IN THE PENUMBRA OF 9/11, everything seemed stupid. Dinner seemed stupid, and buying more paper towels seemed stupid. Hoovering seemed stupid. Illustration seemed stupid. Remembering that on Monday nights ER came on at ten o’clock seemed stupid, although they still remembered. Accordingly, a heavy, effortful sensation attended the pettiest of enterprises; indeed, the pettier the task, the more onerous its completion.
Only one thing did not shrivel into one of those mummified orts under the stove so inconsequential that even the mice ignore it, and that was Lawrence’s work. It may have seemed ever so slightly stupid to Irina before, but no more. He was a bit embarrassed to make good on his offhand assertion in Tas some years ago that “someone might as well cash in” on calamities that have already happened. But Lawrence had effectively been playing the same lottery combination for years, and finally his number had come up. Terrorism was no longer a tiresome sideline. Lawrence’s specialty had streaked to the top of the international agenda in the same number of seconds it had taken for those towers to come down.
Their claim on 9/11 was modest, and shared by millions of New Yorkers. They had merely been in the city at the time, and uptown at that; neither had lost family or friends. Yet gradually Lawrence asserted ownership. He had put in the spadework on this issue while most of his colleagues had dismissed terrorism as a longstanding bore, and had earned his share of what were, however appallingly, substantial occupational rewards.
Overnight, Lawrence was much in demand. He was pulled onto the same circuit of news programs that had solicited his expertise after the Good Friday Agreement, only this time he was waxing eloquent about a subject of worldwide concern, and not merely about a peace agreement in the back of beyond. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times commissioned op-eds. Simon & Schuster signed him for a book about “new” versus “old” terrorism, which paid a six-figure advance. He got a raise at Blue Sky, suddenly nervous of losing him.
Thus by early 2003 Lawrence and Irina were amply provided for, and their two-bedroom rental began to feel cramped. Despite the runaway property market—in five years, London real-estate values had doubled— Irina proposed that they buy a house. She pointed out that you could still get a few decent deals around Ramsey’s neighborhood of Hackney and Mile End.
Lawrence’s noncommittal response echoed his reaction to her proposal that they get married six years before. His reaching for the very same phrases—I guess so, If you want, I’m not especially bothered either way—did not seem coincidental. These days anyone could opt out of a flimsy old wedding license, and meantime a fisherman’s eight-foot-square shack in Suffolk, with one toilet and no bath, was now listing for £250,000—that was $400,000. Thus in contemporary urban life, mutual investment in real estate was marriage—real marriage, the binding, frightening, complicated kind that precluded ready escape. No wonder Lawrence squirmed. But for pity’s sake, they’d been together for nearly fifteen years. He might stop hedging his bets.
IT WAS THE MORNING of Valentine’s Day, an occasion they’d gotten in the habit of acknowledging with no more than “Happy Valentine’s Day!” and a peck. A bad habit, and Irina had resolved in advance to do better this year.
Grabbing his overcoat, Lawrence hurried to the door, and she stopped him. “Don’t wear that sports jacket. You forgot, it has that grease stain on the lapel.” When he protested that he didn’t care, she insisted. “If I take it in today, I can get it back from the cleaners in time for your interview with Dispatches, and it’s your favorite for TV. Besides, you’re BMOC at Blue Sky now, and have no business looking like a slob.”
“No!” he said with a ferocity that took her aback. “I’m in a hurry, forget it! I’ll wear something else for Dispatches!”
“Lawrence!” Hands on hips, she was flummoxed. “I’m offering to take your jacket to the cleaners, which is a favor, remember? And that stain is very obvious. Just switch it for the blue one, which will look fine with that shirt.”
Standing in the hallway, he looked cornered, though why her offer to clean his jacket would make him feel hounded was beyond her. He removed the offending item with the slow, funereal motions with which he might have draped it across the glassy-eyed face of a pedestrian who’d been fatally run over. Even when she took it from him, he held on to it a little longer, and they almost ripped a seam.
On a whim admittedly trite, Irina went shopping at Anne Summers that morning. The idea was really more of a joke (if, it transpired, a pricey joke) than a serious bid to spice up their sex life, whose routine was now so ritualized that the introduction of any new element would be as revolutionary as Vatican II. Brusque sorts like Lawrence dismissed risqué undergarments as Rocky Horror camp. Still, she nursed a tiny hope that the black satin teddy might turn him on. To this day, she had no idea what did turn him on. One thing was sure: if he did get off on sexy lingerie, he’d never have told her.
Debating whether to keep it wrapped in the box or to surprise him by wearing it to bed, Irina checked the sports jacket for spare change or stray business cards, and was about to head off to the cleaners when she encountered a lump in the inside pocket.
A mobile phone.
An ordinary enough discovery, except for the fact that to her knowledge Lawrence didn’t own a mobile phone. He had certainly never given her the number. And they’d discussed the matter. While they could afford them, Irina regarded spending as akin to voting, and she resented the exorbitant UK price plans; British children were squandering such a large proportion of their meager resources on mobiles that chocolate sales had slumped. Since they were both easily contacted by landline, Lawrence had seemed in accord, so much so that she first assumed that he’d picked up someone else’s mobile left behind at some meeting, intending to return it.
To confirm as much, she turned the set on and pressed the PHONE BOOK button.
Bethany.
Lacking a surname, presumably the listing was first for beginning with B. But as she pressed the DOWN tab, she found only six more numbers entered into the permanent memory: Club Gascon, Irina, National Liberal Club, Omen, Ritz, Royal Horseguards Hotel.
Heart pounding, she scrolled up to the B entry, and hit SEND.
“Yasha! But why are you—?”
END.
Irina spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of suspension. There was an explanation, some temporary professional exigency that required this phone, perhaps provided by Blue Sky. She distracted herself by puzzling over the listing of Omen, the strange coincidence, and the inconsistency: Lawrence detested Japanese food. Her mind idled to her theory that the cuisine had latterly grown so popular for being light, and thus beloved of women for lunch.
On return home, earlier than usual, Lawrence was boisterous. “Hey, sorry I forgot this morning—happy Valentine’s Day!” His smack on the lips rebounded like a basketball. Her diffident father greeted his daughter with a similar springy terror, as if at any moment the cops would burst from the bushes and arrest him for incest. “I thought we could call Club Gascon, and ask if they have a cancellation.”
