Flesh: A Novel

5

HE GOES RUNNING IN BATTERSEA Park, his feet stirring the leaves that sometimes lie thick on the paths under the trees. He has a distinct memory of how, as a child, he used to like running through leaves like that, through heaps of dry brown leaves. Why was that so enjoyable? Something about the way the leaves didn’t impede you, but made a lot of noise.

A dog makes some pigeons take to the air. It’s one of the pack of them that the professional walkers are out with every morning. Until he lived in this part of London he didn’t even know that was a job people did, walking other people’s dogs.

He arrives back at the house with an island of sweat on his T-shirt front. The paved forecourt is separated from the public street by tall iron railings partly overgrown with wisteria that is starting to wither now. He pushes open the gate. The windows of the house reflect the gray day like the surface of a pond. He doesn’t use the main door. There’s another door at the side. There’s even a discreet sign, with an image of a pointing hand, and the words TRADESMEN’S ENTRANCE. He lets himself in there and walks up the service stairs to his small apartment at the top.

He has a shower.

He shaves.

He puts on his suit and tie.

It’s nearly nine when he brings the Mercedes around from the mews and waits for Mr. or Mrs. Nyman to need him.

He used to do quite a lot of work for them through the agency. Then they offered him a full-time job as their security driver.

Mr. Nyman is in his sixties. His wife is much younger, probably about forty. They seem to live quite separate lives and it’s fairly unusual for István to drive them anywhere together. Mr. Nyman in fact spends much of his time at their country house in Hertfordshire, and usually travels there by helicopter, so that István’s job for the most part involves driving Mrs. Nyman around London.

“Tell me about yourself István,” she says to him one day.

“About myself?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want to know?” he asks.

“Just something about you,” she says.

He’s at the wheel of the Mercedes, in slow-moving traffic on Piccadilly.

“Karl says you were in the army,” Mrs. Nyman says.

“Yes.”

“How was that?” she asks.

“How was that?” The traffic is moving again and he has to focus on it for a moment.

“Yes,” she says.

“It was…” He wonders what to say, what sort of answer she’s looking for. “It was okay,” he says.

“It was okay?”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean?” she asks.

“What does it mean?”

“Yes.”

“It means… it was okay.”

“What do you mean okay? What does that actually mean?” she says. “When you say It was okay you’re not actually saying anything, are you?”

“I’m not sure what you want to know,” he says.

“I want to know what it was like. Stop being so fucking evasive,” she says. “Are you always like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like this. Evasive.”

Their eyes meet in the mirror.

She’s obviously sort of joking and he doesn’t say anything else, he just smiles at her.

For a few minutes they travel in silence.

Then she says, still apparently joking, or half joking, “Does Karl ask you about me?”

“No,” he says.

“What I do?”

“No.”

“Who I see?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t tell me anyway, would you? I mean if he did.”

István doesn’t say anything.

“I don’t know if I can trust you,” she says.

“Sure, you can trust me,” he says.

“You see, it’s the way you say things like that that makes me think I can’t.”

“The way I say things like?”

“Shooor, you can trrrust me,” she imitates, in a thickly accented voice.

He laughs, even though he actually feels slightly hurt at the way she made him sound.

In fact, as far as he can tell, she doesn’t do anything that she might want to hide from her husband, except drink too much sometimes, and he must know about that anyway.

She lights a cigarette, even though she’s not supposed to smoke in the car.

“You don’t mind?” she says, a few seconds later.

He just shakes his head.

The next day she says, “I’m sorry about yesterday.”

“That’s okay,” he says.

“I was drunk,” she says.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says again.

“Thank you for being so understanding,” she says.

They stop at some traffic lights on Park Lane.

He’s taking her to lunch with a friend of hers.

“Would you say you’re non-judgmental?” she asks him, as they move off again.

“Non-judgmental?”

“Yes.” She lights a cigarette and then lowers the window a little. “Would you?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“I think you are,” she says.

“Okay.”

When they arrive at the restaurant where she’s meeting her friend he asks her if she knows how long she’ll be.

She says she doesn’t.

He drives around trying to find somewhere to park. The wipers are going. Through the speckled windshield he looks at the wet streets of Covent Garden.

He leaves the Mercedes at the place on Shelton Street and then stands in Pret on St. Martin’s Lane, shaking off his small umbrella and looking at the sandwiches.

He sits in the window, on a tall stool, with a BLT.

When he’s finished it he takes his time over his Americano, watching people walk past in the rain outside.

Behind him there’s the noise of the lunchtime Pret.

He’s not the only man wearing a suit. There are quite a few of them in there, he notices, turning his head for a moment. That was one of the things that struck him about London when he first arrived here, central London in particular—how many people you see wearing suits. The streets are full of them. He’d never seen anything like it.

On the sidewalk outside he puts up his umbrella.

He’s not sure what to do now. He has to stay in the area. It might be hours though. A lot of the job is just waiting like this.

“We were at school together,” Mrs. Nyman says, when he picks her up at the Ivy an hour and a half later. She’s talking about the friend she’s just had lunch with, who’s apparently an artist of some sort.

“She’s really special,” Mrs. Nyman says. “I’m trying to get her a proper show.”

“Okay.”

“She’s not very good at self-promotion.”

“Okay.”

“She doesn’t seem to understand how important that aspect of it is.”

“No.”

“Anyway, I’m trying to get her a proper show.”

“Okay.”

“Karl knows some people. People with money to invest in that sort of thing.”

“Sure.”

She starts doing something on her phone, messaging someone or something—he hears the little popping sounds as she types with the thumb of the same hand that’s holding the phone while using the other hand to lift the cigarette to her mouth.

She says she wants to get him something, something to make up for how obnoxious she was when she was drunk the other day. Obnoxious—that’s the word she uses. He’s not familiar with it. It’s fairly obvious what it means though.

“It’s all right,” he says.

“No, I want to,” she says.

“Seriously, it’s all right,” he says.

“Let me do this,” she says.

They’re in Hermès on Bond Street and she’s holding a tie, holding it up to him to see how it looks.

“No,” he says.

“Please.”

“No,” he says again. “Thank you.”

He moves away, to a position nearer the door.

She spends another twenty minutes or so in the shop, looking at things while a sales assistant follows her around, answering her questions and passing things to another more junior sales assistant to set aside when she decides she wants them.

Still waiting near the door, István notices that the tie she wanted to get him is among the things she pays for at the end.

