BY THE TIME LAWRENCE would be getting to the corner, Irina had registered that his hasty departure in this downpour was not well planned. Perhaps clinging a bit after their confrontation over marriage last night, he’d lingered at breakfast, then grabbed a light jacket as he raced out the door. Snatching his trench coat, she ran downstairs, glad that Lawrence had missed the light and was still waiting to cross Borough High Street.
“Hey, Anorak Man! You’re getting soaked!” she shouted from their stoop, waving the coat. “You’re not dressed for this! You’ll get cold!”
The light had turned, and he was late. “I’ll manage!” he cried.
In her other hand she waved the clincher, a Ziplocked ham-and-cheese beading in the rain. “But you forgot your lunch!”
After mutual hesitation, they both ran to the other, closing the block between them in a comic reprise of lovers dashing slo-mo through a field—only Irina wasn’t leaping barefoot through clover, but scampering across gritty, wet London pavement in socks.
“Are you out of your mind?” asked Lawrence. “You’re not wearing any shoes!”
“I have a nice warm home to go back to,” she said, pulling off his jacket—an anorak, in fact—helping him into the overcoat, and handing off their sturdiest umbrella. “I can change my socks.” After tucking the Ziploc in the ample pocket of the trench coat, Irina took the umbrella back, opened it, and set it in his free hand. She wiped off the droplets beaded in his eyebrows, slicked his matted hair back from his forehead, and smiled.
“Thanks,” he said, holding the umbrella to shelter them both. With a look of having just remembered something, he leaned over and kissed her. It was a small kiss, closed-mouthed and chaste, but tender.
One of those many interstitial sequences that didn’t tell well: Lawrence left for work in a jacket that wasn’t waterproof, and I ran after him in the rain with his overcoat and lunch. Little wonder that Irina began dinners with friends like Betsy at a loss for stories. But these moments were the stuff of life, and they were the stuff of a good life.
Irina shivered back to the flat. Padding the hall to find dry socks while leaving wet footprints on the carpet, she reflected that the larger tale of their duo probably didn’t tell well, either. The only unconventional element in their lives together was this stint of expatriatism, but with Americans in London a dime a dozen, Several Years in the UK would never make a best-selling memoir. They were not waiting for anything in particular to happen. Presumably Lawrence would continue to establish himself in the think-tank biz—make more money, perhaps join the rotation of talking heads on the television news. Presumably Irina would continue to reap muted acclaim; who knows, maybe she’d win a prize. Likely they’d move back to the US in time, but Irina was in no rush. They hadn’t quite decided the question of childbearing, though whichever way they resolved the matter they’d not make history. Eventually they’d grow elderly and have health problems. In some ways, their lives together amounted to one big lamb-stuffed vine leaf. Why, look: the upshot of last night’s marriage palaver was that they’d keep on doing what they’d been doing. What a shock.
She tidied the toast-and-coffee dishes, then fetched the post, sifting supermarket offers for bills. Rain splatted the windowpanes, but the building was old and solid and they’d never had a problem with leaks. Treating herself to an upward nudge of the thermostat, she slipped a cassette of Chopin nocturnes into the stereo and nestled into her chair at the dining table to write checks. Her black woven velour sweater was a little dirty and oversized, but thick and soft. She felt protected.
Snug in the flat for the rest of the day while it bucketed outside put her in mind of camping in Talbot Park with her best friend at age fourteen. After their wiener roast, the sky had blackened; in high winds, she and Sarah barely managed to pole and spike the tent. Zipping the flaps as a torrent unleashed, the two girls had unfurled their sleeping bags and grinned. Only a thin nylon interface separated them from misery, its very tentativeness intensifying Irina’s conscious gratitude for refuge. They’d played gin rummy with a flashlight while the rain lashed their flimsy dome, the seams overhead barely beginning to glisten. Still, the seams gloriously held, the pelting resonating in their ad hoc home, replete with books, a transistor radio, and a thermos of minestrone. The overnight in Talbot Park was a touchstone of sorts. That evening she’d experienced an explosive joy for the simple fact that she was warm and dry.
For most Americans, the sensation of safety was an unmindful default setting, the least you could expect, or the worst. “Security” was often cited disapprovingly as the reason that some women stayed in bad marriages, implying, security meaning money, an arrangement just shy of prostitution. Too, folks who opted for security supposedly traded adventure and spontaneity for a spiritual subsistence that was pat and dead. But for Irina and Lawrence, achieving any semblance of security had been hard work. Safe haven was probably hard-won for most people, whose refuges were far frailer than they appeared—not so different from that Talbot Park tent, and as readily flattened by a gust of circumstance: a plant closure, a dip in the markets, a flood during the one month that the house was freakishly uninsured. It stood to reason, then, that security was a more precious commodity than its plodding reputation would suggest—and that it was profligate to treasure safety only in retrospect.
Not only had Lawrence earned a doctorate in international relations from an Ivy League school after growing up in a desert in more than one sense, but he didn’t have a job out of school. For their first three years together he churned out applications to universities, journals, and think tanks galore while part-timing in bookstores. Here and there he’d have an article or op-ed accepted, but for the most part it was three solid years of rejection. He spent his weekends glowering at televised golf. For all that time, they had no reason to anticipate that at long last salvation in the form of a crisp, letterheaded envelope with postage stamps of Queen Elizabeth would ever perch in their mailbox. Meanwhile, every unexpected expense, even a broken toaster, prompted a crisis.
For her own part, the road to illustration had run neither straight nor smooth. Tormented over her buck teeth, Irina had been a reclusive child who often drew alone in her room after school. She’d kept a pictorial journal with printed captions since she was ten (“Irina has to tip-toe passed the stoopid studio or she’ll get in big trouble”; “Mama’s ballet students are rilly stuck up”), but narcissistic, self-dramatizing parents had left her allergic to the arts. So she hadn’t gone to college at Pratt or Cooper Union but Hunter, capitalizing (a little lazily) on her background by majoring in Russian. She’d first earned her crust by translating dry Russian seismology texts, and tripped over illustration by accident.
In her late twenties, she’d been living with a brooding, volatile divorcé named Casper, a frustrated novelist (if there’s any other kind) on the Upper West Side with joint custody of a seven-year-old daughter. Inspired by the library books he checked out for his little girl, like a legion of naïve novelists before him he figured that in comparison to literary fiction the children’s market would be a cinch to crack. Since Irina had continued to draw idly in her journal evenings, he proposed that they collaborate.
Convinced that it was never too early to introduce kids to the “real world,” Casper wrote a story about a little boy named Spacer (a less-than-apt anagram of the author’s name) who wants more than anything in the world to win the sack race on Sports Day at his school. The boy practices and practices in his backyard (for Irina, drawing all those different sacks—not only the traditional potato sack, but duffels, sleeping-bag covers, those lovely white-and-orange carrier bags from Zabar’s—had been great fun). But when the big day arrives, Spacer doesn’t win the race. He doesn’t even place.
Yet Casper refused to wrap up his tale with any tried-and-true moral, like it’s not whether you win or lose. He was adamant the story not suggest that Spacer just needed to try harder, or that Spacer might prevail next year. Rather, the narrative underscored that Spacer had tried as hard as he could but his best wasn’t good enough. Casper wouldn’t allow that his protagonist was somehow a finer character for learning to lose graciously, nor would he let the poor kid off the hook by at least downgrading the importance of sack races in general. Casper’s idea that you teach kids point-blank that sometimes you don’t get what you want, period, was, um, sophisticated she supposed, but a little brutal. While she was also able to head off titles like The Loser and Little Engine That Couldn’t, his final choice, Sacked Race, was no more inviting.