When she pointed out that he had therefore not planned the occasion in advance, he admitted that making a reservation had slipped his mind.
“A night at Club Gascon could run us 150 quid,” she said unenthusiastically.
“Hey, you only live once! And I thought that tight fist of yours had loosened up.”
It had. The financial objection was disingenuous. Since finding Club Gascon listed on that mobile, which exuded an alien, Kryptonite weakening in the pocket of her cardigan, she didn’t feel that their favorite special-occasion restaurant belonged to them anymore. “I’ve already thawed the chicken,” she said.
He didn’t press it. Club Gascon having cancellations on Valentine’s Day was a farcical notion anyway, unless some other woman in this city had also found a mysterious mobile in her partner’s sports jacket. Lawrence busied himself, tossing junk mail, studying the TV listings, dusting the dining table, though that was her job. He commonly came home fagged, tight-lipped, and terse. Yet washing dishes, he delivered a rapid nonstop monologue about the Bush administration’s maladroit alienation of prospective UN allies on Iraq, whose invasion Lawrence both deplored and seemed to be looking forward to. Then he dropped airily, “Take in my jacket?” She said yes. “Thanks! You don’t have to pick it up. I’ll do it.”
“That won’t be necessary,” she said, and she caught him sneaking a long look at her face as the water ran. But it was only when she said, “Mind if we skip popcorn tonight? I’m not in the mood,” that his eyes flecked with alarm. They always had popcorn. Its seasoning maybe—Thai 7-Spice or American Barbeque—but the bowlful itself in front of the news had never been a question of mood.
Keeping her own counsel through dinner, Irina knew she should have just come out and asked him about the phone; the longer she delayed putting the question, the more malignant it seemed to grow. But dread is a mighty discouragement, and after cleanup she even let him tune in the Masters.
Though she’d grown into an avid snooker fan, this last season Ramsey Acton had been mysteriously absent from the circuit, and her fascination with the game had waned. She wasn’t familiar with the players in this match, and felt no investment in who won. She had no idea why they were watching this. Or rather, she did.
Yet tonight, Lawrence was glued to the screen. When she interrupted with a comment on Paul Hunter’s girly hairstyle, he brushed her off. “Would you please?”
“Please what?”
“Just—keep it down, so I can follow this!”
“You said a few years ago that you’d had it with this game,” said Irina. “Since when did you get so involved in a snooker match again?”
“Americans say snooker!” he exclaimed, rhyming the word with looker. “I’m sick to death of this pretentious wannabe Brit-speak! You’re a Yank just like me, and an American doesn’t watch snoooooooooooooooooker!”
The OOOs rang through the room. Irina fluctuated between injured, angry, and stunned. Gravely, she rose from her armchair, and switched off the set.
“Look, I’m sorry I used that tone of voice,” Lawrence backpedaled. “I’ve had a hard day, that’s all.”
Irina kept her back to him, bracing her hands on either corner of the TV. “I’ve had a hard day, too,” she said quietly.
“Come on!” he cried from the couch, resorting to the boisterousness with which he had first burst into the flat. “Turn it back on, and I promise I won’t be such a jerk.”
She turned around, blocking the black set, forcing him as she might have years before to look at his woman of an evening instead of that screen. “Lawrence. Why have you never told me you have a mobile, or given me the number?”
His face churned. That was the point, before he said a word, that he broke her heart. The contortion of those muscles paraded a decision over whether to tell her the truth. Once he finally spoke, Lawrence’s opting for the honesty route didn’t nearly compensate for the fact that candor had been a choice. For an alternative direction to have beckoned, it was probably well trod.
“I guess,” he frowned, “we have to talk.”
Irina sank into her armchair, and cursed herself. Had she kept silent, she might have won another precious day or two of normal life. Clearly that normal life was not really so normal, and hadn’t been for some time, but if lying to your partner was anathema, lying to yourself was bliss.
“You mean,” she said, and it really wasn’t fair that she was the one who had to say it, “about Bethany.”
“Yeah,” he croaked.
It had always been a joke. Putting the woman’s name in italics, speaking it with that droll hint of sarcasm. The jealousy had been a game. She’d been jealous for fun, because it made Lawrence seem more attractive; it hadn’t been serious. Because Bethany—well, Bethany—the little vixen was too OBVIOUS, wasn’t she? But then, if an Islamic iconoclast is going to make war with the West, he’s not going to blow up a Rotary Club in Nebraska, is he? He’s going to knock down the World Trade Center. An African monomaniac isn’t going to hold free and fair elections; he’s going to rig the ballot and then declare himself president for life. It’s what made the world such a bore really, the plodding predictability of it all, the fact that appearances, alas, are rarely deceiving, so that when your partner works with an attractive woman who wears scandalously short skirts and flirts with him shamelessly, that’s the one he’ll have an affair with, dummy, for you ignore the obvious at your peril.
The burden of these scenes isn’t only their banality, but your obligation to solicit all the information that you don’t want to know. “How long,” she said, “has this been going on?”
Again his face kneaded with that awful deciding. He might have allowed, “Only a few weeks,” and gotten away with it, but Lawrence did seem to have registered that for him to have come clean on the main thing only to fudge the details would make this conversation utterly futile. “It’s hard to say…” he stalled.
“I realize it’s hard to say,” she countered. “I doubt it’s hard to calculate.”
He continued to train his gaze at a right angle to her chair. “Five years,” he said. “Or a little under.”
Irina looked at Lawrence blankly. She had no idea who he was.
The few moments that followed were misleadingly silent, for in that time a low rumble in her core built to that notorious roar of an oncoming train that fleeing onlookers had described during the fall of the twin towers. Irina was abashed at the analogy, surely a vain misappropriation of national tragedy, but the sensation of implosion was still akin. After all, she had dully marveled watching CNN that September morning at how effortlessly over the course of a few seconds a great feat of engineering, the labor of many years, a tribute to tireless devotion and even love, had been laid to waste. Likewise, the alliance in this living room had taken even longer to forge, and was equally a labor of love, yet was just as readily annihilated. If your own life is a self-contained city, then Lawrence was a tower at the prow of her island. With Lawrence felled—or the myth of Lawrence, as she had understood him only moments ago—her skyline was suddenly leveled and more plain. Certainly the feeling in this chair in the rubble of her personal apocalypse recalled that everything-is-stupid aftermath of 9/11, save that even on September 11 there had been one thing, one solitary thing, that hadn’t seemed stupid. Now that, too, was bagatelle.