They’re in the Mercedes again when she hands him the stiff orange envelope. She leans forward and it appears next to his shoulder.

He hesitates before taking it.

There’s this moment when she’s holding it out and he hasn’t taken it yet, when he doesn’t know if he’s going to take it or not.

He takes it.

“Thanks,” he says.

She doesn’t say anything.

He puts it on the passenger seat and asks where they’re going.

It’s not actually the first present that she’s given him. There have been other things.

One day when he’s driving her somewhere, she tells him to stop.

He pulls over.

“Switch off the engine,” she says.

He does.

“Come and sit in the back with me,” she says.

“Why?” he asks.

“Because I want you to,” she says.

He gets out of the car and gets in again in the back.

It feels strange to be in the back, to see the world from that position. To see his own empty seat in the front.

“Yes?” he says.

“You know I’ve got the hots for you, don’t you,” she says.

The directness of it does surprise him.

“Yeah?” he says.

“Yeah?” she imitates, pitching her voice very low, and making him sound like some sort of idiot.

He smiles at her.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Okay,” he says, after quite a long silence.

“Why don’t you kiss me?” she says.

“I’m not sure that would be such a good idea,” he says.

“That’s a really annoying thing to say.”

“Still.”

They just sit there for a few seconds.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Don’t say that.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t say that,” she says again.

“Okay.”

“Take me home,” she says.

“Okay,” he says.

He drives her home in silence.

Soon after that they start having sex together, usually when her husband is out of London.

When they have sex it’s always in his apartment, at the top of the house, which is only accessible via the tradesmen’s entrance and the service stairs.

“Does your husband know about this?” he asks her, after she’s visited him up there a few times. He’s started to wonder if she and her husband have some sort of “arrangement.”

“Karl?”

“Yes.”

“No,” she says. “Of course not.”

“I’m not the first though, am I?”

“The first what?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do you mean am I in the habit of fucking the help?” she says.

“The help?”

“You don’t know that phrase?”

“No,” he says.

“It’s American,” she says. “It’s what they call their servants. It maintains an illusion of equality.”

“Okay.”

“You’re the first,” she says.

“Okay.”

“I hope you’re flattered.”

“Sure,” he says.

She puts her clothes on.

“See you tomorrow,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says.

He works out that she would only have been about twenty-five when she married her husband, who would have been fiftyish then.

She says it’s been “years” since she and her husband have had sex.

“And there was nobody else?” he asks her.

“No,” she says.

It might be true, he thinks. There’s something surprisingly innocent about her.

He meets his friend Claudiu in a pub near the Cheyne Walk house. It’s an unexpectedly scruffy place for the area, mainly frequented by builders who are working there, it seems. It’s one of those pubs without music. There’s just the sound of people talking, and sometimes laughing.

“How are you?” Claudiu asks.

“Yeah, okay,” István says.

For a while they talk about the old days in east London.

István asks after some of the others from that first house share. Claudiu is still in touch with a few of them. Tibi and Botond, Jerzy and the Lithuanian. They used to go out on Friday nights sometimes, to the General Havelock, or the Faces, or into the West End. They talk about some particularly memorable occasions, laugh about them.

“Those were fun times,” Claudiu says fondly.

István shrugs, sort of agreeing.

Claudiu himself doesn’t go out on the pull these days. He has a girlfriend now, he says.

She’s Irish apparently. She works in an office.

When he asks István about his own situation, whether he’s seeing anyone, István wonders whether to say anything about Helen Nyman. “Sort of,” he says.

“Sort of?”

István nods.

“What do you mean?” Claudiu asks.

István tells him what’s been happening.

“Your employer’s wife?”

“Yes.”

“You’re shagging her?”

“Yes.”

“How did that happen?” Claudiu wants to know.

István suggests they step outside for a smoke, and standing on the sidewalk in front of the pub he describes what happened in the Mercedes that day, when she told him she had “the hots” for him, and then how she appeared at his apartment a day or two later and he thought something like Actually, why not?

They laugh.

“What’s she like?” Claudiu asks him.

“She’s okay,” István says.

“Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?” Claudiu is smiling at him.

“How d’you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” Claudiu says.

István sort of laughs again. “Yeah, she’s all right,” he says.

“How old is she?”

“Forty,” István says. “About forty.”

The fact is, he quite enjoys her visits. The sex is undeniably intense and exciting. Partly it’s that there’s this feeling of transgression, he thinks, the feeling that they shouldn’t be doing this. And that feeling is if anything intensified by the fact that he doesn’t actually find her particularly attractive, that he doesn’t even particularly want to have sex with her. In other words, the fact that he doesn’t particularly want to have sex with her somehow makes the sex more intense and exciting. He finds himself looking forward to it sometimes. And actually he does find her more attractive than he did at first. It’s interesting the way that happens, the way a certain amount of physical familiarity, of seeing someone every day, can make them seem more attractive. That has definitely happened with her.

Every morning he takes her son, Thomas, to school.

Thomas is usually late.

István waits in the idling limousine while leaves fall from the plane trees of Embankment Gardens.

Finally the front door of the house opens and Thomas appears in his school uniform tweed jacket and tie and walks across the stone paving of the forecourt.

“Morning,” István says, when Thomas opens the door of the Mercedes.

“Morning,” Thomas says.

“How are you?” István asks him.

“I’m okay,” Thomas says.

It only takes a few minutes to drive to the school, which is on Cadogan Square, in a tall red-brick house not dissimilar to the one that the Nymans live in on Cheyne Walk.

After dropping him there István tops up the Mercedes at the Texaco station on Sloane Avenue and then makes his way back to Cheyne Walk and waits for Helen Nyman to appear, usually after her personal trainer leaves at about ten.

There are things that happen at the same time every week. Every Tuesday, for instance, he takes her to Cottesmore Gardens in Kensington, to a modest white house with a tree in front of it. As the autumn wears on and the leaves fall from the tree the front of the house seems more exposed.

She’s always in there for exactly an hour.

“You probably want to know what happens in there,” she says one day, as they drive away afterward.

“If you want to tell me,” he says.

“It’s my therapist,” she says.

“Okay,” he says.

They arrive at Kensington High Street.

“What do you think of that?” she asks.

“What do I think?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” he says.

He wonders, as he drives, whether to tell her that he was in therapy himself for a while. It’s not something he normally tells people.

When he does she seems surprised.

He says so.

“I am,” she admits.

“Why?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t think we had that sort of thing in Eastern Europe?” he says, smiling at her in the mirror.

