6

ON ONE MORE EXASPERATING afternoon in August, Irina thumbed through the illustrations for Seeing Red up until the blazing arrival of the Crimson Traveler, gripped the pages by the corners, and ripped them from her drawing pad. Not allowing herself to reconsider, she immediately tore them in half, and crumpled the uninspired blue pictures into the bin. Only the new ones had life. Only the new illustrations were tolerable to her: those visited by a tall, terrifying figure from another world, whose rash, outlandish hues would blow the mind of any stunted visual pauper raised in the cramped, confining spectrum of midnight to cerulean. How had she ever borne drafting those first nine workaday pictures without red? Nevertheless, she would craft the blue ones again. The redrawn blues would pulse with need, with longing and deprivation, with all of the dolor and ache that gave “the blues” its emotional and musical connotations.

Though she told herself that she was simply being professional, the impatient disposal was still unnerving. What else formerly of such value, on which she had lavished painstaking care, might she suddenly tear asunder and cart to the trash because it was “workaday” and “uninspired”?

Meanwhile, just as Irina grew more expert at designing excuses for why she was out when Lawrence rang, Lawrence ceased to solicit them. By the end of the month, when once again she barely beat him back to the flat, no “Please hang up and try agains” would await her on the answering machine. If she wasn’t there, he didn’t want to know, so perhaps he didn’t want to know why, either.

She found his company unendurable.

Always a bit excessive, their dependence on television grew extravagant. Night after night they propped stuporously in their appointed seats, both glad of such a miraculous object—one that facilitated spending hours at a go in the same room without speaking, and at once cast this catatonic antisocial behavior as perfectly normal. Nervous of coming upon such a black hole in the schedule that they might be forced to turn off the set—say, a deadly confluence of World’s Wildest Police Videos, Gardener’s World, and House Doctor—Lawrence took to returning daily from work with a video.

Irina failed to follow the most primitive plot twists in the movies he rented. The visions that had begun that first phantasmagoric Sunday evening had only multiplied, furnishing far more transfixing drama than anything Lawrence dug up at Blockbuster. And visions they decisively were, as opposed to fantasies. She didn’t seem to concoct them like a fabulist, but to be subjected to them like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, arms bound, eyelids propped. She doubted she could stop them if she tried. But then—she didn’t try.

There is a knock on the door. It is late at night. They have not been expecting a guest. Irina sags. She is heavy with foreknowledge of who has come calling, and of what the visitor will require of her. Limp in her armchair, she is slow to rise. She follows Lawrence to the hall. On the landing stands Ramsey Acton, ramrod-straight and stock-still. He would never have traveled with his most treasured possession outside its case in real life. But in this solemn passion play, he is gripping his cue, planting the butt on the lino like a staff. Clad in black, he looks Old Testament, like one of the prophets. His blue-gray eyes are harrowing. They do not light on Lawrence, but stare directly over his shoulder to Irina. Ramsey’s refusal to acknowledge her partner’s presence does not seem rude. By implication—whatever the reason for Ramsey’s strange appearance at their door in a city where people do not customarily drop in on one another unannounced, much less at such an hour—it has nothing to do with Lawrence. Irina meets Ramsey’s eyes. They are uncompromising. No one says a word. Ramsey doesn’t need to. This is a summons. Should she fail to heed it, he will not be back.

London’s night air is cooling at the close of summer. Irina takes her coat from the rack in the hall. Following Ramsey’s gaze, Lawrence turns to Irina as she draws on her wrap.

He looks mystified. He has not seen Ramsey Acton for over a year. He has no understanding of why the man would show up like this with no warning. Yet it is too late for explanations. She is sorry. In the oddest way, for Irina this has nothing to do with Lawrence, either. She picks up her bag from its hook. That is all she takes. It is all she will ever take. There is every likelihood that she will never return to this lovely flat again. Brushing silently past Lawrence, she slips to Ramsey’s side. His cool, dry hand slides around her waist. Finally Ramsey looks Lawrence in the eye. The one look transmits everything. All these weeks she has been petrified by the prospect of sitting Lawrence down one arbitrary evening and blurting what he most fears to hear. The hackneyed scene will no longer be required. Lawrence knows. He is reeling from learning too much too fast. His dizziness can’t be helped. He will have all the time in the world to regain his bearings—to piece together painfully why she must have snapped at him over so minor a matter as toast.

Ramsey tosses his cue lightly into the air and catches it at a midpoint, where it balances. The cue has transformed from Biblical staff to an implement more playful, like the cane in a tap dance by Fred Astaire. Gracefully, Ramsey turns her from the door. They walk down the stairs.

The other recurrent vision was odder, because it never went anywhere. It just sat.

Ramsey and Lawrence are seated at the dining table in Borough. This is the same table at which they had consolidated the couple’s resolution last year—Lawrence’s resolution, really—that though their established foursome with Jude and her husband was no more, Ramsey would not be jettisoned from their friendship. How poignant: it is only thanks to Lawrence’s insistence that Ramsey has been rescued from social oblivion. Irina would have let the man slip from their acquaintance altogether. As if she knew, and had been leading herself not into temptation by sternly lashing the object of her unconscious desire to a little raft and letting it drift down-stream. As if Lawrence had known also, and had run off to scoop Ramsey’s raft from receding waters as a gift for Irina—as if Lawrence were pimping for his own ersatz wife.

Wife. The word forms the centerpiece of the mirage, like a bouquet on the table. Lawrence and Ramsey are sitting opposite, squared off. In the knock-on-the-door fancy, Lawrence seems irrelevant. In this one, it is Irina who doesn’t pertain. She is standing, exiled to the hallway. This is solely a matter between two men. Though the scene’s trappings are civilized—the dining table is a Victorian antique, the hand-sewn drapes are drawn and discreet—the feeling is Wild West, OK Corral. There could as well be a gauntlet on the table, and a pair of pistols.

Lawrence’s expression is tolerant. Whatever this is about, he will hear Ramsey out. Ramsey’s expression is simple, open.

Ramsey says to Lawrence, “I’m in love with your wife.”

This one line, that is the vision. It poses neither question nor solution. It merely frames a predicament. The scene stops there, for there is nowhere for it to go. Were the confrontation to carry on—Lawrence might say gruffly, “Well, that’s tough luck,” and Ramsey might return quietly, “Whose tough luck?”—the perfect impasse would remain. However little Irina herself “pertains,” Irina and only Irina has the power to move this encounter beyond face-off, to advance the plot.

Especially this second scenario was sufficiently trite that it ought to have embarrassed her. But she wasn’t embarrassed. It was too interesting. I’m in love with your wife. Irina wasn’t Lawrence’s wife. Yet the word arose in her mind’s eye because it was true. Whatever the law might dictate, Irina was Lawrence’s wife.

 

IN THE DAYS SHE’D been capable of focusing on more than her own misery, Irina had registered what the dramas and thrillers of the sort that Lawrence fed their voracious VCR were abundantly about. In the main, films place protagonists in a moral quandary, or test their mettle with trials by fire. Yet few members of the audience ever confront the cinematic dilemma in real life. Most people don’t have to figure out how to blow the whistle on government conspiracies without getting themselves killed. Most people aren’t pledged to take an assassin’s bullet to protect the president. World War II is over, and the standard Western mother is not likely to have to choose between the lives of her two children in a concentration camp.

By contrast, there is one province in which, sooner or later, virtually everyone gets dealt a leading role—hero, heroine, or villain. Performance in this arena is as fierce a test of character as being tempted to sell nuclear secrets to Beijing. Unlike the slight implications of quotidian dilemmas that confront the average citizen in other areas of life—whether to report cash income on your taxes—the stakes in this realm could not be higher. For chances are that at some point along the line you will hold in your hands another person’s heart. There is no greater responsibility on the planet. However you contend with this fragile organ, which pounds or seizes in accordance with your caprice, will take your full measure.

Irina had liked to think of herself as a decent person. Yet in this most telling of spheres her behavior had grown disreputable overnight. While she might have preferred to regard her two-timing as “out of character,” it is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing. Ipso facto, her furtive afternoons with Ramsey Acton were necessarily in character. For that matter, barring the onset of brain-wasting diseases like variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, there may be no such thing as behaving “out of character.” Should what you get up to fail to comport with who you think you are, something is surely inaccurate (and likely optimistic) about who you think you are. Since Irina had not consumed enough British beef to blame vCJD, she was not therefore “a decent person,” but a duplicitous, traitorous tramp whose attachments were shallow, whose word, implicit or otherwise, meant nothing, and who was hell-bent on defiling the finest elements both of her life and in herself.