“Why?” Another obligation, but because the question had to do with the inner workings of a total stranger, she was not sure that she cared.
“Well, I could say—”
She stopped him. “Mention versus use.”
His face was plowed into itself. “I don’t know.”
“You must have thought about it.” She was calm, albeit dead calm, sails slackened.
“Sometimes. Others, not at all. I keep things—separate. You know, I—”
“Oh, God, you’re not going to say compartmentalize, are you?”
“Uh—not anymore!” She didn’t smile. “I guess I didn’t like this feeling, like I was this regulation think-tank wonk, and, you know, solid, steadfast … a good doobie, a good soldier… I had the urge to be—bad.”
“It would have been easier on me if you’d just sneaked a couple of cigarettes,” she said dryly. In retrospect, her own dirty secret seemed hilariously, bitterly small.
He raised an eyebrow. “I’ve known about that, you know. Your breath…”
“You know I sneak two fags a week, and I’m oblivious to your having an affair for five years. What does that make me but a moron.”
“No, it makes me careful. I wasn’t dropping clues, hoping to be found out. I’ve dreaded hurting you. I’ve gone to lengths not to.”
“I’m supposed to feel flattered? That you cheated well? Because going to lengths not to hurt me is not fucking some other woman at all.” She had claimed that fabled moral high ground, but the air was thin up here, the landscape bleak, the company nonexistent. The moral high ground was a lonely steppe. She might have preferred a grottier lowland, slumming in the mud with everyone else.
“Well, obviously,” he said, staring at his hands.
There was no need to try to make him feel any more ashamed; she regretted that lengths remark, as if both she and Lawrence were ganging up on him. “Is that it?” she asked gently. “You were tired of being a choir boy?”
“I felt—packaged. Boxed up, to other people, to myself. To you, even. I know this whole thing isn’t like me. And I’ve racked my brains over that. But I came to the conclusion that doing something that wasn’t like me was part of what drove me to it. I wanted to do something outrageous.”
“But what you’ve done—are doing—isn’t outrageous. It’s commonplace.”
“It hasn’t felt,” he admitted, “commonplace.”
The assertion came with pictures, and she winced.
“I guess I wanted something that was mine,” he added.
All of Russia wasn’t enough? “I was yours.”
“Something private.”
“You mean secret.”
“All right. Secret. Still, I don’t totally understand it,” he puzzled. “I love you.”
“What about Bethany?” The woman had earned her way out of italics.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you tell her that you love her?”
“Sometimes,” he said warily. “But only in—certain circumstances.”
“In those—certain circumstances. With me. Has it been that crap?”
“No, it’s been fine!”
“A pretty feeble adjective for fucking the love of your life.”
“Look, I don’t want to rub your nose in it. And you’re a great-looking woman, in addition to being a fantastic cook and an incredibly talented artist—”
“Don’t,” she said. “I don’t know why, but the longer you go on like that, the more it sounds insulting.”
“The point is, with, um— Well, it’s different.”
“It’s hotter.”
“That’d be one way of putting it.”
“You have another way of putting it?”
“Not particularly,” he said glumly.
Irina was not sure if the impulse behind her next question was to understand, or to hurt herself. Nor was she sure why she might want to hurt herself, or what she had done that should be punished. “Do you kiss her?” she whispered.
“What kind of question is that?”
“The kind I want an answer to.”
Flustered, he said, “Well, what do you think?”
“Because you don’t kiss me.”
“Oh, I do, too!” he objected.
“Pecks don’t count. You haven’t really kissed me in years. So you kiss her instead. I think that hurts me more. I might be able to forgive you for fucking her a thousand times. I’m not sure I can forgive you for kissing her once.”
She might have kept looking the other way, slipping the mobile quietly back into his jacket when she brought it back from the cleaners. Now, presumably, they had to do something. Which seemed wasteful. This was all about sex, yes? In all, it was a small transgression—wasn’t it? It should have been. It really should have been. Alas, the fact that it should have been didn’t mean it was.
“I wish I could admonish you with what a loser she is,” Irina proceeded leadenly; none of what she was about to say was in her interests. “How she’s feckless, or uneducated, or dumb. How you two have nothing in common. How you’re used to being around people who care about the world and who actually read the newspaper, so with some airheaded bimbo with Nautilus-tightened deltoids you’ll get bored. How this is clearly some harebrained infatuation that won’t last five minutes—when it’s already lasted five years. Because none of that’s so, is it? She’s smart. She speaks six languages. She has a doctorate. Since she’s riding the same terrorism wave as you are, I assume her career is going great guns. You two have everything in common—more, I suppose, than we do. I’ve appreciated when you try to explain your research to me, and you make a credible show of caring what I think. But we can’t really get into it, all that intellectual sparring and meeting of minds. I’m an illustrator. Icing on the cake, you have the hots for her. You’re perfectly suited.”
Meanwhile, Lawrence had dropped his chin, and shed two discreet tears—one for her, and one for him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I had what I wanted more than anything in the world, and I messed it up.”
She studied him. When he’d returned from that conference in Sarajevo, and she had the night before declined that very other life of which Lawrence had for the last five years been so generously availing himself, she had conjectured that the journey toward true intimacy was a decon-struction—a progressive discovery of the Other as not-you, of how little you understood your partner, an unknowing. Yet however often she may have challenged the kind of constraining generalizations that Lawrence now averred packaged and boxed him—that he was “kind” or “confident” or “regimented”—the one cornerstone of his character that she had never tried to dig up was that Lawrence James Trainer was loyal. In theory, then, they were now closer than they had ever been, because the process of unknowing was complete.