“It’s not that.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me more,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want to tell me about it?” she asks.

“What about it?”

“If you don’t want to talk about it,” she says.

“I don’t mind talking about it,” he says.

He tells her that it was after his time in the army.

“I thought it might be that,” she says.

“It was just for a few months.”

“Did it help?”

“Yeah,” he says, “I suppose.”

“So this was in Hungary?” she asks, apparently not wanting to leave the subject now.

“Yes,” he says.

“What sort of therapy was it?”

He says he doesn’t know it in English.

She asks him to explain what sort of thing it involved, and as he drives he tells her something about it.

She says it sounds like it was probably some sort of cognitive therapy.

“Yeah, I think so,” he says.

“And it helped?” she asks.

“Yeah, it helped.”

“Were there meds?”

“Meds?”

“Were you on some sort of medication?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she says. And then, “Do you mind if I ask what?”

“Seroxat.”

“Are you still on it?”

“No,” he says. “I stopped it a few years ago.”

“Okay,” she says.

“You?” he asks.

“Meds?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes,” she says, lighting a cigarette. “Sometimes.”

Things are slightly different after that. Something is different between them. She seems to take him more seriously or something.

One sign of this is that she sometimes stays for longer after they have sex in his apartment.

One day, as they lie on the sofa listening to the rain intensifying on the roof-window, she asks him what he did when he first arrived in London. He tells her that he worked on the door of a strip club in Soho.

“A strip club?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know.”

“What strip club?”

“You won’t know it.”

He tells her the name. It makes her laugh. “What was that like?” she asks.

“It was okay,” he says.

She makes a face that means—That’s what you say about everything.

She asks him if he ever slept with any of the women who worked there.

“What sort of question is that?”

“Well, did you?”

“One,” he says.

“And?”

“And what?”

“What was it like?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was it good?”

“Yeah,” he says with a shrug.

She asks him what happened, exactly.

“Nothing much,” he says. They just had sex a few times and hung out together for a while. He explains that usually he didn’t interact much with the women who worked there. They didn’t take people like him very seriously, he says.

“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.

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.

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.

“Thanks,” she says.

He passes her an ashtray.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Maybe I should get a new job,” he says.

“No,” she says, as he knew she would. “I don’t want you to do that.”

In the morning she leaves and he stands at the open roof-window smoking a cigarette and wondering what to do.

And then her husband’s cancer comes back.

The strange thing is that on the surface nothing changes. Mr. Nyman looks tired. Otherwise he looks like he always does.

István drives him to Harley Street for some scans. It’s drizzling. The wipers are going. He drops him off and then, after finding somewhere to park, he stands in Pret, looking at the sandwiches. In the past he would have taken something like an All Day Breakfast, something with bacon in it. Now he finds himself more drawn to the vegetarian options. He has a smoothie too, one of the healthy-looking green ones.

When he picks him up afterward Mr. Nyman doesn’t say anything. He just takes his seat in the back of the Mercedes and sits there on the quilted leather, staring out the window.

“Cheyne Walk?” István asks.

“Yes,” Mr. Nyman says, his thoughts obviously elsewhere.

He says he wants to go to Ayot St. Peter and wait there for the results of the scans, which will take a few days. Helen asks if he wants her to go with him. He says he does, which surprises her. Since she doesn’t like using the helicopter, István drives them there.

It’s a tense weekend.

István hears shouting downstairs and a door slam.

Later Helen comes up to his room.

“What happened?” he asks.

“He’s losing it,” she says.

“How do you mean?”

“He’s impossible. Whatever I do is wrong. Whatever I say.”

“Well,” István says.

“He’s gone for a walk,” she says.

“It’s raining.”

“That’s what I told him.” She sits down on István’s bed. “I should have stayed in London,” she says.

He shrugs.

“I just annoy him,” she says. “I think it was one of those situations where I wanted to do the right thing by offering to come here, and he wanted to do the right thing by saying yes, but actually I didn’t want to come here and he doesn’t want me to be here.”

István grunts.

He shakes a cigarette loose from the packet.

The rain is ticking at the window. Outside, the hill on the other side of the lake is only half-visible.

“Do you want me to give you a blow job?” she asks.

He defers, for a moment, putting the cigarette in his mouth. “Seriously?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Okay,” he says.

On Monday morning there’s an unexpected phone call. Afterward the house is ominously quiet. Helen tells István that it was the doctor with bad news—the tumor is more advanced than they thought it was. It has already spread into the peritoneum, she says, and possibly further.

“What is the peritoneum?” István asks.

“Sort of the intestinal wall,” she says. “I’m not sure exactly. They want to operate as soon as possible though.”

“So we’re going back to London today?”

“Yes,” she says.

When her husband had the previous tumor removed, a few years earlier, the operation was done at a private hospital in Germany.

He says he wants to have this operation there as well.

“Are you sure?” she asks him as they drive back to London.

“Yes,” he says.

She says it might be simpler and quicker if he had it done in London.

“I want to have it done at Bad Trissl,” he says. “Why do you always have to argue with me about everything?”

“I’m not arguing.”

“Yes you are.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are. I want to have it done at Bad Trissl.”

“Okay,” she says. “If that’s what you want. Fine.”

“I understand why,” she says to István later. “Last time they operated, and everything was okay afterward. He wants that to happen again, in exactly the same way.”

“Sure.”

“He wants the same room in the hospital, the same doctor, everything.”

“Is that possible?”

“I don’t know.”

The arrangements are made and only a day or two later István drives him to Farnborough for his flight to Munich.

Helen stays in London for a few more days, until Thomas’s half-term starts. Then she and István pick him up from his boarding school.

“Daddy’s cancer has come back,” she says to him.

“Okay,” he says after a few moments.

“Yes,” she says, looking sad.

“Will he be okay?”

“The doctors think so,” she says.

“When did it come back?” Thomas asks.

“He got the results about a week ago,” she says.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to tell you on the phone,” she says.

“Why didn’t he tell me himself?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe he was embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?”

“Yes.”

“Embarrassed?” Thomas says again.

“Yes. People are embarrassed to be sick sometimes, darling,” she says.

The next day they fly to Germany to be with him when he has the operation. István drives them to London City Airport. Thomas wears headphones and stares out the window and doesn’t say anything. Helen speaks to her husband’s sister Mathilde on the phone.

“Aunt Mathilde says hi,” she says to Thomas when she has finished.

“Okay,” he says.

“She says she’s thinking of us.”

“Okay,” Thomas says.

