Kitabı oku: «The Post-Birthday World»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

chapter five

chapter six

chapter seven

chapter eight

chapter nine

chapter ten

chapter eleven

chapter twelve

about the book

Praise for The Post-Birthday World

About the Author

Also by Lionel Shriver

About the Publisher

chapter one

What began as coincidence had crystallized into tradition: on the sixth of July, they would have dinner with Ramsey Acton on his birthday.

Five years earlier, Irina had been collaborating with Ramsey’s then-wife, Jude Hartford, on a children’s book. Jude had made social overtures. Abjuring the airy we-really-must-get-together-sometime feints common to London, which can carry on indefinitely without threatening to clutter your diary with a real time and place, Jude had seemed driven to nail down a foursome so that her illustrator could meet her husband, Ramsey. Or, no—she’d said, “My husband, Ramsey Acton.” The locution had stood out. Irina assumed that Jude was prideful in that wearing feminist way about the fact that she’d not taken her husband’s surname.

But then, it is always difficult to impress the ignorant. When negotiating with Lawrence over the prospective dinner back in 1992, Irina didn’t know enough to mention, “Believe it or not, Jude’s married to Ramsey Acton.” For once Lawrence might have bolted for his Economist day-planner, instead of grumbling that if she had to schmooze for professional reasons, could she at least schedule an early dinner so that he could get back in time for NYPD Blue. Not realizing that she had been bequeathed two magic words that would vanquish Lawrence’s broad hostility to social engagements, Irina had said instead, “Jude wants me to meet her husband, Raymond or something.”

Yet when the date she proposed turned out to be “Raymond or something’s” birthday, Jude insisted that more would be merrier. Once returned to bachelorhood, Ramsey let slip enough details about his marriage for Irina to reconstruct: after a couple of years, they could not carry a conversation for longer than five minutes. Jude had leapt at the chance to avoid a sullen, silent dinner just the two of them.

Which Irina found baffling. Ramsey always seemed pleasant enough company, and the strange unease he always engendered in Irina herself would surely abate if you were married to the man. Maybe Jude had loved dragging Ramsey out to impress colleagues but was not sufficiently impressed on her own behalf. One-on-one he had bored her silly.

Besides, Jude’s exhausting gaiety had a funny edge of hysteria about it, and simply wouldn’t fly—would slide inevitably to the despair that lay beneath it—without that quorum of four. When you cocked only half an ear to her uproarious discourse, it was hard to tell if she was laughing or crying. Though she did laugh a great deal, including through most of her sentences, her voice rising in pitch as she drove herself into ever accelerating hilarity when nothing she had said was funny. It was a compulsive, deflective laughter, born of nerves more than humour, a masking device and therefore a little dishonest. Yet her impulse to put a brave, bearable face on what must have been a profound unhappiness was sympathetic. Her breathless mirth pushed Irina in the opposite direction—to speak soberly, to keep her voice deep and quiet, if only to demonstrate that it was acceptable to be serious. Thus if Irina was sometimes put off by Jude’s manner, in the woman’s presence she at least liked herself.

Irina hadn’t been familiar with the name of Jude’s husband, consciously. Nevertheless, that first birthday, when Jude had bounced into the Savoy Grill with Ramsey gliding beside her—it was already late enough in a marriage that was really just a big, well-meaning mistake that her clasp of his hand could only have been for show—Irina met the tall man’s grey-blue eyes with a jolt, a tiny touching of live wires that she subsequently interpreted as visual recognition, and later—much later—as recognition of another kind.

Lawrence Trainer was not a pretentious man. He may have accepted a research fellowship at a prestigious London think tank, but he was raised in Las Vegas, and remained unapologetically American. He said “controversy,” not “controversy”; he never elided the K-sound in “schedule.” So he hadn’t rushed to buy a white cable sweater and joined his local cricket league. Still, his father was a golf instructor; he inherited an interest in sports. He was a culturally curious person, despite a misanthropic streak that resisted having dinner with strangers when he could be watching reruns of American cop shows on Channel 4.

Thus early in the couple’s expatriation to London, Lawrence conceived a fascination with snooker. While Irina had supposed this British pastime to be an arcane variation on pool, Lawrence took pains to apprise her that it was much more difficult, and much more elegant, than dumpy old eight-ball. At six feet by twelve, a snooker table made an American billiards table look like a child’s toy. It was a game not only of dexterity but of intricate premeditation, requiring its past masters to think up to a dozen shots ahead, and to develop a spatial and geometric sophistication that any mathematician would esteem.

Irina hadn’t discouraged Lawrence’s enthusiasm for snooker tournaments on the BBC, for the game’s ambiance was one of repose. The vitreous click-click of balls and civilized patter of polite applause were far more soothing than the gunshots and sirens of cop shows. The commentators spoke just above a whisper in soft, regional accents. Their vocabulary was suggestive, although not downright smutty: in amongst the balls, deep screw, double-kiss, loose red; the black was available. Though by custom a working-class sport, snooker was conducted in a spirit of decency and refinement more associated with aristocracy. The players wore waistcoats, and bow ties. They never swore; displays of temper were not only frowned upon but could incur a monetary fine. Unlike the hooligan audiences for football, or even tennis—once the redoubt of snobs but lately as low-rent as demolition derby—snooker crowds were pin-drop silent during play. Fans had sturdy bladders, for even tip-toeing to the loo invited public censure from the referee, an austere presence of few words who wore short, spotless white gloves.

Moreover, on an island whose shores were battered by cultural backwash from the States, snooker was still profoundly British. The UK’s late-night TV may have been riddled with reruns of Seinfeld, its cinemas dominated by L.A. Confidential, its local lingo contaminated—chap and bloke giving way to guy. But the BBC would still devote up to twelve hours of a broadcasting day to a sport that most Americans didn’t know from tiddlywinks.

In all, then, snooker made a pleasing backdrop while Irina sketched the storyboard of a new children’s book, or stitched the hem on the living-room drapes. Having achieved under Lawrence’s patient tutelage a hazy appreciation for the game, Irina would occasionally look up to follow a frame. More than a year before Jude ever mentioned her husband, Irina’s eye had been drawn to a particular figure on screen.

Had she thought about it—and she hadn’t—she had never seen him win a title. Yet his face did seem to pop up in the later rounds of most televised tournaments. He was older than the preponderance of the players, who tended to their twenties; a few severe lines in the long, faceted face could only have scored it beyond the age of forty. Even for a sport with such an emphasis on etiquette, his bearing was signally self-contained; he had good posture. Because to a degree snooker’s rectitude was all show (Lawrence assured her that away from the table these gentlemen didn’t incline towards Earl Grey and cucumber sandwiches), many players grew paunches, their complexions by thirty hard-living and haggard. In a game of finesse, their arms often went soft and their thighs spread. Yet this character was narrow, with sharp shoulders and slim hips. He always wore a classic starched white shirt, black bow tie, and distinctive pearl-coloured waistcoat—a signature perhaps, intricately over-woven with white silk thread, its filigree reminiscent of certain painstaking fills in her own illustrations.

When they were introduced in the Savoy Grill, Irina didn’t recognize Ramsey from TV. He was out of context. Brilliant with names, faces, dates, and statistics, Lawrence quickly put to rest her nagging puzzlement over why Jude’s husband seemed familiar. (“Why didn’t you tell me?” he’d exclaimed. It was a rare day that Lawrence Trainer was obsequious.) Ramsey Acton immediately pulled down a whole file on a man apparently an icon of the game, albeit something of a holdover from the previous generation. Borrowed from American basketball, his handle on the circuit, “Swish,” paid tribute to Ramsey’s propensity for often potting so cleanly that the object-ball never touched the jaws of the pocket. His game was renowned for speed and fluidity; he was a momentum player. A professional for twenty-five years, he was famous, if one could be famous for such a thing, for not winning the World Championship—though he had played five championship finals. (By 1997, that was thirty years, and six finals—still no championship.) In no time Lawrence had nudged his chair closer to Ramsey’s, engaging in an exultant duet that would brook no intrusions.

Irina had mastered the basics: right, you alternate potting a red with potting a colour. Potted reds stay potted; potted colours return to their spots. Reds cleared off, you sink the colours in a set order. Not so difficult. But if she was always a little unclear on whether the brown or the green went first, she was unlikely to engage a pro in engrossing speculation on this matter. By contrast, Lawrence had mastered the game’s most obscure regulations. Hence as he waxed eloquent about some notorious “respotted black,” Swish bestowed Lawrence with a handle of his own: “Anorak Man.” The gentle pejorative was clearly coined in affection. To Lawrence’s satisfaction, Anorak Man would stick.

Irina had felt excluded. Lawrence did have a tendency to take over. Irina might describe herself as retiring, or quiet; in bleaker moments, mousy. In any event, she did not like to fight to be heard.

When Irina locked eyes with her friend that evening, Jude’s rolled upward in a gesture a mite nastier than Oh, those boys being boys. Jude had met her husband during her journalism phase, when she’d been assigned a puff piece for Hello! in the 80s, and Ramsey was a minor pinup star; in the interview, they’d got hammered and hit it off. Yet for Jude what had probably started out a meagre interest in snooker had apparently slid to no interest in snooker, and then on to outright antagonism. Having made such a to-do about how Irina must meet Ramsey Acton only to display such annoyance, Jude must have routinely hauled her husband out and plunked him next to the likes of the adoring Lawrence in order to get her money’s worth, or something’s worth anyway.

Lawrence utterly neglected the woman he called his “wife” to others but whom he had never bothered to marry; Ramsey was better brought up. Shifting towards Irina, Ramsey firmly turned aside any more snooker shoptalk for the night. In a thick South London accent that took some getting used to, he commended her illustrations for Jude’s new children’s book, extolling, “Them pictures were top drawer, love. I was well impressed.” He had a way of looking at Irina and only at Irina that no one had employed for a very long time, and it frankly unnerved and even discomfited her; she constantly cut her own gaze to her plate. It was a bit much for a first meeting, not presumptuous in a way you could quite put your finger on but presumptuous all the same. And Ramsey was lousy at casual chitchat; whenever she brought up the Democratic convention, or John Major, he plain stopped talking.