IT MIGHT HAVE SEEMED odd to outsiders, but they slept together that night. Wearing clothes would have made a weird situation weirder, so they took them off—though somehow the surprise black-satin teddy no longer seemed appropriate. Irina drew Lawrence, Total Stranger, to her breast and stroked his hair. According to script, she should have been seething. Yet she couldn’t find the anger, and she looked for it long enough to conclude that it wasn’t there. She felt sorry for him. A peculiar but at length fortuitous choice. As it turned out, feeling sorry for Lawrence would prove a fleeting privilege, and she’d have all the time in the world to feel sorry for herself.
When they woke that morning, she wondered if the anger might be lying in wait, and she would rise in a single motion to rail at Lawrence as he cowered in the bedsheets, screeching like a harridan possessed. But the rage wouldn’t come. She didn’t scream about how many lies he had told her, or pry masochistically into the methods of his subterfuge. She padded numbly to make coffee. She felt diminished, frightened, and defeated. More and more the whole sorry business felt obscurely her fault. Since Lawrence thought it was his fault, they shuffled the flat in mutual apology—deferent, solicitous. Lawrence didn’t care for any toast.
On impulse, she saw him off for work downstairs, all the way to the pavement. They hugged. As she watched him slouch toward Borough High Street, Irina realized that, from the red flag of that mobile phone onwards, she had yet to cry. But once Lawrence reached the light and turned to give her another hangdog wave, she remembered that simple sequence from a few years before, when she’d run after him in the rain in socks, to hand off his trench coat, his ham sandwich—a memory sweet for its very ordinariness, a rare slice of normal life that she’d savored like pie. So when she lifted her hand to wave back, she could only manage to raise it waist-high, the strength required to bring it to her chest having failed her. The fingers waggled weakly, while the features of her face ran like ink in the rain. It wasn’t raining this morning, but it should have been. Because Lawrence never came back.
IRINA SLIPPED INTO THE train, and miraculously got a seat. It was only six-thirty p.m. and for an eight p.m. engagement she had allowed too much time. Though there was always the Northern Line, which had a way of vacuuming the fat from your schedule like liposuction. Voilà, between London Bridge and Monument the train stuttered to a halt, its quiescent passengers no more startled than by the fact that on one more night the sun had set.
The nature of her errand might be considered rash, although people who have nothing to lose may have lost, along with everything else, the capacity to be rash. True, she could have waited for a proper night’s sleep, but there was no telling when that might next be, and the very irrationality of her urgency helped to drive it.
The evening before, she had gone through the standard paces because she hadn’t known what else to do with herself. She’d made dinner. The time came and went for Lawrence’s traditional arrival from work. By nine p.m., she returned the chicken breasts, stuffed with ricotta and wild-boar pancetta, to the fridge. She checked the answering machine, in case he’d rung while she was taking out the rubbish. Finally she thought to retrieve her e-mail, and the message from his office address was brief: “I don’t know how to say I’m sorry in a way that makes any difference. You have every right to be mad. I guess I won’t be coming home. Maybe we both need some time to think.” Considering to whose flat he had doubtless repaired, she didn’t imagine that he’d be doing a lot of thinking.
She sat in her rust-colored armchair. She didn’t drink. She didn’t eat. She didn’t play Shawn Colvin. She sat.
All night, she hunted feverishly for her fury. For five years Lawrence had been fucking the daylights out of his sassy, know-it-all colleague behind her back, and she did indeed have “every right to be mad.” Anger is protective; it holds the darker emotions at bay. Yet dejection and despair were bound to penetrate any feeble bramble of wrath, like intruders in Doc Martens crushing a narrow skirting of blackberry bushes around an unlocked house.
On a lone thin wick did a flame of fury flicker, and she stared into it as if mesmerized by one lit candle on a cake.
Ramsey’s forty-seventh birthday. That Gethsemane over his snooker table. She’d said no, hadn’t she. She’d averted her face, and fled to the loo, where she stared herself down in the mirror. So why hadn’t Lawrence done likewise? Why couldn’t Lawrence have confronted the same fork in the road, seen the harm that lay left, and determinedly chosen the right? And now look. She’d cheated herself for a fool’s rectitude. The electricity she’d felt with Ramsey that night, and revisited in tiny, jaw-juddering jolts at Bournemouth, the Pierre Hotel, had been like jamming two fingers into a live socket. But she’d denied herself. And for what.
She must have dozed a couple of hours around dawn. She woke in the chair with a start; there seemed no time to lose. Might those two have waited, to give themselves time to think? Besides, Jude was the sort who would want a big production, even the second time around, and that took many months of planning. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Digging out the number, she moved with the jagged haste of Dustin Hoffman at the end of The Graduate. Only after dialing did she realize that he might be playing the Masters in North London this week, and would need his sleep.
“It’s Irina,” she said, her clarifying “Irina McGovern” a token of the fact that they hardly knew each other. She realized that she risked sounding like a nut, but among the many things she no longer cared about was sounding like a nut. “Have you gotten married?”
A bleary pause; she had woken him up. “Oi, now that you mention it, I don’t seem to have got round to it.”
In the rush of relief, she had to sit down. “I’d like to see you.” After fair enough, lemme get me diary, she cut him off. “How about tonight?”
When he named a venue convenient for himself—Best of India on Roman Road—she was disappointed. Any restaurant that “finally,” as he remarked, had a liquor license was a dump. She had hoped for a reprise of Omen, that she might return to her own fork in the road and turn left. Likewise, her heart fell when he suggested that they meet at the restaurant; she was no longer worthy of retrieval in his Jaguar. “I’d give you a lift,” he added, “but I flogged the motor.” She was consternated. Sold that 1965 classic? Since the XKE was a part of her private landscape, he might have asked—much as when a tree splays on either side of a property line, you get permission from your neighbor before you fell it.
Well, she wasn’t about to take the Ford Capri, little more than a four-year parking problem, and a gesture in retrospect intended to buy her off. So here she sat on the Northern Line, under the river, in the same navy blue skirt she’d worn to Omen, cursing herself for tossing the white blouse with the tear in the collar into the bin.