István takes the suitcases—there are four, which seems a lot since they are only going to be away for a few days—to the Lufthansa Business Class check-in desk. Helen hands over her and Thomas’s passports to the man there.

“Okay,” she says, when the luggage is checked in.

“Okay,” István echoes.

She puts the passports into her handbag. “We’ll be back on Sunday,” she says, speaking to him as if he were just the driver. “I’ll let you know what time.”

“I hope it goes okay,” he says.

“I’m sure it will,” she says.

That evening she phones him from the Kempinski Vier Jahreszeiten hotel in Munich.

“I know this is weird,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says.

“This whole situation.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Me?”

She waits for him to say something.

“Sure,” he says. “You?”

“Yes, I’m okay,” she says.

She returns to England on the Sunday to take Thomas back to school and then two days later she flies back to Germany herself.

A few weeks pass, which she mostly spends in Germany.

Sometimes she appears in London for a few days and then disappears again.

When she’s in London she and István don’t see much of each other.

He doesn’t ask her questions about what’s happening.

For a while they almost sort of lose touch.

One morning she phones him from Munich and asks him to pick her up from London City that afternoon.

As he drives her to Cheyne Walk he asks her how things are and she tells him that the doctors in Germany want to do another operation, that the first one wasn’t entirely successful.

“Okay,” he says.

“They didn’t get all of it or something,” she says. “Or it seems there’s still something there anyway. They say they have to totally remove most of his lower intestine.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” István says.

“Yes,” she says.

He’s slightly surprised how upset she is.

It has always seemed to him that she had no significant feelings for her husband, that if she ever loved him she didn’t anymore.

She has said as much herself, more than once.

The thing is, it’s not as simple as that, he thinks.

Whatever word she wanted to use for it, or not use, there obviously was a significant emotional attachment there.

It was naive of him to think that it might be otherwise.

He seems to be the last person she wants to talk to about it though.

She has lunch with her friend the artist.

“Are you okay?” he asks her when he picks her up afterward at the River Café.

“Yes,” she says.

“Sure?”

“Yes,” she says again, wiping her eyes.

“If you want to talk to me,” he says.

“I don’t,” she says.

“Okay,” he says.

They drive back to Cheyne Walk in silence.

The next day she flies to Germany again, and there’s something so stiff and distant about the way they part at the airport that driving back into London he wonders if this is it, if the whole of the last year has just been a waste of time.

That evening, though, she phones him. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

“For being such a cunt.”

After a few seconds he says, “Don’t worry about it.”

“This is really difficult for me,” she says. “This whole situation.”

“I know,” he says. “Obviously.”

“I feel very guilty,” she says.

“About what?”

“About everything.”

“You shouldn’t,” he says.

“Why not?”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.”

They talk for another twenty minutes.

Even so, he’s still far from sure where things stand, to the extent that he wonders whether some of the things she said on the phone might have been her way of ending it, or of starting to end it.

And then the next day she sends him some naked pictures of herself taken in the hotel room in Munich. He studies them. It’s been a few months since he’s seen her naked, which makes them more interesting. They’re tasteful soft porn. An open bathrobe, things like that.

He Facebook messages her. Thanks for the pictures

She messages back almost immediately. That’s ok

I like them

:)

What have you been up to?

Went to see Karl

How is he?

Ok

How’s the hotel?

Ok

It looks nice

Why don’t you join me here?

There’s a delay this time, before he messages back.

During the delay something else arrives from her—I’d like that

He has already typed Yeah? in response to the last thing, he just hasn’t sent it yet.

He hesitates, and then sends it anyway, even though it means something slightly different now.

Lufthansa Business Class from London City to Munich just involves having an empty seat next to you and being served a meal you don’t really want. Still, it makes him feel sort of important to be in that part of the plane. And the feeling of importance is prolonged by the sight, at Arrivals, of a man in a suit holding up a sheet of paper with his name printed on it.

“You’re here for the conference?” the man asks, when they’re on the highway.

“Sorry?”

“The security conference.”

“Yeah,” István says, not sure what the man is talking about.

The man tells him that the drive might take longer than usual because of road closures to do with the conference.

“Okay,” István says.

They don’t speak again until they arrive at the hotel.

When they do, István isn’t sure if he needs to pay the man or not. It seems not. The man simply wishes him a pleasant stay in Munich and István thanks him and follows a porter, who already has his suitcase, into the lobby.

Another porter accompanies him up to the room.

When the porter has left, István snoops around a bit. That’s how it feels, like he’s snooping. Like this isn’t his own room that he’s in. It’s partly the silence, which seems unnaturally pure, and the way that everything is so perfectly arranged and undisturbed. He looks into the bathroom, and opens the minibar. He holds aside the net curtain and checks the view from the window—a neat courtyard overlooked by many other windows like his own. In one cupboard there’s a Nespresso machine. In another some wooden hangers, one of which has a bathrobe on it.

He turns to the room again.

Imposing lamps flank the bed, and one whole wall, strikingly, looks like a detail from an eighteenth-century painting or tapestry, massively blown up—an enigmatically smiling woman in a tall white wig.

He takes off his shoes and tries the mattress, and while he’s lying there he phones her.

“You’re here?” she says.

“I’m here. I tried you from the airport.”

“I was asleep,” she says. “Sorry. Everything okay?”

“Very nice. Thank you.”

“What are you doing?”

“Not much. I just arrived.”

She asks him if he wants to come to her room.

“Okay,” he says.

She tells him the room number and he puts the phone down.

He lies there for another minute or two against the pillows, looking at the ceiling, which is discreetly studded with smoke detectors and other things, and wondering what will happen now. He’s not sure what to expect, after the last few months.

It also feels strange to meet her in a place like this. It feels very much like her world, a world from which he has always been excluded until now.

He takes the elevator up. She’s on the top floor.

After opening the door of her room, she just looks at him for a few seconds.

“What?” he says.

“Nothing. I’m just looking at you.”

When she asks him how he is, he shrugs. “Okay. You?”

“As you see.”

He’s not sure what she means. Maybe that she looks tired, is wearing tracksuit trousers and a T-shirt and socks that are falling off and no makeup.

“I know I look shit,” she says.

“You don’t look shit,” he says.

She seems to have some sort of enormous suite. There’s an eight-seater dining table. A marble fireplace. Various arrangements of sofas and other furniture.

“Is that your terrace?” he asks.

“M-hm.”

He slides open the glass door and steps out.

It’s a mild, gray day.

