IRINA TOLD HERSELF SHE could use the constitutional, but her heels down Grove Road rang with the same self-deceit of afternoon clips into the bedroom on the pretext of stowing a pair of socks, when her real intention was to masturbate. If she was walking all the way down to Borough, chances were high that she would indulge her secret vice.
The morning’s mild late-April weather was overcast, yet she felt oddly dogged by a shadow, a darkness at her back. She’d allowed plenty of time for this adventure—the tube ride home, then a late-afternoon train to Sheffield from King’s Cross. As for the vice, though it was Saturday she’d assurance by e-mail that Lawrence was safely at a conference in Dubai. So the drag on her spirits must be the impending World final tomorrow. Ramsey had once more gotten his hopes up, and if he went down in this one, that would make eight championship finals that he’d reached and lost. He’d turned fifty last summer, and if he didn’t prevail in the 2001 he might never get a chance at that title again.
More honestly, the dread may have been of going to another snooker tournament, period—smiling idiotically beside Ramsey as the supportive little wife. It would be one thing were Ramsey ever obliged to play the supportive little husband. But aside from her sparsely populated book launch at Foyle’s last September—for which, Snake’s Head being strapped, Ramsey had bought the wine—he’d had little experience of what it felt like to be invisible.
Her attendance at tournaments was now a constant bone of contention. That first season during which he’d kept her tucked in tow Ramsey had taken more titles than in the ten years previous, culminating in making his seventh final at the Crucible. Yet the following two tours, with her company at best sporadic, his ranking had nosedived. His reduced status at Match-Makers translated into the loss of perks like limo service, and while he may not have cared much about limos in and of themselves, he did care about what they meant. Worse, dropping from the Top 16 required this giant among men to play qualifiers to gain entry to tournaments whose trophies had decorated his basement snooker hall, which was, he said, like having to ring the doorbell of your own house.
So Ramsey had concluded that Irina’s presence made all the difference, and pressured her at every turn to come along. She’d insisted that she was a woman with her own career and not his lucky rabbit’s-foot. She didn’t ever want to get bored with snooker (that was the politic formulation), and that meant only going to see him play when she felt like it (okay, basically never). Oh, his expectation that she attend the final tomorrow was more than reasonable, and it had been ungenerous of her to watch yesterday’s semi at home on TV—and “watch” only loosely speaking, since the match was really just on in the background while she e-mailed Lawrence about Dubai.
Crossing London Bridge to Borough High Street was bittersweet, passing Borough Market a sharp reminder of how little she cooked these days. But then, maybe all those pies had been a waste of time. She couldn’t say.
The instant that she slid her old key in the lock and slipped into the flat, something felt changed. The air smelt more fragrant. A saucy black beret decked the coat rack.
The living room at first glance seemed unaltered, until her eye lit indignantly on a muddy-brown Lissitzky, which had replaced the Miró. Lawrence, buy new art prints? On the table lay the Independent, a paper that he ridiculed as shrill. Where, pray tell, was the Telegraph?
Padding uneasily down the hall, Irina poked her head into her former studio, long ago converted to Lawrence’s study. Now, in the space where her drawing table once sat, was a second desk, and not of the Oxfam ilk that Irina favored but brand-new. Further reconnaissance turned up a clatter of makeup on her dresser—gaudy lipsticks that Irina herself eschewed—and in the loo, mango-blueberry shampoo.
Lawrence used Head & Shoulders.
It was in the kitchen that Irina began to frown. To her consternation, her long rows of spice jars had been reduced to a few crude standards like premixed Italian seasoning and dehydrated parsley. Some twenty popcorn seasonings, several like Old Bay and Stubb’s Barbeque Spice Rub toted from New York, had vanished wholesale. The larder had also been culled, her dark sesame paste, rose water, and pomegranate molasses replaced with soup mixes, instant gravy granules, and bottled Bolognaise. The seal was broken on Irina’s massive rainy-day jar of Spanish anchovies in olive oil; she shouldn’t betray her presence here, but the amount of self-control it took to keep from putting that big beautiful jar sternly in the refrigerator was stupendous.
Irina’s pulse accelerated. Clearly any moment now the door could open, even with Lawrence in Dubai. It would have been wise to skedaddle, but she had come all the way from the East End to bathe in the light of her old life streaming through those eight-foot windows. So instead she contrived a plausible alibi—“Terribly sorry to have startled you; I’m Lawrence’s ex, Irina, just dropping by to pick up a—pair of shoes!”—and settled into her rust-colored armchair to contemplate this revolutionary state of affairs.
Jealousy under the circumstances was preposterous. Irina was the one who’d walked out, and if Lawrence had found a hand to hold a full three and a half years later, that was not only his right but his due. Presumably this turn of events might lift the burden of guilt that still weighed heavily when she conjured his lonely life. She continued to feel responsible for Lawrence; it was always hard to slip in here and not leave broccoli in the fridge. Yet she was not so selfish as to keep Lawrence eternally at her beck for occasional cups of coffee. While she was a little hurt that he’d not seen fit to inform her of a new woman in his life, technically it was none of her business. Nevertheless, when poking about the flat she’d felt for all the world like a little bear who cries, “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” and “Who’s been eating my porridge?”
After an hour of reverie, Irina bestirred herself, and drew on her jacket. Maybe she’d be cured for good of this perverse pastime, now that Goldilocks might come barging in unannounced at any moment. Cautious to maintain her alibi all the way to the pavement, she rustled into her old wardrobe for a pair of pumps—shoved to the back, behind a line of whorish stilettos.
She scurried downstairs and pulled the front door closed. Yet at the very point that she should have been able to breathe a sigh of relief, her heart stopped.
On the curb, Ramsey stood propped against his opalescent-green Jaguar XKE, smoking a cigarette. The snapshot unerringly duplicated his appearance at her doorstep on his forty-seventh birthday—once again, leaning but perfectly straight, Ramsey himself resembled a cue stick set against the car—except that when he retrieved her for sushi that summer those cool, contemplative inhalations had been mesmerizing, while just now the same tableau made her want to throw up.
“What are you doing here?” she asked in a strangled voice.
“Funny, that. I were about to ask you the same thing.” There was no gracious ushering to the passenger seat, but a quick jerk of his head in its direction. “Get in.”
Irina hung back. “I know how this looks. But he’s not up there. I could show you.”
“Away from the table, I don’t fancy playing games. Your man hiding in the cupboard, or nipping out the back?”
“Ramsey, please! Go upstairs with me! Let me show you that no one’s there!”
“You humiliated me enough for one day, ducky, and I’ll not have this argy-bargy on the Queen’s highway. Get in.” He flipped his fag into the gutter, where it joined several other fresh butts, swung into the driver’s seat, and pushed open the passenger door. Glumly, Irina complied.
The Jaguar plowed from the curb, Ramsey’s flinty gaze trained forward. He looked torturously attractive—slender wrists extending from the leather jacket as he gripped the wheel, the facets of his face all the more chiseled for being set in rigid fury. It was always like this, when he cut himself off from her, that she longed for him, physically longed for him, and she had to stop herself from slipping her hand into the taut, hot hollow of his inner thigh. Cutting her eyes nervously toward the driver’s seat, she thought in dull helplessness, I will always want to fuck him.
Indeed, at that moment she was visited by the disconcerting vision of having gotten divorced, perhaps over the very sort of gross misunderstanding now under way in this car, and then running into her ex-husband by chance at a bar. She knew with perfect certainty that even with years of hostile impasse intervening, she would no sooner lay eyes on this gangly, achingly well-proportioned snooker player—pretending aloofness no doubt, feigning indifference to her arrival, pulling on a Gauloise and laughing collusively with his mates—than she would want to fuck him. Snugged forlornly apart in her bucket seat, Irina was reminded of one of her most dog-eared sexual fantasies, if hardly the stuff of Germaine Greer: getting down on her knees before those tall, neat black jeans and begging him, begging him please would he let her suck him off. Surely fantasies of self-abasement, while commonplace, were unhealthy, but that’s what she would do in that bar. She could see herself, perhaps not having crossed paths with the man for a decade, during which no cards, no e-mails, and no calls, falling to the floor and imploring him, would he please take it out, could she see it one more time, could she touch it and suck it and make it hard. Here all this time she’d been anxious over Betsy’s old admonishment that sexual infatuation never lasts, but no one had warned her against the equally wretched alternative whereby come what may you couldn’t get shed of the fixation, and it stuck to your fingers like tar.