It was February, not summertime, and as she emerged from the Central Line at Mile End the wind whipped, biting. That luscious July in 1997, the sky had been lambent until after ten; now, nearing eight, it had been pitch dark for three hours. That magical birthday—Oxo Tower to the left, Tower Bridge to the right, the dome of St. Paul’s catching the light up ahead—the vista of the Thames out the open window of the Jaguar had spread a picture-postcard reminder of how lucky she was to live in one of the most dramatic cities in the world. Yet the area around the Mile End tube stop was grungy, cluttered with rancid-smelling fried chicken joints, low-lit, and vaguely threatening. Traffic was heavy, the pedestrian signals short; aggressive drivers careered through the crosswalk, inches from her shoes. By two blocks up Grove Road, her gloved hands had grown cadaverously cold.
The restaurant was drafty, and chintz of old Christmas tinsel still scalloped the cornice. Though she was a few minutes late, Ramsey, usually so punctual, was not yet in evidence. She took a seat, banging her hands together, and ordered a glass of house red, on so little sleep sure to go straight to her head. It had done just that by the time she’d nearly drained the glass, the door tinkled, and Ramsey sidled in at half-past.
She was immediately struck that he looked off-color, almost yellow, and little remained of his hair. Some men lost it all at once, she supposed—though she was astonished that he’d gained weight. Oh, he wasn’t paunchy, but his face was bloated and blurred. Unless the light was playing tricks with the folds of his shirt, he’d grown those little breasts of the overindulgent. Heavy drinking? Once renowned for the swift, fluid grace of his break-building, presently Ramsey walked with a faint geriatric creak; he was still graceful, but painfully slow. “Sorry I’m late,” he apologized, kissing her cheek; his lips were chapped, his breath disagreeably sweet. “I’d an appointment that set me back.”
The wine eased cutting to the chase. “You said on the phone that you hadn’t gotten married. Or yet, anyway. Is that still on?”
“No,” he said. “Jude studied on it hard, like. What she’d have to be up for. I give the bird credit for knowing her limits. And I’d well rather she backed out when she did than get halfway in and then decide she couldn’t stick it.”
“You make marrying you sound like such a trial.” Irina smiled teasingly. “Is it really that bad?”
“Oi, make no mistake.” His return tease was minor-key.
“Well, I’m sorry it didn’t work out.” She dispatched the last few drops of acrid wine. “Actually, I take that back. I’m not sorry at all.” She banged the glass down like a gauntlet, and looked him in the eye.
The gray-blue irises were overcast, his gaze distant. In his remoteness, Ramsey looked very wise, but in a way that made wisdom seem not altogether pleasant. A wise person, for example, doesn’t believe that he has to pick up any old gauntlet just because somebody flopped it on his table, and he said nothing. Self-consciously, she scanned the meager wine list. He let her take the initiative, and she ordered a merlot.
“So how’s Anorak Man keeping?”
“I wouldn’t know. Lawrence left for work yesterday morning, and never came home.”
“That don’t sound like the bloke!” The energy of the exclamation seemed to cost him, and he sagged.
“Yes, well. Lawrence seems taken lately with acting out of character.”
“You worried, pet? Rung the Met?”
“There’d be no point to telling Missing Persons. I’ve a pretty good idea where he is.”
The wine was uncorked with ridiculous flourish for a bottle that probably sold for £3 on the High Street, and Irina ran out of appetite for being coy. “He confessed two nights ago that he’s been having an affair with a colleague for nearly five years. He’s made himself scarce because he’s ashamed of himself. And maybe because he’s more in love with her than he admits. Or in lust, and I guess close up it’s hard to tell the difference.”
“So sorry, love,” he said, and unlike her sorrow on his account, readily retracted, he did sound truly, deeply sorry. “Must be powerful hard on you.”
It was hard on her. Though she had gone about arranging this meeting with fierce, hysterical determination, the image of Lawrence on the corner of Borough High Street waving good-bye, perhaps for the last time, was starting to intrude torturously on this interlude. Beneath the bloat, Irina could still discern the fierce lines and narrow contours of the face she’d once been dying to kiss. Yet his rumpled cotton shirt was misbuttoned, and he’d neglected a belt. Rather than arrive in that entrancing black leather jacket, he had bundled in wearing, of all things, a faded blue anorak. Unable to quite plug into the high voltage that had thrummed between them at Omen, she suffered from an awkward, groping sensation, as if clattering the thick brass bars of a British three-prong blindly against a socket cover in the dark.
Eating didn’t much appeal, but she was grateful for the ritual of ordering a meal. She reflexively ordered a vindaloo, he a chicken tikka; not at her most diplomatic, she muttered something about the dish not really being Indian at all but a British invention, and awfully bland.
“Only grub here I can stick. I don’t fancy self-torture.”
“You don’t like chilies?” she said with amazement, and tossed off without thinking, “As a couple, you and I would be hopelessly incompatible.”
“You reckon?” he said, with a returning lightness that got her hopes up.
The food arrived, in all its irrelevancy. Ramsey was barely touching his wine; maybe he’d realized it was time to cut down. Meantime, with the comings and goings of patrons, the restaurant heating system couldn’t keep up, and Irina kneaded her hands together in a gesture that must have made her appear even more anxious than she was. They looked at each other over the steaming ramekins, and it seemed to hit them at once: for the first time since they’d met, they were both free.
“Your hands…?” he asked. Her mumble about having a “condition” was incoherent, but she did manage to get across that they were cold. He moved the dishes aside, and reached forward, sliding his long, dry, tapered fingers slowly from the tips of her fingers to her palms, then wrapping them around the oysters below the thumbs. That was when it happened: the three prongs stopped rattling on the plastic cover, slipped cleanly into the socket, and hit the mains.
“You’re on the rebound, pet,” he murmured. His hands never stopped kneading, smoothing, squeezing, fingers sliding along the vulnerable undersides of her wrists. Should the effortless, inventive choreography of their hands be any indicator, they might make lovely partners on a dance floor. “Or after one day, I’d call it more of a ricochet.”
“It hasn’t been only a day,” she said. Her hands were warmer now, slithering into valleys and slipping under overhangs like twin skates undulating across an ocean floor. “You remember when we went to Omen on your birthday, and we went back to your house? There was a moment over your snooker table, when you were teaching me to brace the cue. I’ve never been sure if you were aware of it. I was dying to kiss you. But I wanted to be good. I didn’t want to hurt Lawrence, or mess up my life. So I didn’t, and ran to the loo. Now—when I look back on that moment, I think I made a mistake.”