Quietly, Ramsey picked up the bill. The wine, and there had been a lot of it, had been pricey. But snooker pros made a mint, and Irina decided not to feel abashed.

That first birthday, his forty-second, as she recalled, he’d seemed perfectly nice and everything, but she’d been relieved when the evening was over.

Irina collaborated on a second children’s book with Jude—the overt manipulativeness of the first, along the lines of I Love to Clean Up My Room!, appealed to parents as much as it repelled children, and had ensured that it sold well. Thus the foursome soon became established, and was repeated—often, for London circles—a couple of times a year. Lawrence, for once, was always up for these gatherings, and from the start displayed a proprietary attitude towards Ramsey, whose acquaintance he enjoyed claiming to British colleagues. Irina grew marginally more knowledgeable about the sport, but she could never compete with Lawrence’s encyclopedic mastery, so didn’t try. Tacitly it was understood that Jude was Irina’s friend and Ramsey Lawrence’s, though Irina wondered if she wasn’t getting the short end of the stick. Jude was a little irritating.

The dinner that began the second year of their rambunctious foursome landed once again on Ramsey’s birthday. For secular Westerners ritual is hard to come by. Two birthdays in a row sufficed to establish standard practice.

Self-conscious that Ramsey always footed the bill on his own birthday, the fourth July, in 1995, Irina had insisted on hosting the do. In the mood to experiment, she prepared her own sushi-sashimi platters, to which she’d noticed that Ramsey was partial. Unlike those precious restaurant servings of three bites of tuna and a sheet of serrated plastic grass, the ample platters of hand rolls and norimaki on their dining table in Borough left no room for the plates. She would have imagined that someone like Ramsey was used to being feted, and worried beforehand that her hesitant foray into Japanese cuisine wouldn’t compete with the flash fare to which he was accustomed. Instead, he was so overcome by her efforts that for the entire evening he could hardly talk. You’d think no one had ever made him dinner before. He was so embarrassed that Irina grew embarrassed that she had embarrassed him, exacerbating the painful awkwardness that had come to characterize their few direct dealings with each other, and making Irina grateful for the boisterous buffering of the other two.

Ah, then there was last year. She and Jude had had a huge row, and were no longer speaking; Jude and Ramsey had had a huger row, and were no longer married. Though seven years was brief for a marriage, that was still a mind-boggling number of evenings in the same room for those two, and they were surely only able to stick together for that long because Ramsey spent such a large proportion of the year on the road. Had it been left to Irina, at that point she might have let their fitful friendship with Ramsey Acton lapse. She’d nothing in common with the man, and he made her uncomfortable.

Yet Lawrence was determined to rescue this minor celebrity from that depressing pool of people—sometimes an appallingly populous pool, by your forties—with whom you used to be friends but have now, often for no defensible reason, lost touch. He might have slipped in the rankings, but Ramsey was one of the “giants of the game.” Besides, said Lawrence, “the guy has class.”

Shy, Irina pressed Lawrence to ring, suggesting that he make a half-hearted offer to have Ramsey over; it was pretty poor form to ring someone up and ask him to take you out to dinner on his own birthday. Yet she expected Ramsey to decline the home-cooked meal, if not the whole proposition. A threesome anywhere would feel unbalanced.

No such luck. Lawrence returned from the phone to announce that Ramsey had leapt at the opportunity to come to dinner, adding, “He sounds lonely.”

“He doesn’t expect another sushi spread, does he?” asked Irina with misgiving. “I hate to seem ungenerous when he’s picked up so many checks. And last year was fun. But it was a lot of work, and I hate to repeat myself.” Irina was a proud and passionate cook, and never bought plastic bags of prewashed baby lettuces.

“No, he begged that you not go to so much trouble. And think of me,” said Lawrence, who did the washing up. “Last year, the kitchen looked like Hiroshima.”

Hence the fare had been, to Irina’s mind, rather ordinary: an indifferent cut of venison cubed in red-wine sauce with shiitake mushrooms and juniper berries, which constituted an old standby. Yet Ramsey was as effusive as before. This time, however, Irina wondered whether it was really the menu that captivated their guest. Perhaps in order to add one note of novelty to a meal she’d prepared several times, before he arrived she had dragged out a sleeveless dress that she hadn’t worn in years. The garment had almost certainly slipped to the back of the wardrobe because—as she discovered once more—the straps were a tad long, and kept dropping off her shoulders. The soft, pale blue cotton sized with latex stretched smoothly across her hips; the hemline was high enough that she had to yank it down her thighs every time she sat down. She’d no idea what had got into her, swanning around in such provocative gear before a man fresh from divorce. At any rate, it wasn’t the venison that Ramsey kept staring at all night, that was for sure.

Mercifully, Lawrence hadn’t seemed to notice. What he did notice was that Ramsey wouldn’t leave. Even with snooker icons Lawrence’s social appetite was finite, and by two Ramsey had exceeded it by a good measure. Lawrence vigorously cleared the plates, and washed them loudly down the hall. As the censorious clank of pots carried from the kitchen, Irina was stranded with Ramsey, and panicked for lack of subject matter. Granted that Ramsey was overstaying his welcome, but she wished Lawrence wouldn’t do that with the dishes! Whenever they did get the ball rolling in the living room, Lawrence would interrupt the flow by brisking in to wipe the table, or to prize off melted candle wax, never meeting Ramsey’s eyes. Oblivious to his host’s rudeness, Ramsey refilled their wine glasses. He didn’t collect his cue case, and then with obvious reluctance, until after three.

Thus the whole last year the trio hadn’t reconvened, as if Irina and Lawrence needed that long to recover. But Lawrence didn’t hold a grudge, agreeing with Irina that sometimes Ramsey’s social skills were as inept as his snooker game was elegant. Besides, Lawrence was well compensated for his lost sleep with free tournament tickets throughout the following season.

It was July again. But this year was different.

A few days ago Lawrence had rung from Sarajevo to remind her that Ramsey’s birthday was coming up. “Oh,” she’d said. “That’s right. I’d forgotten.”

Irina chided herself. She had not forgotten, and it was foolish to pretend that she had. The slightest abridgments of the truth with Lawrence made her feel isolated and mournful, far away and even afraid. She would rather be caught out lying than get away with it, and thus live with the horror that it was possible.

“Going to get in touch with him?” he asked.

Irina had been chewing on this matter ever since she learned that Lawrence would be at a conference on “nation building” in Bosnia and wouldn’t return until the night of July 7. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the one who’s big buddies with Ramsey.”

“Oh, I think he likes you.” But Lawrence’s tone imparted moderation, or even reservation, as in “I think he likes you well enough.”

“But he’s so odd. I have no idea what we’d talk about.”

“The fact that they’re thinking about dropping the bow-tie rule? Really, Irina, you should call, if only to make an excuse. How many years have we—”

“Five,” she said morosely. She’d counted.

“If you let it go, he’ll be hurt. Before I left, I did leave a brief message on his cell-phone voice mail to apologize that I’d be in Sarajevo this year. But I let it slip that you were staying behind in London. If you want that badly to get out of it, I could always call him from here, and say that you changed your mind at the last minute and came with. You know, happy returns, but what a drag, we’re both out of town.”

“No, don’t. I hate lying for petty reasons.” Irina was uneasy with the implication that she didn’t have a problem with lying for substantial reasons, but further qualification seemed tortuous. “I’ll ring him.”

She didn’t. What she did do was ring up Betsy Philpot, who had edited Jude’s and Irina’s collaborations at Random House, and so knew Ramsey somewhat. Not having worked together for a couple of years, Betsy and Irina had morphed from colleagues to confidantes. “Tell me that you and Leo are free on the sixth.”

“We’re not free on the sixth,” said Betsy, whose conversation never ran to frills.

“Damn.”

“This matters why?”

“Oh, it’s Ramsey’s birthday, when we’ve had this custom of getting together. Except now Jude’s history, and Lawrence is in Sarajevo. That leaves me.”

“So?”

“I know this sounds vain, and it could be all in my head. But I’ve wondered if Ramsey doesn’t—if he isn’t a little sweet on me.” She’d never said so aloud.

“He doesn’t strike me as a wolf. I’d think he’s nothing you can’t handle. But if you don’t want to do it, don’t.”

For Betsy, another American, everything was always simple. In fact, her cool, compass-and-ruler approach to circles that others found difficult to square had a curious brutality. When Jude and Irina had fallen out, she’d advised with a savage little shrug, “As far as I could tell, you’ve never liked her much anyway. Write it off.”

Irina wasn’t proud of the way she “dealt” with this quandary, meaning that she didn’t deal with it at all. Every day in the countdown to July 6, she promised herself in the morning to ring Ramsey in the afternoon, and in the afternoon to ring him in the evening. Yet propriety pertained even to night owls, and once it passed eleven p.m., she’d check her watch with a shake of the head and resolve to ring first thing the next day. But he probably slept late, she’d consider on rising, and the cycle would begin again. The sixth was a Saturday, and the Friday before she faced the fact that a single day’s notice so obviously risked his being busy that to ring at the last minute might seem ruder than forgetting the occasion altogether. Well, now she wouldn’t have to face down Ramsey Acton all by herself. A flood of relief was followed by a trickle of sorrow.

The phone rang Friday at nearly midnight. At this hour, she was so sure that it was Lawrence that she answered, “Zdravstvuy, milyi!”

Silence. No returning, “Zdravstvuy, lyubov moya!” It wasn’t Lawrence.

“… Sorry,” said an airy, indistinct British accent after that embarrassed beat. “I was trying to reach Irina McGovern.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “This is Irina. It’s just, I thought it was Lawrence.”