“Where are we going?” she asked after several awful minutes of silence.
“Sheffield,” he said. “In case you forgot, which it seems you have done, I’m playing the championship final tomorrow.”
“But I haven’t packed a bag.” She looked at the plastic holdall in her lap, wondering how she’d explain the shoes.
“Worse things happen at sea,” he said sourly.
“I seem to recall getting it in the neck a few years back for not packing a bag.”
“Bournemouth, ducky, were a mere difference of opinion. I’ll show you getting it in the neck.”
Irina closed her eyes. “How did you know I was there?”
“I followed you, didn’t I?”
She turned to him in incredulity. “You’re supposed to be in Sheffield. You came all the way down to London to lurk outside your own door, and follow your wife, wherever she happened to be going? What if I’d been going to Safeway? Wouldn’t that have dug up a lot of dirt—scandal, she’s still buying yellow-tag vegetables! My God! Do you distrust me that much?”
“Turns out I don’t distrust you near enough.”
“It’s not easy to tail a pedestrian in a car. Are you that lazy, or did you like the challenge?”
“Look, I drive down to give you a lift up to Sheffield, so you don’t have to take the train. It’s meant to be a surprise. Just when I rock up, I see you leave the house. So I’m—curious, like.”
“You weren’t curious. You were paranoid.”
“Paranoia, darling, is fear what ain’t warranted. In this case, seems not.”
“Ramsey. I am not having an affair with Lawrence.” The assertion sat there uselessly, like the shoes in her lap, which didn’t even match her outfit.
“Just saying the same thing over and over don’t make it so.”
“I’ve only said it once. And I’m only going to say it once, too.” Irina had a sick feeling that she’d repeat herself plenty by the time this was through.
“Fair enough. What was you doing in his flat, then? Having tea?”
Irina glanced defeatedly at the shoes; she’d never fob off on Ramsey the implausible excuse she’d concocted for Goldilocks. Besides, maybe, just maybe, this was an opportunity for her husband to understand her better. “I go there … once in a while. When Lawrence won’t be home. I like to … walk around. I sit in my old chair. Sometimes I read the paper. That’s all.”
As an argumentative tool the truth was overrated. Ramsey grunted Uh-huh with disgust, as if she might have made more of an effort. “And why d’you do that, then?”
She gazed out the window. “I love you, but—sometimes I feel a tug. Of my old life. Almost as if it’s still running alongside this one. It’s not that I exactly regret leaving Lawrence, but I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like if I’d stayed. You and I have a wonderful life together. But it’s fractious, you have to admit… You’re gone for weeks, and then when you’re home we keep bizarre hours and drink too much… So there are things about life with Lawrence that I miss. The order. The simplicity. The peace. I like to visit. It connects me with my past, and makes me feel more like myself.”
“His dick in your cunt must make you feel like yourself as well.”
Irina pressed two fingers to her forehead. “As for what else I miss, Lawrence never said ugly things like that to me, ever.”
“Should have, shouldn’t he? Wasn’t you messing about with me?” “So now I’m just a slag. Because I fell in love with you.”
“You don’t exactly regret leaving Anorak Man. Now, there’s reassurance a bloke can well hold on to.” As Ramsey took out his wrath on his fellow drivers, for once Irina wasn’t relaxed by faith that his snooker skills transferred to the road. Suddenly small colored balls bore no resemblance to two-ton vehicles whatsoever.
“Look,” she said, “I know my explanation sounded strange. But you’re in the final tomorrow. For the sake of your own concentration, you have to put this aside—”
“How considerate. For my sake, I’m to sweep the fact you’re shagging another bloke right under the carpet.”
“I am being considerate, you idiot! Isn’t winning the World what you’ve worked toward since you were seven? You don’t need all this aggro! You need a nice meal, and a pleasant evening with your wife, and a good sleep.”
Alas, the harmonious scenario could not have sounded more farfetched.
“YOUR MAN,” WHISPERED IN Irina’s ear once she had hastily settled in the Crucible’s guest section, “has looked in better nick.”
She shot a sharp glance over her shoulder at Jack Lance. “He’s here, isn’t he.”
“By a whisker. You wouldn’t think, now, that a geezer with a ranking of thirty-two would play quite so fast and loose with a championship final. Had us all on tenterhooks, he did. Whiff of the prima donna, sashaying in here with thirty seconds to spare. And fancy, without even bothering to comb his hair.”
“Ramsey’s ablutions,” she said stiffly, facing forward again, “ran a little behind.”
“Had a pretty hard night of it yourself, love, from the looks of you.” Jack’s breath was hot on the nape of her neck.
“Thank you for your concern.” She hated Jack Lance. It wasn’t just that he was greasy and hated her, too. When Ramsey slipped from the Top 16, all the little gestures of flowers and champagne and room-service sushi were cut off with the same abruptness with which a smile would drop from the manager’s face. Now that, in defiance of anyone’s expectation, Ramsey Acton was back in the final, Jack was once again brownnosing up a storm, as if he hadn’t given Ramsey the bum’s rush for two solid years. Although the manager had a point—for every twenty minutes, late-comers were docked a frame—it was only thanks to Irina’s shaking and fetching and phoning, Jack, that Ramsey’s inert body wasn’t still cutting a diagonal across their hotel mattress.
Lights down. To rousing acclaim, the MC introduced Ronnie O’Sullivan: the heir apparent, the bête noire. Though the dickie-bow rule had now been relaxed, O’Sullivan had respectfully donned one anyway, along with a traditional white shirt and black waistcoat; he had traded the ponytail of his bad-boy youth for a cropped, conservative cut. After taking the cure in posh adult summer camps, he’d not even coldcocked any WSBA officials for a couple of years. Striding to his chair, at the ripe old age of twenty-five Ronnie exuded a new seriousness, his demure smile to the crowd flashing the turned leaf of a Reformed Character.
When the MC introduced his opponent, Ramsey Acton also appeared a changed man, but in the only manner that a player with a lifelong reputation for grace, sportsmanship, and stately deportment could transform: for the worse. His bow tie slanted at a seasick angle, and unfortunately a heavily starched white shirt holds not only planes but creases. Unshaven stubble glinted in the stage lights. Before locating his chair, Ramsey stood with a slight weave squinting at the crowd, as if astonished to find himself in a snooker tournament when he thought he was on the way to the launderette.
Irina put a hand to her head. The night before, he’d ordered a bottle of Remy from room service, and over her protests dialed for a second around sunrise. She’d been petrified that he’d be hungover for the final, but hadn’t thought to worry about an eventuality far more dire: that he would still be drunk.
Snooker was rife with the myth of drink, but myth it was. Even Alex Higgins, who famously performed three sheets to the wind, had never exactly benefited from not being able to see the cue ball. More, however larger-than-life the legendary Hurricane’s inebriated lurchings about the table may have sounded in recounting, at the time those sessions must have fostered in his audience only an embarrassed cringe. Ramsey himself had never bought into that bunk about booze begetting inspiration, claiming that Higgins underachieved his whole career for the very fact of playing rat-arsed.
Irina did not understand why Ramsey kept groping about his person, nor did she understand when instead of beginning the frame he shuffled over to confer with the referee. Much less did she understand when the ref announced, “Frame, Ronnie O’Sullivan,” when neither player had taken a shot.
Jack slipped out, returning to whisper furiously, “Your man forgot his chalk.”
“So?” she whispered back. “Couldn’t someone lend him some?”
“That ain’t the point. It’s a penalty. One frame. One whole bloody frame.”
Starting one down without O’Sullivan having potted a single miserable red, Ramsey took the first break-off. He clutched the rail to steady himself, and the wild stroke (“Foul, and a miss!”) failed to contact the white altogether. Previously in pin-drop form, the crowd rumbled in astonishment, drawing a stern “Settle down, please!” from the ref.
Was Ramsey’s disreputable condition all his wife’s fault? From their arrival in Sheffield Irina had tried to get it through his thick skull that for her to carry on with the very man she’d left for Ramsey would make no sense. After a triathlon of weeping and screaming and barricading in the loo, punctuated by door-rapping reprimands from hotel management and wall-pounding from next-door guests, finally he had seemed to believe her, but by then it was morning. Though he’d dressed for the final with time to spare, the arc of falling out to falling in again was still not complete, and they’d clutched into bed—hence the unkempt condition of Ramsey’s gear. She’d hoped fucking would make him feel better, but now that the results were on display before millions of BBC viewers it seemed that their desperate morning grapple had further exhausted the man. Besides, there’s a big universe out there that is beyond fault, in which whoever is to blame is of no consequence—in which all that matters is what happens.