The text was roundly rejected. Yet to her astonishment, one editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux expressed interest in the illustrator. Although the selective come-hither spelled the end not only of the collaboration but of the relationship, doodling on her lonesome with colored pencils sure beat translating papers on plate tectonics.
It wasn’t easy, though, and it still wasn’t. For long periods she’d had to illustrate on spec, and several of these projects never saw the light of day. Even now, after eight published picture books, her work was not widely known. Only thanks to Lawrence’s patient encouragement had she never given up.
Point being, there’d been nothing exhilarating about tippling on the edge of professional oblivion. More recently, there was nothing boring about being able to pay the phone bill. Not being able to pay the phone bill had been boring as could be.
But it was in the romantic realm that Irina was particularly flummoxed why anyone would exalt unremitting peril. What was dreary about being confident that on the average evening your partner would come home? Irina’s most profound sense of safety hailed from the solidity of her bond with Lawrence, which she pictured visually as one of those sisal ropes that tether ocean liners—weathered a shade gray by the elements, but six inches thick and multiply wound on a one-hundred-pound brass cleat. Lawrence would never leave her. Lawrence would never cheat on her. Irina never rifled Lawrence’s post or went through his pockets, not because she was gullible or afraid of being caught, but because she knew with certainty that there was nothing to find. In turn, she would never leave Lawrence nor, that bizarre brush with temptation in July notwithstanding, cheat on him, either. Barring an untimely auto accident, that they would grow old together wasn’t simply an aspiration; it was a fact. She’d bet the farm on it. Now, that was real security, regardless of whether Lawrence lost his job or her illustration prospects dwindled. She was damned if she understood why anyone would prefer to get up in the morning and confront the snarl, “All right! Who is it?” She failed to see the entertainment value in one of you flouncing out the door with no promise of ever coming back.
So, Irina considered over the electric bill, did their difference over marriage last night qualify as a “fight”? Funnily enough, she rather hoped that it did. Curious, this hunger she sometimes felt for conflict, since the odd affray seemed to lend their lives the grain and marble of fine red meat. Yet she could count the instances that she and Lawrence had conducted proper set-tos with fingers to spare.
There was memorable aggro over the coffee table of green Italian marble that she’d located at the Oxfam outlet in Streatham, whose installation Lawrence had resisted with disproportionate ferocity—being convinced from her description that it was garish. Willfully, she bought the table over his objections, though the deliveryman would only prop it in the lobby on the ground floor. Lawrence refused to help in protest, and alone she hauled the heavy slab to their first-floor flat stair by stair. Silently she slid it before his beloved sofa of a like shade. “Huh,” he said sheepishly. “Kind of brings the whole room together, doesn’t it?”
In kind, when he was offered the research fellowship in London, she was happy for him of course—but irked that she’d no say in the matter, regardless of her attachment to New York. But in short order she loved London, relished living abroad, and conceded cheerfully that he’d been right to accept the post.
Thus their few clashes had clustered around issues of dominion: who was the boss and of what. Resolutions involved the division of territory. Indeed, most couples seemed to carve up the world like rival colonial powers divvying the spoils of conquest. Much as Germany got Tanzania and Belgium the Congo, Irina ruled the aesthetic, and Lawrence the intellectual. She spoke with authority about the appalling lineup for the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery this year, he with authority about New Labour’s inconsistent immigration policies.
Granted, the perpetual peacetime that yawned before them was potentially stultifying. Yet with her parents constantly at each other’s throats, Irina’s childhood had been anything but oppressively serene. The hurtle of porcelain may have provided a brittle thrill, but now Irina and her sister would inherit only a few stray pieces of the cobalt china that their maternal grandmother had improbably wheeled out of the Soviet Union in a tea chest when fleeing Hitler’s armies and all the way to a Russian enclave of Paris. Did their mother go to the trouble of shipping that tea chest when she emigrated to the US, merely to ensure that she and her husband would fling dishes of the finest quality? Imagine, that china surviving the clash of civilizations, but not one lousy marriage.
As for what Irina’s parents fought about—money, of course; her father refused to sell insurance when dialogue coaching dried up just so Raisa could buy another $300 A-line from Saks. There were fights involving jealousy, although Raisa was generally enraged that, when she mentioned a handsome widowed father of a ballet student on costly calls to California, her husband didn’t get jealous enough. They didn’t like each other much. Since even minor disputes tended to expose this unpleasant truth, Irina resisted romanticizing the “tempestuous relationship” for its queasy injections of excitement.
She and Lawrence were contented together. If that was a problem, she could live with it.
LAWRENCE PHONED EARLY THAT afternoon. “Yo, Irina Galina! I’ve got a surprise!”
“You just spent ten grand on an engagement ring.”
“What, you trying to make my real surprise seem dinky?”
“No, I’m trying to turn a point of contention into a joke. And if you did any such thing, I’d have your head, milyi.”
“Anyway, I checked last night’s snooker results. Turns out that Ramsey beat Hendry by a frame. After a slow start, seems it was a great match.”
“Which I deprived you of. All over the trivial issue of whether we should get married.” But her tone was good-humored.
“You can make it up to me,” said Lawrence. “Ramsey’s playing the Big Baby tonight in the second round. If we get the 4:32 out of Waterloo, we can just make it.”
It was meant to be a lovely little gesture of inclusiveness, compensation for his lackluster response to her marriage proposal. Curiously, her stomach tightened around her small lunch. “You mean… go to Bournemouth?”
“Yeah! You were hacked off when I wanted to go by myself, remember?”
Being hurt that he didn’t want her along was quite a different matter from wanting to go. “Yes,” she said faintly. “I remember. Though the weather…”
“Eat the weather,” said Lawrence. “I tried to raise Ramsey on his cell, but it’s switched off—so I couldn’t get us comps. But I called to reserve tickets, and lucked out; there were only a few left. I found us a hotel in the area, so we can make a night of it.”
“So, what… then we eat out?”
“Well, obviously we should see if Ramsey’s free afterwards. He’d be offended if we came and then didn’t try to hook up.”
“Not necessarily,” she said in a tone that Lawrence wouldn’t have understood.
“Get a few things together, and meet me at Waterloo information at four-fifteen.”
Lawrence could be a little bossy.
After her self-congratulatory reverie this morning she didn’t want to be conjuring sharp thoughts like Lawrence could be a little bossy. Though she had a couple of hours before she needed to leave, the sudden change of plans put her in such turmoil that continuing to draw was out of the question. She hadn’t seen Ramsey Acton since that disquieting birthday dinner in July, and she didn’t want to see him.
Lawrence wouldn’t care if she showed up at Waterloo wearing the same rumpled clothes she had on, but abruptly the jeans felt grungy, the voluminous sweater shapeless and unflattering. After burning through a variety of outfits before the mirror, she wondered whether rocking up at Ramsey’s match in an alarmingly short skirt of black denim, which flared sassily from her thighs, and strapped 40s heels that with this skirt made her legs in black nylons look a mile high might be inconsiderate of a man who admitted that he was “lonely.” But hey, it wasn’t her fault if he couldn’t find his own girl. Checking out the effect in the mirror before she dashed out the door, she thought, Good God—I look like Bethany.