Yet every time her eyes found Ramsey’s face—which had a delightful way of changing ages depending on the light; since over the course of five minutes it could flicker from adolescent devil-may-care to middle-aged gravity, then on to the fatalistic resignation of an old-timer, she often felt in the presence, cradle-to-grave, of a whole man—she felt good, and not the indulgent, petty feeling-good of eating chocolate. When he touched her—and he needn’t cup her bare breasts or sidle fingers up under her skirt; holding her hand would do it, or resting his forehead on her temple—she experienced the sense of revelation that physicists must enjoy, when they believe they’ve finally put together that elusive theory of everything, located the one prion or quark that binds all matter. In the moment, it was impossible to conceive of this feeling as wicked. In Ramsey’s arms, her attraction to this remarkable snooker player (of all things) not only seemed “good,” made her “feel good,” but seemed an attraction to The Good—to an absolute that made all life worth living, rejection of which would be both morally reprehensible and inhuman. Only back in the Borough flat, and confronted with a man who had bestowed on her nothing but generosity and did not deserve to be repaid for his devotion with coldness and perfidy, did Irina feel unclean.

 

ON THE MORNING OF August 31, Irina trotted once more numbly to the newsagent for a Sunday Telegraph. En route, she upbraided herself for imputing internal turmoil to strangers, for her fellow pedestrians seemed universally to look stricken. She allowed herself a touch of irritation at having to weave past so many laggards, trolling the sidewalks in a narcotic daze. More bizarrely, at the newsagent customers were murmuring to one another, as if all the rules of city life had been suspended for the day.

Alarming headlines were inconclusive, photos consuming most of the front pages.

Brow furrowed, Irina scurried back to their building, to find the girl from the ground-floor flat sitting on a lower stair with her head in her hands. Irina had never learned her name, but wasn’t so devoted to the chilly etiquette of urban life herself, nor grown so callous in her recent self-absorption, that she would angle her way blithely around a crumpled fellow tenant sobbing her heart out.

Irina put a hand, just, on the girl’s shoulder. “Are you okay? Do you need any help? What’s wrong?”

Again, with London protocol so drastically revised that Westminster could as well have issued a decree, the girl didn’t merely snuffle that she’d be fine, thanks, but began to gush. “My boyfriend doesn’t understand! He’s furious with me! He says I didn’t even cry like this when his mother died. But I just can’t believe it! I’m gutted! It’s so sad!”

Irina shyly unfolded the paper in her hand, which she had halved not so much for ease of carrying as out of respect. “I’m sorry, I just got up, and the papers only…”

Overcome, the girl could now only nod. “B-both. Both of them.”

This turn of the wheel wasn’t quite in the same league as the collapse of the Soviet Union, but in Britain it came close.

“This is absolutely incredible.” Closing the door, she hugged the headline to herself. “Diana!”

“What’s that cow up to now?” said Lawrence. She knew he would light into one of his cruel imitations. “Oh,” he said in falsetto, lowering his head and batting his eyelashes, “I’d love to help the underprivileged, but I just ate five jars of marshmallow fluff, and have to go throw up! While I’m stuffing my whole hand down my throat, could you tell those nice people that was not cellulite in my thighs? I’d just been sitting on a chenille bedspread! Afterwards, can I tell that story about Charles saying, ‘Whatever love is’? Because with so many dresses I only wear once, it’s important to keep the commoners feeling sorry for me!”

“Are you quite finished?”

“Just getting started!”

“Because she’s dead,” Irina announced.

“Get out.”

“She and Dodi Fayed were being chased by photographers and crashed in a tunnel in Paris.” Irina delivered the news with spiteful triumph. Not often did she see Lawrence speechless (all he could manage was, “Wow. That’s weird”), and watching him flounder was satisfying. “So maybe the next time you start to say something vicious about someone you hardly know, you should stop to think that any day you could find out they’re dead, and consider how you’d feel.”

Over the national keening of the next few weeks, Irina took the jarring death of the “people’s princess” personally. In narrative terms, Diana’s story had lurched from genre to genre. Like Irina’s once-charmed romance with Lawrence Trainer, a fairy tale had soured to soap opera, and then hurtled toward tragedy.

 

“YOU SAID YOU HAD something you had to talk to me about, and this had better not be just another girly mope about Princess Di.” The merlot banged on the table, next to Irina’s zinfandel. “For a schlep all the way out to the East End, I expect nothing short of scandal.”

For some people keeping secrets was invigorating, but for Irina they were combustible; by September she was about to explode. Absent a therapist, the next best thing was plain-speaking Betsy Philpot. They’d arranged to meet at Best of India, a hole-in-the-wall on Roman Road. Betsy and Leo lived in Ealing, well west, and Betsy had resisted traveling across the whole of London with five Indian restaurants in her own neighborhood. But Irina insisted that Best of India served distinctive dishes at reasonable prices; it lacked a liquor license, but didn’t charge a corking fee. An executive with Universal—recently acquired by Seagram’s—Leo had just accepted a salary cut to stay on board. Glad to save a few quid on the wine, Betsy had relented. Besides, like most excellent company, Betsy was a gossip, and would have met Irina in Siberia if she had “something to talk about.”

With the conventional obsequiousness of Indian waiters (a thin cover for contempt), the Asian uncorked the zin, then presented their poppadoms and condiment tray with a flourish. Irina made a mental note to avoid the raw-onion relish.

“Well, out with it,” said Betsy. “Life’s short, and tonight’s shorter.”

Irina hesitated. Obviously, it was dangerous to spill the beans to anyone who was friends with Lawrence as well. But to release the story into the world was also to relinquish sole proprietorship. When you let other people in on your business, you allowed them to have cavalier opinions about it; you might as well hand guests your prized original Monet miniature for a coffee coaster. Too, the moment she opened her mouth, her transgressions would become a matter of public record. Any prospective retreat would leave a slime trail.

“You’re not going to approve,” said Irina.

“I’m your judge and jury?”

“You can be moralistic.” Though Betsy hadn’t been Irina’s editor for years, a shadow of hierarchy remained. Betsy wouldn’t live in any fear of Irina’s opinion of her.

“Excuse me, I didn’t realize this was going to be a critique of my character.”

“It isn’t.” Irina took a slug of wine. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t start defending myself against all the mean things you’re going to say when you haven’t said them yet.”

“My guess is that you’re the one who’s been saying mean things, about yourself.”

“You’re right there—vile things.” Another slug. “Anyway, back in July, something—happened to me.”

“You know how when you’re in the gym, and you have to do your situps, and you go for water and retie your shoes? Putting it off never makes it any easier.”

Crumbling her poppadom, Irina couldn’t look Betsy in the eye. “I met someone. Or we’d known each other for years, but only met-met this one night.” No matter how she told it, the tale sounded cheap. “I seem to have fallen in love with him.”

“I thought you were in love,” said Betsy sternly. Her own congenial marriage had the dynamic of a corporate partnership, and Betsy had more than once expressed a wistful envy of Irina’s conspicuously warmer tie.

“I did, too,” said Irina dejectedly. “And now, on a dime, I feel nothing for Lawrence, or nothing but pity. I feel like a monster.”

“—Since when do you smoke?” Irina’s British friends would have cadged one, but Betsy was a fellow Yank, and rather than slip out the packet of Gauloises, Irina might as well have tabled a Baggie of white powder, a used syringe, and a spoon.

“It’s only occasional.” Irina tried to direct the smoke away from Betsy’s face, but the circulation system blew it back again. “Don’t tell Lawrence. He’d have a cow.”

“I bet he knows.”

“I do the whole breath-mint thing, but yeah, probably.”

“Oh, he definitely knows about the ciggies. But you have bigger problems to fry. I meant I bet he knows you’re having an affair.”

Irina looked up sharply. “I’m not.”

Betsy examined her skeptically. “This is a platonic infatuation? You go to museums, and work yourself into ecstasies over a painting?”

“I’ve never been sure what ‘platonic’ means exactly. We, ah—it’s physical, all right. But we haven’t, ah, sealed the deal. I thought that was important.” She was not at all sure it was important. Restraint has an eroticism of its own, and the agony of forgoing sexual closure had for weeks achieved a sweetness that bordered on rapture. If this was loyalty, what in God’s name was betrayal?

“Has the nooky side of things been so bad, with Lawrence? Fallen off?”

“Bad? It’s never been bad with Lawrence. We probably, or we used to until recently, have sex three or four times a week. But it’s strangely impersonal.”

“Three or four times a week, and you’re complaining? Leo and I fuck about as often as we rotate our mattress.”

“I never know what’s going on in his head.”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“I’m too afraid that he’ll ask me what’s going on in mine.”

“Which is?”

The waiter arrived, and Irina colored. The Asian surely assumed that loose Western floozies routinely conducted just this sort of seedy discussion over poppadoms.

“I think about someone else,” she mumbled once he’d taken their orders. “It started out as a last resort, and now it’s an entrenched bad habit. If I don’t summon a certain other party in my head, I can’t—finish the job.”

“This other party. What does he do for a living?”

“If I tell you, then you’ll know who it is.”