“… You lot rabbit in—was that Russian?”

“Well, Lawrence’s Russian is atrocious, but he knows just enough—he’d never manage in Moscow, but we use it at home, you know, as our private language … Endearments,” she continued into the void. “Or little jokes.”

“… That’s dead sweet.” He had still not identified himself. It was now too awkward to ask who this was.

“Of course, Lawrence and I met because I was his Russian tutor in New York,” Irina winged it, stalling. “He was doing his doctoral dissertation at Columbia on nonproliferation. In those days, that meant you needed to have some Russian under your belt. These days, it’s more like Korean … But Lawrence has no gift for languages whatsoever. He was the worst student I ever had.” Blah-blah-blah. Who was this? Though she had a theory.

A soft chuckle. “That’s dead sweet as well … I dunno why.”

“So,” Irina charged on, determined to identify the caller. “How are you?”

“… That’d depend, wouldn’t it? On whether you was free tomorrow night.”

“Why wouldn’t I be free?” she hazarded. “It’s your birthday.”

Another chuckle. “You wasn’t sure it was me, was you? ’Til just then.”

“Well, why should I be? I don’t think—this is strange—but I don’t think, after all these years, that I’ve ever spoken to you on the phone.”

“… No,” he said with wonderment. “I reckon that’s so.”

“I always made our social arrangements through Jude, didn’t I? Or after you two split, through Lawrence.”

Nothing. The rhythm to Ramsey’s phone speech was syncopated, so that when Irina began to soldier on, they were both talking at once. They both stopped. Then she said, “What did you say?” at the same time he said, “Sorry?” Honestly, if a mere phone call was this excruciating, how would they ever manage dinner?

“I’m not used to your voice on the phone,” she said. “It sounds as if you’re ringing from the North Pole. And using one of those kiddy contraptions, made of Dixie cups and kite string. You’re sometimes awfully quiet.”

“… Your voice is wonderful,” he said. “So low. Especially when you talk Russian. Why don’t you say something.” Summat. “In Russian. Whatever you fancy. It don’t matter what it means.”

Obviously she could rattle off any old sentence; she’d grown up bilingual. But the quality of the request unnerved her, recalling those porn lines that charged a pound per minute—what Lawrence called wank-phone.

“Kogda mi vami razgovarivayem, mne kazhetsya shto ya golaya,” she said, binding her breasts with her free arm. Fortunately, nobody learned Russian anymore.

“What’d that mean?”

“You said it didn’t matter.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“I asked you what you had in mind for tomorrow night.”

“Mm. I sense you’re having a laugh.”

But what about tomorrow night? Should she invite him over, since he liked her cooking? The prospect of being in the flat alone with Ramsey Acton made her hysterical.

“Would you like it,” she proposed miserably, “if I made you dinner?”

He said, “That’s bleeding decent of you, pet.” The curious little endearment, which she’d only encountered once before when collaborating with an author from way up in Newcastle, was somehow warmer for being odd. “But I fancy taking you out.”

Irina was so relieved that she flopped into her armchair. In doing so, she pulled the cord, and the phone clattered to the floor.

“What’s that racket?”

“I dropped the phone.”

He laughed, more fully this time, round, and the sound, for the first time in this halting call, relaxed her. “Does that mean yes or no?”

“It means I’m clumsy.”

“I never seen you clumsy.”

“Then you’ve never seen me much.”

“I never seen you enough.”

This time the silence was Irina’s.

“Been a whole year,” he continued.

“I’m afraid Lawrence wouldn’t be able to join us.” Ramsey knew that, but she’d felt the need to insist Lawrence’s name into the conversation.

“Rather put it off, so Lawrence could come as well?”

He’d given her an out; she should jump at it. “That doesn’t seem very ceremonial.”

“I was hoping you might see it that way. I’ll call by at eight.”

For the most part, other people took couples as they found them: you were, or, at a certain point, you weren’t. At its most torrid, your love life was merely titillating to others, and the done-deal nature of established couples like Irina and Lawrence was doubtless a big bore. Romantic devastation occasioned, at most, an onlooker’s tinny sympathy or schadenfreude. Romantic delirium was even worse. Newly in love, you expected to draw envy or admiration, but were far more likely to attract a finger-drumming impatience for you to get over it. Of course, people did have opinions, about whether you were suited, or probably fought; almost always your friends—that is, friends of the couple—liked one of you more. But these opinions were cheap. They cost nothing to hold, and nothing to change.

Ramsey arranged her cue in her right hand. Leaning over the table, he demonstrated the proper position for sighting the shot. She did as she was told. As he murmured about how you had to “hit through the white” and not “pull back after contact,” she inhaled his breath, aromatic with brandy and toasted tobacco. When he reached behind her to adjust the angle of her cue, their fingers touched.

Yet in defiance of his own instruction that you mustn’t “pull back after contact,” his hand reflexively recoiled. When he urged her to move her grip further down the butt, he declined the pedagogic option of shifting her hand with his own. Turning her face to his, Irina was startled to confront an expression of idiotic innocence.

Irina finally twigged. Alex “Hurricane” Higgins? Ronnie “the Rocket” O’Sullivan? Jimmy “the Whirlwind” White? Without a doubt, many a snooker player was a rogue. They drank, they smoked, they whored; they never thought twice about “shagging another bloke’s bird.” And fair enough, Ramsey hoovered fags, had a taste for weed, and was no stranger to the bottle. But on one point he and his notorious competitors decisively parted ways. Ramsey Acton was a nice man. Maybe he did find her fetching; she could hardly hold that against him. But Irina had described her relationship as sound, satisfying, and permanent. And Ramsey was Lawrence’s friend.

If anyone was kissing anyone tonight, she would have to kiss him.

Even putting the momentous matter of Lawrence aside, the prospect was fraught. Ramsey might never have thought of her in that way at all. At the very least, she risked the mortification that Estelle must have felt when she tore off her shirt and the teenage Ramsey Acton fled in dismay to his bicycle.

Still, it could have been a small decision. Drunken, addled revellers often do things late at night for which they apologize in the morning with a reductive titter. But the minimizing of such moments was a matter for other people. For Irina knew with perfect certainty that she now stood at the most consequential crossroads of her life.

“I almost forgot,” she said with a shaky smile. “Happy birthday.”

chapter two

At the rattle of the key in the lock, Irina felt her pulse in her teeth.

“Irina Galina!” It wasn’t precisely a sobriquet. In a nod to the rhymey assonance of the Russian language, Irina’s mother had chosen Galina for her middle name, and Lawrence loved the boisterous, comical cadence of the double-barrel. Yet tonight his pet handle rang from the hallway with a grating singsong, as if she were an adorable Muppet on Sesame Street and not a grown woman.

Dropping his luggage, Lawrence poked his head into the living room. In a stroke, her heart fell. She thought, I have never before looked into that face and felt absolutely nothing.

The first time Irina ever laid eyes on Lawrence—having found her posting for Russian tutoring on a Columbia message board, he’d made an appointment for his first lesson—she opened the door of her West 104th Street apartment with an imperceptible double-take. She wouldn’t pretend to love at first sight, but she did register a familiarity, as if they had met before. Though his trim physique was buried in flannel and drooping denim, the face was arresting: sharply cut, cheeks hollowed from overwork, forehead curdled, deep-set eyes as big, brown, and imploring as a bloodhound’s.

Even then, Lawrence liked to think of himself as a self-sustaining unit, like a geodesic dome whose moisture infinitely recirculates and waters its own crops. Irina did soon grow to appreciate that Lawrence was an enterprising young man who had bootstrapped himself from the moneyed equivalent of trailer-park trash to the Ivy League. But what tore at her sympathy that first afternoon was the immediate apprehension that he was starved—that emotionally he was like one of those wild boys raised by chimps, who’d been subsisting in the forest on roots and berries. That first impression had never left her, of pleading and raw need, of an undercurrent of desperation of which Lawrence himself was unaware. Even the cockiness with which he had leaned, smirking, against the door frame had proven simply heartbreaking in the end, since his improbable incompetence at Russian justified no swagger. Over the proceeding years her sympathy had only deepened.

Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence’s face was familiar, it was killingly so—as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She’d been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises—or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence’s face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead. Strong, unapologetic nose: nothing. Boyishly tousled hair: nothing. Pleading brown eyes—

She couldn’t look in his eyes.

“Hey, what’s up?” said Lawrence, kissing her perfunctorily with dry lips. “Don’t tell me you’re just sitting here, not even reading.”

Just sitting here was exactly what she’d been doing. Her own mind having converted overnight into a home entertainment centre, she’d felt no need to reach for a book. In fact, the prospect of reading anything as demanding as a cereal box was risible.

“Just thinking,” she said weakly. “And waiting for you to come home.”

“Well, it’s coming up on eleven, right?” he said, returning to the hall to cart his bags to the bedroom. “Almost time for Late Review!”

Lawrence’s voice died quickly and left dead air, as if the very acoustics of their home had gone flat. Irina struggled to right her posture, but kept sagging into the cushions of her chair. She heard bustling from the bedroom. Naturally the instant he arrived he had to unpack. Always this tyrannical obsession with order.

When he shambled back to the living room, Irina couldn’t think of anything to say, and she wasn’t accustomed to having to “think of ” something to say to Lawrence.

“Okay,” she croaked. As if contaminated by Ramsey’s syncopated syntax, Irina’s timing was off, and her response to Lawrence’s proposal was minutes late.

“Okay, what?”

“Okay, let’s watch Late Review.”

There was too much space around their words. Irina visualized this ragged discourse as a mismatch of type-sizes and prints, like a kidnapper’s ransom note snipped jaggedly from different headlines. That she and Lawrence had ever carried a competent conversation now seemed incredible. She wondered what they used to talk about.

“We’ve got another twenty minutes,” he said, splaying on the couch opposite. “So how’s tricks? Anything new?”