What happened was awful.
For O’Sullivan’s part, his opponent’s reek of eighty-proof may have objectified the less estimable moments of his own career. Likewise Ramsey’s missing sitters that the poor bastard would have potted the first time he picked up a cue at age seven might have reminded Ronnie of frames he himself had thrown away in fits of petulant defeatism. Perhaps he was aghast at having a mirror held up to his younger self, or to the disheveled has-been he, too, might become on rounding fifty. In any event, the more carelessly Swish banged balls every which way except in the pockets, the more meticulously the Rocket cleaned up the mess that Ramsey had left behind. Indeed, the spectacle was gastronomic, like watching a clumsy restaurant patron litter his setting with dinner-roll crusts, and a nimble waiter arrive between courses with one of those clever scrapers to politely clear the table of every crumb.
Familiar from previous tournaments, the eight fans whose black T-shirts spelled out G-O-R-A-M-S-E-Y had ebulliently stationed themselves in a middle row at the start of the match. After the interval, the A, M, S, and E never returned. G-O-R-Y passed comment on a massacre.
When the afternoon session concluded with Ramsey whitewashed eight-nil, Irina rose from her seat only to have Jack admonish her, “Done enough damage for one day, love. You let me at him first.” She stewed just long enough for Jack to report back that “his royal highness” was refusing to open his dressing-room door. Sure enough, when Irina herself pleaded and cajoled, the lock remained bolted, the only sound from behind the clinking of glass. She retired disconsolately to their hotel room.
When she hunched back into her seat for the evening session, Jack wasn’t speaking to her, which she supposed was a blessing. While the Crucible crackled with electricity, the audience didn’t display the excitement generated by the impending grand contest between two greats of the game so much as the bawdy leering and elbow-jabbing that precedes a striptease.
Ramsey did deliver a song and dance. Since he’d been barricaded in his dressing room for hours, the fact that his hair remained wild, his chin scraggly, his clothing so crumpled that it might have been used to scrub the floor bespoke the same willful up-yours for which Alex Higgins had made a reputation twenty years before.
For that matter, Irina had seen the videos, and the antics on stage studiedly duplicated Alex’s most egregious displays of shit-faced contempt. When sitting out, Ramsey slouched with legs extended and feet splayed, his face washing with waves of boredom or annoyance. At the table, he indulged the splashy trick shots that he’d exhibited at the Ooty Club. Many of these four-and five-cushion spectaculars did indeed pot the object ball, but he’d have given no consideration to position thereafter, and the flamboyance reliably netted a single point. Rather than try to disguise his condition, Ramsey flaunted it, negotiating from table to chair with an exaggerated sway, and knocking back the liquid in his Highland Spring bottle with gasping gusto, as if it held something far more invigorating than mineral water.
While the afternoon session had been painful—fundamentally, Ramsey could not play—the evening one was mortifying. Irina had seen her husband’s game slip out of kilter; she had never seen him rude. Yet once O’Sullivan was up ten frames to nil, Ramsey grumbled something like “Poncy wanker!” Whatever he said, it drew a caution, and any more “ungentlemanly conduct” risked expulsion from the match. When O’Sullivan accomplished a remarkable break of 133, Ramsey didn’t quietly tap the edge of the table, snooker’s equivalent of tipping one’s hat, but rolled his eyes. Since O’Sullivan responded with table manners that would have wowed Amy Vanderbilt—always leaving the final black genteelly on the baize after a clearance—the two opponents had perfectly exchanged roles, as if Ramsey were ceding not only the final, but his soul. Higgins had defied the courteous conventions of the sport from arrogance; Ramsey would only defy them from self-loathing.
Of the chaps in black T-shirts, only G and O made an appearance. After the interval, they had taken their own advice and gone.
The carnival concluded, she knocked gently on Ramsey’s dressing room. This time he opened the door. He was still unkempt, but his face, ashen and lined, was somber. For all the theatrics with the Highland Spring bottle, it had surely contained no more than water.
Ramsey said nothing. He let her wrap her arms around his rumpled waistcoat, and draped his own lifelessly around her back. She put her palm to his cheek, and assured him she’d be right back; she informed the reporters outside the door that Mr. Acton was indisposed, and there would be no postsession interviews. When she returned, Ramsey was still standing motionless in his dressing room. She fetched his coat from the couch, and held it out; he stuffed his arms numbly into the sleeves. There was something sinister about the fact that on the way to the limo, as she fended off thrust microphones, Ramsey put up not a word of ritual protest that even his wife was forbidden to lay a hand on the lovely Denise. But had she not remembered to pick up his cue herself, he’d have left it behind on the floor.
Alas, the charade was not yet over. The final of the World Championship is best of thirty-five frames, a marathon traditionally played over four sessions and two days. That Sunday night, Ramsey allowed himself to be fed in their room, woodenly lifting the fork to his mouth like a grave-digger’s spade. He drank no alcohol, and plenty of water. He continued to say nothing. He got ten hours’ sleep, clutching Irina like a pillow, after which he showered, shaved, and ate a fortifying breakfast that he didn’t appear to taste. Methodically he donned his black slacks, white shirt, and pearl-colored waistcoat, all freshly cleaned and pressed by the hotel. His dickie-bow was perfectly horizontal.
When he walked on stage for the afternoon session, no trace remained of his Alex Higgins impersonation of the previous night. His bearing was dignified, his comportment polite. The fact was that he played extremely well, more than holding his own by the interval at three frames to one.
But the day before Ronnie O’Sullivan had made Crucible history by winning the first sixteen frames on the bounce. He needed only two frames out of the next nineteen to clinch the title. Of course, technically Ramsey could still win the championship. But before the interval he had lost the single frame that he could afford to, meaning that he would now have to take fifteen frames straight to prevail. Even in the most celebrated dark-horse victory in snooker, the legendary World final of 1985, the terrier Dennis Taylor had never lagged behind the purportedly unbeatable Steve Davis by more than eight frames.
When the players emerged for the second half of the session, Irina could imagine the commentary that must have run on the BBC: grudging admiration from Clive Everton, who would have been deeply affronted by Ramsey Acton’s poor sportsmanship the day before, conceding that this afternoon Swish was “showing plenty of bottle.” Ramsey did not go quietly. His form was exquisite, his breaks substantial. There were no self-destructive bouts of braggadocio at the sacrifice of position. His safeties were calibrated, his snookers fiendish. He took three more frames in a row. He would give these fine people who paid money to see him an excellent show.
But Ramsey was fifty years old. He was no longer quite the player he once was, and he had never been superhuman. In the session’s final frame, he barely missed a fantastically difficult yellow, and let Ronnie in. O’Sullivan cleared the table. Ramsey’s firm concessionary handshake, his sustained locking of eyes during which he even managed a smile, delivered a congratulations for Ronnie O’Sullivan’s first World Championship title that seemed as heartfelt as anyone could ask for. He was far too much of a pro to blub on camera, but his wife was close enough to detect that his eyes glistened.
Though Ramsey Acton had defended his honor with a short-of-humiliating final score of eighteen-six, there would be no fourth session; ticket-holders for the evening performance could apply for free passes next year. So inexorable was this result that for the Monday afternoon session Jack Lance had not even bothered to come.
THUS THE SPLENDID NEWS that Irina received within a fortnight of their return to Victoria Park Road could have been better timed. To her amazement, a jubilant call from Snake’s Head informed her that Frame and Match had just been short-listed for the prestigious Lewis Carroll Medal, an international award for children’s literature renowned for moving copies with its distinctively embossed gold sticker on the cover. She hadn’t a clue how her obscure volume had ever come to the attention of the judges, for half of its modest print run of two thousand had already been returned by January. The sheer unexpectedness of her good fortune would have buoyed her all the more under ordinary circumstances.
These were no ordinary circumstances. Ramsey would hardly eat. He slept long hours, and took afternoon naps. He still burrowed into snooker biographies, and read Snooker Scene cover to cover, but when he did so he scowled. He disappeared for hours at a time to his table in the basement, firmly closing the door behind him, and lending his wife an unease of a piece with her what is he doing in there? when he locked himself for ages in the loo. On the one occasion that she’d bridged the battlements to bring him to the phone, she discovered him sprawled on the floor, surrounded by rails and bolts, with a crazed look on his face. “Jack has an exhibition match lined up, if you’re interested,” she said, and he quipped without looking up, “Already made an exhibition of myself, didn’t I?” In response to her puzzlement over why one end of the table was disassembled, he mumbled something like, “Too much rebound. Table’s unplayable.” It had been a little like coming upon Jack Nicholson typing “All work and no play” thousands of times in The Shining, and she’d left him to it.