“You’re planning on getting through a lamb korma, a chicken vindaloo, and a side order of spinach and chickpeas without telling me the guy’s name?”

Irina stirred a shard in the coriander chutney. “You’ll think I’m nuts.”

“You’re projecting again. You think you’re nuts.”

“It’s not that crazy. On the face of it, there’s no reason that a children’s book illustrator would have a whole lot in common with a think-tank research fellow, either.”

“What, is this guy some working-class gardener or something?”

“He wishes he were working class. But he has plenty of money.”

“Look, I’m not going to play Twenty Questions here.”

Irina shook her head. “If we ever go public, Jude is sure to think we were running around behind her back while they were still married. We weren’t.”

“Ramsey Acton?” said Betsy with incredulity. “I’ll give you this: he is good-looking.”

“I hadn’t even noticed he was handsome before; or only abstractly.”

“This entire country has noticed your boyfriend’s good-looking, as of the 1970s.”

Their food arrived, and Irina helped herself to a tiny spoonful of each dish, which puddled in disagreeable pools of red oil on her plate.

“You know, you’ve lost weight.” The observation carried a hint of resentment. Betsy, as they say, was big-boned—though she was pretty, and Irina had never figured out how to tell her that. “It’s okay for now—you look hot as the blazes, frankly—but don’t overdo it. Lose any more and you’ll get waiflike.”

“I’m not on a diet. I just can’t eat.”

“You’re on the luv diet. Worth ten pounds. But don’t worry—you’ll put it back on at the closing end.”

“Who says there’s going to be an end?”

“Irina, get real. You’re not going to run off with Ramsey Acton. Jude made that mistake; learn from it. Get him out of your system. For that matter—if you’re telling me the truth—maybe you should get it over with and fuck the bastard. Stop building it up into such a big deal and find out one more time that fucking is fucking. On this score, most men are fungible. Then patch things up with Lawrence. As for whether you tell him about it and have a big cry, or shove it under the carpet like a grown-up, that’s your call. But Ramsey is a not a long-term prospect.”

“Why not?”

“For starters? Take what you said, about money. Sure, Ramsey’s made a lot of it. But according to Jude, it’s all very easy-come. There’s a corollary. She couldn’t believe how little there was to filch when they divorced.”

“She got a house in Spain!”

“Out of millions? I don’t know how much you know about snooker, but these boys make do-re-mi hand over fist when they’re on a roll. Why isn’t there more of it left? I’m not only talking about finance, but temperament. You go all the way to Roman Road so you can bring in your own bottle of red. You’re frugal. Ramsey? Is not frugal.”

“It could do me good, to learn to splurge a little. It has done me good.”

“Did you ever talk to Jude about what it was like to live with a snooker player?”

“Some,” said Irina defensively. “She moaned a lot. But she was prone to. As Ramsey says, she’s chronically dissatisfied. They were a bad match.”

“And you’re a good one? Go on the road with them, and you’re stuck in hotel rooms, playing with the tea machine. But they don’t want you to go on the road, not really. They like to play hard away from the table, too. And stay home, you’re a widow for the season, sitting there wondering how much he’s drinking, what’s up his nose, and who’s sidling next to him at the bar.”

“That’s a cliché.”

“They always come from somewhere.”

“Ramsey’s different.”

“Famous last words.”

Irina sulked over her spinach, and threw back another defiant gulp of wine. When the waiter silently opened the second bottle, she sensed his disapproval.

Betsy wasn’t finished. “If you’re seriously contemplating a future with this character, can we talk turkey? Ramsey’s, what, fifty?”

“He’s only forty-seven.”

“Big diff. Forty-seven, in snooker, is like ninety-five for everybody else.”

“Ramsey says that, when he started out, plenty of snooker players were only reaching their prime in their forties.”

“Times have changed. The superstars are all in their twenties. Ramsey’s slipping. You can count on the fact that he’ll keep slipping, too. Maybe it’s eyesight, or steadiness of hand, or just starting to get burnt out despite himself, but he’ll never get back to where he was. He’s never quite won the World Championship, and he hasn’t a snowball’s of winning it now. The point is, you’re getting the guy at the tail-end. It’s not the fun part. Sometime soon he’ll be forced to retire, unless he’s willing to publicly embarrass himself. Snooker’s his whole life, as far as I can tell. Retirement’s not going to be pretty. When I picture it, cognac and long afternoon naps feature prominently.”

“They almost always take up golf.”

“Oh, great.” Betsy heaped another spoonful of the neglected lamb onto her plate, eyeing Irina askance when she poured another glass of wine. “Listen, you must be having a rough time. But before you do anything hasty, try to be practical. Jude says he’s neurotic.”

“She’s one to talk.”

“I just want you to walk in with your eyes open. She says he’s a hypochondriac. That he’s superstitious and touchy, especially about anything to do with his snooker game. Expect snooker, snooker, snooker. You’d better like it.”

“I do like it,” said Irina. “Increasingly.”

“‘Increasingly’ means you didn’t give a shit about it before. But I get the feeling it’s not a fascination with snooker that’s driving this thing.”

“All right. No.” Irina had never tried to put it into words, and had a dismal presentiment that any attempt to do so would prove humiliating. Nevertheless, she’d give it a go. “Every time he touches me, I think I could die. I could die right at that moment and I’d leave this earth in a state of grace. And everything fits. No matter how we sit next to each other, it’s always comfortable. The smell of his skin makes me high. Really, breathing at the base of his neck is like sniffing glue. Slightly sweet and musky at the same time. Like one of those complex reduction sauces you get in upscale restaurants, which somehow manages to be both intense and delicate, and you can never quite figure out what’s in it. And kissing him—I should be embarrassed to say this, but sometimes it makes me cry.”

“My dear,” said Betsy, clearly unmoved; boy, was that speech a waste of time. “It’s called ‘sex.’”

“That’s a belittling word. What I’m talking about isn’t little. It’s everything.”

“It isn’t everything, though it seems that way when you’re drunk on it. Eventually the smoke clears, and there you are, with this guy downstairs hitting little red balls into pockets the whole day through, and you wonder how you got here.”

“You think it doesn’t last.”

“Of course it doesn’t last!” Betsy scoffed. “Didn’t you go through something like this with Lawrence?”

“Sort of. Maybe. Not as extreme. I don’t know. It’s hard to remember.”

“It’s no longer convenient to remember. Didn’t you two go at it hot and heavy for a few months? Or you wouldn’t have moved in together.”

“Yes, I guess. But this seems different.”

“It seems ‘different’ because right now you’re up to your neck in it. And meanwhile, there are traffic bollards in your head to keep you from getting at what it was like in the olden days with Lawrence. My money says it wasn’t different at all.”

“You think everyone goes round in the same cycle. You get all very giddy and infatuated at ‘the beginning,’ and then inevitably the fire dies down to sorry little embers. So in no time I’ll be having mechanical, impersonal relations with Ramsey three times a week instead of with Lawrence.”

“If you’re lucky.”

“I refuse to accept that.”

“Then you’ll find out the hard way, cookie.” Betsy’s eyes sharpened when they caught Irina glancing surreptitiously at her watch. “I’ll stand behind you whatever you do, because you’re my friend. And I promise I won’t say this again. Still, I’d feel remiss if I didn’t at least say it once. Lawrence may not be God’s gift to womankind. But—don’t laugh, this isn’t unimportant—he is a ‘good provider.’ He’s solid, and I’m pretty sure he loves you like all get out, whether or not he’s always able to show it. He’s the kind of man you’d want around in a flood or an earthquake, or when some hood is breaking into your house. Icing on the cake, he’s a caustic, irreverent son of a bitch, and I like him. I’m not saying that a girl doesn’t gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. Just because if you leave him you’ll break his heart doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow your nose—literally, from the sound of it. But I think you’d miss him.”

“And, in the other event, wouldn’t I miss Ramsey?”

“I don’t doubt that cutting this thing off right now would probably feel like hacking off your arm. But it would grow back. You’ve been with Lawrence, what, ten years?”

“Close,” said Irina absently.

“That’s like a bank account, steadily accruing interest. You are frugal. Don’t shoot your wad. You could blow your savings on some fancy, shiny gadget. Then when it jams, you’ll be stuck with this glorified paperweight in your bed, and you’ll be broke.”

It wasn’t nice, but Irina was no longer paying attention, and she asked for the bill. That’s what happens when people give you advice that you don’t care to take: their voices go tinny and mincing, like a radio playing in another room.

Betsy folded her arms. “Doesn’t Ramsey live a few blocks from here?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.” Irina stirred her pocketbook for her wallet.

“Next question.” Betsy’s eyes were flinty. “Are you or are you not walking back with me to the Mile End tube?”

“I might—take a cab.”

“Swell. We can share one.”

“Borough’s not on your way.”

“I don’t mind the ride.”