She brisked to the station with their second sturdiest umbrella. At the information booth, for once Lawrence didn’t ride her for dressing up, but whistled thinly through his teeth; he seemed to like it when she looked like Bethany. Having already purchased the train tickets, he imitated the Cockney ticket seller as they located the platform—“Aynt no trines bick to Loondun ofter tan-farty-throy, mite!” He had a good ear.
Once they were ensconced in the carriage and it lurched off, she was free to lie back and think of England. Out the window, poky houses with yards the size of bathtubs gave way to sheep.
“Ramsey must be pretty pissed off with some of his press,” said Lawrence. “The guy beats the #1 in the game, and the coverage was snide. This also-ran rep he’s got—it’s not as if he’s a loser. To stay in the game for thirty years, you have to win a shitload of matches, even if he’s never taken the championship.”
“I’m still worried about his future,” she said. “He can’t keep playing forever, and then what’s he going to do?”
“Long as his hands stay steady and his eyesight holds, nothing’s forcing him to retire. Besides, he can always commentate for the BBC, do endorsements.”
“I don’t see him as a commentator. He can be awfully inarticulate in public. Product endorsements? Oh, great. When I picture his later life, it seems depressing. I think having been something is sort of awful.”
“Has-been beats never-was.”
“I know you have a thing for snooker,” she ventured. “But I’ve still found your friendship with Ramsey hard to understand. You don’t seem to have much in common with the man. You’re used to being around people who read the newspaper.”
“You don’t get male bonding. And Ramsey tells great snooker stories.”
“Don’t those stories ever get tired?”
“Alex Higgins throwing his own television out the window? You’ve got to be joking.”
AT THE STATION IN Bournemouth, Lawrence flagged a cab. While it was pleasant to be taken care of—not to have to bother her pretty little head about tickets, reservations, and taxis—passivity was enervating. Once they were off, too, Lawrence chatted up the taxi driver about the Grand Prix, while Irina sat silently alongside.
“Swish has seen better days, ain’t he?” said the cabbie. “But he’s old guard, and it’s bloody amazing the geezer’s still at the table—”
“Ramsey’s not only got staying power, but Ramsey’s got class,” Lawrence proclaimed. “O’Sullivan’s a whiner and a sore loser. Not to mention a moron.”
Irina winced. For all Lawrence knew, the cabbie was an O’Sullivan fan.
“Hear him caterwaul in the first round, like?” the taxi driver rejoined; Lawrence was lucky. “Never stopped whingeing—about the baize, the calls, the kicks. Made the ref clean the ball twice, he did. Nothing’s ever good enough for the Rocket.”
“The guy’s a prima donna, and he’s spoiled. Sometimes you can be too talented. He’s never had to work hard. When matches don’t fall in his lap, he busts into tears.”
“American?” the cabbie picked up.
“Las Vegas.” Lawrence happily claimed the town he detested if it added color to his bio, and leaned hard on his Rs in a refusal to apologize for his accent. Since Americans in Britain were wont to feel cowed about their crass vowels and violent consonants, Lawrence’s unadulterated pronunciation surely displayed a strong sense of self. But for some reason, his aggressive skirl grated on her ear this evening.
“You Yanks don’t follow snooker much, am I right?”
Irina struggled forward. “No, in the US—”
“Not generally,” said Lawrence. “But I love snooker. Makes pool seem like something you’d play in a sandbox. And we’ve gotten to know Ramsey a little over the years, you know, friend of a friend? Helps give me a feel for the game.”
“You don’t say. How do you find him, mate?”
“Great guy. Modest. Incredibly generous.”
“Though he does have something of a chip—” Irina began.
“He has a sense of honor,” Lawrence plowed on. “A real man’s man.”
“Oi, from what I hear the bloke’s not unpopular with the ladies as well,” the cabbie leered. “Not quite the blade he once was, what with that gray around the temples. But you watch your woman about that fella. He’s more of an operator than he lets on.”
“I don’t know about that. He was married for several years. To an insufferable twit, I might add.”
When the cabbie let them off at the Bournemouth International Centre, Lawrence tipped him a whopping 30 percent—a benevolence that Irina knew full well hailed not from sympathy for hard-workers in service industries, but from gratitude that the driver had stooped to banter with his lowly passenger. Lawrence could come across as so brassy and arrogant, but in the odd excuse-me-for-living moment her partner’s emotionally emaciated upbringing poked through like a bone.
Much like Lawrence himself, the conference center was trying too hard. The bulky brick building’s materials were ostentatious, and Irina wondered if its designers had any idea that their project was failed and ugly. The tall, tinted windows overlooking the bay, which made the long, ghost-white pedestrian pier extending into the water look not only enticing but permanently out of reach, somehow recalled Lawrence as well. He seemed to peer at his own experience like Alice in Wonderland, after nibbling the wrong side of the mushroom and now much too tall to fit through the door, looking longingly at the tiny garden. On outings like this one they tried to have fun, and every minute positively ached with mutual good intentions. Yet unself-conscious, fully inhabited joy mysteriously eluded the man, and Irina yearned to give it to him like a present, to give him nothing less than his own life.
A burly character with a buzz cut behind them in the tickets queue was looking impatient. Frosty at first—sir this, sir that—the booking agent had warmed to Lawrence’s schmooze about the upcoming match, and was now conceding that, though the wager would pay little, he’d had to put his money on O’Sullivan. “Ronnie’s the future, mate!”
“Listen,” said Lawrence. “Any way you might get a message to Ramsey Acton?”
“This look like a Royal Mail office to you?”
“Mind if I go ahead, mister?” the man behind them finally intruded. “Just trying to return a ticket before it turns into a pumpkin.”
“No problem, no problem!” Lawrence demurred frantically. “Just thought I’d ask. Thanks a lot,” he said, in gratitude for tickets he’d paid for, adding to the beefy man in the queue, “And sorry about that, pal, really, sorry for keeping you waiting!”
He might have pressed his case about getting a note to Ramsey a little harder, and surely all that groveling was unnecessary.
This compulsive criticism was out of control, and she had to stop it.
Purbeck Hall was spacious, so once they found their seats she could not fathom whence derived this sensation of explosive claustrophobia. It had been kind of Lawrence to buy her an overpriced program, but she flapped it, reading nothing, just to keep from looking at his face. She couldn’t suppress a feeling of constraint, as if she were tied up, and when Lawrence reached over to push a strand of hair from her eyes she battled a ludicrous impulse to slap his hand. Yet it was only when Ramsey strode on stage that Irina realized this trip to Bournemouth wasn’t just a dubious journey in bad weather or a trip to see a sport she was tepid about when she’d rather stay home and work. It was a catastrophe.
A catastrophe, as in the definition of a collision: two objects trying to occupy the same space. As soon as Ramsey materialized, a feeling of wrongness permeated the hall, of an occurrence that shouldn’t be physically possible, like parallel lines meeting, or attending your own funeral. Suddenly the occasion felt off, out of kilter, like that uncertain period that precedes full-fledged nausea when you don’t yet accept that you’re going to be sick.