His fingers ceased to circle the knobs of her knuckles, and gravely stilled. When she tried to slide her own hands up over his veiny metacarpi, he pinned them to the table; the skates had swum into a lobster trap. It was past time for him to say something.
“If it’s truly over with Jude?” she carried on in the silence, like Wile E. Coyote churning off a cliff into thin air. As a rule, cartoon characters only fall when they look down, so she didn’t. “I’d like to come home with you.”
With a last light squeeze, Ramsey’s hands withdrew.
Irina thought she might cry out. The current cut off so abruptly that the lights of the shabby restaurant should have gone dark. The power outage set off the same implosion in her midsection as Lawrence’s admission night before last, and she couldn’t take two terrorist attacks in as many days.
“I couldn’t be no use to you,” he said heavily. “You’re a beautiful bird. You could do better.”
“Now, don’t you think that determination is up to me?”
“No,” said Ramsey staunchly. “Never met a bird that knows what’s good for her.”
She looked down at her vindaloo, forming a layer of congealed grease. “It was all in my head, wasn’t it? I thought it was mutual. I thought you wanted to kiss me, too.”
To salvage her pride, he should have begged to differ, even if he had to lie. Instead he said, “At my snooker table all them years ago? You didn’t make no mistake. But I did, didn’t I? I ought to have paid the bill at Omen and drove you home.”
“To the contrary,” she said. “That night was one of the highlights of my life.”
“Look, pet.” He looked pained. She now felt badly, having so misapprehended the situation, and embarrassed him like this. Too little sleep and too much anguish had addled her judgment. “You’re better off with Anorak Man and no two ways about it.”
“All very well,” she said, defeated. “Except that Anorak Man doesn’t seem to think he’s better off with me.”
“My own advice, for what it’s worth, is you two patch things up. For donkey’s years I seen you was good together. I reckon what you just discovered is hard to square, ’cause when I were about the bloke was always dead sound. He can help you with your work and such like, where I don’t know no children’s book editors from pork pie. He’s took care of you, pet, and he’s clever, cleverer than me by a pole. He makes them clever political jokes I never get. Not half bad to look at. Always treats me proper as well, keeping up with all them stats like my centuries and that. Far as I could ever figure he loves you more than the world, even if he ain’t always brilliant at showing it.”
“No, he apparently hasn’t been brilliant at showing it for the last five years,” she said wearily. “So that’s very sweet, your pushing me back on Lawrence as an act of noble self-sacrifice. But I would really rather you just take the compliment.” So long as she had already humiliated herself, she might as well go all the way. “I think I could fall in love with you. I think I almost did, on your birthday. Even if you’re not interested, that’s nice, isn’t it? I’d at least like you to feel flattered.”
Ramsey took his time, tapping out and lighting a fag. “It’s dead nice,” he said, his tone as drained as his complexion. “I’m flattered, I am. But I’m a waster, pet. And about as sexy as a mealy banger on cold mash.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do,” he said softly, spewing smoke. “I know about that.”
“You seem to think so highly of Lawrence,” she said, trying to control the quaver in her voice. She’d put Ramsey in such an untenably awkward position that it really wouldn’t do to cry. “And I may know you only so well. But I do know this much: you’d never have betrayed me, like Lawrence. You’d never have deserted me.”
“You reckon?” he said skeptically, tapping an ash into his chicken tikka. “I wager you’d have said the same thing about Anorak Man, three days ago.”
“Maybe,” she begrudged.
“Besides, sunshine,” he added quietly, touching her forehead. “There’s different sorts of betrayal. And, love, all manner of desertions.”
The waiter asked if there was something wrong with their orders, and they demurred that they just weren’t hungry; he cleared the dishes and brought the bill. Though Ramsey would ordinarily whisk it up right away, the tab stayed untouched on the table. “Here, let me,” said Irina, reaching for it. “You’ve taken me out so many times.”
“I might just take you up on that,” he said sheepishly.
The tension was gone. If she’d made a fool of herself, so be it, and now they were able to sip the wine and catch up like the old friends they would apparently remain. She bummed a Gauloise. “It occurred to me after I rang this morning that you might be playing in the Masters this week,” she said. “But I haven’t seen you on the BBC once this season. Have I missed something?”
“Missed the fact I retired. It were Jude’s idea, though I could see the merit. Go out on a high note, swan off into the sunset with that Crucible trophy. She’d notions about me commentating, or flogging some product on the telly. Can’t say I got the energy of late… But I could sure use the fees, like. Fact is, I’m a bit skint.”
“You? Short of money?”
He sighed. “I ain’t husbanded my resources, as they say. Jude, you know, she’s bloody high upkeep, and somehow that $50,000 she won in New York never made an appearance. So with all the travel in style to Spain and that, my winnings from the Crucible burnt up like autumn leaves by the end of the year.
“But it’s queer,” he mused. “Talk about the way your mind keeps coming back to some turning point, like that moment of yours over my snooker table? I been known to place the odd wager on me own matches, see. And I were this close”—he held his thumb and forefinger a quarter-inch apart—“to putting my last hundred grand on a flutter in that 2001 final. But me and Jude’d started up again by then, and that woman—well, you know how she feels about snooker. I figure she did a number on my head. I just couldn’t quite get up the confidence that I’d win. I got so far as to picking up the phone, but put it down again. Jesus wept! Would have cleaned up, at eight-to-one. I’d be taking you out tonight to the poshest joint in town, after trousering eight hundred grand.”
They walked together in silence to the end of Roman Road, where Irina would turn left toward the tube. It was depressing, the evening being yet so young that she needn’t worry about making the last train.
Putting a hand on each of her shoulders, he turned her into the orange of the streetlight. “Irina, that night of my birthday”—burfday—“it weren’t all in your head. But timing is everything.”
It is late. After eight p.m., or even nine. With no need to greet her returning warrior, no nightly obligation to provide freshly popped corn, pink pork escalopes, broccoli with orange sauce, she needn’t cut short her rambling constitutionals. These lunatic walkabouts have reached ever further afield these last two months—through Green, St. James, and Hyde Parks, on to Regent’s or, today, all the way to Hampstead Heath. She has traipsed without respite for five hours, and will return to Borough fatigued. Wearing herself out is the idea. Then, in those first weeks, wandering the city in an abstemious stupor had been purely about keeping herself from the liquor cabinet, the wine, the packet of fags she no longer has to hide.