She follows him onto the terrace. There’s some furniture out there, a plastic-wicker sofa and some matching chairs around a low table.

“Nice,” he says.

“It’s okay.”

“So,” he says. “What now?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?” she asks.

“Do?” He’s lighting a cigarette.

“Yes.”

“What am I here to do?” he asks.

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Support me?”

“Support you?”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Okay.”

The terrace is quite high up. There’s a faint sound of traffic from somewhere out of sight.

“Do you want to go out somewhere?” she asks.

“I don’t know. What is there?”

“In Munich?”

He nods.

“You mean to do?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Like sightseeing?”

“For instance.”

“Not much,” she says. “It’s not that kind of place.”

He looks around, seeing if any windows have obvious sightlines onto the terrace. None seem to. It’s mostly lower roofs around them.

“You could sunbathe naked here,” he says.

She laughs. “In this weather?”

“In summer.”

“Is your room okay?” she asks.

“It’s very nice.”

“I had to beg them to give it to me,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“There’s this conference on.”

“The security conference?”

“Yes,” she says, perhaps surprised that he knows about it. “The hotel’s full of NATO people or whatever.”

He tells her that the man who drove him from the airport asked him if he was there for it.

“What did you say?”

“I said I was.”

She laughs at that. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

He sits on the plastic-wicker sofa.

She’s standing in front of him.

He looks up at her, having to squint despite the fact that it’s overcast. He even shields his eyes with his hand for a moment. It’s not warm out there and her nipples have appeared through the fabric of the T-shirt.

“So there’s not a lot to do?” he says.

“No,” she says.

“So what have you been doing?”

“Not much.”

There’s a silence and then she says, “Want to see the bathroom? It’s quite amazing.”

“Sure,” he says.

They have sex in the bathroom, just sort of anyhow, still half-dressed on the warm marble. It’s over in about two minutes and then they lie in the enormous oval tub with their heads at opposite ends. The tub is in the middle of the floor, its exterior finished in the same smoke-veined white marble as everything else there. They spend nearly an hour in it, their legs intertwined under the greenish water, or lying heavily on each other’s slippery torsos.

Her small pink foot is next to his face.

If he shuts one eye it seems to be next to her head, at the far end of the tub.

He half-sits to let in more hot.

“Are you hungry?” she asks.

“Starting to be.”

“Should we order something?”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want to go out,” she says.

“No,” he agrees.

They order some food up to the suite and watch the stupidly huge TV. After hopping around for a while, they end up with what seems to be the German version of Strictly. It’s easy to follow, and amazing how quickly allegiances form. Within twenty minutes it feels as if they’ve always been emotionally involved in the lives of these people, as if they’ve always wanted some of them to succeed and some of them to fail.

They laugh at them too, of course. Just the fact that they’re speaking German seems funny when everything else is so familiar from the English version. There seems to be a contradiction, she says, between the German language as they experience it and light entertainment formats. Certainly the fact that everyone is speaking German makes the sequined costumes seem even more camp.

The doorbell of the suite sounds.

István, in one of the hotel dressing gowns—it’s made of a heavy quilted material the color of bronze—opens the door and the man pushes the cart into the room.

When he starts to unload it onto the table, István says, “No, it’s okay, just leave it.”

He signs for it and hands the man the ten-euro note that Helen took from her purse for the tip.

The man thanks him.

“No worries,” István says.

The man withdraws, and István wheels the cart over to the sofa facing the TV and lifts the metal covers from the plates.

“Thanks,” she says.

It’s dark outside by then.

After eating he smokes a cigarette on the terrace.

When he steps back inside she asks him if he wants to stay the night.

“Is that okay?” he asks.

“Yes, it’s okay,” she says.

It’s the first time that he’s ever slept in her bed.

The next morning they have breakfast at Café Luitpold, which is about a ten-minute walk away, on the other side of the Hofgarten.

She says she discovered it during the weeks she was there on her own.

While they wait for their food, he asks how her husband is. It’s the first time that either of them has mentioned him.

“He’s okay,” she says.

And then she says, “No, actually he’s not okay.”

“No?”

“No.”

“The operation?” István asks.

“It was last week.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Was it successful?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s too early to say. It’s not just that though.”

“What is it?” he asks.

For a while she doesn’t say anything.

She has a sip of her coffee.

“He’s just very depressed,” she says. “That’s what’s hardest to deal with in a way, the way the physical difficulties lead to emotional difficulties, and there just seems to be no way out of it.”

“Yeah,” István says.

“The whole situation is just awful.”

He nods.

She visits her husband most days. The hospital isn’t actually in Munich. It’s in another town, about eighty kilometers away.

István drives her there, in an Audi that they hire. First they take the highway east out of Munich, and then switch to another one, going south with the mountains straight ahead of them now. Sometimes the mountains dissolve in shafts of sunlight. Sometimes they stand dark and solid against the sky. They drive toward them and ten minutes later they’re nearly there. Soon after the exit there are signs for Onkologisches Kompetenzzentrum Bad Trissl.

István parks, and they walk across the asphalt to the entrance.

While she’s upstairs he sits on one of the leather sofas in the lobby looking at things on his phone.

She usually spends about an hour up there.

They usually drive back to Munich in silence and usually arrive at around dusk.

At first he leaves his things in his own room in the hotel. Slowly, though, they start to migrate and within a week most of his clothes are in her cupboards and his washbag and shaving kit, his toothbrush and his skincare products, are on the smoke-veined white marble next to one of the sinks in her bathroom.

The doctor tells her that they plan to start the chemotherapy as soon as her husband has recovered from the surgery, which has left him extremely weak. He says there’s no way that the surgery alone will stop the cancer.

“Okay,” she says. As a response to what the doctor has just said, it feels insufficient. She doesn’t know what else to say though.

The doctor says, “I’m not sure how to put this.”

She looks at him, waiting.

“I’m a bit worried about your husband’s attitude.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“The will to fight is very important,” the doctor says.

“Yes,” she says.

“You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe if you could talk to him,” the doctor says.

“Okay,” she says.

“You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” the doctor says.

She tells István what the doctor said to her. They’re driving back to Munich. The snow that fell a few days ago still looks faintly luminous up on the mountains even though it’s already dark on the highway.

“Are you going to talk to him?” he asks her.

“And say what?”

“I don’t know.”

“He seemed really pessimistic,” she says.

“The doctor?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say exactly?”

“It wasn’t what he said so much. It was his whole demeanor or whatever. I think he thinks Karl’s going to die.”