Although she’d suffered that little dolorousness on seeing Ramsey on television last night and feeling no pang of desire, on balance her neutral response to his broadcast image had been a relief. Yet now that he was loosed from the cage of the screen, Irina’s urge to reach out and rest her hands on either side of those narrow hips was overwhelming. As Ramsey assessed the lay of the balls after O’Sullivan’s break, her mind’s eye spontaneously fit her own hips into the cups of that barely broader pelvis. Over her own dead body, her head compulsively slipped two hands around the tight, delicately muscled back, up under the shirt, knuckles brushing the starched white fabric. Irina felt crazed. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. That attraction in July, it was bad and traitorous and stupid and just the result of too much drink; but now she was stone-cold sober. July was supposed to be a one off. She couldn’t have been more devastated if, after testing clean past the crucial five-year mark, a doctor had informed her sadly that a lethal cancer had recurred.
It seemed impossible that Lawrence couldn’t tell. But he didn’t appear distracted from the game by the fact that his partner was at this very moment having some kind of public sexual attack, with a flush rising—visibly, she was sure—from her clavicle to her hairline. She considered claiming to be suddenly indisposed and insisting they go straight to their hotel, except that now she’d laid eyes on Ramsey in the flesh—she thought that very phrase, in the flesh—it was too late.
Irina had sampled a smattering of illicit drugs in her youth, but she’d picked her spots—a few tabs of acid and mescaline, a little ecstasy and grass, the odd upper. She’d steered clear of heroin, crack, and crystal meth. Whether or not she’d prove susceptible to these more famously addictive substances, she theorized that for everyone there was that one high you couldn’t refuse, for which you’d sell your soul—and anyone else’s. There was no way of knowing which quantity would produce a permanent craving until you took it. As soon as you took it, even that single, investigative taste, you would have to have more. Thus the only protection from yourself in this instance was never to try it. Presented with a palmful of tablets guaranteed to induce her own customized version of consummate bliss, she would scatter the pills to the winds.
Yet here was Ramsey Acton, propped on stage like an upended capsule concocted in some back-room laboratory as the one substance on earth that Irina Galina McGovern could not resist. She’d had fair warning in July, sniffed a few heady grains from a split vial, just enough to know that this was the drug that she had been avoiding her whole life.
However much a mess, Irina didn’t need the overhead monitor to keep track of the score. She could readily read the tide of play in the language of Ramsey’s body.
He was winning. His cuing was a model of economy; not a muscle moved that was not in the service of the shot. At rest, he was exquisitely still, demurring from even pro forma sips of water. Last night on TV, he’d looked so lifeless; he visibly didn’t give a damn. What he appeared to have clawed back for himself in the meantime wasn’t so much his cueing skills per se, but the very quantity that gave rise to them in the first place. He had made himself care. No mean feat, when she thought about it—to care violently about a bunch of little balls, and about whether in traversing a rectangular surface they bounced against one another in such a way as to land into holes.
Lawrence applauded frantically after every frame, obviously hoping to draw their friend’s attention to the fact that a certain couple was in the audience. Irina’s impulse was to the contrary, and she slumped in her second-row seat, praying that the stage lights didn’t cast enough ambient glow to illuminate their faces.
At the interval, Ramsey’s removal from her sight was a relief, for simply sitting in his presence was aerobic exercise. Despite a chill in the auditorium, her hairline was damp. Though Lawrence had piped “Ramsey!” as the players withdrew, their friend had disappeared without a backward glance.
“This is a fantastic match,” Lawrence proclaimed. “I bet right now O’Sullivan’s crawled back to his dressing room to bawl.”
Irina looked at him oddly. It wasn’t quite as if Lawrence were speaking a foreign language—she understood each individual word as it emitted from his mouth—but she could not make sense of them together. Heart skipping, skin slick, mind festering with so much soft-core porn that she could rent out videos, she was at an utter loss why Mr. Trainer seemed to be talking about, of all things, a snooker match.
“… You look bored,” said Lawrence, not concealing his disappointment.
“I’m not bored,” she said honestly.
“Then, so far, are you glad you came?”
Irina crossed her legs. They were her best feature; Lawrence seldom admired them. “It’s very interesting,” she said, and meant it, too. But then, acid rain was interesting, and Srebrenitza.
As the cheers rose when the players returned to the stage, Lawrence resumed his feverish clapping. Irina patted her hands inaudibly together, for form’s sake. Despite the moist mash of her applause, or perhaps because of it—as if Ramsey had a canine sensitivity to the very softest sound in the hall—before the lights had fully dimmed, he turned to look at the second row, sighting with the one-two of a knock-out combination first Irina McGovern, then Anorak Man beaming in the next seat.
He smiled.
But this was not the smile of ease, of expansiveness, of anticipatory triumph that one might expect from a sportsman in the advantaged position of six frames to two. Slight and asymmetrical, it had an element of the wan, the bittersweet, the self-mocking and sardonic. Disconcertingly for a player enjoying such a dramatic lead, it was a fender-bender, a prang of a smile, crumpled, a little twisted. It was a smile of defeat.
As if determined to coordinate his game with his facial expression the way some women accessorize outfits with pocketbooks to match their hats, Ramsey began to lose. It was dreadful to witness, like watching a compulsive gambler in the black squander his prodigious pile of chips until there’s nothing left to bet besides his house. After Ramsey folded in eight frames on the trot, Irina was left with the perplexing impression that not only was he losing on purpose, but that he was doing so to show off. The ritual sacrifice of his lead seemed to constitute the inverse of conspicuous consumption, the way some wealthy people try to impress you not with what they’ve got but with what they’re willing to throw away.
Irina was unsure if she was supposed to be flattered. Ramsey had, after his fashion, given her the Grand Prix—though normal men would try to impress a girl by winning it, would they not? For all his appearance of gentlemanly containment, there was something flamboyantly self-destructive about Ramsey Acton that was downright childish, and won or lost what was she supposed to do with the Grand Prix?
Once the rest of the audience had cleared off in the desultory spirit of leaving a sporting event that had started out cracking but ended rather crap, Ramsey tooled coolly out on stage with his untied dickie bow stringed around his neck and his pearl-colored waistcoat unbuttoned, hooking over his shoulder a short-cut black jacket whose leather looked thick enough to saddle a horse. After such a disgraceful performance, he should have been shuffling with rounded shoulders. Instead he peacocked toward their seats, wearing an unflappable expression that most people can only manage with dark glasses. The very ferocity of her annoyance angered Irina the more. The ex-husband of an estranged friend should elicit none but the mildest emotions of any stripe.
“Yo, Ramsey!” cried Lawrence, standing. “What happened?”
Ramsey exuded a ridiculous cheerfulness, moving with the celebrative lightness of a man who has just lost a great deal of weight. “I been at this donkeys’ years,” he said, squinting. “Sometimes I just lose interest. Can’t predict it. And can’t be helped.”
“When you lose interest in snooker,” said Irina, “do you get interested in anything else?”
“Whatever else would I be interested in, ducky?” He looked her in the eye.
“Listen,” said Lawrence, his glance flicking from Ramsey to Irina with an ear-pricked, wind-sniffing alertness that one rarely sees outside of wildlife programs. “We should probably check into our hotel. But according to the Internet, it’s not far from here. You available for a bite to eat?”
“If I’d have won, an appearance at the Royal Bath bar would be expected. But losing makes the colleagues nervous—they’re afraid they’ll catch it like crabs—so I’m free. We can swing by your hotel in the limo, and then make a night of it.” His gray-blue eyes glinted. “Sure I’m massive behind on Afghanistan.”