“Oh,” she said, “nothing much since we last spoke.” Behold, her first lie. Irina had a queasy feeling that it wouldn’t be her last.

“Didn’t you have dinner with Ramsey? Don’t tell me you chickened out.”

“Oh, right,” she said thickly. She was no good at this. She was already botching it. Of course she’d have to give an accounting of last night. But the mere sounding of Ramsey’s name gave her palpitations. “Yes, we did that.”

“So how was it? You were worried that you’d have nothing to say to each other.”

“We managed,” she said. “I guess.”

Lawrence was beginning to look irked. “Well, what did you talk about?”

“Oh, you know—Jude. Snooker.”

“Is he entering the Grand Prix this year? Because I thought I might go.”

“I have no idea.”

“I wondered if his ranking’s slipped enough to have to play the qualifiers.”

“Beats me.”

“Well, you can’t have talked that much about snooker.”

“No,” she said. “Not so much.” It was as if she had to hoist every word from her mouth with a forklift.

“Did you at least get any good gossip?”

Irina tilted her head. “Since when did you care about ‘gossip’? That is, about what’s going on in someone’s heart, and not in their head?”

“I meant like, is it true that Ronnie O’Sullivan has checked himself into rehab. What’s your problem?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. She had not, overnight, turned into an ogre, and she gazed at her partner mournfully. It was obscene, though, that he couldn’t tell the difference the moment he walked in the door, if a flicker of nervousness ran through her that maybe he had. Since Lawrence avoided the main thing like the plague, the fact that he hadn’t remarked on her lacklustre response to his home-coming was if anything a red flag. It was hardly subtle: so far this conversation was reminiscent of a prison visit. They seemed separated by a thick pane of glass, and spoke haltingly as if through receivers. After all, Irina had broken a law of a kind, and had just begun her first day of what could prove a very long sentence. She added pitifully, “I made you a pie.”

“I had a snack on the plane … Sure, why not. A small piece.”

“Would you like a beer with that?”

“I’ve already had a Heineken … What the hell, let’s celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“The fact that I’m back.” He looked wounded. “Or didn’t you notice?”

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “Yes, of course. That’s what the pie is for. To welcome you home.”

In the kitchen, she leaned her palms against the counter, dropped her head, and breathed. It was a relief to escape Lawrence’s company, however briefly; yet from the fact of the relief itself there was no escape, and it cored her.

Leadenly, Irina removed the pie from the fridge. Chilling for under two hours, it wasn’t completely set. With any luck the egg in the filling had cooked thoroughly enough that the pie’s having been left out on the counter for a full day wasn’t deadly. Well, she herself wouldn’t manage more than a bite. (She’d not been able to eat a thing since that last spoonful of green-tea ice cream. Though there had been another cognac around noon …) The slice she cut for herself was so slight that it fell over. For Lawrence, she hacked off a far larger piece—Lawrence was always watching his weight—than she knew he wanted. The wedge sat fat and stupid on the plate; the filling drooled. Ramsey didn’t need admiration of his snooker game, and Lawrence didn’t need pie.

She pulled an ale from the fridge, and pondered the freezer. Normally, she’d join him with a glass of wine, but the frozen Stol-ichnaya beckoned. Since she’d brushed her teeth, Lawrence needn’t know that she’d already knocked back two hefty belts of neat vodka to gird herself for his return. Spirits on an empty stomach wasn’t like her, but apparently acting out of character could slide from temporary liberation to permanent estrangement from your former self in the wink of an eye. She withdrew the frosted bottle, took a furtive slug, and poured herself a better-than-genteel measure. After all. They were “celebrating.”

Lawrence was too polite to object that she’d served him a slice much bigger than he’d asked for, and exclaimed, “Krasny!”

“That’s ‘red,’ you doorak,” she said, in the best imitation of affectionate teasing she could muster. “‘Beautiful’ is krasivy. Red Square, krasnaya ploshchad, da?”

Ordinarily Lawrence’s tin ear for Russian made her laugh, but there was an edge on her voice that made Lawrence look over.

“Izvini, pozhaluysta,” he apologized correctly. “Konyeshno, krasivy. As in, krasivy pirog”—she was amazed that he knew the word for “pie”—“or, moya krasivaya zhena.”

For pity’s sake. Even in Russian, he called her his “wife.” The term had never before struck her as cheeky, but it did now.

And it was typical, wasn’t it, that he could only call her beautiful in Russian. In English, she was cute, a safe, minimizing adjective that could as easily apply to a hamster as to a “wife.” It wasn’t fair to be irritated by a perfectly lovely compliment, but the resort to speaking in tongues when coming anywhere near emotional subject matter was painfully reminiscent of her father. A dialogue coach for mostly B-movies, her father was a master of accents; his work ran along the lines of coaching the man who did the voice of Boris Badenov in Bullwinkle on how to thicken his consonants with Soviet wickedness. He could switch readily from Chinese “flied lice” to Irish brogue, and she supposed it was all very amusing. Except that he had never told her he loved her, or was proud of something she’d accomplished, unless rolling his Rs like Sean Connery or lapsing into a Swedish lilt—I lahf me leetle dahter, jaaaaaa! She’d adored all the voices he’d employed reading her stories when she was little, but as she grew older the charm wore off. Why, he was born in Ohio, but even his Midwestern delivery sounded like one more accent.

Besides, Lawrence may have used Russian as a device to arms-length sentiments that might sound embarrassing in English, but it was also their private argot, and right now it was too much. It was too intimate. It hurt. “Thank you,” she said firmly in English, and brought the Russki speak to a close.

Lawrence tried, with one more line, to keep it going. “Tih u-sta-la?” His minor-key delivery was wrenchingly tender, and Irina bowed her head. She hadn’t touched her pie.

“Yes, I’m a little tired. I didn’t sleep well.” She hoped this didn’t count as her second lie. Arguably “not sleeping at all” fell under the subhead of “not sleeping well.”

“Something on your mind?” He had noticed. He was fishing.

“Oh, maybe it was the sushi. Only takes one piece of dicey tuna. My appetite’s off. I’m not sure I can eat this.”

“You do look pale.”

“Yes,” she said. “I feel pale.” Not wanting to appear too conscious of the time, Irina surreptitiously glanced at the watch on Lawrence’s wrist. Damn. Still five more minutes before Late Review.

“So, how was the conference?” It was disgraceful, how little she cared.

He shrugged. “A junket, basically. Except for the fact that I got to see Sarajevo, a total waste of time. Too many UN wonks, and NGO losers. You know, you need a police force. Well, duh. At least my budget didn’t have to cover it.”

“God forbid you should come back having learned something you didn’t know already, or having met someone you actually liked.” The sentence escaped her mouth before she could stop it. She tried to gentle the barb with a smile, but from the expression on Lawrence’s face she might have slapped it. “Milyi!” she scrambled; “dear” sounded warmer in Russian. “I’m just razzing you. Don’t look so serious.”

She had to stop this, the compulsive criticism. What ever happened to mental kindness? For that matter, what ever happened to plain kindness? Lawrence had been out of town for ten days, and everything she’d said since his arrival had been either flat-out mean or insultingly fatigued. Another man—whoever that might be—would have taken issue with the dig. But Lawrence didn’t like trouble, and reached for the remote.

Irina considered the word. The fact that Lawrence so frequently reached for the remote seemed apt.

More criticism.

When BBC2 came on, Irina was so grateful for the distraction that she could have kissed the tube. Ordinarily, in front of the TV Irina sewed on buttons, snapped beans, but now she focused on the screen with what she hoped was a look of rapt fascination.

She was rapt, and she was fascinated all right, but not by Late Review. Because Irina was seeing things. Really, it was like being possessed, or schizophrenic. Figures grappled in the shadows. Behind the TV, a man and woman grasped each other so tightly that it was impossible to tell which arms and legs were whose. Their mouths were open and fastened. When she glanced to the left, the same man flattened his lover against the wall, raising the woman’s arms overhead and pinioning her wrists to the plaster as he buried his face in her neck. If Irina cut her eyes a few degrees to the right, there they were again, disrupting the drapes, as the taller figure pressed the woman so fiercely against the window frame with his pelvis that her tailbone must have hurt. (It still hurt, but only a little. The soreness on Irina’s tailbone was from the side of the snooker table. The abrasion might have been worse had they not sunk in tandem to the floor.)

These figures that had invaded her living room, Irina hadn’t invited them, nor bid them to make such exhibitions of themselves against her walls. (And on her carpet. She glanced down, and there was the same immoderate couple. He was on top. Slight enough that the woman could still breathe, the man was still heavy enough to pin her. She couldn’t get away if she wanted to. She didn’t want to.) In their defence, the visitors were only kissing, but if a qualifier like only applied to kissing like that, one might as well say that Jeffrey Dahmer had only murdered and cannibalized people or that Hitler had only tried to rule the world.

The hallucinations were an affliction. She was trying to watch television with her partner, to have a convivial slice of pie and a quiet nightcap—though Irina’s vodka seemed to have evaporated, and she couldn’t remember drinking it—and here were these people in her home who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves, and who induced her to keep squeezing and kneading against one another the muscles of her inner thighs.

“You might not be keen on the subject matter,” said Lawrence. “But that still looks worth seeing.”

Irina tore her eyes from her shameless guests. “What’s worth seeing?”

“Boogie Nights!”

Gamely, she ventured, “Well, I wasn’t big on Flashdance, but I didn’t mind Saturday Night Fever.”

Lawrence looked incredulous. “How could you have listened to a fifteen-minute discussion of that movie and still think it bears any relation to Saturday Night Fever?”

Irina cringed. “Oh. What’s it about, then?”

“The porn industry!”

“I was a little distracted.”

“A little?”

“I told you I was tired.”

“Being short of sleep might take the edge off, but it doesn’t send most people’s IQ plummeting to below fifty.”