“Oh, stop it! Yes, if you must know, I am. We hardly ever get to see each other in the evening. I won’t have long, either.”

“Did you really want to see me? Or am I just a beard?”

“Yes, I really wanted to see you. Can’t you tell? Two birds, one stone is all.”

“So you drag me all the way out to the East End—”

“I’m sorry about that. I have warm associations with this place. We—well, the management isn’t into snooker, so they don’t know who he is. And I do like the food.”

“That’s funny. You didn’t eat any.”

“I told you, my appetite is crap.”

“If Lawrence asks me when we wrapped things up here, I’ll have to tell him.”

“He won’t ask.” This was true, but there was something sad about that.

Irina tried to treat her friend, but Betsy was having none of it, as if refusing to be bought off. They split the bill. Walking down Roman Road, they said nothing.

At Grove, where Betsy would turn left and Irina right, Betsy faced her. “I don’t like to be used, Irina.”

“I’m sorry.” She was fighting tears. “It won’t happen again. I promise.”

“You’ve got to talk to Lawrence.”

“I know. But lately we can’t seem to talk about anything.”

“I wonder why that would be.”

“He’s such a purist about loyalty. If I ever allow that I’ve been attracted to someone else, he’ll slam the door in my face. And I’d destroy his friendship with Ramsey. I don’t think I can say anything without being sure what I want to do.”

“Lawrence is a good man, Irina. They’re thin on the ground. Think twice.”

 

“YOU’RE PANTING!”

“I ran. We don’t have much time.”

“Get in here, pet, you’ll catch your death. Your hands!”

They crossed the threshold, hips locked like freight cars. Closing the door with his back, Ramsey massaged her fingers with his own.

It was a minor malady, and common: Raynaud’s disease, which sent the small blood vessels of the extremities into spasm at even moderately cool temperatures. Now that September had kicked in, the problem had returned. When it was diagnosed, Lawrence had suggested, for working in the studio during the day, a pair of fingerless gloves.

Not bad advice. But when she’d explained the ailment to Ramsey at Best of India last week, he’d instinctively reached across the table, working the corpse-cold flesh until its temperature conformed to the touch of a live woman.

A minor distinction, or so it would seem. Lawrence came up with a technical solution, and Ramsey a tactile one. But for Irina the contrast was night-and-day. Oh, she’d rarely complained. Big deal, she got cold hands; there were worse fates. Lawrence had even bought her those fingerless gloves, which helped a bit. But on some winter nights out her hands got so stiff that she couldn’t turn the front-door key, and she’d have to knock with her foot. Yet not once had Lawrence massaged her fingers with his own until they warmed. He was a considerate man, ever drawing her attention to up-and-coming publishers, and she never lacked for little presents, sometimes for no occasion at all. But she didn’t first and foremost crave professional advice, or thoughtful trinkets. She wanted a hand to hold.

“Brandy?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t,” she said, accepting a snifter. “I was on edge at dinner, and went through a bottle of wine like seltzer.”

As usual, he led her to the basement, where they nestled onto a leather couch with the light over the snooker table switched on. The expanse of green baize glowed before them like a lush summer field; they might have been picnicking in a pasture.

“I feel awful,” she said. “I told Betsy about us, and—”

“You oughtn’t have told her.”

“I had to tell someone.”

“You oughtn’t have told her.”

“Betsy can keep a secret!”

“Nobody keeps another git’s secret like they do their own—and most people can’t keep them. Not even you, pet, if tonight’s a measure.” He sounded bitter.

“I can’t talk to Lawrence. You’re hardly objective. If I didn’t confide in someone I was going to go mad.”

“But what’s between you and me is private. You’re turning what we got into dirt. What secretaries titter about over coffee. It’s soiling.”

“It’s soiled anyway.”

“That ain’t my fault.”

“It’s mine?”

“Yeah,” he said to her surprise. “You got to decide. I might keep up with this carry-on, against my better judgment. If it weren’t for one thing. Irina, love—you’re making a horlicks of my snooker game.”

Irina wanted to pitch back, Oh, so what? but she knew better. “What do I have to do with your snooker game?”

“You’ve spannered my concentration. I’m lining up a safety shot, and all what’s running through my head is when you’ll ring. Instead of rolling snug up against the balk cushion with the brown blocking the pack, the white ends up smack in the middle of the table on an easy red to the side pocket.”

“Oh, what a tragedy, that your practice game is off, when I’m repaying the kindest man in my life with duplicity and betrayal!”

Ramsey withdrew his arm coolly from around her shoulders. “The very kindest?”

“Oh, one of the kindest, then,” she said, flustered. “This isn’t a competition.”

“Bollocks. Of course it’s a competition. Naïveté don’t suit you, ducky.”

“I hate it when you call me that.” The way Ramsey pronounced the anachronism (nobody in Britain these days said ducky outside West End revivals of My Fair Lady), it sounded like anything but an endearment. She hugely preferred pet. The northern usage may have been equally eccentric, but it was tender, and—pleasingly—she’d never heard him address as pet anyone but her. “I have so little time. We shouldn’t waste it fighting!”

Ramsey had retreated to the far end of the couch. “I told you from the off. I ain’t into anything cheap. We been sneaking about for near on three months now, and that’d be three months longer than I ever mean to smarm round behind a mate’s back and roger his bird.”

“But we haven’t—”

“Might as well have. I had my arm up your fanny to the elbow.” (In Britain, fanny was not part of the anatomy that one would pat affectionately in public.) “Tell that to Anorak Man and ask if it really matters that it ain’t my dick. Fifty-to-one odds he’d not shake my hand for being so respectful, but punch me in the gob. It’d be a fair cop as well. I’m bang out of order, I am, and so are you.”

Irina bowed her head. “You don’t have to try so hard to make me feel bad. I feel awful already, in case you were worried.”

“But I don’t want you to feel shite, do I? I don’t want to feel shite. I don’t want to think of you leaving here tonight and going to bed barearsed with another fella. I don’t want to and I don’t have to and I won’t.”

Irina had started to cry, but Ramsey made a show of hardness, as if her tears were a gambit. “If I was a bird, I’d be fancied a right mug. Letting some more or less married bloke mess about with me during the day. But I’m a bloke, so instead I’m a Jack the Lad. Hand in the knickers, and it costing me no more than the odd chardonnay.

“That’s the way your man in the street thinks, but it ain’t the way I think, darling. I think I’m a right mug. You slink in here and rub up against my trousers like a cat itching her backside on a post, and then it’s, Blimey, look at the time! And you nip out the door again—leaving me with the post. I got no moral objection to self-abuse, but it’s well short of a proper good time.”

“You shouldn’t talk about us like that,” she sniffled. “Or me like that. It’s ugly.”

“We been making it ugly! Bugger it, woman!” Ramsey socked a fist into his opposite palm. “I want to fuck you!”

Despite her miserable curl at the far end of the sofa, Irina felt a twinge, as if he had her on a string, and could tug at the tackle between her legs like a toy on wheels. Thus her pride at his declaration was dovetailed by resentment. It was all very exhilarating to have conceived a consuming infatuation against the placid backdrop of her reserved relationship with Lawrence. But there was no opting out; she could not nibble at sexual obsession when it suited her. The craving was constant, and with Ramsey now removed by three feet even the brief deprivation was unbearable. “I want to fuck you, too,” she mumbled morosely.

“You treat me like a rent boy! It’s been long enough. You rubbish me, and you rubbish us. You rubbish yourself. If you’re right and Lawrence ain’t twigged yet, you can nip back to your happy home and stay. Or you can get your bum into my bed and stay. You cannot have him and me both. ’Cos I am shattered. I am half demented. Waiting for you to show tonight, I couldn’t pot the colors on their spots, and I could pot the colors on their spots standing on a fruit crate when I were seven.”

“Three months may seem like an eternity to you, but I’ve nearly ten years with Lawrence at stake here. I have to be sure of myself. There’d be no going back.”

“There ain’t never no going back! In snooker, you learn the hard way that every shot is for keeps. I got no time for prats who hair-tear about Oi, if only I’d not used quite so deep a screw on the blue. Well, you didn’t. You potted the blue, or you didn’t. You’re on the next red, or you ain’t. You live with it. You make the best call you can in the moment, and then you deal with the consequences. Right now, it’s your visit. You’re in amongst the balls. You got to decide whether to go for the pink or the black, full stop.”

“Is Lawrence the pink? Because I don’t think he’d appreciate the color.”

Ramsey looked unamused.

“Sorry,” she continued with a nervous smile, “it’s just, Reservoir Dogs is one of his favorite movies, and there’s this scene where Steve Buscemi whines about why does he have to be ‘Mr. Pink’…Oh, never mind.”

“I’m entered in the Grand Prix next month,” said Ramsey levelly. “I got to get tournament ready, and I got to be able to concentrate. In the best of all possible worlds, I’d ask you to come with me to Bournemouth. But that’s obviously a nonstarter.”