If it was a joke, it was at Lawrence’s expense. Before she fell in behind the two men, Irina muttered at Ramsey’s side, “Since when have you ever even heard of Afghanistan? I bet you a hundred quid you couldn’t find it on a map.”
“I’m full of surprises,” he said.
“You’re full of something.”
It was like that, and it had better stop being like that. Irina shut up.
Outside the stage door, Ramsey issued them into his limo, muttering in Irina’s ear, “Nice gear.” She plowed gracelessly in front of Lawrence in order to insert him between her and the snooker player—scooting down the leather upholstery as if sternly sliding a wine glass out of her own reach.
When Lawrence gave the driver the address, Ramsey interceded. “Oi, Anorak Man, the Novotel’s a tip! Why not let me get you a room in the Royal Bath?”
“Nah,” said Lawrence. “I checked out their Web site, and it’s out of our league.”
“On me,” Ramsey offered.
Lawrence stolidly refused Ramsey’s generosity, and the limo proceeded to the Novotel. Irina fought a disappointment. They never stayed in upmarket hotels; the extra towels, terry-cloth robes, and gold-plated faucets might have been fun. Her disappointment redoubled when they arrived—at an address that wouldn’t have collected many snooker celebs in limos at its curb. A doorman hustled out to ask the driver if he was lost.
After Lawrence checked them in, they skipped up the stairs (thin carpeting, gold-and-navy paisley) to give the room a glance. Lo, it was one of those overheated units with plastic water glasses, powdered-coffee sachets, bare bars of Ivory, and windows with brown aluminum frames that didn’t open. The color scheme was mauve. Lawrence hit the remote, flicked through the stations, and frowned. “No cable.”
“No fresh flowers! No champagne! No fruit basket!”
“Hey—did you want me to take him up on it?”
“No, you were right. He’s sure to pay for dinner, and that’ll be pricey enough.”
“Sometimes that guy throws his money around in a way that—I don’t know. Some of us have to work for a living, right? And he doesn’t have to call this place a dump. It’s okay, isn’t it?”
“It’s fine,” she said. “Bottom line”—a smile—“it’s warm and dry.”
“Too warm,” said Lawrence, searching the walls. “And I don’t see a thermostat.”
“I admit it’s a little grotty, but it’s only for one night.”
“Look, if you want to stay at the Royal Bath, I could afford it! Just say the word!”
“You mean, we could afford it. But we’re not going to spend hundreds of pounds for wrapped soap.”
Across the board of expenditures, their frugality was uniform. Taking one last look at the room whose air freshener was so rank that it made you want to smoke to cover it up, Irina wondered what kind of a splurge they didn’t consider wasteful. It was only one night, but after a sequence of nights just like this one they’d be dead.
Waving at the driver to stay put, Lawrence held open the car door, so Irina had no choice but to slip in next to Ramsey. En route to the restaurant, she pressed her elbows to her waist and squeezed her knees together. Staring rigidly ahead, she might have been mistaken for a prisoner incongruously escorted to death row in a limousine. As the ungainly vehicle negotiated corners, her left arm would brush Ramsey’s stiff leather jacket, administering brief electric shocks like foretastes of the chair.
Ramsey apologized that, the hour being late, they were “stuck with Oscar’s,” the Royal Bath’s in-house restaurant, which wouldn’t be serving after ten p.m. either, but would make an exception in his case. The hotel was making a mint off of snooker players this week, and had to make nice. Lawrence’s terse rejoinder, “Of course,” contained a hint of Oh brother!; maybe it was Ramsey’s having to be special that rankled. That and the fact that they were not to avoid having their noses rubbed in the spectacle of the grand hotel they were missing. When they drew up to the imposing white edifice—five floors between two fairy-tale turrets, set back on landscaped grounds, and lit up like Disneyland—Irina refrained from remarking on its splendor.
After a doorman rushed to usher the snooker player from the limo, Ramsey held his hand out for Irina, who had a tricky time not showing so much leg in her short black skirt that it qualified as a different part of the anatomy altogether. The doorman gave her a discreet once-over, and shot Ramsey a nod of approval. Lawrence strode around from the other side and roughly grabbed her hand in a spirit that Irina did not especially like.
“Hard luck, mate,” a bellboy called to Ramsey on the way in.
“Got nil to do with luck, son,” said Ramsey. “Rarely does.”
The dining establishment that they were “stuck with” was pretty flash, and Ramsey was right about the maître d’ being willing to keep the kitchen open for select clientele. When Ramsey excused himself to change his damp shirt, Lawrence anxiously scoped out the few remaining patrons, all on dessert. “In no time we’re going to be the only people here,” he fretted. “We should go to an all-night diner or something.”
“This isn’t New York. There may not be any all-night diners in Bourne mouth.”
“At least we should just order an entrée, no extras, and get the check in advance.”
“You mean the bill.”
“Check, bill, who gives a shit? Think Brits don’t still know you’re talking about money?”
“Shh, calm down. You know very well that Ramsey’s not going to ask for a carryout of meatballs and a glass of water. Why not relax and enjoy yourself?”
“Because it’s rude! These waiters want to go home!”
“They may get overtime. The maître d’ sure did; Ramsey slipped him something crisp. I didn’t even recognize the denomination.”
“Which is gross. Buying people like that.”
“You’re one to talk! The biggest tipper I know.”
“I don’t tip people to get them to stay up until three in the morning on my account, just in case I might want a second espresso.”
“If we’re here ’til three a.m., I bet we’re not drinking coffee.”
“That’s another thing. Whenever we’re out with Ramsey, you’re pretty liberal with the booze. You should watch yourself.”
“I haven’t had a sip of wine, and I’m already criticized for drinking too much?”
“Advance resolve never hurts…. By the way, your hair’s kind of a mess.”
“Thanks for the boost of confidence. I thought you liked the way I looked.”
“Well, sure. You look fine.”
“Fine.”
“Good.”
“Fine or good? Which is it?”
“Okay, good!”
“So why does that make you mad?”
“I’m not mad, I’m just hungry, and I wish Ramsey would stop powdering his nose and get his precious butt back here before we have to order breakfast instead.”
“I thought you liked him.”
“I like him fine.”
“Fine again. I thought you liked him a lot.”
“Yeah, a lot, so? What’s with you?”
“What’s with you?”
“Are you having a row?” Ramsey inquired pleasantly, taking his seat in a freshly starched white shirt.
“No,” said Lawrence.
“Then what would you call it?” said Irina.
“Why call it anything?” said Lawrence.
“How about ‘daft’?” said Irina.
“Since when do you say daft?” Lawrence charged.
“What’s wrong with daft?” said Irina.
“It’s pretentious.”
“What am I pretending to?” she countered. “Having lived in London for seven years? Besides, since when do you not have a taste for every synonym under the sun for stupid?” She’d tried to give the tease an affectionate cast, but it hadn’t come out right.
“Sorry, but I’m feeling a bit left out,” said Ramsey. “Oi, do carry on, like. But someone might clue me up on what the argy-bargy’s about.”
“The argy-bargy—if I’m allowed to say that—is about what all the best arguments are about: absolutely nothing,” Irina interpreted for their host. “It’s pure, like abstract expressionism. No vases or dead pheasants. Subject matter just gets in the way.”
“Don’t be glib,” said Lawrence. “We were talking about something plenty substantive. I’m uncomfortable keeping all these restaurant employees after hours.”
“I aim to make it worth their while,” Ramsey said smoothly, perusing the wine list, “and yours, mate.”