So rather than race down the stairs and pound on the basement door exuberantly demanding admission, Irina rested the receiver in its cradle and returned to the series of black-and-white still-lifes she’d been doodling in rapidographs. The little smile rising over her notebook was all she permitted herself in celebration.
Once she’d sat on the news for a week—the moment never seemed right—she had to admit that she was dreading its delivery, and that she resented dreading it. Ramsey conducted his whole occupational life in the limelight. Even as runner-up at the Crucible he’d earned almost £150,000; he may have rued the fact, but his performance had been on TV. Now with one light in her own life she felt compelled to hide it under a bushel.
However, the medal’s organizers were anxious to arrange a date for the prize-giving dinner at which all short-listed candidates could be present, and were proposing one of several evenings in September, before which she and her spouse would be flown to New York and put up in a hotel. She had to give them an answer, including whether Ramsey would like to go. So during an arbitrary and until that point lackluster dinner at Best of India in latter May (the brown-rice-and-vegetable rule guaranteed that they ate out virtually every night), Irina unveiled her godsend.
Feigning that the news had come in that very day tainted her cheerful astonishment with a hint of falseness. Hastily, too, she appended that of course she didn’t expect to win—as, she supposed, she didn’t—although being short-listed might sell “a few” extra copies. After all, she said, the scope of the Lewis Carroll Medal may have been “international,” but it hailed from Manhattan; the likelihood of its being awarded to a book about a sport that Americans didn’t know from Parcheesi was negligible.
Ramsey kissed her across the table, nipped next door to the off-license for a bottle of plonk champagne, and returned to propose that they schedule a fabulously expensive dinner some other night to celebrate. Nevertheless, when she explained why Frame and Match would never win, he agreed—lighting into another bitter riff on the gobsmacking ignorance of snooker that he’d encountered in Brighton Beach. He assured her that of course he’d accompany her to the ceremony in September—provided it did not interfere with the Royal Scottish Open. After only a few minutes, their discussion of her good fortune gave way to talk of which tournaments Ramsey would enter next season.
As the week proceeded and blended into the next, they did go out to dinner numerous times, but never officially to acknowledge her shortlisting, and somehow the promised occasion never quite materialized.
ALTHOUGH WHILE DRESSING FOR the reception in the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue Irina was understandably nervous, the scale of her anxiety seemed disproportionate. Over and over she had recited to herself that it was enough to be nominated, and indeed she knew in her gut that Frame and Match would never clinch the Lewis Carroll. Clapping and smiling and acting implausibly exhilarated on someone else’s account was bound to be an ordeal, but one short and survivable. So the source of her fretfulness while she wrestled with her unruly hair had little to do with girding for defeat.
By happy or unhappy coincidence, depending on your perspective, this very week Lawrence Trainer was scheduled to be in New York—for some dreary conference called “The Growth of Global Civil Society.” He had long been her greatest supporter, and the four years that had elapsed since they’d parted had surely transformed him from jilted lover to comrade. He’d sounded so thrilled for her when she e-mailed him news of the Lewis Carroll in May (Ramsey’s being home all the time had precluded confiding cups of coffee near Blue Sky for the entire summer). Besides, this was her party, and it was her right. So she’d invited Lawrence to come tonight, and he’d accepted.
Irina might have stuck by the decision without regrets had she informed Ramsey well in advance that Lawrence was coming to the awards dinner and brooked no argument, or even given Ramsey the illusion of being consulted on the matter before she issued the invite. But no. Every night in August when she’d considered raising the attendance of her “comrade” with Ramsey, she’d felt sick to her stomach—though not quite as sick as she felt now, with the reception to start in half an hour, and Ramsey in for a big surprise.
To make matters worse, one of the other five short-listed authors was his ex-wife.
“That’s a right skimpy dress, pet,” said Ramsey behind her as she messed in the vanity’s mirror. “The hem’s not two inches from your fanny.”
“Badger me enough, and I’ll tuck it around my waist.”
He ran a finger into her cleavage. “You planning some sort of jacket?”
“That’s right,” said Irina. Her application of eyeliner was so unsteady that she looked like Boris Karloff. “I spent two hundred quid on this thing, so of course I’m going to cover it up with a large burlap sack.”
“No, you’re going to swan into that do downstairs half-starkers, and every tosser in the room will want to fuck you.”
“You used to like it when I looked sexy.” Lord, did nothing ever change? He reminded her of Lawrence.
“I love it when you look sexy—shut in a cupboard with a padlock.”
She turned from the mirror as he was slipping on his jacket and said, “Wow!” She’d grown inured to his snooker gear, but rarely saw him in a proper tuxedo. “You’re the one belongs locked in a closet.”
It would take many more compliments than that to placate her husband. For all the hotel rooms they’d shared, this was the first time they’d ever checked in under his wife’s name. He’d bristled when the porter called him “Mr. McGovern,” and his abrupt anonymity on arrival in JFK yesterday had put his nose out of joint. On opening Ramsey Acton’s passport, the immigration agent hadn’t raised an eyebrow, and his “Welcome to the United States” was the same bored greeting that he shoveled at every other tourist in the queue.
“If you don’t stop pacing like that,” she said, “we’re going to be dunned for leaving runnels in the carpet. Are you edgy about seeing Jude?”
“Not particularly. Though with you tricked out like that, I reckon she’ll be jealous.”
“Why? She divorced you.”
“Birds don’t like it when you fancy their discards. Like when you rustle round in somebody’s rubbish and pull out a right serviceable knick-knack. Suddenly they get to thinking, Oi, give that back! That’s a right serviceable knickknack!”
“I worry that Jude assumes we were carrying on while you were still with her.”
“So?” Ramsey slid his palms into the hollows of her hipbones. “Let her.”
SO POWERFULLY WAS IRINA distracted by the impending arrival of Lawrence Trainer that she’d given little thought to Jude Hartford, whose path she’d not crossed since their falling-out five years ago. As she and Ramsey descended in the gilt elevator, an encounter with the woman was imminent. Most people would field an uncomfortable reunion of this nature by rising above—extending limp congratulations for being short-listed, making no allusion to previous unpleasantness nor even to the incongruous fact that Jude and Ramsey used to be married, and presenting a united front of seamless connubial contentment. But since social awkwardness always brought out in Irina that bizarre confessional incontinence, chances were she would within minutes blurt that Ramsey was irrationally jealous, had probably started to drink too much, and picked fights at the drop of a hat—all to a woman sure to use any unattractive intelligence to smear Irina behind her back.
Clutching Ramsey’s hand, Irina entered the events room to mark Jude’s presence at the far end by the drinks table—though in that floor-length ivory kaftan the woman might easily be mistaken for a refreshments tent. When Jude turned with a swirl toward the entranceway, her outsized expression of astonished joy took a fraction of a moment to arrange itself. Like Lawrence of Arabia leading the charge on Aqaba, Jude flapped across the room with her arms extended wide, and as the dervish advanced, Irina feared the expression on her own face was one of horror.
“Darling!” Jude smothered her ex-friend in a shimmer of upscale synthetic. “And don’t you look divine!” Irina’s “You, too!” was weak. Billows of fabric failed to disguise the fact that Jude had put on weight. Yet she still emanated that distinctive hysteria—a desperation for a fineness of life that, like a gnat, was only surer to elude her the more frantically she snatched after it. “And Ramsey. You dear man!” Jude brought his forehead to her lips as if delivering a blessing. “Jude,” he replied. As if that said it all.
A tall, squarish character ambled from behind. He exuded a languorous cannot-be-bothered-to-try-to-please that generally correlates with having money. When Jude introduced Duncan Winderwood grandly as the “tenant of my affections,” he said in a plummy accent, “I’m so terribly pleased to make your acquaintance,” employing that pro forma aristocratic graciousness meant less to make you feel loved than to ram down your throat how civilized he was. Irina instinctively disliked him, and she could tell that he didn’t care. Being British, Duncan was the one man in the room who would almost certainly recognize Ramsey Acton, but his interaction with her husband was brief and bland.
“Isn’t this a coincidence,” Irina submitted aimlessly. “About the Lewis Carroll.”