“Oh, but I would love to—”

“I mayn’t have made world champion,” he plowed on, “but I been in six championship finals, and got an MBE from the Queen. That mayn’t mean much to a Septic Tank”—he had taught her Cockney rhyming slang for Yank—“but it does mean something to me. I won’t be treated like a bauble by a bird who’s snug as a bug with another bloke but needs a bit of buzz. And I won’t play in a bent match. I’d never have played a single frame if I knew from the off that the trophy was pledged to another fella.”

The monologue had all the earmarks of a rehearsed speech. But Irina was starting to get a feel for Ramsey, and she didn’t think so. He was a performer, and his game was the soul of spontaneity. This show had taken an improvisational turn at her imprudent outburst about betraying “the kindest man in her life”—though her more considerable imprudence may have been impugning the paramount importance of snooker. Impetuously, he had gone with the turn and kept going. His voice sounded measured; the discussion itself was out of control. She could already sense where this was leading, and her cheeks drained. It was all she could do to keep from leaping across the sofa to clap a hand on his mouth.

“I don’t want to see you again before the Grand Prix,” he said. “And that’d be no love notes neither, nor blubbing on the blower. When I come back to London, I only want you to rock up on my doorstep if you told Lawrence you’re in love with me, and him and you is finished.”

If Ramsey was being melodramatic and had had a fair bit to drink, his it’s-him-or-me ultimatum made unpleasantly good sense. Yet he couldn’t resist taking his levelheaded proposal that one step further that would make it hasty, foolhardy, and scandalously premature: “And that ain’t all, ducky. When you leave Lawrence, if you leave Lawrence, you don’t tuck in upstairs as me in-house personal slag. You marry me. Got that? You marry me, and toot-sweet. At forty-seven, I got no use for long engagements.”

As proposals go, this one was less bended-knee woo than assault. His delivery had been cruel, his clear intention to make what was already a terrible choice only the more stark. There would be no “trial separation” from Lawrence, no sampling of Ramsey’s wares like one of those small squares of Cheshire at Borough Market with no obligation to buy. On the other hand, no man had ever asked Irina to marry him before, in any tone of voice. His furious demand, flung at her from three feet like a wet rag, prickled the back of her neck.

“Ramsey—I didn’t even marry Lawrence, after nearly ten years.”

“I rest my case.”

 

ON RETURN TO THE flat, Irina made little effort to disguise the fact that she’d been crying. Since it was past midnight in a town with cosmopolitan pretensions but provincial transport, the tube was shut. Flaunting the coldness of his newfound absolutism, Ramsey hadn’t rung her a cab, but had abandoned her on his stoop to make her way home however she saw fit. The handshake at the door was the limit, instigating such a torrent of sobs on her flight from his house that when she finally flagged down a taxi on Grove Road the cabbie had to ask her to repeat the address three times.

Ramsey was not the only one inclined to make a show of his indifference. Failing to comment on her puffy red eyes, Lawrence said stiffly in the living room, “It’s late.”

“I missed the tube. Took forever to find a taxi.”

“You, spring for a cab? Since when do you not look at your watch every five minutes to make sure you can catch the last train?”

“Time got away from me. It’s a Friday night, and the minicabs were all booked up, so I had to wait.” As long as she was lying, she might as well go all the way, and disguise the fact that she had hailed one of those exorbitant black taxis off the street.

“Why didn’t you call to let me know you’d be so late? I might be worried.” He didn’t sound worried. He sounded as if he’d have gladly paid a hoodlum to biff her over the head on the way home.

“Finding a working pay phone would have delayed me even longer.” Her delivery was fatigued, and her heart wasn’t in this.

“If you rang a minicab,” said Lawrence, “you’d already found a working pay phone. And that’s assuming that Betsy didn’t have her cell.” His pronunciation of Betsy cast doubt on whether Irina had seen the woman at all. Apparently one of the sacrifices of lying, however selectively, was the ability to tell the truth.

“Okay, I just didn’t think of it when I had the chance. I’m inconsiderate.” She added lamely, “Still, maybe it’s time we broke down and bought mobiles.”

“Yeah, that would be great. I could call you, or you could call me, and I’d have no idea where you were, and you wouldn’t have to tell me.”

Irina let the crack slide, as if stoically allowing a spewed gob of spittle to drizzle down her cheek. “If you must know the real reason I’m so late, we had a fight. Betsy and I. It took some sorting out.” The amount of effort required to concoct this transliterated excuse was stupendous, and she wondered why she bothered. It was nearly two a.m. and for an ordinary girls’ night out an improbably long evening.

“What about?”

Irina searched her conversation with Betsy for some scrap to throw him like a bone, but could find little to salvage. “I won’t bore you, it was stupid. But you should know that Betsy’s a big fan of yours. She thinks you’re wonderful.”

“Glad somebody does.” Lawrence got ready for bed.

 

DURING THE TEN-DAY COUNTDOWN to the Grand Prix in Bournemouth, Irina might have been scratching wobbly Xs into the stone walls of her gulag, marking the inexorable march of time toward her own execution.

Indeed, fantasies of death daily flickered through her mind. She wasn’t so far gone as to contemplate sticking her head in the oven, but whenever she crossed Borough High Street the image descended of the lorry that was barreling in her direction running the light. She rued the fact that the IRA had, as Lawrence had foretold, reinstated its ceasefire, making a spontaneous explosion in their local tube station just as she exited the elevator that much more far-fetched. Walking beneath the scaffolding of the numerous luxury housing developments springing up in the neighborhood, she didn’t exactly wish that breezeblock overhead would tipple off the slats, but she could still see it careen two stories to her skull. These morbid flights were silly, but like the visions of Ramsey at the door, the couples grappling on the carpet, the figments of fatal accidents were uninvited.

Also uninvited were the persistent daydreams of Lawrence going leadenly through her address book to inform Irina’s friends of her untimely passing. Tentatively, Betsy would ask, “Has anyone told Ramsey?” Lawrence wouldn’t understand why Ramsey of all people should be high on the list, especially when it had been pulling teeth to get poor Irina to go out to dinner with the guy on his birthday. Plain-speaking or not, Betsy would still be discreet, though she might volunteer to give Ramsey the black news herself. At the funeral, Lawrence would be flummoxed why Ramsey, of all the mourners, seemed the most distraught. Finally, something would click—that birthday; Irina’s exasperating remoteness when he came home from Sarajevo; her mystifying short temper since, and unexplained absences during the day… Lawrence would be angry at first, but with no Irina to fight over anymore fury would rapidly fold into grief. Maybe at length, having loved the same woman would bond the two men, and cement their friendship. (Nonsense, but beguiling nonsense nonetheless.) You see, it wasn’t that she wished she were dead, exactly. Rather, the only circumstance in which she could bear to have Lawrence informed that she was in love with another man was one in which she did not—nay, could not—witness the consequences.

Lawrence may have made dutiful visits to Las Vegas every three or four years, but his parents thought think tanks incomprehensible and pretentious, and he thought golf instruction aimless and vapid; the disconnect was total. His brother was a methamphetamine junkie always hitting his father up for money; his unambitious sister worked for Wal-Mart in Phoenix. Irina was not part of Lawrence’s family; she was his family. Given the books-and-politics jaw that filled out his rare socializing, she was also his one true friend. The resultant responsibility had never weighed heavily in the past. Now it was crushing.

Still, not a day went by that she didn’t stare down the telephone when Lawrence was at work, or finger a 20p piece when passing a phone box. The sensation was akin to that of a smoker who is trying to quit, when he eyes the one packet he has hidden for emergencies in that little magnifying-glass drawer on top of the OED, thinking, Well, just one, just one fag wouldn’t make any difference in the long run—would it? Ramsey may have issued rash ultimatums over too much brandy, but were her quavering voice ever to emerge from his receiver he would surely loose a deep, soughing sigh of relief, and within minutes she’d be rushing toward his arms in Hackney.

Oh, probably. Ramsey’s resolve would be as easy to break down as the fibers of a chuck steak soaked in a full bottle of Barolo. But a temporary fix wasn’t the answer. She had a decision to make. As Betsy had observed, retying her sneakers would make the exercise no less onerous.

To the naked eye, Irina’s bereft afternoon ambles during this period—which had an insidious tendency to veer, once across the river, toward the East End—gave every appearance of maudlin self-pity. To the contrary.

She felt sorry for Betsy, now saddled with a secret that she didn’t want, bound to make her feel a traitor in any future gathering at which Lawrence was present.