“Just because my mind wandered doesn’t make me an idiot. I don’t like it when you do that. You do it all the time, too. You’re always telling me I’m stupid.”

“On the contrary. I’m constantly trying to get you to have faith in your own opinions and to be more forceful about them in public. I’m constantly telling you that you are smart, and very perceptive about the world, even if you don’t have a PhD in international relations. Sound familiar?”

Irina hung her head. It did sound familiar. Lawrence could be tempted to use the M-word on Irina, but he used it indiscriminately on everyone sooner or later, so there was no purpose to taking it personally. And he had, he was right, many times urged her to be more outspoken about her views around his colleagues’ dinner tables.

“Yes, you’re usually very supportive,” she conceded.

“Why do you keep trying to pick a fight?” From Lawrence, this was brave.

“I don’t know,” she said, and with genuine puzzlement. She truly did not understand why, when she had such a powerful motivation not to rock the boat, she would keep being so provocative, or, on an evening when she was desperate not to attract close examination, she would behave in an erratic, irritable fashion sure to bring maximum scrutiny to bear. Did she want him to know? Maybe she was forcing him to play a parlour game, like Botticelli: I’m a famous person, and my name begins with big scarlet A.

Are you dead?

(As of tonight? To my marrow.)

Are you female?

(All too female, it turns out.)

Where were you last night, at five in the fucking morning?

(Only yes-or-nos. That question is cheating.)

You’re one to talk about cheating!

Or maybe Lawrence was supposed to play hangman on the back of his conference programme, and, since he would never in a million years guess that she’d have chosen F-A-I-T-H-L-E-S-S H-U-S-S-Y, proceed to noose himself, letter by letter?

They finished watching Late Review. As if having given up on her ability to absorb the most primitive factual aspects of the novel and West End play the panel went on to assess, Lawrence didn’t solicit her opinion for the rest of the show. He turned off the television, and as the tube went black Irina thought, Come back! Commonly vexed by its incessant prattle, tonight she could have watched TV for hours. Instead of getting ready for bed, Lawrence plunged back to the sofa; horribly, that clap of his palms on his knees meant he wanted to talk. Irina tried to fill the yawning silence with encouraging little smiles, though just what she was encouraging remained obscure. Apropos of nothing she said, “I’m glad you’re home,” an assertion that, while it unquestionably did constitute Lie #3, she did not throw out as duplicitous cover. Rather, she wanted it to be so, and half-hoped that if she said she was glad he was home emphatically aloud she could make it be so.

“And?” he said at last. “What else is new?”

Irina looked at him blankly. Did he suspect something? “Not much that I haven’t told you on the phone. Work,” she said starkly. “I got some work done.”

“Can I see it?”

“Eventually … When I’m finished.” She didn’t want to show the new work to Lawrence. She wanted to show it to Ramsey.

Giving up, Lawrence rose with his face averted, and she could tell he was hurt.

They chained the door, closed and locked the windows, drew the drapes, took their vitamins, flossed, and brushed their teeth. A rote regime repeated every night, on this one it took on a murderous monotony. Though having missed a night’s sleep and so exhausted she was dizzy, Irina dreaded going to bed.

Methodically, they removed their clothes, and hung them on hangers. Irina couldn’t remember the last time that she and Lawrence had torn off each other’s garments and thrown them to the floor, in a frenzy to contact bare skin. You didn’t have to do that, when you shared a bed for years, and it would be wildly unreasonable of her to sulk over the matter. Everyone understood: that’s what you did at “the beginning,” and she and Lawrence were in the middle. Or she had thought for ages that they were in the middle, though you couldn’t read your own life like a book, measuring the remaining chapters with a rifle of your thumb. Nothing prevented turning an ordinary page on an ordinary evening and suddenly finding that you weren’t in the middle but at the end.

Irina cornered the rumpled white blouse onto the hanger with more care than the rag deserved; the little tear along the collar was longer now. The navy skirt was stretched; at least she’d had the presence to glance in the mirror when she came home, and yank the button round to centre it at the back. For the first time in a day she had combed her hair, which had flown into such disarray that she’d looked electrocuted.

But she hadn’t had the presence to take a shower. She’d returned to the flat with so little time to spare. Even then, it had been hell to tear herself from the Jaguar. Climbing the depressingly steep learning curve that apparently attends the sordid departure, she’d refused to kiss Ramsey good-bye in front of this building; a neighbour might see. What little time that remained to prepare for Lawrence’s arrival she’d squandered on vodka, and on standing in the living room in a state of paralysis, hands held out from her sides as if afraid to touch a body that had suddenly developed a vicious will of its own. But now she risked having left an incriminating odour on her skin, if only from a peculiar excess of her own perspiration.

The real telltale reek arose from these thoughts in her head. They were rancid.

She was naked now, but Lawrence didn’t give her a glance. That was normal, too. You got used to each other, and the nude body lost its surprise. Still, it saddened her that her experience was of not being seen at all, much as the cool boys in seventh grade had looked straight through her before she got braces. On the other hand, maybe she did the same thing to Lawrence, whited him out with an oh, that. In the privacy of his obliviousness, she took the time to look for once, to really look at and see her partner’s bare body.

He was fit. From a military regime of spending his lunch hour at a sports club near the office, his shoulders rounded with muscle, and his thighs were solid. His penis even at rest was a better-than-respectable size. Granted, gentle love handles swelled at his waist, but she couldn’t ride him about a mere couple of pounds comprised entirely of her own pie. Besides, she gladly pardoned his minor flaws—flat feet, a thinning at the temples—for they had entered into a contract of sorts, which she could have recited like the Lord’s Prayer: Forgive me my defects, as I have also forgiven your deficits. After all, her breasts were beginning to droop; she now awoke with little bags under her eyes; the hieroglyph of a lone varicose vein on her left calf warned cryptically of untold decrepitude to come, and she could soon have need to cash in on his own forgiveness in buckets. It was a shame that he held himself in a defensive hunch, since if Lawrence simply stood up straight he’d cut a fine figure of a man for forty-three. Most women Irina’s age were obliged to overlook far more than slight swells or flat arches, and nightly bedded butterball guts, hairy shoulders, double chins, and bald pates. She was lucky. She was very, very lucky.

So why didn’t she feel lucky?

“Read?” she proposed.

After ten days, he should have said no. After ten days, he should have slipped a hand around the small of her back, and clapped his mouth on her neck. “Sure,” he said, kicking the duvet to his feet. “For a few minutes.”

Irina had no idea how Lawrence could dive straight from a steady drone of “nation building” to The End of Welfare. In his place, she’d be desperate for an antidote, a sumptuous reread of Anna Karenina, or a cheap thriller. But then, since Lawrence’s professional bread-and-butter was so dry that it was more like plain charred toast, she had no real understanding of wanting to spend your life blathering about “nation building” in the first place. She obviously wasn’t a serious person. Still, she wished he’d leaven his life a bit. Back in the day he hadn’t been averse to James Ellroy, Carl Hiaasen, or P. J. O’Rourke. Ever since becoming a fellow at Blue Sky, he was consumed with making every moment count. But towards what?

Irina settled on the adjacent pillow with Memoirs of a Geisha. She could take her time with it, since there was no chance that Lawrence would want to read the novel next. It was about submission, and weakness, and servitude. It wasn’t about overcoming disadvantage, the way Mr. Think Tank defeated his vulgar Las Vegas upbringing (as Lawrence would say, he was “a phoenix rising from the trashes”). It was about living with disadvantage and even capitalizing on it. The book was too much, she realized, about women.

They didn’t touch. Settling in, Lawrence rested his right leg against her left; Irina rearranged her leg to restore the distance. She turned a few pages, but the couple from the living room was back again, groping across the type. Preemptively, Lawrence switched off the lamp, right at the point that Irina had finally managed to digest an entire sentence. He might have asked.

There was a formula. Lawrence had assured her that all couples do it the same way pretty much every time, even if you make a stab at creativity at “the beginning.” She had no idea how he’d come to this conclusion. This was a man who, left to his own social devices, would talk about safe externals like the election of New Labour for hours on end, so it was awfully difficult to picture Lawrence inquiring of colleagues over drinks, “Do you always use the same position when fucking your wife?” Nevertheless, he was probably right. You sorted out what worked, and it was too much bother to keep concocting some new twist on what frankly admitted of limited variations. Also, once you did get into a—she saw no necessity for calling it a “rut”—a set and roundly successful sequence, if then you suddenly started rooting around down there with your mouth, say, when for years that hadn’t been part of the programme—well, it seemed weird, didn’t it? Like, what is this, why are you doing that. Not only weird, but alarming. And the last thing that Irina wanted to be on this of all nights was alarming.

Besides, she didn’t object to doing it the same way every time; sameness wasn’t the problem. (Before last night, there hadn’t been a problem, had there, or at least not one that seemed pressing. Whatever her modest dissatisfactions, their redress could always be deferred to the following night—be deferred indefinitely, come to that. Anyway, why not count her blessings? Hadn’t she come—how many women could say this?—hadn’t she come every single time that she and Lawrence had made love?) The problem—that is, if it was a problem—was same-what.

As always, Irina turned on her right side. As always, Lawrence did likewise, and fit himself behind her, slinging his left arm around her waist and nestling his knees in her crooked legs. Together they formed two Zs, a comic-book symbol of sleep. And on the evenings they had given each other the signal—a leonine yawn, a mutter about having had a damned long day—sleep was just what they would do, too. But Lawrence had been gone ten days, and ran his hand tentatively over her rump. “Are you feeling okay?” he whispered. “You said something about bad fish.”

Unless she was about to tell all, and at such a bewildering juncture that she was still not sure what there was to tell, she could not seem cold to his advances. That would be a giveaway, wouldn’t it, that something was wrong. She had to act normal.

“I’m fine,” she said (Lie #4, and this one was a whopper). Truly wishing that she could give him the reassurance he deserved, she clasped his left hand as it wandered uncertainly across her hip—it seemed lost—and pulled his arm between her breasts.