The waiter took Irina’s order first, and she opted for the scallop starter, with wild bass and morels for the main course. Lawrence’s face twitched when Ramsey duplicated the same order, down to the side of spinach. Though his self-denial would not let the help go home a minute sooner, true to his vow Lawrence refused an appetizer, and chose the cheapest, plainest dish on the menu, some kind of roast chicken.
Irina’s chair had been placed in front of a leg of the round table, and to make herself comfortable she’d scooted to one side. Moving the chair toward Ramsey had been a mistake; she’d left her partner geographically odd man out. Yet now to rearrange her chair on the opposite side of the table leg would seem strange.
“An excellent choice, sir,” the waiter commended when Ramsey selected the wine—ergo, it was exorbitant. Once the bottle arrived, Lawrence put his hand over his glass, and asked for a beer. It seemed churlish. When Irina and Ramsey cooed over the saffron cream on the scallops, Lawrence wouldn’t taste one, but noshed antagonistically at a bread roll whose crust was so thick that he might have been gnawing on Ramsey’s leather jacket.
Since Anorak Man was not playing his usual part of well-read snooker fan, Irina had no choice but to do the honors. After all, like many people with narrow specialties, Ramsey might have liked to express interest in professions like illustration or defense analysis, which were beyond his ken, but he didn’t want to ask dumb questions. That left it to his guests to ask dumb questions of him. Since the sounds at the table had reduced to those of clanking silver and the click of Ramsey’s cigarette lighter, the lamest of inquiries was better than none.
“Is snooker a very old game?” asked Irina. “And where does it come from?”
“Snooker is right recent. But it’s a variation on billiards, which goes back to the sixteenth century. China, Italy, Spain, as well as Britain all claim they invented the game.”
“Nice to be fought over,” said Irina. This very evening suggested otherwise.
“Snooker grown out of a version of billiards called ‘black pool.’”
“Like the coastal town?” asked Irina. “Is that what the place is named for?”
“Blackpool,” Ramsey ruminated. “Maybe. Never thought of that.”
“How could you dine out on stories about ‘black pool’ and not have thought of that?” asked Lawrence.
“’Cos I’m a poor dim bugger,” said Ramsey affably, heading off that this was exactly what Lawrence meant. “As for where snooker came from, people say it were invented by Neville Chamberlain.”
“At least there was one arena in which the guy had balls,” said Lawrence.
All that skipping school in Clapham had come at a cost. Ramsey looked blank. “Chamberlain was a colonel in the British Army, stationed in India. Them blokes must have got dead bored. Black pool already used fifteen red balls and a black. Chamberlain added the other colors, and invented new rules. In India, there’s still a snooker hall in the Ooty Club at Ootacamund what’s preserved as the cradle of the game. Always wanted to head there, I have. The table’s meant to be the absolute business. They’re right particular about who gets to play, but I wager they’d let Ramsey Acton hit a few.”
“This’d be your idea of a pilgrimage?” asked Lawrence. “The Ooty Club?”
“You could say that,” said Ramsey, unfazed by Lawrence’s tone. “In the old days, balls was made of ivory. Had to be cut from the very center of the tusk. Word is some twelve thousand elephants gave their lives for the glory of snooker. I got a set myself—cost a king’s ransom, they did. Should stop by and take a geek at them someday. Hardly ever play that set. But you get a click from the ivory, a ring, that modern balls can’t match.”
“Lawrence might find that fascinating,” said Irina.
“Oi, I reckon the ivories are more the sort of thing an artist might fancy.”
“I’m not big on pilgrimages,” said Lawrence. “So feel free, Irina. Go see his etchings.”
“Really, Lawrence is the snooker fan,” she said firmly.
“Seem pretty interested yourself, love.”
“Only up to a point,” she said, softening a crust with the saffron sauce intently.
Ramsey glugged Chateau Neuf du Pape in both their glasses. The hand hovered over her setting—the slim wrist, the tapered fingers. Lawrence took a niggardly sip of lager. Ramsey lit another fag. Lawrence waved the smoke from his face.
“So what are balls made of now?” she proceeded in despair, like reshouldering a heavy suitcase when it was clear that no one else was going to help.
“Plastic,” said Ramsey, spewing smoke. “It’s thanks to snooker that plastic were invented. Changed the face of the world, this game did. Though some would say”—he clicked a nail against the Perspex salt cellar—“not for the better.”
Lawrence squinted. “Neville Chamberlain invented snooker, and snooker invented plastic. Are you making this up?”
“I ain’t that clever, mate. It’s true. Them ivory balls was so bleeding dear that the sport were desperate for a substitute, and put out a reward, right? It was you lot got it sorted as well, back in the days you Yanks was always inventing shite. Manufacturing outfit called Phelan runs adverts offering ten large in gold for a ball you don’t have to shoot an elephant to make—right inconvenient, you’d agree. Chap named John Wesley Hyatt in Albany, a printer, comes up with the first version by accident. Spills some printer’s what-all that hardens like a treat.”
“You mean, the way the telephone was invented,” said Lawrence.
Since Alexander Graham Bell had nothing to do with snooker, Ramsey looked uncomprehending again. “Trouble is, them first plastic balls? Hit them together hard enough and they’d explode.”
Irina laughed. Lawrence didn’t.
“What I’d give to have a set of them,” said Ramsey fondly. “Gives a whole new meaning to safety play.”
“Lawrence! Finally snooker and terrorism intersect.”
“Modern balls,” said Lawrence with a steely quality, “are made of super chrystalate.”
“Good on you!” Ramsey raised his glass (not that he appeared to require an excuse), and the arrival of their entrées suggested a change of course in more than one sense. “So, Anorak Man! What’s up with the, you know, the politics and that?”
Irina wished that Ramsey were skillful enough to make his asking after her partner’s affairs seem better than conversational duty. But then, Irina suspected that Ramsey had no earthly idea what a “think tank” was.
“This year, a lot of my work concerns Northern Ireland.”
As if Lawrence had evoked a hypnotist’s trigger to send his subject into a trance, Ramsey’s eyes spontaneously filmed. Irina had seen it before: all over the world, the incantation Northern Ireland had magical powers. With the potential to put commercial soporifics out of business, the topic could drive die-hard insomniacs into a deep, dreamless sleep within sixty seconds.
“Now that he’s got a ceasefire in his grubby hands,” Lawrence continued obliviously, “Blair has dropped all the other preconditions unionists have demanded for letting Sinn Fein into talks—like an IRA weapons handover and a declaration that the war is over. Blair’s concessions up-front could be harbingers of more outrageous concessions in a settlement down the road.”
Ramsey looked up from his wild bass with a hint of panic. The pause in Lawrence’s monologue seemed to indicate an apt juncture at which to pass comment. None was forthcoming.
“Concessions like what?” Irina felt like a young thespian’s mother prompting her dumbstruck ward from the audience when the kid only has one line.
“Obviously, giving in on a united Ireland,” said Lawrence, shooting Irina a what-are-you-stupid? look that she knew all too well. “Putting together some bullshit federation, or handing Dublin the power and London the bill. But there are other issues—prisoners, the RUC…”
Lawrence continued in this vein for some minutes, until Ramsey looked about to fall over. Whenever Lawrence talked shop, he used words like dispensation and remit and arcane phrases like it isn’t in Adams’s gift. He was proud of his mastery of fine points, but didn’t seem to understand that for people like Ramsey you had to connect the dots, to tell a story—and to explain why of all people a snooker player should care.