She felt sorry for Ramsey, who had merely taken a friend out for sushi in all innocence, and who couldn’t have anticipated that with two tokes on a doobie his shy, demure dinner companion would transmogrify into a voracious sexual predator; who gave heartbreaking credence to “the code” between men about keeping your hands off your mate’s bird, and despised anyone who broke it, not least of all himself; who was obliged at this very moment to focus all his energies on that £60,000 prize in Bournemouth, when his head was raging with anxiety that the sole object of his desire was even now rededicating herself to a safe, comfortable relationship with his rival; who meanwhile was helpless. The passivity of his romantic position would echo all too familiarly the last frame of six championship finals, during which he could only take limp sips of Highland Spring as the trophy he coveted most in all the world slipped through his fingers.

Most of all, of course, she felt sorry for Lawrence. When he didn’t think she was looking, she had more than once caught an expression on his face like that of a small boy who had been abandoned by his mother at Disney World. It was infused with longing, bewilderment, and desolation. He was being punished, and he had no idea for what. Everything about him that his partner used to adore now drove her insane. She wouldn’t speak two words of Russian to him anymore, and hadn’t employed the tender solicitation “Lawrence Lawrensovich!” for months. Whenever he told her about his work, like that coup of getting his proposal accepted by Foreign Policy, she acted bored, and no longer even pretended to listen. When he brought home a photocopy of the published article, she left it languishing unread on the dining table until he sheepishly slipped it back into his briefcase. Even his walking into a room seemed enough to make her irritable and claustrophobic. Whenever he proposed that they go see Boogie Nights at the weekend, maybe take one of those long Sunday-afternoon rambles of hers together for once, or go to Borough Market for vegetables as a team, she shrugged the invitations off, or discouraged him with faux consideration that he must have too much work. While not long ago she had prepared delectable meals in order to please him, now she concocted, if anything, more elaborate fare, but he could tell that she was merely driven to escape his company for the kitchen. He could do nothing right, and lately there seemed little purpose in trying. Presumably she would explain when she was good and ready. Since every indicator pointed to the fact that the explanation was dire, he had a vested interest in delaying that juncture for as long as possible.

Among the principals in this drama—she’d no illusions about its being anything but ordinary, although all the earth-shaking experiences of life, birth, death, love, and betrayal, were technically “ordinary”—there was only one party for whom she had no sympathy whatsoever. Were her own affections constant, Ramsey would easily concentrate on the upcoming Grand Prix. Betsy would have shouldered only the manageable burden of Irina’s sour thoughts about Jude Hartford. And Lawrence would be happy as a clam.

 

TWO NIGHTS BEFORE THE tournament was to get under way in Bournemouth, Lawrence made a radical bid for quiet and switched off the TV.

“Listen, I know you’re not that interested in snooker.” Knees canted, arms thrown wide on either side of the sofa, his posture was confrontational. “But I thought maybe you were interested in Ramsey.”

A wave of white cold washed Irina’s face, leaving a prickling sensation along her hairline; she might have dived into an Arctic ocean full of pins. She wasn’t ready for this. She’d wanted to have prepared something, a list of reasons or a speech. Even carefully composed disclosure would have been bad enough. Discovery was worse by a mile.

“Snooker’s all right,” she said faintly.

“I mean, his story is interesting, isn’t it? First he’s a prodigy, then he fades from view because prodigies grow up, and, according to legend, he fell seriously into the gutter. But he pulls himself together, and this time more from application than pure natural talent, he nearly makes it to the top. But not quite. Becomes the sport’s ultimate also-ran. Six championship finals, never wins a one. So you’ve got this guy who’s getting older, past his prime, never quite got his hands on the ultimate prize, and is beginning to slide. But it’s all he knows, snooker. What does a guy like that do? When he’s got nothing to look forward to but falling apart? Where’s he going to find a fresh reason for living?”

The sweat rising from her breasts was rank. Lawrence may have historically avoided the main thing, but this sadistic cat-and-mouse wasn’t like him.

“In something else, I guess,” said Irina.

“Like, another sport? Go for a whole new game.”

“As I understand it”—Irina amazed herself by still being able to talk—“retired snooker players often take up golf.”

“But golf’s got none of the elegance. None of the strategy, the scheming—thinking half a dozen moves ahead, plotting the big picture. Chess would make more sense, if he had the brains for it. Which he doesn’t.”

“Ramsey’s not stupid.”

“He dropped out of school at sixteen. Oh, he can go on for hours about the merits of a percentage versus an attacking game. But don’t talk to him about New Labour having co-opted the Tories’ agenda. I tried once; it was painful. And this is his country.”

“There are different kinds of intelligence,” said Irina blandly. She wished he would get on with it, and stop trying to be clever.

“I can see why snooker players gravitate to golf,” Lawrence carried on, still taken with his coy conceit. “It’s not direct combat. You take on an opponent by besting him side-by-side, by taking turns. When you’re on the green, or at the table, your rival’s hands are tied. It’s polite—not gladiatorial, like soccer, or even tennis. Really, sports like snooker and golf are for pussies.”

“Real men fight it out hand-to-hand?”

“Yeah. They do. But you couldn’t call Ramsey a macho man.”

“Are you saying that he’s a coward?”

“Sportsmen seek out games that suit their natures. He’s weak, so he’s avoided a test of physical strength. And he’s averse to head-on conflict—with another man anyway. In snooker, your opponent is an abstraction. The lay of the balls could as well be generated by computer. Ultimately, all snooker players are playing against themselves, their personal best. Now Ramsey is playing against himself and losing.”

“In some contests,” she submitted, “Ramsey keeps up his end pretty well.”

“So, all this drama—it captures your imagination?”

“Yes, Ramsey captures my imagination,” she said heavily, looking at her hands.

“Good. Because the Grand Prix is next week. Ramsey’s in the lineup, and Bournemouth’s only a train ride. Get a B&B, make an outing of it?”

“You mean,” she asked, raising her gaze incredulously, “you want to go?”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.” At a stroke, his squared-off posture wilted, and he dropped his arms to his lap. “It’s just,” he continued morosely, “we haven’t done anything in a while. Together. I’ve been to tournaments, but you haven’t. And when you know one of the players, you have an angle, a—reason to care…”

Discreetly, Irina patted her forehead dry with her sleeve.

“A snooker tournament is very British,” Lawrence added. “You know, it could be culturally enervating.” His correction, “I mean—edifying,” was embarrassed. Lawrence had resigned himself to being lousy at Russian. English was another matter.

“I’d be glad to watch the tournament with you,” she said carefully, trying to breathe deeply, to slow her heartbeat. “But don’t you always say that you can actually follow the frames better on TV?”

“Well, you miss the atmosphere. And I bet Ramsey would take us out.”

All right, he didn’t know. Yet on some instinctive level Lawrence was savvy enough to use Ramsey as bait. The vision of that threesome trying to soldier through an entire dinner—well, Irina hoped the horror didn’t show on her face.

Lawrence added, “Also, Ramsey says he’s optimistic, about the Grand Prix.”

“You talked to him?” asked Irina sharply.

“Sure I did. Free tickets.”

“So how is he?” With luck, her wistfulness was not pronounced.

“Damned if I know. The poor bastard may not be socially adept, but that call was the limit. For all the banter I got out of the guy, I might have been Inland Revenue. Maybe he’s not comfortable on the phone.”

“No, I bet he wasn’t comfortable.” Subtext-laden dialogue was great fun in plays, but in real life it was hideous.

“So what do you say?”

“If you’d like to do something together—wouldn’t you rather it were just us two?”

“Just us two doesn’t seem to do it for you lately. I thought maybe a third party… a little excitement…”

“I don’t need that kind of excitement,” she said in all sincerity.

“Never mind, then,” he said glumly. “It was only an idea.”

“Well, as you say—I’m not as big a snooker fan as you are,” she said gently. “It seems a lot of trouble, going all the way to Bournemouth. But we could still watch the tournament together. The first rounds are broadcast late, aren’t they? After eleven-thirty? Maybe get a bite out first. Make it a date?”

Lawrence perked up. “Okay. Would you like that?”

His expression of struggling hopefulness was soul-destroying. These days Irina’s small kindnesses, to which Lawrence was now prone to attach exaggerated importance, seemed downright malicious, encouraging as they did an optimism that she might more decently quash. Hence Irina was mean when she was nice to him, and mean when she was mean. Since it didn’t matter, presumably she was free to treat him however she liked. So this was “power.” It was overrated.

“Yes, I would like that,” she said softly.

Yet she thought, Oh, how I would like to like that. For a moment, Irina could feel the haunting presence of that other life in which the prospect of dinner out with Lawrence and a nestle in front of a snooker match presented itself as simply glorious.

 

WHEN IRINA HAD SUGGESTED “a bite out,” she had in mind the likes of Tas, a cheap Turkish restaurant a ten-minute walk up Borough High Street. But Lawrence wanted to make a grand night of it, and made a reservation at Club Gascon, whose prices had previously restricted their sampling of its Basque haute cuisine to special occasions.

Irina didn’t select her most fetching of outfits (she reserved her really smashing garb for outings to the East End), but made herself presentable. Which is more than she could say for Lawrence. “You’re going to wear that? Club Gascon is pretty posh!”