She is wearing the faded blue polo neck. A faint golden ghost still haunts the left breast. She refuses to toss the shirt in the rag bag. Lawrence had scrubbed at the curry stain for ten minutes with pre-treatment over the sink. She has every reason to have soured on such memories. But who could wring acrimony from any partner, ex or otherwise, having labored to rescue a tattered top because he loves it, or loves it because he loves her? Once loved her. As for the pretty red scarf at her neck, it was a present from Indonesia, which he brought back after a conference in Jakarta. While doubtless he’d been on the junket with her, she cannot shred it in a rage. To the contrary, the trove of this and every other gift that populates the flat, freshly finite, has grown more precious.
As she trudges the last leg home along the Thames, the lights of the South Bank across the river glimmer with the Shakespeare and Pinter that Lawrence would never make time for. Unencumbered by a workaholic, she could now attend all the theater that she likes. She doesn’t like. Climbing the slope of Blackfriars Bridge, she feels Hampstead Heath in her knees. Why, she’s walked fifteen miles today, if not twenty.
A waste of time. She should be getting started on the new illustrations. The commercial success of Ivan has increased the pressure to produce—and isn’t that the way. Not long ago, no one gave two hoots about Irina Mc-Govern’s next children’s book, and she’d have given her right arm to be in the position she’s in today. Now that she has the audience, she wishes it would go away. If Ramsey’s humiliating thanks-but-no-thanks when she threw herself at the poor man in February is any guide, there must be some rule of the universe that says, “All right, you can have what you want, but not while you still want it.” Circumstances reversed, Lawrence would take refuge in his work—in its dryness, its coldness, its dullness even. Yet she isn’t able to bury herself blindly in a drawing in the same spirit. The darkest, most morbid of artwork still draws on a vitality that she cannot rouse.
Nearing the flat, she surveys the heavy postindustrial neighborhood with its Victorian remnants of red brick. She searches for her former sense of satisfied ownership, of having annexed a brave new world far from Brighton Beach, where her mother makes her feel clumsy and plain. Instead she feels like a foreigner again, and wonders what she’s doing here. It was Lawrence’s job at Blue Sky that had brought them to Britain. Now rather than savor the flavorful local expressions—“a bit of a dust-up”; “that knocks the competition into a cocked hat”—Britain just seems like any old somewhere else, somewhere she doesn’t belong. The city is awash with Americans anyway, and, latterly, with nouveau riche Russians on package holidays, who speak in a savvy, post-Soviet slang she can’t decipher. She doesn’t feel special. Worse, she feels abandoned, as if having deplaned during a layover, only for the flight to take off without her. Maybe shipping back to the US would keep at bay this confusing sensation she has almost nightly: an overweening ache to go “home” when she’s already there.
At the door of the flat, she fumbles with her keys. The stairwell’s timer-light is out. She hasn’t been on top of things lately; she never remembers to ring the management company during office hours. The flat too is dark. Lately she keeps the drapes drawn during the day. She gropes for the switch. It is killingly silent. Ironically, she had joined her neighbors in a ten-year campaign to have Trinity Street gated down the middle to block through traffic. A shortcut to a major route south, the narrow, historic road had choked bumper-to-bumper during rush hours. For years, she had railed from these windows at the drivers, who were loud and rude. Within days of Lawrence’s departure, Southwark Council had come through. Now that she has what she wished for, the stillness outside is oppressive. She misses the rev of engines and irritable honk of horns, which might have provided a reassuring sense of human bustle nearby.
To the surprise of her former self, she turns on the TV. After battling Lawrence for years over telly OD, now she, too, keeps it yammering the whole night through. Well, television is a creditable substitute for heavy traffic, and she’s not going to play Scrabble alone.
BBC2 announces the upcoming broadcast of the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield. She hastens to change the channel. She won’t torture herself. It’s not only that Ramsey has retired.
He rang up not long after her botched propositioning of the poor fellow at Best of India, to make sure that she was all right. She suggested, awkwardly, that maybe they could be friends. Grown-ups don’t usually tender friendship so baldly, and she’d sounded like little Ivan in her own unaward-winning book. Ramsey hemmed and hawed. Finally he must have feared that he was hurting her feelings, and came clean.
She apologized for not noticing in the restaurant, because she had been too absorbed in her own devastation. Now that she has stopped by Hackney several times, she finds that Ramsey’s illness provides them a common quality of convalescence—if she is to indulge the conceit that Ramsey is getting better. Some afternoons she intersects with visiting snooker stars. Stephen Hendry and, more surprisingly, Ronnie O’Sullivan are especially attentive, and she feels sheepish about ever having dismissed Hendry as boring, or O’Sullivan as uncouth. In person, Hendry has a sly sense of humor, O’Sullivan a heart. She brings the odd shepherd’s pie or rice pudding, which she doubts that Ramsey eats. They are not close enough—yet, anyway—for her to help him with what he really requires: sponge baths, or assistance with the bedpan. Of course, he does have a day nurse from the NHS, a terribly possessive middle-aged Irishwoman who is obviously a snooker fan, and who is always trying to get visitors to cut it short. Upstairs, she teases Ramsey that the nurse fancies him like mad. Frail and preternaturally aged, he finds the joke much funnier than she intends. Despite the sadness of it all, she is relieved to have found someone else to care for. When he urges her to go live her own life, she assures him that he is doing her the favor, and she means it.
Mercifully, the electricity has never returned; the prongs no longer even clatter against the socket. Timing is everything.
On her own account, she has resolved to eat proper meals with vegetables. Yet so far by the time she gnaws through some crackers and cheese, she can’t get it together to steam broccoli. (After these insane walkabouts, she’s losing weight. But if she’s honest, she makes up for plenty of lost calories with alcohol.) As she stands over the cutting board to catch the crumbs, her eyes roam the rows of spices beside the stove: juniper berries, wild thyme, onion seeds. Now that she has no one to cook for, the spices will stale. The oils in the exotic condiments will go rancid—aubergine pickle, Thai satay.