“Pish and tosh! To be honest, it isn’t a coincidence!” Jude cried, laughing through the sentence. “Talent will out, don’t you think? Talent will out!” She seemed to have forgotten all about having impugned Irina’s work as “flat” and “lifeless.”
“There’s no way mine will win,” said Irina. “The subject matter is too obscure.” When Ramsey shifted at her side, she appended quickly, “For Americans, I mean.”
“To be honest, I did think your illustrating a book about snooker was good for a giggle,” said Jude. “Didn’t you used to think snooker was a big bore?”
“I’ve gotten—a lot more interested,” said Irina faintly.
“I suppose you haven’t had much choice!”
“You made a choice, I recollect,” Ramsey intruded brutally. “To rubbish my profession at every opportunity.”
“I think what Ramsey’s trying to say,” said Irina, “is that we all need a drink.”
Fortified with a glass of red that was tempting fate with all that white sailcloth, Jude exclaimed, “I was simply floored when I read you two had got married!”
“It was certainly a surprise to us,” said Irina forcefully. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind! To be quite honest, maybe back in the day we should have switched places at the dinner table and saved us all a pack of trouble!” Jude’s conversational tic was beginning to wear, even if to be honest had spread like genital herpes among the British bourgeoisie. Much as its counterpart plague among the young—D’ya know what I mean?— conveyed a persistent and often justifiable insecurity about an ability to speak English, the repeated insertion of to be honest seemed to imply that unless otherwise apprised you could safely assume that the speaker was lying.
“Ramsey, you old dog,” she continued. “I worried that I missed something in the Guardian social pages about a big shindig. Not that you look a year over forty-nine, sweetie, but didn’t you turn fifty last year? I pictured you letting out the Savoy with the haut monde.”
“We didn’t fancy a lot of fuss.” His delivery was grim. For his fiftieth the summer before, Irina had taken Ramsey’s admonishments that he “didn’t fancy a lot of fuss” at face value, and repeated the homemade sushi spread that had so overwhelmed him in 1995. His eyes had continually darted beyond the candlelight, as if a hundred well-wishers would soon spring from the shadows. It emerged that she hadn’t read his signals correctly—no apparently meaning no only in cases of date rape.
The hall was growing packed, and the event’s organizers pulled both couples away to meet the foundation directors, journalists, and judges. Although Irina read apology in the judges’ eyes (sorry, but we didn’t vote for you), they did all heap praises on Frame and Match, talking up the vibrancy of the colors, the freshness of her material… Starved of serious approbation for most of her career, Irina was perplexingly deaf to the tributes. Compliments were empty calories, like popcorn.
She explained to the group that the lipstick-red, the lemony yellow, and the creamy green merely duplicated snooker balls as faithfully as she knew how. “As a matter of fact,” she added, “snooker first took off in the UK as a spectator sport because of the advent of color television. The BBC needed programming that was literally colorful. So the show Pot Black was born, the players became national celebrities, and what started as a haphazard, mostly amateur game got organized into rankings and tournaments and high-stakes purses.”
Jude’s expression was pitying: Oh, my poor darling, you have had an earful.
“Ramsey”—Irina pulled him forward—“was on Pot Black all the time!” Alas, she only put him on the spot. The group could follow up with no better than, “So you’re a snooker player!” and Ramsey could return with no better than, “Yeah.” Silence.
In the midst of this conversational maw, Lawrence made his entrance.
Obviously, Irina might as well have invited a suicide bomber from the West Bank, or the Mask of the Red Death. But the moment she met Lawrence’s deep-set brown eyes from across the room, they flushed with a warmth that put out of mind, however temporarily, the scale of her mistake. Ramsey’s gray-blue irises could wash oceanic, as available as open water, but something about their very color gave them also the terrifying capacity to go cold. Yet despite the scorn that often issued from Lawrence’s mouth, it was in the nature of that particular shade of umber that his eyes could express a limited set of emotions: tenderness, gratitude, injury, and need. When they lived together she had often chafed at the shabbiness of his dress; now those familiar dark Dockers and the threadbare button-down with no tie made her smile. In fact, everything about Lawrence that once vexed her now entranced her instead. She loved his fundamental humility, at such odds with his intellectual bluster as The Expert. She loved his slumped, unassuming posture. She loved the fact that at an occasion of this nature he could always be relied upon to hold up his end of things; you could throw Lawrence into any social pool, and he would swim. She loved his rigidity and discipline, all just a cover for a raging terror of the gluttony, intemperance, and sloth that would surely ensue should he ever step off the straight and narrow. She loved that Lawrence Trainer was truly able to be “happy for” another person’s good fortune, and his demeanor as he advanced glowed with his present happiness for hers. Lastly, while she may long before have lost touch with the urge to tear off his clothes, she still loved his face. She loved his carved, haunted, beautiful face.
It was a toss-up whether Ramsey would find the more unforgivable her invitation to Lawrence in the first place, or her expression when he walked in. Either way, when she glanced at her husband, Ramsey’s eyes had made ready use of their capacity to go cold.
Lawrence diffidently pecked her cheek. “Congratulations!”
“Thank you,” she said. Ramsey put his left arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight, his hand mashing her upper arm. “Ramsey? Lawrence happened to be in town, and so I asked him to come.”
“Happened to be in town. Ain’t that lucky.”
“Hey, Ramsey!” Lawrence heartily shook Ramsey’s free hand. “No hard feelings. Really, it’s great to see you.”
“Anorak Man,” said Ramsey. With Irina, the epithet had morphed to caustic slur, a token of his refusal to dignify her former partner with a proper name; to Lawrence’s face, the handle inevitably resumed a measure of the affection with which it had first been coined. But Ramsey didn’t want to feel any of his old fondness for Lawrence. Even less did he wish to confront the awful truth that Lawrence Trainer was a nice man.
“Hey, congratulations on making it to the final in Sheffield this year!” said Lawrence. “What does that make, eight?”
“You should know.” Ramsey could hardly talk, so furious was he to be having this conversation at all. “You’re the boffin.”
This mashing business with Ramsey’s left hand had grown actively unpleasant. “Lawrence, let me get you your one glass of wine,” said Irina, discreetly disengaging from her husband’s clasp. In science fiction, when parallel universes collide, the molecular integrity of the whole world is often imperiled, and now she knew why.
“Listen,” said Lawrence quietly beside the bar service. With twenty feet separating the two men, the atomic particles of the room settled again. “I checked out your competition at Barnes and Noble. Man, you’re a shoo-in! Those other entries totally suck! I mean, get a load of that piece of shit that Jude wrote—and now that I get a look at her, load is the word. When I came across the title, I bust a gut!”
In Children of Size, a chunky little girl is smitten by a boy at school, and to win his favor she goes on all manner of diets. Hungry all the time, the once cheerful protagonist grows peevish. The tenant of her affections finally bewails that he had been smitten with her as well, until she became so unpleasant. Behold, he likes a bit of heft. The little girl learns to eat sensibly and to love her own body, even if she would never be thin—happy ending.
“You know, Ramsey didn’t seem too thrilled I showed up,” said Lawrence. “I could just have a quick drink and go. I don’t want to ruin the evening for you. It’s your night.”
“Davay gavoreet po-russki, ladno?” she asked, and continued in hushed Russian. “Yes, it’s my night. Which means I should be able to have you here if I want to. And you belong here. You kept me going in illustration through some tough years. Please don’t go. Please?”
“I’ll stay if you want me to,” he assured her. “But why is he still so touchy, after all this time?” Lawrence’s Russian was surprisingly fluid.
“Mozhet byt potomy shto on vidit shto yavsyo yeshcho tebya lyublu.”
Embarrassed, Lawrence switched to English again. “You only love me in a way. Maybe you should tell him I’m getting married. That might make him feel better.”
Irina cocked her head. “Would I be making that up?”
Lawrence said softly, “Nyet.”
Irina glanced at her toes before looking up again. “Congratulations. I guess that’s good news.” She shouldn’t have appended the I guess, but she couldn’t help it.
“Da, na samom dele,” he said fervently. “Very good news. I hope you don’t feel bad that you and I, that we never— We didn’t get married but maybe we should have, and this time around I’m going to do it right.”
“Lawrence Trainer!” shrieked the refreshments tent. “Look at the pair of you, like old times! Why, our old foursome is back! Just a tad mixed up, that’s all.”
“Hi, Jude,” said Lawrence wearily. He could never stand Jude Hartford.