He was clad in the same uniform of baggy jeans and plaid flannel he’d worn when they met. She should have been accustomed to his chronic slovenliness, but now she was spoiled. Ramsey had impeccable dress sense.

Lawrence shrugged. “If I’m going to pay all that money, I want to feel relaxed.”

Irina rolled her eyes. “You make me look like a tosser! Here I am in a skirt and heels, and I walk in with a man dressed like a dog’s dinner!”

“Oh, shit-can the Brit-speak, would you?” he grumbled, shambling back to the bedroom. “For one night?”

He reemerged in navy slacks and an aquamarine button-down. Years of living with an artist hadn’t improved his sense of color. “Those blues clash,” she muttered.

“Blues can’t clash,” he said resentfully.

“I did the better part of a book in blue, and I assure you they can.”

Lawrence powered toward Blackfriars Bridge, brow in a scowl, torso tilted as if fighting a heavy wind. His stride was short but his pace vigorous, and Irina had trouble keeping up on cobbles in heels.

Seated in the dark restaurant, with its knurling arrangements of exotic blooms, Lawrence griped that their table was cramped by other diners—“Not very romantic.” Irina swallowed the advisement that a thriving romance could readily flourish at a lunch counter over corned beef hash. As she surveyed the extensive menu, her selection was hampered by apathy. When Lawrence suggested that they opt for the five course prix fixe with matching wines—an extravagant sixty quid a head that was sure to get them both pole-axed before the Grand Prix back home—Irina said sure just to spare herself the effort of ordering à la carte. Getting well oiled for their sports date also appealed. If she weren’t desperate to lay eyes on Ramsey Acton even on television, Irina would happily have drunk herself unconscious.

Orders taken, Lawrence moved his champagne-and-armagnac cocktail out of the way and leaned forward over the table. “So,” he said intently. “How are you?”

Irina recoiled as if from a loaded gun. “Okay,” she stonewalled. “The first illustrations for The Miss Ability Act seem to be coming out all right.”

He stared her down a beat. Her expression was stolid. He leaned back. He sighed. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, “but when you were out with Betsy the other night, I sneaked a peek at your drawings. They’re pretty outrageous. Good outrageous, I mean. Still—don’t you think those illustrations are a little adult?”

“How so?”

“Well—sensual.”

“Children have senses.”

“The protagonist is a gimp in a magic wheelchair, right? Not a vamp.”

“Nothing about being disabled means you can’t be beautiful.”

“I thought characters in children’s books were more supposed to be cute.”

“Sleeping Beauty? In the classics, female protagonists had breasts, and were woken with kisses. They were smitten with handsome princes, and wanted to get married. It’s only nowadays that children’s books have been purged of sex, and the principals are consumed with learning that little Somali children are just like them, or with putting away their toys.”

“But your illustrations are for ‘nowadays.’”

“I’m sorry you think my work is unprofessional.”

“I didn’t say that. Just, what I glanced at seemed a little risqué.”

“I didn’t show any terrible body parts.”

“You didn’t have to. It’s something about the line, the feel. The look on the gimp’s face. I don’t know how else to say it—it’s lustful.”

“I’m sure Puffin will let me know if they think my illustrations unacceptably lewd.”

The white wine that accompanied the foie gras was late-harvest, the mournful, bittersweet color of a day’s end, that piercing golden bask over the landscape made all the more aching for the fact that it wouldn’t last. The undercooked goose liver lolled on a bramble of presentational sticks like one of Dali’s melting clocks. When Lawrence raised his glass, he couldn’t think of anything to salute, and their flutes clinked against each other to nothing in particular.

“You know, this Asian financial crisis is galloping, and the baht is in freefall,” said Lawrence. “I’m a little worried about our investments, but there’s a bright side. Taking a holiday in Thailand in the next few months could be fantastically cheap.”

“Why would we want to go to Thailand?”

“Why not? We’ve never been there. The beaches are supposed to be great.”

“You hate beaches. And since when do you want to go anywhere that doesn’t double as research? No terrorists in Thailand, are there?”

“Now that you mention it, I had thought about taking a trip to Algeria.” He waited; no reaction. “That’s fine with you. If I go to Algeria.”

Lawrence’s going anywhere would mean being able to see Ramsey with impunity, even at night. “Shouldn’t it be?”

“It’s only one of the most dangerous countries in the world right now. In that Islamic raid on Sidi Rais in August, three hundred villagers were massacred with machetes.”

“Oh?” Her eyes clouded. “I missed that.”

“How could you miss that?”

“It’s not my business to follow that sort of thing, it’s yours.”

“The rest of the world is everybody’s business! You used to take an interest.”

“Algeria is no safer if I personally keep up with how dangerous it is.”

“Anyway, I wasn’t serious, about Algiers. I was serious about Bangkok.”

As for demurring, I don’t think we should be making any plans, because I may be leaving you within days, she wasn’t there yet. “Maybe,” she said dubiously. His disappointment was palpable.

His agenda for their evening having inspired such little uptake, Lawrence fell back on his stock default: terrorism. It was a fascination she couldn’t fathom. Lawrence had had little or no experience of being victimized by terrorists himself. He hadn’t lost his mother in Lockerbie. He couldn’t trace his lineage back to Belfast. They’d occasionally been ejected from the tube over a scare, but nothing in their vicinity had ever blown up. His professional interests exhibited a curious arbitrariness; they came from nowhere, had no organic roots. Maybe having made himself up, rejecting the tat and anti-intellectualism of Las Vegas, lent his adult incarnation an inevitable artifice. On the other hand, maybe having lived for months with a woman whose head was roiling with God knows what, whose behavior had utterly transformed, and none for the better, due to no transgression of his own that he could identify, whose comings and goings were so overtly suspicious as to encourage his darkest imaginings to run rampant, and—most importantly—whom he could no longer trust to be truthful, or even nice—well, maybe that was something like being terrorized.

“This decision to invite Sinn Fein into talks, not a month after the IRA ceasefire was reinstated”—he attacked his scallops as if they had delivered a personal insult—“I think it’s hasty. They don’t get punished for Canary Wharf and Birmingham, they get rewarded. Oh, sure, we’ll take you back into the fold, never mind you broke the last ceasefire with no warning and caused millions of pounds in commercial damage! It’s undignified, and overeager. Blair is sucking Sinn Fein’s ass, and it looks bad.”

“You don’t think there’s a place for forgiveness? For drawing a line and saying, never mind the past, let’s start here, clean?”

“People who have acted in bad faith before are likely to act in bad faith again. You don’t do yourself any favors by acting credulous.”

“By that reasoning, you don’t negotiate with terrorists, period.”

“You probably shouldn’t. You probably have to. But at the very least, a long probationary period makes sense. When you can’t trust someone’s word, make them prove themselves with what they do.”

 

THEY STAGGERED THROUGH THE last three courses as if dragging themselves around the final laps of a demanding jog. The meal was a waste. Lawrence was trying so hard, and wanted so badly to conduct a joyful, energetic evening, one that confirmed that Irina had simply been going through a moody, difficult period now emphatically over. Irina made an effort as well, she truly did, smiling during lulls, admiring each dish, racking her brain for topics, but they all seemed booby-trapped; even her speculation about Betsy’s “business partnership” marriage felt laden with allusion. Somehow their incapacity to match the theater of dining with theater of their own revealed the whole restaurant business as a swindle. The cost of this meal could have kept a child alive in East Africa for a year, and they might have derived the same sustenance from a Big Mac.

Their separate bank accounts enabled Lawrence to pick up the tab. “Thank you so much for dinner,” she said formally. “I had a lovely time.”

“Yeah, it was great!” Lawrence exclaimed. “We should do this more often.”

Thus they conspired: they had had a lovely time. Surely with so many good intentions applied on both their parts, so much high finance applied to the purpose as well, the occasion could not conceivably have come off as dumpy.

They hustled home, for the most perverse of postprandial entertainments.

 

LAWRENCE SWITCHED ON THE TV just as the announcer introduced the players. Ramsey’s loyal cult following screamed Ram-see! Ram-see! when he walked on. “You know, this we-try-harder Avis thing that Ramsey’s got going,” said Lawrence, bombing to the couch. “I wonder if it hasn’t made him more popular. I bet that audience wouldn’t go nearly as ape-shit if he’d won those six championships instead.”

Riveted by that face, Irina merely grunted. The camera panned eight men in black T-shirts, each printed with one letter of G-O-R-A-M-S-E-Y on the front.

“Oh, man!” Lawrence cried when Ramsey’s opponent was introduced. “What a rough draw. Stephen Hendry in the first round!”

The world’s #1 was greeted with a lackluster patter of polite applause.

