FIVE
But I must leave Sophia and her new friend to convey the news to you the reader - news you are receiving before even Sophia received it, given that she had more important matters to attend to than her mobile phone - that, little more than a month after returning to England, she would be on a plane to the group's headquarters in Tokyo. She would be part of a sizable UK delegation (numbers had not yet been confirmed, but there were likely to be 12 at the least) for what had once been a biennial event, but one which for one reason or another hadn't been held for nearly seven.
When she told husband Peter about the nine-day trip, after she had returned to her riverside home in leafy Barnes, seeing how exhausted she was, he expressed concern that her workload might catch up with her one day, if she wasn't careful to maintain a healthy work-life balance. He knew the type of dedication she brought to her work and especially to seeing that the needs of her clients, especially the high-net-worth ones, were fully met. He could see that she had been unstinting with her time and energy on the short German trip, and was naturally worried that she would overdo things on a longer trip to the Land of the Rising Sun in her desire to please her bosses on their home turf.
Meanwhile, Sophia could be certain that Peter had not let the grass grow under his feet during her absence. In her absence, it was a given that the children's Czech nanny, Myška, would have been sharing his (her!) bed when given a pink slip by her Hungarian flatmate and lover Piri. Indeed, based on past experience, Piri had possibly joined the party, and - who knows? - maybe brought along some of her Bohemian friends. Peter certainly seemed pretty chipper. But then he
never
looked or seemed tired. He might be out half the night with his mates or on the job all night with his stable of female admirers, but you would never know it. He'd just sleep it off the next couple of nights and everything would be as right as rain. Sophia sometimes wondered if he actually worried about
anything
.
That night in bed, after Sophia had caught up with news about the children (Ollie, six, and Chloe, four and a half), Peter asked her probing questions about her Frankfurt trip. Before she left, she told him that she would be going to the Frankfurt Opera, but he hadn't bought it then and he wasn't buying it now. As it happened, tickets had been bought and bank people had gone to see
Manon Lescaut
, but of course Sophia was not among them. Sensing, like sleep-deprived POWs facing lengthy interrogation by the Gestapo, that resistance would be futile, Sophia admitted that she had passed up a trip to the opera (which she wasn't very fond of in the first place, as Peter knew) in favour of an evening at a cabaret. (Sophia thought this sounded better than 'nightclub'.) It didn't take long for her husband to elicit the whole truth surrounding the night out. Being someone who enjoyed his vicarious pleasures as much as the next man, Peter wasn't satisfied until he had squeezed out every last detail. Being an understanding and sympathetic person too (as everyone kept reminding Sophia), he was particularly disappointed for his wife that she hadn't been able to get to know Rania a little more intimately. Maybe next time, he suggested.
Wheedling the truth about the driver Andreas out of his wife took Peter a little longer. But, as usual, his network of mates and mates' mates had already furnished him with the important details of this little tryst. (At the centre of the web was the Egyptian Seth, Peter's friend of old, who worked at the Japanese bank with Sophia and had been known to send some pretty profitable 'business' her way.) Peter seemed pretty cool with the fact that the specifications of his weaponry matched his own, and the German went right up in his estimation when Sophia recounted the hard time he had given her and the slightly sour note on which they had parted. Good for him, was Peter's verdict, much to his wife's chagrin.
Now it was time to find out what her husband had been up to while his wife was away. At first, Peter had seemed affronted that Sophia would so much as suspect that he would get up to any monkey business while she was gone, but it was really more of a ploy to turn her on than a genuine attempt on his part to pull the wool over her eyes. It all began to fall into place when Peter let it slip out in conversation that Piri's sister was visiting from Szeged in Hungary.
'Ah, I get it, a threesome with the sisters?'
'Well, not exactly.'
'You mean you took this sister out for a romantic dinner, wined and dined her and then brought her back to this bed for a quick - sorry, long - fuck?'
'Again, not exactly. Look, do you want me to tell you, or are you set on going through all the possibilities?'
'Okay, one more try. Knowing how generous, hospitable and inclusive you are, you cooked for them here and then banged all three of them before they buggered off home at dawn?'
'Did you set up hidden cameras or what?!'
'Oh, Peter, you are incorrigible. I know you're dying to tell me what happened. Go on - I'm all ears.'
And so Peter told the story of his evening with Myška, Piri and Kriszta, which I will reduce to a kind of gist to give a flavour of what was an uproarious and very special night. It all really kicked off after dinner, or perhaps I should say,
with
dinner, since Peter had prepared an authentic goulash, with imported Hungarian sweet paprika, beef lard, caraway seeds - the works. Piri had brought six bottles of the best Hungarian red wine she could lay hands on, and Myška had brought a dessert - a fabulous lemon meringue pie. Meanwhile, Kriszta hadn't been idle, preparing some traditional pogácsa pastries in a variety of flavours, including bacon and pumpkin seed, while the goulash was simmering away.
(God, Sophia thought, Peter's always been one for using food to lower the defences and get girls to drop their panties for him.)
After dinner, they had played a popular Hungarian card game called ulti, tweaking it so that there were forfeits for those who lost a certain number of hands. Yes, a bit like strip poker, in practice, Peter conceded, but more like 'Truth or Dare', in theory. Sophia could see where this was going - not that it was exactly something requiring a degree in astrophysics to predict. Peter explained that one unforeseen consequence of picking a game that was well known to three of the participants but unknown to the fourth (Peter himself) was that he had fared significantly worse than the others and had had to face several humiliating situations early in the evening.
The first was when he chose 'truth' and was asked if he had ever been thinking about another woman when making love to his wife. When he said, 'Only twice,' the others had of course pressed him to name the women. Peter had blushed - most out of character - which merely led to the chorus of voices asking him to name names to grow louder. Driven into a corner from which there was no escape, he said the two people concerned were with him in the room now. The revelation - such as it was - was received with whooping and hollering by the protagonists, but Kriszta remained strangely silent. (I can see where this is going, thought Sophia.)
'So you find me unattractive, Péter?' she finally said, addressing him, as she always did, after the Hungarian manner.