“Alex Higgins is from Belfast, isn’t he?” said Irina.
“Yeah,” said Ramsey, with a glance of gratitude. “And just like Higgins, I always get the impression them Taigs and Prods revel in the mayhem—that they don’t want it to be over, that they enjoy it.” Heartened, or a shade more awake, he braved another thought. “Still, the bleeding empire’s over, innit? Might as well let them bastards have their freedom.”
“Northern Ireland has nothing to do with colonialism!” Lawrence exploded. “It’s about democracy! The Protestants are in the majority, and the majority want to stay in the UK. They don’t want their goddamned freedom!”
Ramsey looked bewildered. “But—all them bombs and that…” It was for all the world like watching a small boy wander into traffic. “Why not give them IRA wankers what they want and wash our hands of the tip?”
Lawrence’s eyes lit up like the twin headlights of an oncoming semi. “That’s exactly the reaction they’re COUNTING ON! Why are all you Brits a bunch of SHEEP? This country stood up to HITLER! Your friend Neville Chamberlain may have been a craven suck-up, but Churchill had brass balls! London was half leveled by the Nazis and stood fast, and now with a few car bombs in shopping centers the whole country’s ready to cave!”
Ramsey messed with the cellophane on a new pack of Gauloises. “Never understood the whole carry-on myself,” he mumbled.
“It’s actually pretty simple,” said Irina, who wouldn’t cite too many fine points, since she couldn’t remember any. “Terrorists use your own decency as a weapon. You don’t want people to get hurt, so you do what you’re told. How the troubles play out is a test case for whether being an asshole pays off.”
“Of course being an arsehole pays off,” said Ramsey, shooting her another grateful glance. “Take Alex Higgins! Hardly wins any tournaments at all, and his two World Championships are ten years apart. Makes a packet mostly for being the most obnoxious, abusive, destructive, insulting, and all-round unbearable berk on the planet. You realize, don’t you, there ain’t a hotel left in Britain will let him stay the night? He’s banned from Cornwall to the Hebrides! I wreck that many hotel rooms, there’d be five competing biographies of me as well.”
“Actually, that’s not a bad parallel—from what I understand,” she added, with a deferential nod to Lawrence. “Remember all the traffic seizures on motorways last spring?”
“Got stuck on the M-4 on the way to Plymouth for the British Open for the better part of a bloody day.”
“IRA hoax threats, but they worked. And remember how another IRA hoax threat delayed the Grand National in April? Well, giving folks like that what they want is like the management handing Alex Higgins two splits of champagne and a complimentary bouquet after he’s trashed his hotel room.”
Throughout this exchange—whose mysteriously ulterior quality made it seem a misuse, even abuse, of an issue that Lawrence cared about very much—Irina’s shoulders had swiveled thirty degrees toward Ramsey. When she tried to yank them to a more neutral orientation, they seemed cast in this attitude in bronze.
“Northern Ireland’s not boring,” Lawrence insisted, as if the fierceness of his assertion could make it true. “The details may be hard to follow. But it’s the biggest issue in this country, and other scumbags around the world will be watching closely how a settlement turns out. Sinn Fein walks away with that bouquet, plenty of other cities will go blooie. It just floors me how the British don’t give a shit.”
Meanwhile a chorus of song arose from the hotel’s bar. Ramsey cocked a wan, private smile. Around the corner his mates were having a high old time, while he was stuck in this poxy restaurant in earnest discourse about Northern Ireland. As the throng at the bar grew more boisterous, Ramsey joined in on the refrain: “Snooker loopy nuts are we / Me and him and them and me—”
“What is that?” asked Irina, laughing.
“With loads of balls and a snooker cue—” The tune was as goofy as the lyrics, but Ramsey’s voice was clear, and he had good pitch.
“That is—appalling!” cried Irina, wiping her eyes.
“‘Snooker Loopy,’” Ramsey explained, while his friends began yet another ghastly verse. “By Chas and Dave and the Matchroom Mob. Rose to #6 in the charts in ’86, if you can credit that. Conceived as a promo for the championships. Sort of what the pair of you was saying about terrorism. It’s horrible, it shouldn’t have paid off, but it did.”
“Where does the name snooker come from anyway?” asked Irina. She’d given up on reeling Lawrence into the conversation, when the line proved repeatedly to have not a live fish on the end but an old boot.
“It were slang for, what, cretin in the military,” said Ramsey. “Some bloke at the Ooty Club slags off another player for being a right snooker when he misses an easy color. Chamberlain intervenes all diplomatic, like, There, there, boys, sure ain’t we all snookers in this game, we are. He says, so why don’t we call the whole kit snooker. It stuck.”
“The original colloquialism snooker,” said Lawrence, “meant neophyte.”
“Neophyte.” Ramsey turned the word in his mouth like a fishbone. “Sounds like some new compound. ‘Oi, you blokes still use super chrystalate, but my own balls is made of neophyte!’”
Irina laughed. Lawrence didn’t.
“YOU COULD HAVE ASKED me where the name snooker came from,” said Lawrence, marching up the stairs of the Novotel.
“I was only making conversation,” said Irina.
“You sure made a lot of it.”
“Somebody had to,” she said, catching her heel on the carpet.
“You’re drunk,” said Lawrence harshly, never wont to employ colorful terms for inebriation—blootered, legless, half-tore. The unadorned drunk was never in danger of sounding adorable. “And I don’t need you to interpret for me about politics.” He jammed their pass-card into the slot. “I think I’m pretty clear. That’s my job, you know. My Russian may suck, but I don’t need a translator in English.”
“I was only trying to help. You sometimes forget whom you’re talking to.”
“Thanks for holding my professionalism in such high regard.”
“I didn’t say anything about how I regard your professionalism, high or low. It’s just that you toss off unionists this and unionists that, when someone like Ramsey may not know a unionist from a hole in the ground.”
“Well, that’s pathetic,” said Lawrence, letting the door slam behind them. “It’s his country. And you’ve got to admit, his views on the subject display the instincts of a total pussy.”
“He doesn’t have any views. He’s a snooker player.”
“We’re never allowed to forget that.” Plopping on the bed, Lawrence reflexively turned on the TV. “His rendition of ‘Snooker Loopy’ was incredibly embarrassing.”
“No one else was left in the restaurant,” she observed wearily.
“As I predicted,” said Lawrence. “Bursting into song, getting sloppy drunk, overstaying your welcome, acting as if you own the place—pretty low-rent.”
“That’s how British celebrities are expected to act. We were tame, as these things go.”
Irina’s defense of their host was as pale as it was impolitic, and she wandered to the window, fiddling aimlessly with the polyester tassel on the tie-back. This hotel was nowhere near the beach, and looked out on a McDonald’s car park whose bins were overflowing. Some glum consolation, bolts of satin brocade wouldn’t have improved the fabric of the evening itself. You could feel lonely anywhere, verge on tears anywhere, even in a luxury hotel like the Royal Bath. If Lawrence hadn’t been apprised at the station that the last train to London was at 10:43 p.m., she’d have urged that they just go home.
“All this commercial buildup,” said Irina. “But we’re in Dorset. It’s hard to remember that this is Thomas Hardy country. Moors and brooding and tragedy.”
“I don’t know,” said Lawrence. “Many more matches like tonight’s, and Ramsey the Obscure might start to have a ring.”
