At that moment a strong gust of wind arrives.
Mathilde has stopped talking.
She has her hands to her face.
“Are you all right?” Helen asks.
Still with her hands at her face, Mathilde nods.
“What is it?” Helen says.
“My eye,” Mathilde says.
“Something went in your eye?”
“Yes.”
Lowering her hands, Mathilde exposes her face. She’s blinking frantically.
For a few moments Helen just watches.
She hasn’t touched her glass of still water and she wets a corner of a napkin in it and offers it to Mathilde. “Here,” she says.
“Thank you,” Mathilde says. She dabs at her eye with the damp corner of the heavy linen napkin.
Helen, waiting, drinks the last of her wine.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“It’s still in there, I think,” Mathilde says.
“I have some eyedrops upstairs,” Helen says. “They may help.”
“Okay,” Mathilde says. “Thank you.”
As they leave the restaurant Helen tells the waiter that they’ll be back in a few minutes and asks him for another glass of the Pouilly-Fumé.
The suite has been made up.
Mathilde lingers in the living room area, with its sofas and eight-seater dining table, while Helen passes through the bedroom to look for the eyedrops in the bathroom beyond.
After a minute she calls for Mathilde to join her.
Mathilde sits on a stool in front of the mirror while Helen squeezes the drops into her eye.
István’s stuff was on the marble surface next to one of the sinks. Helen had forgotten about it. Fortunately she had the presence of mind to tidy it away before calling Mathilde through.
“Thank you,” Mathilde says.
“Better?”
“I think so.”
Mathilde keeps the eye shut while the drops work.
“How is this hotel?” she asks, cautiously opening it again.
“It’s fine,” Helen says.
“It seems very nice,” Mathilde says, and as they pass through the bedroom on their way out she looks around as if she’s assessing the place, and perhaps wondering if she should stay there herself the next time she’s in Munich. “Whose clothes are those?” she asks.
“What?”
“Whose clothes are those?”
One of the cupboards in the bedroom is open and, plainly visible, a man’s clothes are hanging in it.
Helen can’t understand why the cupboard is open. She thought that housekeeping always closed the cupboard doors when they did the room.
“I don’t know. They must be István’s,” she says, after failing to think of anything else to say.
“István’s?”
“Yes.”
“Your driver?”
“Yes.”
“What are they doing here?”
“He… keeps some of his clothes here.”
“Why?”
“There’s more space,” Helen says. “His room’s quite small.”
Not responding to that at all, Mathilde looks in the direction of the neatly made bed and presumably sees that there are personal objects on both of the nightstands.
None of the objects is particularly identifiable as István’s—at least not in the time that Mathilde has to look at them before Helen says to her, “We’d better go back to the restaurant. I told them we’d be back in a few minutes.”
“How’s your eye?” she asks in the lift.
“It’s okay, thank you,” Mathilde says.
“It still looks a bit pink.”
“It’s okay.”
Helen’s new glass of Pouilly-Fumé is waiting on the table, which has been tidied up in the five or ten minutes that they were away.
They’re there for another half an hour or so, and during that time it’s the opposite of how it was before—Helen does most of the talking, while it’s Mathilde who seems distracted and doesn’t say much.
Helen has signed for the meal, they have left the restaurant and are on the point of saying goodbye in the lobby when Mathilde says, “I’m sorry, I have to ask you. Are you having some sort of affair with your driver?”
“No,” Helen says.
There’s something wrong with the way she says it though. It doesn’t sound like the truth. She heard that herself. She said it too quickly or something, or the question didn’t seem to surprise her enough. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like the truth and Mathilde obviously doesn’t believe her.
For a few seconds they just stand there.
“Okay. Goodbye,” Mathilde says. “Thank you for lunch.”
“Goodbye,” Helen says.
She watches Mathilde walk out to where her own driver is waiting for her, and then, a few minutes later, leaves the hotel herself.
When she returns she finds István in the suite watching some business show on CNN. He went out for a few hours so that he wouldn’t be around while Mathilde was there.
“You’re wet,” he says.
She nods.
She was walking in the Hofgarten when it started to rain. For a while she sheltered in the Diana Pavilion but when the rain didn’t stop or even ease off much she walked back and her hair and shoulders and shoes are soaked.
“What happened?” he asks.
“I’m going to have a shower,” she says.
“Yes, you should,” he says.
“What happened?” he asks her again when she reappears in one of the hotel’s quilted dressing gowns.
“Nothing,” she says.
“How was your lunch?” he asks.
“Fine.”
There’s the sound of the rain on the windows, a surprisingly quiet sound given how hard it’s still coming down out there.
“Yeah?” he says. “How was…” He’s forgotten the name.
“Mathilde,” she says.
“Yes.”
“She was fine.”
“What’s she like?”
“She’s okay. I don’t know her that well.”
“What did you talk about?”
“I don’t know. About Karl. Why?”
“No reason.”
“Are you actually interested in what we talked about?”
“Not really,” he says.
She seems upset about something.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she says, and then suggests that, when she’s dried her hair, they have gin and tonics in the Jahreszeiten bar.
They’re on the second one when she tells him what happened.
“She saw my stuff?” he says.
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“She asked if we were having an affair.”
“And what did you say?”
“No. Obviously.”
He looks thoughtful.
“I don’t think she believed me,” Helen says.
“No?”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Do you think she’ll tell Karl?” he asks her.
“I don’t know,” she says. “And even if she does, I’m not sure he’s in any state to take it in. Let alone do anything about it.”
“No,” István says, and has a sip of his drink.
6
THE NEW SWIMMING POOL at Ayot St. Peter is finished in time for the summer holidays. There’s a week of hot, sunny weather at the end of June and they use it a lot.
Thomas, when his school term finishes in July and he joins them there, hardly uses it at all. Helen sometimes pesters him into putting in an appearance. Wearing a T-shirt and shorts, he sits in the shade with his phone and never stays long. He slips away and they only notice half an hour later that he isn’t there. He seems to spend most of the day upstairs in his room.
“What does he do in there all day?” István asks.
“I don’t know,” Helen says.
She goes down the steps into the pool. She’s very visibly pregnant now. She sits down in the water, on one of the middle steps.
“He’s got his phone,” she says. “His iPad. I don’t know.”
With slow, deliberate movements, she scoops water onto her shoulders.