Lawrence’s arm felt like a two-by-four. His proximity may not always have stirred a rapacious lust, but the snug of his chest against her back had always provided a deep animal comfort and sense of safety. Now it made her feel trapped. When his pelvis worked gently against her tailbone (against that very abrasion from the snooker table), his erection had the pesky quality of a poking finger.

This was terrible! What had she done? Had Lawrence ever lain beside her only to experience the limbs of her body as pieces of timber, only to regard the press of her flesh as a “trap” and her own polite knocking at the sexual door as some bothersome nag, nag, nag, she would shrivel up inside to a black, fisted dried currant.

With practiced dexterity and Irina’s numb cooperation, Lawrence slipped in from behind. It was, they had both agreed, a nice angle. But Lawrence may have had an angle on intercourse in more than one sense. Before the protocol had settled, they’d tried the usual assortment of positions. But it hit her now—how awful, that it had taken last night, of all things, to notice—that amid the several options available nothing had obliged them to choose this posture in particular and stick with it. Moreover, the selection of a front-to-back configuration as the only way they would make love for, prospectively, fifty-some years was Lawrence’s doing, and the choice wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t arbitrary—it wasn’t just how they ended up making love, willy-nilly, the way she had ended up wearing that navy skirt and raggedy white blouse to dinner last night, because that was the outfit she’d been trying on when the buzzer sounded. They’d been doing it for nearly nine years this way and she should never have allowed this position for more than a time or two and now it was too late to object and that was tragic. She had passively capitulated to Lawrence’s weakness, to his real weakness and not the kind of weakness he feared, like atrophied pectorals or abdication in an argument about appeasement of the IRA.

This was what the coward in Lawrence had opted for: That they never kiss. That they never look at each other. That he see only the blurred profile of her head; that she always stare at the wall. That she never be permitted to meet those imploring brown eyes and watch them get what they begged for. Though in the West 104th Street days they had lit candles on the bed stand, now it was always dark, as if for good measure—as if being faced toward white plaster weren’t impersonal enough. The irony was that Lawrence loved her. But he loved her too much. He loved her so much that it was scary, and he would no more gaze into her eyes while they were fucking than stare into the face of the sun.

Per custom, after a couple of minutes Lawrence reached quietly for her nether regions, circling and homing in on central command. His earnest manipulations were never quite right of course—never quite, exactly right. But to be fair, there was something inscrutable about that recessive twist of flesh, if only because the clitoris was built on an exasperatingly miniature scale. For a man to get a woman to come with the tip of his finger required the same specialized skill of those astonishing vendors in downtown Las Vegas, who could write your name on a grain of rice.

Because one millimetre to the left or right equated geographic ally to the distance from Zimbabwe to the North Pole. Little wonder that many a lover from her youth who had imagined himself nearing the gush of Victoria Falls had, through no fault of his own, been paddling instead the chill Arctic of her glacial indifference. To make matters worse (and again the distinction was a matter of a hair’s width), the dastardly little scrap was capable of inducing not only bliss but blinding pain—total-turnoff, back-to-Go-do-not-collect-$200 pain—and how could anyone negotiate such a perilous node with any confidence if he didn’t have one? She had sometimes thanked her lucky stars that she was not a man, faced with this bafflingly twitchy organ whose important bit measured not a quarter of an inch across, when chances were that the woman herself couldn’t tell you how it worked. It would have been unreasonable, therefore, to take issue with the disappointment of a tad off this way or that, and given that the whole project was fundamentally impossible, Lawrence was surprisingly good at it.

Tonight, however, Irina couldn’t catch the wave. Too much of her attention was focused on trying not to cry. And the truth was that she was fighting her own pleasure. For once, the off-ness, it didn’t have to do with his middle finger being just a smidgen too far down. It was wrong; it felt wrong, even wrong as in morally wrong. But if she didn’t come, Lawrence would know she hadn’t come, and more to the point he would know that, while he was in Sarajevo, something had happened.

It was even more wrong, what she did, to get where she had to go; it was fiendish.

Irina had indulged her share of fantasies. She had imagined “a” man doing this or that, or even, though she had never admitted as much to anyone else, “a” woman; there were only two sexes, after all, and to keep yourself amused you had to use all the combinations at your disposal. Yet these throwaway figures were always faceless, like mannequins with the heads lopped off. She had never before conjured one man, a real man, a man you could ring on the phone, with an address, a preference for hot over cold sake, a long face, and a black silk jacket. A tall, willowy man, with thin lips and grave eyes and a mouth of such infinite depth, with such an inexhaustible array of recesses, that kissing him was like touring the catacombs of Notre Dame. Last night it had felt less as if she’d slipped her tongue into his mouth than as if her entire body had crawled into the maw. It was a whole world, his mouth, a whole unsuspected world, and kissing him occasioned the same sense of discovery as sliding a clear drop of plain tap water under a microscope and divining whole schools of fantastic fibrillose creatures, or pointing a telescope at a patch of sky pitch-dark to the naked eye and lo, it is spattered with stars.

She had only kissed him. So why was the modesty of her transgression such negligible solace? The skirt had twisted, but she’d kept it on. The blouse had ripped that little bit further, but she’d never let him lift it. Let him? He hadn’t tried. He had, to do Ramsey justice, tried only to stop. Which she should have also, she should have tried to stop, but she didn’t try, did she, or hard enough, because she hadn’t stopped, had she, and when you try hard enough you succeed, don’t you? You succeed. It was true that she hadn’t pulled his T-shirt from the waist of his trousers and smoothed up the flat of his bare stomach to the mounds of his chest. But she’d wanted to, and now there was no stopping her mind, her wretched, unprincipled mind, from making up for lost time. She hadn’t unclasped his thick leather belt, with its heavy pewter buckle. She hadn’t unfastened the button at his waist, or edged the zip, tooth by tooth, to its nadir. He had said, “We can’t do this,” in defiance of the fact that they clearly could because they were. Sometimes, more accurately, “We shouldn’t do this,” a point on which their agreement remained shamefully theoretical. Later, plaintively, a helpless railing at the gods for smiting the poor man with what he most perfectly could not resist and most certainly ought to: “But I like Lawrence!” Nevertheless, if firmly belted, buckled, buttoned, and zipped away, the captive baton that had rounded neatly against the socket of her hipbone had given every indication that, if the spirit was reluctant, something else was very, very willing.

Still, she hadn’t fucked him, had she? She hadn’t fucked him, because that would be wrong. But she’d wanted to. She wanted to fuck him. She wanted to fuck him more than she had ever wanted to fuck any man in her life. She wanted to fuck him, and not “make love” to him either, she wanted to fuck him. It was all that she could do to keep from shouting as much out loud, and Irina gnashed a bit of pillowcase between her teeth. She was dying to fuck him. She could see it. She could almost feel it now. She could feel it. It was not only one of the things she wanted, it was the only thing she wanted, to fuck him. That was the only thing in the whole bloody world she wanted and she would always want it, too, not just once, but over and over, to fuck him. And she knew that she’d do anything, give up everything, humiliate herself to fuck him and if he ever refused her she could see herself begging, on her knees, begging him, please—

“Wow,” said Lawrence.

Irina was covered in sweat, and it took a minute for her breathing to steady, and for the nuclear mushroom behind her eyes to recede. A considerate man, Lawrence was usually into ladies-first, but her enthusiasm had spurred him; he, too, had finished, whenever that was, and she hadn’t noticed.

“I guess you really missed me,” he said, giving her a final squeeze.

“Mmm,” she said.

Sleep remained at bay, even as Lawrence began lightly to snore. Irina was disconsolate. Lawrence didn’t know, and he never had to know. Not about last night, and not about tonight, either. But she still held herself accountable, and not only for her perfidy on Victoria Park Road, but for the more considerable infidelity a few minutes ago in her head. That was the whole theory behind mental kindness, wasn’t it? That on any Judgment Day worth its salt, you wouldn’t merely be confronted with whom you insulted or what you stole, but with the whole unspooled videotape of your tawdry little mind from birth to lights-out. Before tonight, Irina had never pictured fucking another man—not a real man, a man they knew. Now not only had she kissed another man while her partner was trustingly out of town, but tonight she fucked him. Forget clinging to cheap literalism. She had cuckolded Lawrence in his own bed.

Nothing could ever be the same again. How pathetic, that at Omen she had worried about “vandalizing” a deluxe sashimi platter with extra yellowtail, while remaining coolly oblivious to smashing up nine years’ worth of mutual devotion in a single reckless night. With one kiss, she had sent the greatest achievement of her life crashing to the floor in a million pieces, like the countless vases and crystal pitchers that she had clumsily upset as a girl. At forty-two, she was still clumsy, but worse, brutally so, purposely so. Yet maybe there was justice after all. As Lawrence slumbered faithfully beside her, she looked at the soft shadow of his face on the pillow, and felt stone-cold. While bull-in-a-china-shopping through this weekend, she had broken not only their covenant, but her own heart.

A grown woman should be able to stop herself. Adulthood was about thinking things through. Now she hadn’t looked before she leapt, and everything was ruined. She had kissed her life good-bye. Even as she whipped herself for being an awful, empty, selfish shrew undeserving of the abiding love of an intelligent, loyal man like Lawrence, she was afflicted again by visions, of the black belt, the silk jacket.

