off their swimsuits and have sex.