Jude introduced Duncan, and the toff went into his somnambulant spiel about how absolutely inexpressibly thrilling it was to meet yet another guest about whom he didn’t give a damn. Without missing a beat Lawrence returned, “Indeed, frightfully, frightfully delightful to make your acquaintance as well, old bean,” getting the geezer’s accent to a tee. For the first time at the reception, something stirred in those muddy eyes, and Duncan seemed to wake up.
“I say,” said Duncan. “Taking the piss, are we?”
“Got that right,” said Lawrence flatly, and turned away.
“I adore you,” Irina whispered.
“You used to,” said Lawrence lightly. “And why not? I’m adorable.” Something had loosened in him—it was no longer difficult for him to see her—and Irina realized that he had finally let her go.
FOR THE SIT-DOWN DINNER in the adjoining room, the Lewis Carroll contestants and their escorts were seated together at a large round front table. Just her luck, Irina’s place card was positioned between Ramsey and Duncan. Lawrence was sitting at another table nearby, and Irina kept him wistfully in the corner of her eye, noting how readily he engaged the guests on his either side in heated conversation. Politics, no doubt—Nepal, Chechnya, who knows. Funny, she’d once been irked by the way he took over socially; now she was charmed to bits.
When she asked after the nature of his work, Duncan said that he “dabbled in a few investments,” ergo he and the Queen had divvied up the better part of England between them. Irina said, “I can’t say I’ve ever been very interested in finance,” to which he replied, “Makes the world go round, my dear,” and she snapped, “Not mine.” There is nothing quite so icy as two people being patronizing to each other, and Irina, usually a good conversational soldier, concluded abruptly that life was too short.
But Ramsey wasn’t providing much by way of salvation. His bearing was stony. His wine glass was drained, and she wished the waiters weren’t so attentive to refills. She’d married a man who detested small talk, and who never felt at ease outside the rarefied world of snooker, but Ramsey’s fish-out-of-water performance this evening was extreme even by the minimal social standards she had learned to apply to him. Well before her Great Sin was revealed with the arrival of a certain someone, he had barely spoken to a soul, and so far this was like navigating a formal dinner with a houseplant.
“I hate it when they prepare this sort of starter with that dollop of mayonnaise.”
Ramsey stared her down with dull incredulity.
“The salmon terrine’s not bad,” she said helplessly, “if you scrape it off.”
A waiter whisked away Ramsey’s starter untouched. When he proceeded to ignore his main course as well, eyes cut toward him askance.
“Not touching your dinner,” she whispered. “It’s a little embarrassing.”
“I am embarrassing you?” he muttered bitterly.
To ruin her own evening, she would have to ask. “Okay. What’s wrong.”
“You humiliated me.”
The rest of the table having written the pair off as standoffish or bashful, with luck she could bury the tiff beneath their chatter. “I’d have thought your wife being nominated for a prestigious award would have made you feel proud instead. My mistake.”
“Oi, you made a mistake, all right. Count on it.” With a raised eyebrow, a waiter cleared off his untouched plate, while a second topped up Ramsey’s wine.
“May I hazard a guess that this hunger strike has something to do with my having invited Lawrence?”
“What do you think?”
As the waiters cleared the rest of the table, Irina accidentally caught Jude’s eye. In any fantasies about a chance encounter like this evening’s, Irina had conjured a gentle display of how perfectly suited she and Ramsey were for each other, how hopelessly in love. This is what it looks like, she would have liked to imply, when Ramsey Acton has found the right woman: he is relaxed, jubilant, sometimes hilarious, and physically exquisite. In this sense, though only in this sense, would Irina have enjoyed making Jude Hartford jealous. But presently Jude’s eyes stabbed instead with supercilious pity. This was not a revolutionary Ramsey, a centered, self-possessed, celebrative man who had truly learned, if late in life, to squeeze the orange; this was a Ramsey that Jude knew all too well. Indeed, her face glowed with the smug relief of having successfully passed along the Old Maid in a game of cards.
The proceedings on the dais got under way, the director of the Lewis Carroll Foundation presenting each entry with a brief biography of the authors and illustrators. As Irina’s book was introduced, Ramsey continued to mutter furiously that it was “bad enough” that she had asked Anorak Man to a public dinner, but that it was especially outrageous to have the “shambolic state of his marriage” paraded before his ex-wife. As Ramsey leaned into her ear, his head blocked her view of the projections of Frame and Match.
“Lawrence was a big booster of my career,” she whispered; it was increasingly impossible to disguise the fact that they were having a row. “It’s appropriate for him to be here.”
“Appropriate,” Ramsey mumbled, “is you showing up at a do with your husband, full stop. And how’d you like your man having a go at me over the World final?”
“He wasn’t having a go, he congratulated you for getting so far!”
As the foundation director had asked for the envelope, Ramsey’s harsh whisper was so close to her ear that it hurt. “He was rubbing my nose in them first two sessions, all wink-wink like, I saw you fall flat on your arse, I watched you get stuffed—”
“Please stop!” She’d been holding it back for the last hour, like sticking her finger in a dike, but the floodwaters were now too high, and despite herself Irina began to cry.
“I saw your face tonight,” Ramsey continued, undeterred. “All soft and wobbly. The secret rabbiting in Russian. You’re still in love with him! You’re still in love with the bloke, and our marriage is a laugh!”
The audience burst into applause, and then rose for a standing ovation. Wiping her eyes hastily, Irina struggled from her chair and tugged Ramsey up with her, though she had missed the announcement of the winner altogether. It was a little ugly, but she prayed that the victor wasn’t Jude, and was guiltily relieved when she saw Jude applauding with everyone else. Irina’s own clapping was fatigued. While she had previously dreaded having to feign joy on another contestant’s account, now she really was glad—that this cataclysmic occasion would soon be over. Nevertheless, the ovation did seem to be going on an odiously long time, and as she glanced around the table all the other candidates were applauding, too, and mouthing things at her that she didn’t understand. Finally the applause died down; while a few elderly guests resumed their seats, everyone else remained standing. Well, let them, but Irina was wrung out, and led the way by plopping back into her chair.
“Ms. McGovern,” said the director, and the audience emitted an uneasy chuckle. “As we understand it, no one else has been nominated to accept the medal in your place.”
Irina’s face burned, her body needling head to toe. She looked in a panic around the table to make sure that she hadn’t misunderstood, and everyone nodded encouragingly and smiled. She edged unsteadily from her chair and meekly climbed the stairs. The beaming officiator looped her neck with a golden disc the size of an all-day sucker.
“Th-thank you,” Irina stuttered too close to the mic, and it buzzed. Her mind was a blank, or almost. That is, there was only one person she wanted to thank. Only one person who had supported her through the long lean years of no prizes. One person who had always urged her to believe in her talent, who had marveled at the drawings in her studio at the end of his own hard day. And of all those gathered here, there was only one person whom she had better not thank if she knew what was good for her. All right, but she would not, absolutely would not thank instead the man who had just single-handedly destroyed this occasion, and as a consequence left it at thank you, period, and stumbled away.
IN THE FLURRY OF handshaking that followed, Lawrence hung humbly back. When he finally took his turn in the receiving line, he tried first to simply shake her hand like the others, but Irina was having none of that, and hugged him close. While she hoped that her reddened, puffy eyes would be mistaken for having wept tears of joy, when they disengaged he took a hard look at her face; he hadn’t lived with her for nearly a decade for nothing. Squaring up to Ramsey, who was propped at her side with all the animation of an umbrella stand, Lawrence may not have grabbed Ramsey’s lapels, but his aggressive stance seemed to indicate that he’d thought about it.
“If you don’t treat her right,” said Lawrence through his teeth, “so help me God, I will punch your lights out.” With a graze of Irina’s temple, he was gone.
A touching bit of chivalry, but it would cost her.
“YOU’RE DRUNK,” SAID IRINA in the elevator. “We will not talk about this now.”
“That so. And when will my princess deign to resume our chat?”
“If we have to continue this disagreeable exchange, we will not do so until we get back to London. Until then I don’t care what you say, I will not participate.”
Irina was true to her word. She was stoically deaf to Ramsey’s multiple attempts to get a rise out of her, and the only sounds she emitted in their hotel room were the pock of dental floss and rasp of her toothbrush. She tugged off her dress, unrolled her tights, and crawled into bed. As she reached for the light, Ramsey asked plaintively, “Not even going to say good-night, pet?” The crisp flip of the switch spoke for her. Slumber had always been out of the question when matters between them were the slightest bit out of whack, but tonight she dropped to sleep like plunging from a tall building to the pavement.