For forty-two years, Irina had lived with the consequences of everything she had ever done. She’d taken her punishment for spitefully hiding her sister’s ballet slippers the night before a recital. When Columbia had accidentally added an extra zero to her cheque for tutoring undergraduates and she spent the money, she’d paid back every dime when they caught the error, taking out a loan on her credit card at 20 percent. She had faced down the disagreeable results of every confidence betrayed, every hurtful remark blurted, every poorly drafted illustration irrevocably published for the world to see. Surely it was asking little enough, this once, to turn back the clock—not years or anything, nor months nor even weeks, but barely a day. Once again they would lean in tandem over the snooker table, inches apart, as Ramsey demonstrated how to brace the cue. Drifting uneasily to sleep, Irina looked temptation square in the face, smiled bravely, and withdrew.

chapter two

To Irina’s mind, it was the most underrated of symphonies: the jingle of the ring, the hard rasp, the clop of the bolt withdrawing, open-Sesame. The soft brush of wood against carpet. Engrossed in her reading, she had turned down Shawn Colvin, the better to keep her ear cocked. Curled impatiently in her armchair, she had more than once brightened in a false start as neighbours tromped past the flat and on upstairs. At last there was no mistaking the bold assertion of dominion, of access, of belonging, into their escutcheon. These were the unsung peak moments of domestic life: those Pavlovian leaps of the heart on an ordinary night when your beloved walks in the door.

“Irina Galina!”

Still in the hallway, he missed the flush of her smile, though there would be others. Only Lawrence would be able to redeem a middle name otherwise a mocking misnomer. Galina Ulanova was the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina in the 1940s, and Irina’s squat pliés (before her mother gave up on her altogether) had conspicuously failed to live up to her namesake. She’d always hated that name, until Lawrence converted it first to joke, and then, if only because she now associated it with his voice, to joy.

“Lawrence Lawrensovich!” she cried, completing a responsive ritual that never grew tired. As for the sardonic patronymic, his father’s name was Lawrence also.

“Hey!” He kissed her lightly, and nodded at the stereo. “The usual tear-jerking soundtrack.”

“That’s right. I do nothing while you’re gone but sob.”

“What are you reading?”

“Memoirs of a Geisha.” She teased, “You’d hate it.”

“Oh, probably,” he said airily, returning to the hall. “What don’t I hate?”

“Come back here!”

“I was just going to unpack.”

“Sod unpacking!” While Lawrence maintained a militantly American vocabulary as a point of pride, Irina appropriated British lingo whimsically, and even, after seven years here, as a matter of right. “You’ve been gone for ten days. Come back and kiss me properly!”

Though Lawrence duly dropped his bags again and U-turned to the living room, his expression as she looped her wrists about his neck was perplexed. He tried for a closed-mouth kiss, but Irina was having none of that, and parted his lips with her tongue. So rarely had they locked mouths in these latter years that their tongues kept smashing into each other, as at ten she would bumble into partners during a pas de deux. Unpracticed, he pulled back prematurely, stringing spittle between their lips—not cinematic romance. Lawrence glanced at her askance. “What’s got into you?”

She would rather not say. She was not planning to say, and didn’t. “You call me your ‘wife.’ Well, that’s what husbands do, when they come home. They kiss their wives. Sometimes they even enjoy it.”

“It’s coming up on eleven,” he said, launching back down the hall with his bags. “Thought you might want to watch Late Review!”

He was a hard case.

When Lawrence sprawled on the couch after unpacking, she took a moment to study his face. The feeling it induced was gratitude, if only for her own restraint. Last night had been close, as close a call as ever she had encountered, and a fleeting shadow crossed her mind, of that other life in which she could only look at Lawrence in guilt and shame and frantic desperation to cover her tracks. The contrasting cleanliness would have been even more refreshing had she intended to tell him everything, but she and Lawrence had been leaving something out—it was hard to identify what—for long enough that to gush that she had nearly kissed Ramsey Acton last night and then thought better of it would have been dangerous, however wryly she recounted the moment. To recount it wryly would entail a gross distortion anyway, and unless she related the crisis as the Gethsemane it had been there’d be no point. Fully truthful, she’d make him anxious, and create a wariness of Ramsey forever after. It was Lawrence’s friendship with Ramsey as well as her own with Lawrence of which she had been mindful when she’d wished the snooker player happy birthday and then excused herself hastily, in a panic, to the loo.

Curiously, contemplating Lawrence she felt less the recognition of when they met than the mystery of his eternal unfamiliarity. There was a discomfort in Lawrence that his bluster would disguise, and in truth she was never quite sure what really went on in his head. As striking as the planes in that drastic face, they were like theatre flats that shut you from the pulleys behind the scenes. She even thought tentatively, He looks a trace melancholy.

There was no doubting that Lawrence’s was a beautiful face, or better than beautiful; fascinating. The kind you could dive into like dark water and get lost. She felt privileged to be allowed to study it, and to follow the unexplained clouds as they crossed his countenance and then dispersed with the changeability of island weather. It was peculiar how the more you got to know someone, the more you grew to appreciate how little you knew, how little you had ever known—as if progressive intimacy didn’t involve becoming ever more perceptive, but growing only more perfectly ignorant. To whatever degree she had been assembling a vivid portrait of Lawrence Trainer’s nature, its refinement was all about deconstruction. She would no sooner limn this or that quality than rub it out for being wildly inaccurate or cartoonlike in its simplicity or exaggeration. He was kind; no, sorry, he was savage. He was selflessly devoted to her; to the contrary, he held something back in a way that was decidedly selfish. He was sure of himself; uh-uh, how could she buy into that superficial confidence when it was obvious that he was achingly insecure? At once, Lawrence was kind, he was devoted, and some portion of that assurance drove to his core. Were her mental picture of Lawrence an illustration on her drawing table, it would after over nine years appear a messy smudge of erasures. Maybe by the time she was eighty-five she would approach the limit of having absolutely no idea who Lawrence was, when before she might have listed out “character traits” as if together they amounted to a man. Maybe arriving at this state of being stymied was an achievement. Maybe to live successfully alongside anyone was to come to understand not how much he was like you but how much he was not-you—and hence to allow, as we do so rarely with one another, that the person sprawled across from you on the sofa is actually there.

“What are you looking at?”

“You.”

“Seen me before.”

“Sometimes I forget what you look like.”

“Been gone ten days, not ten years.” Lawrence glanced at his watch. It wasn’t eleven.

“You haven’t asked me how it went last night, with Ramsey.”

“Oh, right. I forgot.” She sensed Lawrence had not forgotten.

“We had a much nicer time than I expected.”

“Talk about snooker? At least I’ve primed you enough that you should have been able to keep your head above water.”

“No, we hardly talked about snooker at all.”

“What a waste! Who else do you know who’s a professional snooker player? You could have at least gotten the dope—the literal dope—on Ronnie O’Sullivan.”

“Ramsey’s not only a snooker player. He’s a person.” Deftly, she chose person over man. “He seems more at ease one-on-one.”

Lawrence shrugged. “Who isn’t?”

“Lots of people.” She could see that Lawrence was jealous. But she wanted to laugh. Lawrence was jealous over Ramsey. Lawrence had title to Ramsey, and her evening with his snooker buddy was meant to have been awkward. Irina had been sent on a mission to maintain Lawrence’s own friendship with Ramsey by proxy, but was supposed to learn her lesson along the way: that she and Ramsey were chalk and cheese, and that she was incapable of engaging in the jubilant snooker banter that only Anorak Man could furnish. Ramsey was meant to have learned his lesson as well: that while Irina might be nice to look at, shapely legs know nothing of Stephen Hendry’s renown for mastery of side pockets, and at the end of the day her partner was much more fun. Alas, these lessons had not proceeded as their architect had planned.

Of course, the evening had been plenty awkward, leaving her unnerved, even shaken, but also intrigued. What was that, what had happened? Whence this improvident urge to fasten her mouth on the wrong man? After Ramsey had given her a lift home—the ride having proceeded in petrified silence—she’d battened herself into the flat, flipping the top bolt, drawing the chain, and leaning with her back against the door, palms pressed flat, as if something were trying to get in. Breathing a bit too heavily still, she had assured herself that the high voltage in that basement snooker hall must already be dissipating to static electricity. Brushing her teeth before bed, she’d envisaged the relief of waking prudently by herself in her as-good-as-marital bed this morning—having done nothing disreputable, nothing that she had to hide from Lawrence or might be tempted to divulge in a confessional rush, after which he would never quite trust her again. Surely once she was straight, sobered up, and well rested, her scandalous impulse while leaning over that fancy match-grade snooker table would shrink to drunken, stoned idiocy, to mere naughtiness, to a delusional infatuation that—there is a God—she’d had the eleventh-hour sense to squelch. In the plain light of day, she would take the strange evening under advisement, as testimony that she should stay away from drugs, that she should drink moderately, that she missed Lawrence and needed to get laid. Over coffee, she had told herself, rinsing her mouth, you’ll shake your head in dry amusement and go ha-ha-ha.

Yet sipping her cappuccino this morning, she’d regarded her near miss with awe and respect. It hadn’t shrunk. To the contrary, what had appeared beforehand as a merely diverting flirtation on Ramsey’s part, one that could prove embarrassing or inconvenient for Irina, had only grown larger as she approached it. Last night had been like groping about in a fog and expecting to bump into a low stone wall, and instead banging her nose smack against an Egyptian pyramid. Whatever she had run up against on Victoria Park Road, by accident, in innocence, and however wisely she had about-faced and soldiered in blind lockstep in the opposite direction, it was big. Briefly, a whole other life had opened up before her, and the fact that she declined to avail herself of it could not eradicate the image.

One other memory had haunted her all day. At the end of that lift home, Ramsey had drawn into the lay-by in front of this building. He should have kept the motor running, to indicate that at three he had no expectation of being asked up “for coffee”. Instead he switched off the engine, and sat for what seemed a terribly long time—though it wasn’t—hands at rest in his lap with a dead quality. They were exquisite hands, with long, sinuous fingers and slender metacarpi, more those of a musician than a sportsman. Yet they lay on his thighs with corpselike inertness, the delicate dusting of blue cue chalk creased in his cuticles, lending them a ghoulish hue. He stared straight through the windscreen, his face, too, at rest, almost empty; he might have been contemplating a list of groceries to pick up on the way home at a twenty-four-hour Tesco. Irina as well made no move to get out of the car.