“It’s a real study, isn’t it?” Lawrence continued. “Hendry’s universally considered the best all-round snooker player in history. But listen to that crowd—they don’t give a rat’s ass! The better Hendry plays, the more the fans can’t stand him. Maybe it’s a working-class thing, that love of the fatal flaw. Most snooker fans are paunchy, hard-drinking wife-beater types who buy tickets every week but never win the lottery. I bet they can’t identify with someone like Hendry, who hardly misses a shot. Where Ramsey makes a great poster-boy for the downtrodden—with that tragic inability to consolidate, I coulda been a contendah.”

Suppressing her impatience with this incessant chatter, Irina said, “I don’t know about all that. Hendry’s trouble is he’s not sexy.”

Lawrence looked over. “You think Ramsey is sexy?”

Irina shrugged, eyes to the screen. “I don’t know. That’s his reputation.” She scrambled for safe territory. “At least he’s not a killjoy. Hendry isn’t only boring for being perfect. He’s a boring person.”

Indeed, according to Ramsey, dreary excellence was only part of Hendry’s problem. Away from the table, he was not a Great Character. A family man nearing thirty, Hendry had personally ushered in a well-behaved, biddable era of snooker in the 90s of going to bed early and eating all your vegetables, and so might be accused of single-handedly halving the popularity of the game overnight. His build was medium, his plain brown hair cut short. The expression on his doughy face remained strangely blank even after those rare shots he botched. His skin was pocked, his posture sway-backed, his buttocks protuberant. In interviews, he was well mannered, always giving his opponents credit for their skill. Hendry was a no-frills player, and the only thing he brought to the game was the game itself. He just happened to have won the same number of World Championship finals that Ramsey had lost. He’d racked up more than twice as many “centuries,” or breaks over one hundred, as anyone in the history of the sport, and he collected titles like flannel did lint. Who gave a toss. Not this crowd, none of whose members had bothered to get T-shirts specially silk-screened to spell G-O-S-T-E-P-H-E-N.

Of course, Irina had no interest in Stephen Hendry, except insofar as he presented a barrier to her view of Ramsey’s face, and she chafed whenever the camera wandered to Hendry’s wooden countenance. She only had eyes for the tall, severe-looking character in his signature pearl-colored waistcoat. When he found his opening in the first frame, he built his break with swift, cleanly cornered moves that earned the tribute from Clive Everton, “He doesn’t hang about, Ramsey Acton!” It was like hearing voices. Everton seemed to be advising Irina personally that Mr. Acton would not wait on her verdict beyond this week.

As she leaned forward in her armchair, Irina’s anxiety mounted with every pot. When Ramsey sank a spectacular long red, and then the white followed it agonizingly into the pocket for an “in-off,” or scratch, she groaned so audibly that Lawrence looked over in perplexity. “Now, that is unfortunate,” tsked the commentator.

“Notice how suck-ass shots are always unfortunate or unlucky?” said Lawrence. “The commentators are so decorous. Unfortunate is a euphemism for incredibly stupid.”

A sound and even interesting observation, save for the fact that Lawrence had made it. Irina pressed her lips. Why couldn’t he keep a lid on it and watch the match?

The second commentator, Dennis Taylor, intoned, “You can’t afford mistakes like that, for you’re letting another man in. Not when that other man is Stephen Hendry.”

Snooker was all about taking advantage of opportunities that may never come your way again, providing it some romantic application. Thus Hendry began to demonstrate that a real champion needs only one chance. Ramsey’s break of fifty-seven was respectable, but with seventy-five points left on the table, the frame was still up for grabs. Alas, Ramsey’s penultimate pot had cannoned the white into the pack, and the reds were spread like cherries for the picking.

As Hendry proceeded to clear the table with the dutifulness of one of those model children’s book characters tidying up after dinner, Lawrence narrated. “You take these paragons for granted when they’re in their prime. Oh, yeah, Stephen Hendry, Mr. Perfect, clinching another frame. And I’m rooting for Ramsey I guess, since he’s our friend. But man, he really can’t hold a candle to Hendry. There’s never been a player like him, and may not be again. It’s only when these perfect people begin to falter that everybody starts to appreciate them in retrospect. Like, gosh, I guess they really used to be fantastic; weren’t those the days. Like, you never know how good you had it until it’s gone.”

Shut up, thought Irina uncontrollably as Hendry, in accordance with good snooker etiquette, left the final black on the table. Just shut up.

As the second frame commenced, Irina scrutinized Ramsey’s comportment for clues to his frame of mind. Playing with unusual ferocity, he emitted a repressed fury, like the superficially normal-looking but secretly twitchy sort of character whom you bump against on the tube, and who before you can say pardon me will whip out a switchblade. He wore the same steely expression as when delivering his ultimatum that she had until the end of this tournament to make her decision. She wondered if he thought she was watching.

In accordance with this pent-up, explosive quality, Ramsey took on a ludicrous diagonal long-shot, and fired the white with such pace at the opposite corner that it not only knocked in the far red with a resounding crack but ricocheted higgledy-piggledy around the table, disturbing several other balls and banging three separate cushions.

Everton exclaimed, “No holding back on that one!” while Taylor chimed in, “Gave that some abuse!” Yet this was rash, uncalculated play of which seasoned commentators sternly disapproved. Everton grunted, “Some of the pots this man takes on I think are outrageous.” When he added, “But you can’t criticize when they go in,” he meant that you can, too, criticize—that for a snooker purist, expedient ends never justify slapdash means.

“Has he been fortunate?” Taylor wondered as the white settled. Lawrence was right, of course, that snooker commentators wielded terms to do with good or bad fortune in a judgmental manner, one indicating that this sport, when properly played—the odd speck of chalk notwithstanding—should have nothing whatsoever to do with luck. To be fortunate was to get away with something that should properly have been punished.

In this instance Ramsey’s reckless display of aggression had been punished. His position on the next shot left disgracefully to chance, lo, the route to the only color available was solidly blocked by a stray red. He had, eponymously, snookered himself.

But as Irina gazed with yearning at the comely man trapped on the opposite side of the screen like one of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia visitors banished to the other side of the wardrobe, and meanwhile Lawrence chided from the couch about what an unprofessional shot that was—honestly, what did we have commentators for, when we had Lawrence to endlessly chip in his two cents from the peanut gallery—the concept of the snooker took on a larger significance. The term referenced a configuration whereby an obstruction you don’t want to hit—cannot hit, by the rules—stands between you and your object. Accordingly, Irina as well had snookered herself. Ramsey escaped his predicament by hitting an extravagant swerve shot. Yet she couldn’t imagine any metaphorical equivalent to the swerve shot, a course of action that would put her back in contact with Ramsey Acton without smashing headlong into that innocently irritating fellow spectator on the couch.

“Well, he got out of that with panache,” said Lawrence, “but he’s not on a red—”

“Would you please?” Irina cried at last.

“Please what?”

“Just—keep it down, so I can follow this!”

“You usually sit there and sew or something,” said Lawrence. “Since when did you get so involved in a snooker match?”

“It’s snooker!” she exclaimed. “Not snucker! You’ve lived here for seven years, it’s a British game, and if you’re going to be a snooooker fan you should at least learn to PRONOUNCE it!”

Granted, Brits rhymed the game with lucre, whereas Americans, who employed the word primarily in the metaphorical sense that Irina had so recently appreciated, rhymed the game with looker. A minor distinction. What was not minor was her tone of voice, and on an evening they had resolved to spend as warmly together as possible. Irina was bang out of order.

Lawrence’s expression fluctuated between injured, angry, and stunned. Irina dropped her head in shame. She might have cared passionately whether Ramsey took the second frame a moment before, but now the soft, polite commentary emitting from the television merely underscored the contrasting incivility of her outburst. Heavily, Irina did the honors, and switched off the TV.

An opening line of dazzling originality might have made for more sophisticated dramaturgy. Yet at crucial turning points—when the otherwise laudable goal of sparkling repartee comes a distant second to clarity—one is apt to rely on the established codes of one’s culture. Thus Irina fell back on the pat American prelude to cataclysm:

“We have to talk.”

In his lacerating attacks on colleagues, his lashing contempt for the copious morons in his surround, Lawrence perpetually exuded a barely contained violence. While he had never struck her, she’d never given him reason to. Consequently, when Irina had contemplated the scene that now inexorably unfurled in their living room, it had crossed her mind that Lawrence could well be moved to take a hard swing at her jaw. Yet however much she had despaired that her partner was a known quantity—however often since July she had supposed that their lives together had gone flat if only because a relationship is among other things a research project, and now that she’d reached the end of her private doctorate on Lawrence James Trainer there was nothing left to find out—Irina was mistaken. Curling on the couch, he whimpered in a small, childlike voice that she had never heard before, “I had what I wanted more than anything in the world, and I messed it up.”

Any images she might have conjured of being beaten about the head or slammed against the wall revealed themselves as the stuff of fantasy, not what she feared, but what she craved. Because what he did instead of hit her was far more brutal.

He cried.