“He’d tell you if he thought that.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” she says.

He wonders whether to ask her about the money, what happens to it if her husband dies.

He doesn’t.

She’s in tears.

“You okay?”

She shakes her head. He feels her do it. It’s too dark to see.

He holds her for a while, feeling the wetness of her tears on his shoulder.

“What is it?” he says.

“He’s going to die,” she says.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“We don’t know.”

“I know.”

“Shh.”

His head hurts. He has no idea what time it is. His eyes are open, though the darkness is so solid around them that it makes no difference.

“It’s my fault,” she says.

“No it isn’t.”

“Yes it is.”

“Why do you say that?”

While he waits for her to answer he nearly falls asleep again.

He’s not sure if she has answered or not.

She might have answered. He might have been asleep when she did. He might have fallen asleep and woken up again without even noticing.

She seems to be asleep now.

He slides his arm out from under her neck.

He feels very awake himself suddenly.

He slips out of the bed and feels his way to the door and through the sitting room, where there’s enough light to make things out, to the terrace.

He stands on the terrace smoking a cigarette and listening to the faint sound of the traffic from somewhere far below.

Thinking about death makes everything seem sad because it makes everything seem unimportant, at least for a moment.

Once, when she was telling him how she often didn’t know what to say to her husband when she went to visit him, she asked him what he would want her to say to him if he was in her husband’s position.

“I don’t know,” he said, honestly enough.

He found it hard to imagine himself in her husband’s position.

To actually imagine it.

What it would actually be like.

Would he want people to ignore the illness, and talk about other things?

Or would he want them to talk about the illness?

Or would it not make any difference what they said?

The way he imagines it, more than anything else he would perhaps feel very lonely—he would feel that he was facing this thing on his own, and that whatever anyone else said, or didn’t say, the fact would remain that they weren’t facing it, and he was.

The next morning they wake up later than usual and lie in bed talking. They talk about the situation with her husband. She seems more phlegmatic about it now.

“I’m sorry about last night,” she says.

“Why?”

“For being so…”

He waits.

“You know. Hysterical or whatever.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “Obviously.”

He wonders whether to ask her what she meant when she said it was her fault. Partly just what was her fault?

He doesn’t.

Still naked he walks to the window and peels back the heavy curtain.

“What’s it like?” she asks.

“Sort of grayish.”

She yawns.

He pushes on the Nespresso machine in the cupboard.

The lights flash.

“What should we do today?” he asks.

“I feel very guilty,” she says.

“What about?” he asks, after a silence, still looking at the flashing lights on the Nespresso machine.

“What do you think?”

“Us doing this?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t seem to feel guilty about it before.”

“No,” she agrees.

“So?”

“I feel I owe him something more now,” she says.

“Okay.”

“Or I don’t know,” she says. “I feel I owe you something as well. It’s very difficult.”

“What do you owe me?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“You once said to me that you didn’t love him,” he says to her. “I don’t think that’s true. I think you do.”

“Yes,” she says. “In a way. You understand.”

“Of course.”

“You spend so many years with someone.”

“Yes.”

“They become part of your life.”

“Yes.”

“Part of who you are.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know if it’s love,” she says.

“Does it matter?” he asks.

“Does what matter?”

“Does it matter what word you use?”

“No. I don’t know. Maybe.”

She’s in the bath.

He’s standing a few meters away, shaving at one of the sinks.

There’s the scraping of the razor, and sometimes the sound of her moving in the water.

She says that her husband’s family—his sister Mathilde for instance—all thought that she “only” married him for his money. What they didn’t seem to understand, she says, is how hard it is to say how much the money is or ever was a factor in the situation. While it seems undeniable to her that she may not have found her husband as attractive if he had been anything other than very wealthy, she nevertheless did find him attractive, and she did think that she was in love with him. It was not, in other words, that she found him unattractive and was only interested in the money. It was never as simple as that. It was that the money, insomuch as it was a factor, will have operated by making her find him actually more attractive as a person than she otherwise would have done, though to what exact degree of difference is obviously impossible to say, so that to even ask the question seems pointless, especially since those sorts of uncertainties, to do with what exactly it is that draws us to another person, in the end surely characterize every decision of that kind, every decision about who we spend our lives with.

There’s a spa in the hotel that they sometimes use.

There’s a nice pool.

Next to the pool there are indoor lounge chairs with views of the gray Munich skyline. It’s a strange feeling to lie there in swimming things with the cold March day just on the other side of the glass.

There are saunas.

“I can’t get used to these naked saunas here,” she says. “I mean, call me a prude but I find it a bit weird to sit there naked with total strangers.”

“You’re embarrassed?”

“What?”

“You’re embarrassed that they see you naked?”

“It’s not just that. I don’t want to have to look at them. I don’t want to have to look at their shriveled little dicks. I don’t want to have to look at their saggy tits.”

“Then shut your eyes.”

“Shut my eyes? That would make it even worse—to be sitting there naked surrounded by naked strangers with my eyes shut? No thank you. I’m surprised how many of the men wax,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you like it?”

“Would you ever do it?”

“I used to sometimes,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“When I worked out.”

“Yeah?”

“It was sort of part of the culture,” he says.

“Why?”

“Why?” He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“To make your dicks look bigger?” She’s smiling at him.

“Does it do that?”

“Yeah, a bit.”

“You’ve noticed that, have you?”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that,” she says.

Which leads to a conversation about the extent to which, in the sauna, they look.

He admits that he does as well. What he doesn’t tell her is that if he finds the sauna mildly arousing, it’s only minimally to do with the fact that there are other naked women there. Partly it’s that he finds it arousing to be naked himself in front of strangers. What most excites him, though, is to see her naked in front of other people. He’s not sure what that’s about, why that turns him on quite so much. He thinks maybe it’s something to do with the fact that she seems, naked in the sauna, in front of other people, to be somehow more naked than it’s possible for her to be now when it’s just the two of them, so that he often finds himself thinking about it later, sort of drawing on the memory of it for an extra lift of arousal when they’re actually having sex.

She speaks to her son, Thomas, on the phone.

“No, he’s still in the hospital,” she says.

István is lying on one of the sofas, looking at a Champions League match on the muted TV.

“No, it’s not good,” she says. Her voice, when she speaks to Thomas, is noticeably different from how it is at other times—softer, and at the same time more sure of itself. “I don’t know,” she says. “They’re going to start the chemo soon. The doctor says we just have to wait and see.”