The buzz that was beginning to ebb had little to do with wine. Irina felt vaguely guilty, but as she reviewed her behavior couldn’t locate an offense. She’d been attentive to their host, an obligation. She’d looked comely in public, but not trashy, which only reflected well on her partner. She’d been lively company, laughing at Ramsey’s jokes, and it was only fitting to express enjoyment when so much money was being expended toward this end. There had been no hanky-panky, no footsie or fingers straying into the wrong laps. She’d been a good girl. She had nothing to be ashamed of.
Be that as it may, she knew perfectly well that you could follow proper etiquette to the letter and still violate a host of unwritten laws in that sneaky fashion that no one could nail you for. In some respects this was the worst rudeness, the kind that you could get away with because it wasn’t in the book. Lawrence would never be able to cite her transgressions outright without sounding touchy or paranoid. He couldn’t reasonably object to a flash in her eyes, or to a fullness to her laughter disproportionate to the small witticisms that gave rise to it. He didn’t quite have the courage of his own perceptions to charge that while she looked rapt enough when he was talking and hadn’t ever interrupted, his conversation had obviously bored her. As for the sassy black outfit, he would like to take his whistle at Waterloo Station back, or at least to ask the kind of question that Lawrence Trainer seemed constitutionally incapable of posing: Did you really put on that short skirt for me?
“How was that cake thing?” Lawrence grunted, scowling at the late-night replay of Ramsey’s match on the BBC.
“It was good,” she said to the window. Ramsey had ordered a flourless chocolate cake with raspberry sauce and pastry cream for the table. Like both bottles of wine, Lawrence had spurned the enticement. Which left Ramsey and Irina to fork tiny, sumptuous tastes from the same plate. There was nothing wrong with sharing a piece of cake. There wasn’t. There wasn’t, was there? “You should have tried it.”
“I’d had enough,” he said emphatically. “… You don’t usually eat dessert.”
“I didn’t order it.”
“Nope,” he said gruffly. “I guess you didn’t. And it takes a different sort of discipline to resist temptation that’s plunked in front of you when you didn’t ask for it.”
Having skirted even that close to the main thing, Lawrence withdrew to the TV. “On replay, the second session is even worse. Ramsey was crucifying O’Sullivan before the interval. Then, wham. He tanked. Sometimes I don’t understand these people.”
“You do understand,” she reflected. “That is, they are people. They’re not machines. But they’re trying to be. That’s why the very best in the game, on a sustained level, are the likes of Stephen Hendry. People who are uncomplicated and a little blank. There’s an absence about them that’s mechanical. Really good snooker, perfect snooker, and maybe this applies to any sport, is all about defeating your own humanity. I was touched, in a way, when Ramsey imploded. When they’re too good, I find it almost unpleasant. It isn’t natural. It isn’t warm-blooded.”
Lawrence looked at her with curiosity. Applying this much consideration to a matter that had previously engaged her so little seemed to constitute one more infinitesimal, ineffable treachery.
The room lacked the panoply of props that one’s own home affords—newspapers to flap, lampshades that need dusting, pepper grinders low on corns. Resorting to the only bit of business she could think of, Irina went for the comb in her purse at Lawrence’s feet.
“Your breath stinks,” said Lawrence.
She wasn’t near enough for him to tell. “I had one cigarette. Just one. Honestly, Lawrence”—she untwisted her hair tie—“it’s like some moral thing now. As if we’ve gone backwards to the flapper days, when women who smoked were seen as loose. All this huffy disapproval seems to have nothing to do with lung cancer anymore.”
“No tobacco is safe. And it makes kissing you like cleaning out the fire grate.”
Since when do you kiss me anyway? She held her tongue, teasing out snarls in the mirror. Lawrence had been right, her hair was mussed, but he’d failed to mention that the escaping strands had sprayed into an impromptu disarray that was rather fetching.
“Speaking of bad breath,” said Lawrence, “where did you put our toothbrushes?”
“Bozhe moi!” she exclaimed. “I forgot.”
“I asked you to get some things together! No wonder I kept thinking something was missing. I can’t believe you didn’t pack a bag!”
“Well, we hardly needed anything—”
“All the more reason to remember what little we did!”
“I was in a hurry.”
“I gave you plenty of time to get ready.”
“I went back to work.” The fib left her mouth with a dissonant twang, like a piano string snapping. She hadn’t gone back to work. She’d spent two hours deciding what to wear.
“I could have used a fresh shirt.” Lawrence sniffed his sleeve and made a face. “Ramsey must have gone through the better part of a pack, so this one smells like an ash can. And now you’ve got to take the train back tomorrow wearing that.”
“So?”
“You’ll have that I-was-unexpectedly-out-all-night look. As if you met someone and were up having wild sex.”
“Little chance of that,” she muttered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She almost said, Never mind, but pushed herself to say instead, “That you don’t seem in a very good mood.”
“I can’t stand not brushing my teeth.”
“I’ll go downstairs and see if they sell a toiletry kit.”
“Too late,” he said furiously. “Nobody’s at the desk. I can’t believe you didn’t pack a bag!”
Lawrence got up off the bed. She could see in his feint first in one direction, then the other, that what was upsetting him perhaps more than the prospect of furry teeth in the morning was the disruption of ritual. At last he moved decisively toward the bath, and Irina stepped in his path.
“Let me go,” he said impatiently. “I have to take a leak.” He seemed grateful to have seized upon a need.
Barring his way, Irina felt her humor teeter-totter, tipping first toward irritation: here she had done as he wished, gone to a snooker match, and put in an effort to make the expedition a success, and then he was a grouse most of the night for no good reason other than his worry about some strangers getting home from their restaurant jobs before midnight. She hadn’t done anything wrong, and she didn’t deserve this gruff, tough, angry treatment over two miserable toothbrushes and a spare shirt.
But under that justifiable vexation lurked a less defensible annoyance: that Lawrence, if not short, was not very tall. That Lawrence, if fit, was not finely streamlined; no number of sit-ups would sharpen an essential bluntness to his figure because that’s the way his body was made. That Lawrence, if successful in his own realm, did not have an exotic occupation that would magically keep restaurant kitchens open all hours and land him in chic hotels. That Lawrence, if virtuous, did not exude an intoxicating perfume of dark-toasted tobacco, expensive red wine, and something else that Irina couldn’t put her finger on and probably shouldn’t. That Lawrence, if articulate, had a dumpy old American accent just like hers.
On the opposite side of the fulcrum lay mental kindness. In a way, it was Lawrence’s very failings that she loved—or it was the overlooking of his failings that her love was good for. She would never forget the first time she noticed that his hair was beginning to thin, and the piercing tenderness that the discovery fostered. Perversely, she loved him more for having less hair, if only because he needed a little more love to make up for whatever tiny increment of objective handsomeness that he had lost. Thus this evening it was the very fact of his not being tall—of his having been, yes, a little boring at dinner, as well as wary and therefore less likable, not to mention harsh, judgmental, and impatient, with a small mustard stain on the collar of his trench coat, probably from that ham sandwich at lunch—the very fact of his not making the help jump for being such a celebrity, and not speaking in a disarming South London accent, and not sporting exquisitely tapered fingers but really rather stumpy, short ones like breakfast sausages—that tipped her to the sweeter disposition. She slipped her arms around his waist. Lawrence’s returning clasp was ferocious.