For the following Monday, Irina had arranged to meet her sister for coffee, and when she left the room Ramsey was still sleeping off however many bottles of wine had substituted for a roast beef dinner. The hasty tête-à-tête was meant to make up for the fact that not only her mother but Tatyana had given the Lewis Carroll dinner a miss, explaining that their mother would regard her attendance as taking her sister’s side. By the time they met in a Broadway Starbucks, Irina was only grateful for Tatyana’s absence the night before. Her sister was an unreliable ally, and would have savored relating Ramsey’s drunken distemper to their mother, since it seemed to confirm everything Raisa had intuited the instant she met the man.
“You don’t look so hot,” said Tatyana after the usual bear-hug. “Considering that I read in the Times this morning that you won.”
“Well, as they say, winning isn’t everything.” Irina would have to suppress her impulse to confide; the scuttlebutt would get back to Brighton Beach. “It’s a bit of a letdown, is all I mean. To get what you’ve always wanted.”
“Wouldn’t it have been more of a letdown to lose?”
“Oh, probably. Make mine a cappuccino? And a muffin. I’m starving.”
While Tatyana fetched sustenance, Irina considered that the person she really wanted to confide in was Lawrence; the fact that he was at large in this very city right now was a torture. Anyway, what did it matter. She would have to live without his counsel indefinitely now.
“Got a little gossip,” said Irina brightly. “Lawrence is getting married.”
“You don’t say! Who to?”
Irina frowned. “Gosh. I forgot to ask.”
“Pretty low-quality gossip, big sister. How do you feel about it?”
Irina took a deep breath. “I’m happy for him. Very happy.”
“Are you sure? You don’t sound that happy.”
“Oh… I guess there’s something sad about it,” Irina allowed cautiously, the gross understatement turning this heart-to-heart to farce. “So final. The absolute end of an era. Whoever it is, she’s very lucky.”
“How did you find out?”
“Lawrence came last night. I invited him, since he was in New York anyway.”
“Wasn’t that awfully awkward?”
“Oh, not at all,” Irina said heartily. “Ramsey is so socially adept, and we’re all grown-ups. In fact, Ramsey seemed glad to see Lawrence, and grateful on my account that he made an appearance. They’ve always liked each other. In no time, those two were nattering on about snooker, just like the old days.”
“So how’s it going, with you and Ramsey?”
“Fine,” said Irina flatly—and then decided, so long as she was lying, to do so with panache. “He was over the moon when I won the medal last night. Couldn’t stop singing my praises to other people. I was abashed. I tried to remind him that it was déclassé to brag about your own spouse, but he was so proud that he wouldn’t listen. He’s vowed to paint the town red when we get home.” And wouldn’t he, in a sense.
When they parted, after an update on Dmitri, Raisa, and the kids, Tatyana cocked her head. “I still don’t get it. You’re in love, you won a big prize—and you look at death’s door. Your face is harrowed.”
“It’s just makeup. I wore eyeliner last night and slept on it. Makes my eyes look ghoulish.”
“Get some cold cream, then!”
“I’ll do that,” Irina mumbled, though fairly sure that the darkness her sister had detected would not readily rub off.
BY THE TIME IRINA returned to the Pierre late afternoon, Ramsey had showered and packed. He seemed to have gotten with the program, and said no more than she did—i.e., nothing. Meeting her eyes, his own flashed with undiminished anger. She absolutely refused to feel attracted to him. As she took refuge in the officious logistics of checkout, the clench of her jaw gave her a headache. In the taxi to JFK, the departure lounge of Terminal 4, and the cabin of the 747, they continued to observe the protocol of speaking only necessities to the driver and flight attendants, and not a word to each other. By the time they tucked back into the Jaguar at Heathrow’s long-term parking at ten a.m. London time the next day, muteness had grown habitual, and almost relaxing.
Irina’s signal to stop for milk on the way home proved fortuitous. Once she closed the door on Victoria Park Road behind her, it would not open again for a solid two days.
“I’M STILL WAITING FOR my apology,” she announced in the foyer, back to the door.
Ramsey dropped his carry-on from a greater height than seemed necessary. “A bird could grow gray waiting for the likes of that. And when do I get mine?”
“When hell freezes”—she clipped past him to the kitchen to store the milk in the fridge—“and pigs fly.”
In retrospect, the dispute may have turned into such a marathon because it departed from orthodox form. Customarily, Ramsey made an accusation; Irina defended herself; Ramsey made the accusation again. The sheer monotony ensured that even Ramsey would finally get bored. But this time, Irina took the initiative, and fired the opening volley herself.
“Who do you think you are?” Hands on hips, she had located the deepest register in a voice that was always husky. As Ramsey drew up to his full six-three in the kitchen doorway, chin at a pugnacious tilt, she was glad for the two-inch boost of her high heels. “I have spent hours, and hours, and hours listening to you despair about how underappreciated you are, about how no one gives you credit for originating the ‘attacking game’ that’s now become standard practice among younger players. About the awful injustice of how little money you won in the early days, when the purses were minuscule, and now these upstarts walk off with a hundred grand just for making it to the semis. About how terrible it is that Snooker Scene hasn’t done a profile of you in ten years. I’ve gone to tournament after tournament—and all you can remember is the matches I missed. But do we ever sit at dinner and talk about my disappointments? No! I worked my ass off for Frame and Match. I was paid a pittance for it, and the print run and distribution were abysmal. But have you heard me keening every night about how underappreciated I am? Have you had to listen to me moan on and on about the fact that I’ve toiled my whole life in relative obscurity? No! So finally, for the first time ever, something good happens to me, I get a little credit, one day in the sun. I ask you to come with me to celebrate something that I’ve achieved, and you sabotage the whole event! Whispering all that poison in my ear, and refusing to eat anything while drinking like a fish? Bickering even through the announcement of the winner so I can’t even hear it, and at the very moment I should have been feeling on top of the world I feel like a fool? It was an act of vandalism! The oldest power-play in the book, too—Don’t get uppity, bitch, because no matter how famous you get, I can always make your life hell. You didn’t care that I was short-listed, and you didn’t care that I won! All you cared about was the fact I’d invited Lawrence, who had every right to be there, and whom I had every right to invite! And if that offended you, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Sunday night had nothing to do with you. A concept that is obviously alien. Everything has to be about you, you vain, narcissistic bastard! Well, Sunday night was supposed to be about me.”
It was, in snooker terms, a spectacular clearance, but unfortunately this occasion would prove their personal World final, and she had only taken one frame. Just like Sheffield’s, this match was slated for two days and two nights, and Irina hadn’t the stamina to keep sinking the same angry reds over and over again. There was no getting around the fact that Ramsey was the real pro at this game, and was far more accustomed to keeping his composure while his opponent got in all manner of splendid shots, confident that one slip or rerack would let him back in. As she caught her breath by the fridge, Ramsey took his cue for his own visit.
“Fair play,” he said. “But why’s your day in the sun got to be my own day in the shade? You totally ignored me! At them tournaments my own wife stoops to show up, I introduce you round, I fetch you a drink, I keep my arm around you, don’t I. I never wiggle out from under, like, Don’t touch me, you animal! for all the world to see—”
“You were hurting my arm! And I had other people to talk to. For a single evening, you were not the center of my universe, and that’s what you couldn’t stick!”
“—Least of all have I ever asked some other bird along what I used to fancy, and to be honest still fancy like mad, hovering off in the corner like, speaking our own private language, having a laugh at what a waster you are!”
Later, at this point Irina’s recollection would begin to fragment. Bits and pieces: Apparently Lawrence had always been lurking in the background as the real tenant of her affections. Ramsey refused to believe that Lawrence “just happened” to be in town, and was sure that the predator had flown all the way from London to impress her. Anorak Man, in this version of events, had for years been lying in wait, ready to pounce the moment relations with her husband showed signs of strain. And what was this about “hoping Jude didn’t mind” that she and Ramsey had married? Was their marriage something to apologize for, to be ashamed of? Her hug with Lawrence after the award ceremony converted to “throwing herself into his arms.” Lawrence’s “bracing” Ramsey after the ceremony developed over the course of a day into “issuing that death threat.” He’d thought he’d found enduring love, and now he found himself party to the same “second-rate, two-timing rubbish” that everyone else settled for, in preference to which he’d rather be by himself. As for convincing Ramsey that when he caught her outside the flat in Borough Lawrence was actually in Dubai, Irina was sent decisively back to square one, and rerunning the entire palaver from Sheffield must have absorbed at least three or four hours on Tuesday night. Over the course of those two days Ramsey assembled a veritable retrospective of her transgressions in the post-birthday world: arranging “appointment TV” to ogle Lawrence on the news, “declaring her love for Anorak Man” in front of her mother, “running him down” to other players in Preston—all the way back to You should have packed a bag.