When she has finished speaking to him she says, in her normal voice, that she needs a drink, and they go downstairs to the Jahreszeiten bar and have gin and tonics.

“He’s coming for a visit this weekend,” she says.

“Okay,” István says.

Thomas arrives on Friday evening. He’s taller than his mother now. He has a room next to hers in the hotel and while he’s there István sleeps in his own room a few floors down.

It’s a strange feeling, though not particularly an unpleasant one, to sleep alone for two nights in that much smaller room.

More unpleasant is the way that in front of her son Helen talks to him as if he’s just the driver. It’s not surprising that she should do that. What else would she do? What is surprising is how it makes him feel now. In London, where it went on all the time, he was used to it and it didn’t affect him. Now it does. She picks up on that. Late on Friday night she phones him in his room. She and Thomas had dinner together somewhere. “I know this is weird,” she says.

“Yeah,” he agrees.

“This whole situation.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Me?”

She waits for him to say something.

“Sure,” he says. “You?”

“Yes, I’m okay,” she says. “I’ve just had a bath.”

“Okay,” he says.

“And now I’m lying on my bed, thinking of you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Okay.”

“I’m naked,” she says.

“Okay.”

“And I’m imagining that you’re here with me.”

“Yeah?”

“Mm.”

“Okay.”

“Mm,” she says again.

He wonders if she’s actually doing what it sounds like she is.

He’s not sure what to do himself. This is the first time anything like this has happened.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Me?”

“Mm.”

“Uh.”

“Are you hard?”

“Yeah actually.”

“I wish I had it in my mouth.”

“That would be nice.”

“Mm.”

Although there’s just silence when she’s not speaking, something about the intensity of it is suggestive.

“What are you doing?” he asks, after a while.

“What am I doing?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m trying to come,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Aroused by the thought of her doing that, he starts to do the same.

Minutes pass without anything being said, though the phone, on loudspeaker, is next to where he’s sitting.

Maybe he makes an audible gasp.

“Did you come?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says, panting slightly. “You?”

“Not yet,” she says.

He sits there for another minute or two, wondering whether he should say anything to help her. Then, in a strangled voice, she says, “I’m coming.” There’s a note of panic to it, as if she’s about to be swept away by a flood or something. Then a small shout, and then silence again, although the silence has a different quality now.

The next morning he drives them to the hospital.

She sits in the back with Thomas and they sometimes talk during the hour-long journey. There are also long stretches when they don’t.

Thomas looks out the window at the distant mountains with an expression on his face that seems simultaneously worried and bored.

“I don’t want you to worry,” she says.

“I’m not worried,” he says.

“These are the best doctors in the world,” she tells him.

“I know,” he says, as if it had never occurred to him that they might not be.

“So tell me more about school,” she asks him, some time later.

“It’s okay,” he says.

It seems that he’s involved in some sort of school play and they talk about that for a while.

“So what’s your part?” she asks him.

“Horatio,” he says.

“That’s great,” she says.

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not an important part,” he says.

“Sure it is,” she says.

At the hospital they’re upstairs for less than half an hour.

István, looking at things on his phone in the lobby, is surprised to see them emerge from the elevator again so soon.

They drive back to Munich in silence, with Thomas wearing his Bose headphones now.

“What are you listening to?” his mother asks him.

He lifts one side of the headphones.

“What are you listening to?” she asks again.

“You wouldn’t know it,” he says.

She takes him shopping in the afternoon and the two of them have dinner together in the hotel restaurant, which she tells him has a Michelin star.

The next morning István drives them to the airport. Thomas’s flight is at about noon. On the way he asks his mother how much longer she’ll be staying in Munich.

“I don’t know, darling,” she says. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

István stands at a discreet distance while she hugs her son at security. She squeezes him for what feels like a very long time. She has tears in her eyes. Thomas has tears in his eyes as well.

“It will be okay,” she says to him.

He just nods.

They wait until he’s out of sight—it’s only a minute, he’s in the priority queue—and then walk back to the Audi.

For a long time neither of them speaks.

“He asked me why you were here,” Helen finally says, as they drive back into Munich, with her sitting next to him in the front now.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said I needed you,” she says.

“And what did he say?”

“He said for what?”

“And what did you say?”

“I said to drive me to the hospital. And he said is that all? And I said yes.”

“He said is that all?”

“Yes.”

There’s a minute of silence. Then he says, “You didn’t spend long upstairs at the hospital yesterday.”

“No,” she says.

“Was it okay?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” she says again.

“Why not? What happened?”

“It was awful actually,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She doesn’t talk much for the rest of the drive into Munich.

Later though, while they’re having lunch, she says, obviously still preoccupied with what happened, “Tommy isn’t the son that Karl wanted. I’m not saying he doesn’t love him. In some way I’m sure he does. He finds it hard to be proud of him though. And Tommy feels that, of course.”

“Sure.”

“They’re just so different,” she says. “Karl doesn’t understand him.”

“No.”

“He doesn’t understand Tommy’s sensitivity. He’s disappointed in him. Karl is, I mean.”

“Okay.”

After a while she makes an effort to talk about other things. Her son seems to be all that she’s able to think about though, and the whole afternoon she keeps coming back to him until István wishes that she would stop.

She says she’s worried that he isn’t happy at his new school, that he’s much more affected by his father’s illness than he lets on, that he’s shutting himself off from her. “We used to be so close,” she says.

Finally she seems exhausted by the subject herself and says she wants to drink gin and tonics in the Jahreszeiten bar.

In the morning he has a hangover, and memories of the sort of drunk sex that starts unusually vigorously but then just sort of stops.

“How do you feel?” she asks. She’s more used to this sort of thing than he is. Even so, she looks pale and fragile.

They had four or five gin and tonics and no supper.

“Okay,” he says.

He has a very long shower and then, wearing sunglasses even though it’s not sunny, they walk across the Hofgarten to the Luitpold.

They have cappuccinos.

After a while he feels slightly more normal.

“You okay?” he asks, taking the last of the cappuccino foam with a small spoon.

She understands what he means.

“Yes,” she says.

It’s raining now and they don’t have an umbrella so they just stay there.

He looks at the cakes under the curved glass and points to one, a pear tart. The man with the tongs puts it on a plate.

István eats about half of it and then pushes the plate toward her.

“How is it?” she asks.

“It’s delicious,” he says.

Outside the rain is falling even more heavily. The florist next door has covered her sidewalk display with a plastic sheet.

“What should we do?” she asks.

“The BMW Museum?”

