Afterward they lie naked on the warm tiles at the side.
“I need to get a wax,” she says.
He shrugs.
“You don’t mind it like this?” she says, looking down at herself.
“No,” he says. Her pubic hair, what little there is of it, doesn’t really seem to have any particular color. It’s a sort of totally neutral tone. “What are you doing for Christmas?” he asks. “You’ll be at Ayot, I suppose?”
“No, we go to Sweden,” she says. “That’s what we do every year.”
“Okay,” he says.
“You don’t mind?”
At the same time as she says that, they hear a sound.
“Tommy?” she calls. “Is that you?”
She covers herself with a towel.
István stands up and pulls on his wet trunks.
“Tommy?” she calls again. “There was definitely someone there,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Who else could it be?” she says.
“I don’t know,” István says.
“Wasn’t he supposed to be at the cinema with his friend?” she says.
“Yeah, I thought…”
“Do you think he saw anything?” she whispers.
István shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says.
“Shit,” she says.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“No, it’s not okay,” she says.
She tugs on one of the toweling robes and leaves.
“I think it was him,” she says, when she comes back a few minutes later. “I think he saw something.”
“Why? Why do you think that?”
“He was being weird.”
“He’s here?”
“Yes.”
“Why isn’t he at the film?” István asks.
“He said it was boring. They left early. Khaled’s driver brought him home.”
“Okay.”
“He was being weird,” she says again.
“What do you mean?”
“He wouldn’t look at me.”
For a few moments, standing next to the pool, they stare at each other.
“What if he says something to Karl?” she asks.
“He won’t.”
“But what if he does?”
“He won’t,” István says again.
“How do you know?”
“Try to imagine that conversation,” István says.
“What conversation?”
“If he told him. Try to imagine it.”
“Why?”
“I can’t imagine it,” István says. “I can’t imagine him saying anything. Even if he saw something.”
After that she encourages Thomas to spend the weekends at Ayot St. Peter with his father. When he says it’s boring there she says he should invite friends to stay. “I’m sure they’d find it exciting to go in the helicopter,” she says. “Wouldn’t they?”
“Not really,” he says.
“Why not?”
“They’ve been in helicopters before,” he says.
“All of them?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe all of them have been,” she says.
“Why don’t you come if it’s so exciting?” Thomas says.
“I have things to do in London,” she says.
“What things?”
“Tommy, please don’t argue with me about this,” she says.
A few days before Christmas, her husband and Thomas leave for Sweden. She makes up some reason why she has to stay in London for an extra day or two, and the night before she leaves to join them she sleeps in István’s bed. It’s the first time that she’s done that, the first time that they have actually slept together. It feels slightly strange.
In the morning, after they have had sex again, she says, “I’m going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you,” he says.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
“Don’t know,” he says.
“You’re going to be a good boy though, right?” she says.
“Meaning?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Yes you do.”
“Is that how it is?” he asks.
“I think so,” she says. “Isn’t it?”
“I mean,” he says, “you’re still married, yeah? You’re going to be with your husband, aren’t you?”
Something about her expression when he says that, an almost frightened look, as if she fears she might have misunderstood something, makes him feel sorry for her.
“You don’t need to worry,” he says.
“Whatever,” she says. “I got you this.”
It’s a small green leather box.
He opens it.
“I know you like classic watches,” she says.
“I do,” he says. “Thank you.”
“It’s the Audemars Piguet.”
“I know,” he says. “Thank you.”
He drives her to the airport for her flight to Stockholm.
She’s flying private, from Luton.
It’s a very cold day. There’s even a small amount of overnight snow on some of the hills next to the highway as he drives back into London.
He goes running in Battersea Park. There’s filmy ice on the boating lake, and they scatter rough pink salt on the steps of Peace Pagoda.
Weeks pass and the park still seems dead.
Then the days lengthen. The light persists until past four in the afternoon in a way that feels strange and surprising at first.
It’s still winter though.
The first daffodils arrive in a hostile world.
And then, what seems like only a few weeks later, the chestnuts have flowers and snow blossoms onto the path.
In the park, they cut the grass.
They cut the grass in the garden at Cheyne Walk as well.
The roof-windows are open and toweling his hair after a shower he hears the drone of the mower, not knowing what it is at first.
When her husband is away she sometimes spends the night in his apartment at the top of the house. He never spends the night in her part of the house.
The nights are warm now.
With the windows open the sound of the traffic on the Embankment is always there, a faint murmur from quite far away.
Sometimes there are other, more immediate, sounds. When the Nymans have parties outside in the garden he is able to hear quite clearly the tinkle of drinks and the hubbub of talk, abrupt outbreaks of laughter or for a moment an individual voice that he knows, hers or her husband’s. On evenings like that he sometimes stands at the open roof-window looking at the part of the lawn that he can see and the occasional party guests who stray down that far, ghostly against the dusk in their pale clothes.
There are those London summer days when summer seems muffled somehow, when a cool, humid grayness hangs in the park as he runs.
Statues hold their positions.
Green water goes through the sluice at the end of the lake, where there’s a sudden composty smell.
Here and there a leaf falls.
The rain knocks leaves off the trees and they plaster the sidewalks and the lustrous charcoal skin of the Mercedes.
He takes it for a full valet service at the place in Clapham. While it’s being done he sits in a Caffé Nero, looking at things on his phone.
There are more days of rain and then the first sharp night.
The thermostat starts the heating after months of inactivity, making half-forgotten watery noises in the pipes.
“What is this?” he asks her as they lie there in the dark.
“What?” she says.
“This,” he says. “Us.”
“I don’t know,” she says, after a long silence.
“It’s okay for you,” he says. “When you feel like sex you come up here. Then you go back downstairs and get on with your life.”
“That’s not fair,” she says.
“Isn’t it?”
“No.”
“How is it not fair?” he asks.
“That’s not how I think of it.”
“That’s not how you think of it?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s how it is.”
She doesn’t say anything for a long time.
Then she says, “Have you got a cigarette?”
He leans over in the dark and feels for the packet on the nightstand. Then the lighter. He lights it himself and hands it to her. She first moves into a sitting position and then takes it from him.