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 too. 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.flesh
In fact he doesn’t see her the next day.