She laughs.

It’s become a joke between them—that he wants to go to the BMW Museum and she doesn’t, and also that whenever it’s raining and they have nothing else to do he suggests it.

Since then, joking apart, he’s been planning to go on his own one day. Now he says that maybe he’ll do that this morning.

“And what am I supposed to do?” she says.

“Whatever,” he says. “I don’t know.”

“Thanks.”

“Come with me?”

“Seriously? No thank you.”

“Why not?”

She makes a face.

“Why not?” he says again.

They take a taxi, an old cream-colored Mercedes. The long, straight streets look bleak in the rain as the taxi’s wipers squeak and its dispatching radio fizzes and blurts. They’re traveling through parts of the city that they’ve never seen before—sparse, gray, and modern. It takes twenty minutes to get there. When they arrive she pays the driver and they get out into what seems to be a grimly futuristic landscape. The departure of the taxi leaves them feeling marooned among noisy roads. Strange towers loom at various distances in the rain and more immediately there’s a large bowl-shaped structure, apparently made of brushed aluminium, which is the BMW Museum.

Inside the self-conscious modernity feels less alienating, and it is at least warm and dry. She pays for the tickets and then they proceed up a wide ramp into something like a history of the twentieth century told in the form of BMWs.

“I didn’t know BMW made planes,” she says as they start up the ramp. The first displays are mainly old photos of aircraft.

“Only the engines,” István says.

“Okay.”

He explains that the famous logo is a sort of stylized propeller, in the blue and white of Bavaria. It was only after the First World War, he says, at a time when Germany wasn’t allowed to have an aircraft industry, that the company turned first to motorcycles and then cars.

“You already knew all this, did you?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

They proceed up the ramp.

The whole place has a strangely peaceful atmosphere. It’s quite pleasant to stroll along and observe the passage of time expressed in the slowly changing forms and colors of the cars.

The silver of the 1950s.

The bright orange of the ’60s.

The beige of the ’70s.

The white of the ’80s.

And so up and up to the display of electric vehicles at the end.

They stop, sometimes, to read the text that accompanies the exhibits.

Often they stop at the same text and read it together in silence, and then take a second look at the vehicle in question, and then move on without saying anything.

From the summit a long escalator takes them down again and they are reunited with their coats.

“What now?” she says when they emerge into the bleakly monumental landscape and the ongoing rain.

There are no taxis in evidence anywhere.

She wonders if they should go back in and ask somebody to call one for them.

Instead he suggests they take the U-bahn.

She looks doubtful. “Yeah?”

“Why not?”

“Okay,” she says, after thinking about it for a moment. “Why not?”

There’s a station a few hundred meters away, where the various buildings of the BMW estate turn into the equally vast but visibly older structures of the Olympic Park. The station is marked by an elevated U high above the noisy road that they’re walking along. It’s also the terminus of the line, which makes it easy for them to know what to do. They board a train that’s already there and as they sit on the orange plastic seats waiting for it to leave he wonders how long it’s been since she’s traveled like this. Although her own family were ordinary middle class, she has been married to her husband for more than fifteen years and it seems unlikely that she’s made much use of public transport in that time. Not that she looks out of place or anything—she’s wearing skinny jeans, Ugg boots with tidemarks from the snow, a puffer coat. She looks perfectly normal, except for the way she’s peering around at things with at least as much interest as she did in the museum.

She sees him looking at her and probably guesses what he’s thinking.

“What?” she says.

“Nothing,” he says.

More self-conscious now, she just stares at her own reflection in the window opposite her, like everyone else.

There’s an alarm sound and the doors slam shut.

“I think we need to get off at Odeonsplatz,” he says as the train starts to move, leaning toward her so that she can hear him over its noise.

“Okay,” she says.

It’s half a dozen stops, and when they arrive at the surface they immediately know where they are—at the corner of the Hofgarten, not far from the Luitpold.

“Okay,” she says.

“What should we do for lunch?” he asks.

“I don’t know. The Italian place?” she suggests.

They sit at their usual table at the Italian place, the one near the front, and she tells the waiter, who knows them, that she’ll have what she usually does.

“The same,” István says to the waiter, who’s pouring fizzy water.

The waiter nods and moves away.

Weeks pass.

Spring arrives in the Hofgarten.

Her husband’s sister Mathilde visits him at the hospital and after that has lunch with her in the hotel restaurant with the Michelin star.

“How did you find him?” Helen asks her.

“I was shocked,” Mathilde says. “Frankly.”

“He’s better this week,” Helen says. “Last week it was like he wasn’t there.”

“It was still a bit like that,” Mathilde says.

“It was worse last week,” Helen says.

Mathilde sighs. “What do the doctors say?”

“They don’t say anything.”

Helen picks at her Caesar salad, aware that she doesn’t look very presentable.

“And how are you?” Mathilde asks her. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m okay.”

“You need to look after yourself.”

“I know.”

“You mustn’t let yourself go.”

“I know,” Helen says.

“It must be hard for you, to be here on your own.”

“István’s here with me.”

“István?”

“Our security driver.”

“Okay,” Mathilde says, possibly sounding surprised that his presence is enough for Helen to suggest that she’s not there “on her own” in the sense that Mathilde obviously meant.

They talk about other things.

Mathilde does most of the talking.

They’ve always had this slightly awkward way of dealing with each other. Though there’s a sort of formal equality between them, as sisters-in-law, Mathilde is of course a generation older and has always treated Helen more like a younger family member, like a niece or something, than as an actual equal.

There has always been a subtle element of pity there too, as if there was something inherently pitiable about Helen’s being married to a man so much older than she is.

And then again the pity has always been undercut by a suspicion that Helen was only ever interested in Karl for his money.

And naturally Helen has always resented both the pity and the suspicion.

It’s a warm spring day and the glass front of the restaurant has been folded open so that at their table it’s almost like being outside.

When the wind blows, which it sometimes does, it rattles the menu cards in their holder.

Mathilde is talking about something else now, about some opera that she saw in Munich once.

Helen nods, pretending to be more interested than she is. Unlike Mathilde, who has a Coke Zero, she’s drinking wine, and while Mathilde speaks, she wonders if she should order another. If Mathilde wasn’t there she probably wouldn’t. She wants another one partly just because Mathilde is there, and she’s having to listen to her and talk to her, and the wine makes doing that less difficult, and yet the fact that Mathilde is there is also inhibiting her from having another one because she doesn’t want her to think that she’s an alcoholic.

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.