“So you’re an artist?” he says.
“I don’t like to say that,” she says.
“Why not?” he asks.
“I just don’t,” she says.
He asks her if she knows many of the people there.
She shakes her head.
“No?”
“They’re not my kind of people,” she says.
“Aren’t they?”
She shakes her head again.
“What kind of people are they?” he asks her.
“Money people and socialites,” she says.
He laughs at that. He’s enjoying talking to her.
It’s just the two of them now—Helen and her friend have been drawn away into some other loitering knot of people.
“Money people and socialites,” he says. “You think so?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe.”
“Which one are you?” she asks him.
“Me?” István says.
She nods.
“Which do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe I’m not either,” he says.
Her eyebrows, which are fashionably untrimmed, do something that indicates skepticism.
“I’m not a socialite anyway.” He smiles at her.
“Okay,” she says, as if that leaves only one possibility.
There are also some other kinds of people there, he says. For instance, there are some well-known politicians and journalists.
He points some of them out to her and she asks him whether that is in fact the foreign secretary that she sees over there.
István looks. “Yes, it is,” he says. “Have you met him?”
“Of course not,” she says.
Definitely showing off now, he offers to introduce her.
The foreign secretary probably has only a vague memory of István—they met at a drinks party for donors a few months earlier.
He’s very friendly, though, when István approaches him and introduces the young artist.
The foreign secretary’s wife—who’s not much older than the artist—is with him and the four of them talk about Helen’s friend’s work.
“I think there’s something interestingly interactive about it,” the foreign secretary’s wife says.
“How d’you mean?” István asks her.
“I think it sort of invites the viewer to investigate it,” she says. “To find their own meaning in it.”
While she’s saying that, there’s some sort of disturbance near the entrance, a disturbance involving the security staff, and for a moment they all look in that direction. It’s hard to see what’s happening at first but when he does, István experiences a small shock of irritation. The disturbance involves Thomas, who it seems is making an appearance after all.
Still taking that in, István is only half-aware that the foreign secretary’s wife is saying something to him.
“Sorry?” he says to her.
She asks him again what he thinks of the work.
“Uh,” he says. “I like it.”
She waits for him to say something more.
Her husband and the young artist are waiting too.
It’s hard for István to formulate his thoughts though, as he hears Thomas shouting, “I do have an invitation. I just don’t have it with me.”
“Someone’s had too much to drink,” the foreign secretary says, with a smile.
“Yeah,” István agrees, trying to smile as well.
He hears Helen’s voice now as she intervenes to smooth things over with the security staff. She sounds tense and upset.
The foreign secretary’s wife is still talking about the work.
She’s about to say something else when Thomas screams, “Don’t touch me!”
He screams it so loudly that everyone turns to look.
Helen had apparently tried to take him by the arm.
“Don’t touch me,” he says again.
“What do you want?” Helen asks him.
“I want to talk to you,” he says.
“Let’s go and talk, then,” she says, indicating the door.
“No,” Thomas says, obviously drunk and very upset. “I want to talk to you here.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I want them to hear.”
“To hear what?”
“How you’ve been stealing from me.”
Helen laughs. “What?”
The feeling of something like foreboding that István had when he first saw that Thomas was there is suddenly much worse.
Thomas’s voice trembles slightly as he says, “Yes. You’ve been stealing from me. You, and him.”
He points, and István is aware of the people he is with, the foreign secretary and his wife and the young artist, and in fact everyone else in the place, taking a new sort of interest in him.
He is not that aware of it though.
He is not that aware of anyone else at all as he stares at Thomas, who is now saying to his mother, “Should I tell them? Should I tell them what you’ve been doing?”
“You’re drunk,” Helen says.
“I know,” Thomas says.
“I think you should leave,” she says.
“I don’t want to leave.”
“I think you—”
“No!” Thomas screams, with such violence that she visibly flinches.
A moment later there are tears shining in her eyes.
“I know you want me to leave,” he shouts at her. “I know you wish I wasn’t here.”
Someone, a middle-aged man in a dark suit, approaches Thomas and whispers something to him and seems to try to take him aside. Without even looking at him, Thomas shakes the man off. Still speaking to his mother he says, “You’ve made that very obvious. You’ve made it very obvious that you wish I wasn’t here.”
István watches him say that with a strange feeling of detachment, a feeling that only deepens as Thomas starts to tell everyone there that István and Helen have been stealing from him for years, that all of István’s apparent successes were only thanks to that stolen money, and that in the end the two of them are nothing more than thieves.
They have something to eat at a café near the police station. Or at least István does, still in his stale Tom Ford suit from the night before, his own odors starting to overpower the lingering scent of the Cartier perfume that he uses these days.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Roddy doesn’t say anything.
It’s eight o’clock in the morning and they’re facing each other across a Formica table.
The café they’re in seems to be a survivor from an earlier age. It feels like nothing has changed in there since about 1983, including the food. The plate that’s put in front of István a few minutes later has on it two fried eggs, two grayish sausages, two triangular hash browns, two slices of toast, also triangular, and a small puddle of slightly congealed baked beans.
Roddy isn’t eating. He just sits there holding his coffee, which is still too hot for him to drink, and looking out through the glass front of the place at the pale gray side of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, which is across the street from where they’re sitting.
“What happened?” he finally asks.
István finishes spreading butter onto his toast.
He struggles to explain what happened.
He tries though.
He feels that he owes Roddy some kind of explanation, or at least an honest attempt at an explanation, having phoned him at six in the morning and summoned him to Charing Cross Police Station.
The paperwork and other formalities took over an hour and then they walked out into the cold January dawn and István said he was hungry.
“I know a place,” Roddy despondently told him.
“All right,” István said, lighting a cigarette.
“Just over there,” Roddy said.
István nodded, hugging himself in his thin suit.
They walked in silence along the Strand.
Some Romanian builders and a sad-looking middle-aged man in a leather jacket who might even be asleep are the only other customers in the café.
Roddy himself has a tousled, unshaven appearance, having had to dress and leave his house in a hurry. To see him like that makes him look somehow unfamiliar, almost like a stranger.
He listens while István tries to explain what happened. The way he describes it, he was subjected to intolerable provocation. That’s what he stresses. The provocation.
“He said we were stealing from him—that just isn’t true.”
“Why didn’t you just ignore it, then?” Roddy asks.
“I don’t know,” István says. It’s something that he asked himself many times during the long, sleepless night that he spent in the police station. “It would have looked like I accepted what he was saying. And some of the things he said after that.”
“Like what?”
“Like… I don’t want to… He said some horrible things.”
Roddy waits for him to tell him what Thomas said.
István finds himself unable to do that.
The words, when he opens his mouth to say them, seem too painful and humiliating to say out loud.
Even so, his own actions are hard for him to understand.
The violence with which he threw himself on Thomas and knocked him to the floor.
He finds it hard to believe that he did that now.
Roddy is still waiting for him to say something.
Instead he just sits there with tears in his eyes.
Perhaps embarrassed, Roddy looks away again, and after wiping his eyes on a paper napkin, István finishes his breakfast.
It takes a few minutes and then he asks the other question that’s been on his mind all night. “Is it possible to keep this quiet?”
“It happened in a room full of journalists,” Roddy says. “It’s already all over the internet.”
István’s face is expressionless as he takes that in.
There’s another long silence.
“So where does this leave us?” he asks.
Roddy sighs. “Honestly?” he says. “I think we’re finished.”