Throughout, Irina refused to play her trump card: that, Ramsey’s raving fantasies to the contrary, Lawrence was getting married. The news still ached, and it was private. She would not violate the personally sacred by flinging it like a rolling pin.
Meanwhile, the house on Victoria Park Road might as well have twisted into the sky like Dorothy’s, and nothing from the rest of the world so much as sailed past the windows. She wasn’t about to launch out for a Daily Telegraph, and turning on the television under the circumstances would have been an act of inflammatory hostility the proceedings could ill afford. Likewise checking e-mail was out of the question, even if Irina yearned to click through the host of congratulations surely hovering in cyberspace. The telephone rang around three p.m. on Tuesday, and for some reason continued to do so at regular intervals for the rest of the afternoon, but picking up the phone mid–spousal harangue was hardly politic, and more than once when the ringing resumed, Irina, in tears, wasn’t fit to answer. By early that evening she jerked the receiver off the hook to shut the bloody thing up.
Since it is the beginnings and endings of most great sporting events that one remembers, Irina later retained her most coherent memory of the last frame.
It was coming up on dawn of Thursday morning, and if there is always something queasy about that indeterminate time of day, like coffee lightened with skim milk, the dull graying through the cracks in the curtains was especially sickening when it signaled the close of a second sleepless night, following on the one before, during which Irina had only dozed on the plane. To say she was hallucinating with exhaustion would overplay the matter, but she was certainly losing sight of what purpose all this verbal laying waste was meant to serve.
Ramsey had sunk into one of his maudlin phases. He had given her everything, his whole being, saving nothing out for himself. He had even sacrificed what meant most to him in all the whole world, the championship final—
“What do you mean,” said Irina, lifting her head blearily from the kitchen table. “How do you figure that?”
“I catch you shagging Anorak Man the day before, I ain’t going to play proper snooker, am I. It’s a wonder I knew which way round to point the cue.”
“Yes, it’s a wonder, since you were stinking drunk!” So many times had Irina repeated her explanation about having only been “visiting herself” that Saturday in Borough that it had come to sound absurd to her own ears, and she had learned to skip it.
“I were blind with grief, pet. Them first two sessions, all I could see is you and Anorak Man, groping in that bed upstairs—”
“After a bottle and a half of Remy, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face! Can we get this straight? Are you seriously holding me accountable for that fiasco in Sheffield?”
Ramsey glared with matching incredulity. “What, or who, drove me to drink? Are you seriously not holding yourself accountable for the biggest public disgrace of my life? Ducky, you are dead lucky your Ramsey Acton is a forgiving man!”
It was amazing that after all this time Irina could still marshal the energy for outrage, but they do not make adrenaline for nothing. Moreover, he had released from embargo all that she had not let fly back in May.
“You disgraced yourself! And furthermore, you disgraced me! Do you think it was easy for me to watch my own husband stagger around the table unable to get a ball within two feet of a pocket? The while looking like a dog’s dinner—clothes crumpled, hair like a dish mop? All those rude remarks you made to O’Sullivan—I wanted to crawl in a hole and die! Forgiveness—I have ladled you forgiveness in buckets!”
“In the charmed universe where I had a loyal wife what didn’t mess about with another bloke the day before, I’d have wiped the floor with that wally O’Sullivan, no two ways about it!”
“In the charmed universe where you took your own wife’s word, maybe you would have won the final. But I will not take responsibility for your mistrust!”
“I handed you my trophy on a plate. And mind, ducky, you’d not have won that sodding medal in New York, if it wasn’t for me.”
Irina’s mouth gaped. “Not only did I lose your trophy for you—but you won my medal for me. How does that work?”
“I gave you snooker. No snooker, no Frame and Match, and no poncy medal, neither.” Neever.
“You gave me snooker? Well, can I please give it back? Because I am sick of snooker, sick to death of snooker, I’m sick of the very word snooker, and if I never saw another snooker match in my entire life I would face east and kiss the floor!”
Ramsey turned white. He stood and cornered on his heel, marching to the basement door. She first assumed that he had fled to his lair to escape his own violent impulses. But violence comes in as many flavors as ice cream, and within the minute he emerged carrying Denise. With nauseous deliberateness, Ramsey propped a foot on a kitchen chair, and cracked his cue of thirty-three years across its back.
THE MURDER OF IRINA’S rival had the one merit of releasing all the tension from the room. The very air seemed to slacken, the ticking of the clock over the Aga cooker to grow more sluggish. The sun had risen, its streams through the curtains mockingly bright.
Irina dragged from her chair to make coffee, wincing as the grinder let loose its banshee wail, as if mourning the demise of a fellow inanimate object. She discovered that they were out of milk.
“I can’t drink straight espresso on an empty stomach,” she said leadenly. “I’m going to head out for a few things. Do you want anything?”
The halves of his splintered cue clutched in each hand, Ramsey shook his head. Thank heavens he made no bid to come along.
When Irina walked outside into the crisp morning air, she went into shock that there was an outside. Yet it wasn’t the great outdoors that produced this sense of relief, but getting away from Ramsey.
When she checked out at Safeway, the familiar clerk didn’t meet her eyes. Par for the course in commercial exchanges these days—so it was more curious that, after gathering herself, the clerk did meet Irina’s eyes, soulfully full-bore. She placed the change in Irina’s hand with solemnity, the way one pressed a coin into a child’s moist outstretched palm in the days when kids were still awed by a quarter. “Cor,” said the girl, “I’m awful sorry, like. I reckon I don’t know what else to say.”
Baffled, Irina didn’t know what else to say, either. Perhaps the change was incorrect, but she’d already plunged it into the pile in her pocket. How badly could she have been cheated if she’d only given the girl a pound? She shrugged, and a mutter of “No harm done” seemed to cover the bases. Or it should have, but the peculiar look the girl shot her in return was piercing.
The open-air market on Roman Road was already under way, and Irina was in no hurry to return to the kitchen where Ramsey would be still holding the two halves of his life in each hand. So she headed for her regular vegetable seller, and picked out some runner beans. Smiling at the merchant, she thought her face might crack; her lips hadn’t curved upward for days.
When Irina had first strolled Roman Road on Ramsey’s arm, locals were cool; the East Enders were resentful about ceding the neighborhood’s national treasure to an American. But she didn’t trade on her status, and gradually they had seemed to warm. Nevertheless, when she presented her basket of produce to the beefy man behind the cart, he, too, looked her searchingly in the eyes with an intensity that was unnerving. “Blimey,” he said. “Terrible thing, innit?”
Maybe there’d been an accident or fire nearby, but honestly she was so depleted, so underslept, and so increasingly tortured by the implications of that splintered stick of ash back in the kitchen, that she hadn’t the energy to care about some strangers’ misfortune. It wasn’t pretty, but on days like this the whole world could go to hell and she couldn’t be bothered. No harm done wouldn’t work this time, so she settled for a neutral mmm.
“Here now, you take that,” said the vegetable seller, selecting three enormous navel oranges and putting them in her bag.
“Oh, but you needn’t—”
He added an avocado. She thanked him, and though she’d been pleased with herself for gaining acceptance in the area, she hadn’t realized her progress had been so considerable as to extend to free fruit. Touched, she had ambled halfway back down the road before, as an afterthought, she ducked into a newsagent to pick up a Telegraph.
Standing before the row of broadsheets, Irina, already pale, went paler.
It is possible she began to weave; she certainly felt faint, though not from lack of sleep.
Catatonic at the kitchen table, Ramsey still clutched his shattered cue. In silence, she slid the stack of newspapers onto the table, pushing his ashtray slagged with cigarette butts out of the way. In the photo on the uppermost front page, angled gray beams resembled the ashy fag-ends in close-up. Irina bowed her head. Tears—the only ones worth shedding amid a septic tank of wastewater spilled these last two days—spattered the photograph.
“I have never—” Her breath caught. “I have never—” She tried again. “I have never been so ashamed.”