The time may come soon that she’ll have to go through all this crap, because the flat is too large and dear for a single tenant. A second month in a row, on April 1 the rent was quietly deducted from Lawrence’s current account. She can’t allow him to keep paying her expenses if he doesn’t live here. He should have canceled all the direct debits weeks ago—the TV license, the council tax bill. She resolves, weakly, to pay him back. Nevertheless, a gnawing anxiety of her abrupt single life is money. Maybe it’s a girl thing. She has salted away over a hundred grand of her own. But no nest-egg could be large enough to make her feel as safe as she did for fifteen years, most of them with little in the bank—yet with a strong, capable, resourceful man as her protector.
She has learned the hard way that there is no safety. That there never was any safety. So it is the illusion of safety that she misses, nothing more. Ruefully, she conjures what has long been her touchstone, the apotheosis of refuge—that tent holding its own against the elements in Talbot Park when she was fourteen. In the end, it was a token of false security, really, of the dangers of ever allowing yourself to imagine that you’ll be okay. Because she should have sealed the seams. By three a.m., the tiny drops along the stitching had joined to streams. A dark line of waterlog was crawling from the feet of their sleeping bags predatorily toward the necks, and the girls got cold. Shaking and drenched, they had huddled down the muddy path to a pay phone outside the office, which was closed. But now there was no one to ring, like Sarah’s mother, to take her home.
She uncorks a Montepulciano. She will dispatch the bottle by self-deceivingly small measures. Thank God the vodka is finished. She has not allowed herself to replace it. She flops into the rust-colored armchair. She has yet, after more than two months, to splay on his green sofa. She lights a fag, her third of the day, one of the dubious privileges of solitude. She is free to kill herself by degrees without being hounded. But she misses his castigation. The voice in her own head is tinnier, and merely whispers that she will quit altogether “soon” or “next month.” During those first few weeks, she got up to a pack a day. She didn’t care. She has clawed that back to half. Still, the carpet has begun to exude the telltale reek of a smoker’s lair. A real smoker.
The drags are contemplative. It’s nice here. But she despairs that she made all the decorating decisions herself, which leaves her surrounded with only her own purchases, her own tastes. He lived so lightly here. Rather than feel tormented by numerous reminders, she wishes that he’d left more behind. His coffee glass—she bought even that. His clothes—stowed; she would have to open drawers and wardrobes to go looking for her own sadness. There had been some laundry, but that was tenderly folded weeks ago, and now if she presses those flannel shirts to her face they smell only of Persil.
She did come across the electric clippers last week, recalling the only time she cut his hair. There is something sensual about cutting a man’s hair, intimate, animal, like a chimpanzee’s grooming of burrs from the coat of her mate. She’d gloried so in the project that he grew impatient. The cut came out too short in the front, and he’d announced peremptorily that next time it was back to the Algerian barber on Long Lane. The clippers were an emblem, therefore, of a failed experiment, and of an afternoon on which he’d not been kind. So it didn’t make a lot of sense to have switched on the appliance, to have gripped the vibrating column—it stirred her like a sexual aid—but you could apparently wax nostalgic about bad memories. It hadn’t made a lot of sense, either, when she’d bowed her head onto his small oak desk—he’d taken his computer with him that morning; he had known that he wasn’t coming back. Resting her forehead on the wood, the way Muslims touch the floor when they pray, she’d petted that desk like a dog. But then, it was very late, and that was before she’d run out of vodka.
If she knows she should be angry, outrage would further wear her out. Besides, she does not for a moment believe that Lawrence delighted in his subterfuge. He may well have revulsed himself, but in so doing he had also interested himself—in himself—and fascination was much more likely Lawrence’s downfall than delight. Moreover, a sense of complicity in her fate has done nothing but compound. Granted, on a few evenings she’d made an effort to shift the program in bed. She’d made that bid or two to get him to make love to her while looking her square in the eye. She’d asked him about his fantasies. But she hadn’t tried very hard. She’d been afraid, though of what? She’d been lazy. So she can’t get up a head of steam over that tart at Blue Sky. If it hadn’t been Bethany Anders, it would have been some secretarial floozy who wasn’t as smart. Because as it transpired, Lawrence didn’t like fucking turned to the wall any more than she did. As it transpired, Lawrence had missed kissing, too. His pursuit of Bethany made Lawrence seem less virtuous, but more ambitious.
Simply vanishing like that had been brutal, and she should be angry about that, too. Still, he did ring up soon after, to apologize. And she understands. Lawrence may have toyed with being “bad.” But he is at core a staunchly moral person. Ergo, the one thing he cannot bear is being in the wrong. He might be able to face her. He cannot face himself. It is his sole cowardice.
Irina thinks a lot about what she feels. By her third glass and fifth fag, Lawrence’s more practical conventions commend themselves. Pretty soon she will have to nip all this feeling in the bud, and start deciding what to do.
Another slab of Port Salut. Of course, the most sensible solution to feeling peckish this time of night would be popcorn. Even for the slightly drunk, the high-fiber, low-fat snack would take five minutes to fix. Scores of seasonings beckon from the spice rack. But she tried going through the motions once. Blossomed like a wedding bouquet, the untouched bowlful made her cry. There are four unopened bags of kernels in the cupboard, and at some point she’ll throw them away.
Unsteadily, she turns off the tube, chains the door, turns down the heat. These small rituals and even brushing her teeth she no longer takes for granted. Only recently has she not woken to unwashed highball glasses and smeary knives in the sink, her teeth furred, the whole flat chidingly toasty, the heat having run full-blast all night. The self-control required to get herself to bed, and once in, to get out again, she has had to rebuild from scratch, like a stroke victim relearning the words weather and pail.
Under the winter duvet, now too hot, she considers masturbating, but declines. She doesn’t know what to fantasize about anymore. And this is crazy, but the unfathomable, half-painful sensation of sexual arousal now seems faintly evil.
She flips a few pages of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and registers nothing. Par for the course, and clinching today’s perfect score of zero accomplishments from morning to night. That arduous walk to Hampstead Heath was not only fruitless, but visually blighted: she kept mistaking a curled brown leaf for excrement, white flowers in a meadow for trash. Following on such an unproductive afternoon, she should be disgusted with herself. But she is not. She is well pleased. By hook or by crook, one more day is over.