But that wasn’t the memory that lingered so. After a beat, they had both resumed animation, and Ramsey got out. Irina remained seated, because she could tell he preferred to come round. He was a gentleman. He opened her door with the gravity of a chauffeur ushering the bereaved from a hearse. As ever, that hand hovered at the small of her back as she walked half a pace ahead. Yet as she rooted for her keys and proceeded to the door, she turned to find him still standing in the street—as if to take the next step onto the kerb was to cross a line in the sand. Since he remained ten feet away and gave no indication of coming closer, that took care of any discomfiting question of a farewell peck on the cheek.

The two matching Georgian squares on which Lawrence and Irina lived were registered buildings, and in order to so much as change the outside colour of the window frames from black to white their management company had to ask permission from the National Trust. (They said no.) So pristinely preserved was this estate that production companies like Merchant-Ivory often used it as a backdrop for historical films. Thus while standard aluminium London street lamps glared a rude orange, the lantern to Ramsey’s left was an iron reproduction gaslight from the nineteenth century. The bulb was flame-shaped, its glow antique. Cast in this theatrical light, golden on one side with his other half in shadow, Ramsey himself could have been acting in a period drama; his uncompromising verticality seemed a posture from an earlier age. Tall, gaunt, and darkly clad, his figure evinced a brooding solemnity she associated not with Snooker Scene but Thomas Hardy.

“Good-night,” she said. “Thank you for dinner. I had a lovely time.”

“Yes,” he said. From lack of use and too many cigarettes, his voice was dry. “I did as well. Thank you for joining me. Good-night.” He stood there. “I’d say, ‘Safe home,’ but it looks like you’re going to make it.” A flickered smile.

She should have shot him a returning smile, and let herself inside. She didn’t. She looked at him. Stock-still before the kerb, Ramsey looked back. Unlike the pause in the car, really only a moment, this suspension was a solid fifteen seconds—which once you have already exchanged “good-nights” has the touch and feel of about a year and a half. Something unsaid passed between them, and if Irina had her way it would stay unsaid, too. Forever. She turned to the door with the resolve of capping a jar of something tasty that is not very good for you, like lemon curd, after having sampled a tantalizing half-spoonful—turning the lid tight, slipping the jar onto a high shelf, and closing the cupboard.

Irina blurted unthinkingly to Lawrence, “I have a confession.”

The look of instant wariness on his face announced that Lawrence liked everything to be fine, thank you very much, that Lawrence didn’t care for “confessions,” and that Lawrence might even have wanted, if necessary, to be lied to. He could seem so industrious, but in some respects he was a lazy man.

“When we finished dinner—” she continued in the absence of any encouragement. “Oh, and you’d have hated it—”

“Do we have anything in common?”

She laughed. “I like Memoirs of a Geisha and sushi. You don’t. Anyway, it was still early when the check arrived—” It hadn’t been remotely early. Irina was damned if she understood this compulsion to revise the irrelevant side details that didn’t even matter whenever you were tinkering with the main thing. “So Ramsey asked if I wanted to go get stoned, and, I don’t know. I said sure.”

“You hate getting stoned!”

“I clammed up, as usual. I wouldn’t do it often. I don’t mind it once in a while.”

“Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where did you get stoned?”

“Well, not out on the street in Soho. Obviously, we went back to Victoria Park Road. I’ve been there often enough, with Jude.”

“They’re divorced.”

“I happen to know that.”

“So you didn’t go back there with Jude.”

“Oh, never mind! I only had two tokes, and then he played a million practice frames and totally ignored me, and then rode me home. I just thought you’d be amused. In fact, I was sure you’d say I was ‘juvenile.’ ”

“You were juvenile.”

“Thanks. That was obliging.” She had wanted to—to tell him something else of course, but like the deluxe sashimi platter there were no substitutions.

“Nuts, I don’t want to miss the beginning.” Lawrence reached for the remote.

“We’ve five minutes yet. Oh, and I almost forgot!” She sprang from her chair. “I made you a pie! Would you like a slice? Rhubarb-cream. It came out fabulous!”

“I don’t know,” he said, peering at her with the intense examination to which she had subjected Lawrence himself not long before. “I had a snack on the plane …”

“I bet you spent all your free time in the hotel gym. And we’re celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?”

“That you’re home, silly!”

His head tilted. “What’s with you tonight? You’re so—bubbly. Sure that dope’s worn off?”

“What’s wrong with being glad you’re back?”

“There’s glad and glad. It’s late. You don’t usually have this much energy. Not sure I can keep up.”

“Tih ustal?” she solicited, in their tender minor key.

“Yeah, pretty whacked.” His eyes narrowed. “Have you been drinking?”

“No, not a drop!” she declared, wounded. “Though speaking of drops, would you like a beer with your pie?”

“Whatever you’re on, I guess I’d better have some, too.”

Scrutinized for signs of inebriation and disgusted with herself for having overimbibed the night before, in the kitchen Irina poured herself an abstemious half-glass of white wine. She pulled out the pie, which after chilling for a full day was nice and firm, and made picture-perfect slices that might have joined the duplicitous array of photographs over a Woolworth’s lunch counter. She shouldn’t have any herself; oddly, she’d snacked all afternoon. But countless chunks of cheddar had failed to quell a ravenous appetite, so tonight she cut herself a wide wedge, whose filling blushed a fleshy, labial pink. This she crowned with a scoop of vanilla. Lawrence’s slice she carefully made more modest, with only a dollop of ice cream. No gesture was truly generous that made him feel fat.

chapter three

Spurning her few minutes’ lie-in, Irina was first out of bed the next morning. The rev and horn blare of bumper-to-bumper traffic on Trinity Street had been driving her insane. The relief of being on her own while buying a Daily Telegraph up the street was all too brief. As she ground beans and waited for the milk steamer to spit, the monotony of their morning routine grated. For a moment it had been touch-and-go as to whether she would top up the steamer with bottled water one more time, or shoot herself. At least while she ran through these paces it was unnecessary to look at Lawrence, or talk to Lawrence. Over the Telegraph at the dining table, her eyes glazed once more; sexual intoxication had turned her into an overnight illiterate. An illiterate who never ate and couldn’t work and slept little, so what did you do when you were smitten? You fucked. And that was the one thing she could not do, would not do. Even for a changeling, there were limits.

Lawrence the up-and-at-’em was dawdling. That toast was taking him forever. His coffee was getting cold. For pity’s sake, if he wanted to read The End of Welfare he would concentrate better in his office. It was nearly nine o’clock! As she turned the pages of the paper, it was hard not to slam them. When the minute hand on her watch passed twelve, her chest burst with ludicrous, hurtful, and patently unjustifiable fury. It was Lawrence’s right, was it not, to linger with his “wife” a few minutes before soldiering to an office where he laboured long hours? Had Lawrence ever sat at table enraged by her mere presence, crazed with a desperation to get her out of her own flat, she would die. She would just die.

Still, she couldn’t contain herself. “After having been gone for ten days, I guess you have a lot of work piled up at Blue Sky.” The sentiment might have come off as seminormal, save for the angry quaver in her voice.

“Some,” he allowed. Since rising, she had been convincing herself that Lawrence didn’t know her at all. A sudden vigilance suggested otherwise.

“I wonder if I feel like having another piece of toast,” he supposed.

“Well, do or don’t!” she exploded. “Have a piece, or don’t have one, but don’t faff about deciding! It’s only toast, for God’s sake!”

Numbly, he collected the dishes. “I guess I won’t, then.”

She winced at his sense of injury as if ducking an incoming boomerang. Apparently cruelty hurled at someone you love—whom you used to love until two days ago, or who at any rate didn’t deserve it—has a tendency to whip back round and thump you on the head.

Finally Lawrence gathered his briefcase. Once he stood on the threshold, Irina flooded with remorse. Now that he really was leaving, she kept him at the door with manufactured small-talk, trying to be warm, to do a creditable impression of a helpmate who will be left alone the whole day through and is reluctant to say good-bye.

“I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said. “I’m getting behind on the illustrations for Seeing Red, and I’m anxious to get to work.”

“I’m not stopping you.”

“No, of course not. I don’t know, maybe I’m premenstrual.”

“No, you’re not.” Lawrence kept track.

“Peri-menopausal, then. Anyway, I’m sorry. That was totally uncalled for.”

“Yes it was.”

“Please don’t hang on to it!” She squeezed his arm. “I’m very, very sorry.”

His stricken mask broke into a smile. He kissed her forehead, and said he might ring later. All was forgiven. Patching over her outburst had been too easy. She couldn’t tell if Lawrence accepted her apology because he trusted her, or feared her.

She steered clear of the telephone at first, relishing the opportunity to think straight, or if not straight at least alone. Besides, Lawrence could always come back, having forgotten something, and she wouldn’t want to have to explain to whom she was speaking. By nine-thirty, her timing was poor, but Irina couldn’t be bothered with the niceties of Ramsey’s night-owl hours when her whole life was falling apart and that was his fault.

“Hallo?”

Irina deplored callers who failed to identify themselves. “Hi,” she said shyly.

The silence on the other end seemed interminable. Oh, God, maybe what was for her an exotic journey on a magic carpet was for Ramsey a casual grapple on the rug. Maybe he really was the ladies’ man the magazines made him out to be, and she should hang up before she made a bigger fool of herself than she already had.

A sigh broke, its rush oceanic. “I’m so relieved to hear your voice.”

“I was worried I’d wake you.”

“That would involve my ever having got to sleep.”

“But you didn’t get a wink the night before! You must be hallucinating.”

“Since I let you go—yeah. I been worried I am.”

“I started to worry that—that for you, it didn’t mean anything.”

“It means something,” he said heavily. “Something shite.”

“… It doesn’t feel shite.”

“It’s wrong.” What he must have intended as emphatic came out as helpless.

“Strange,” she said. “Not long ago, I’d have been able to conjure your face pretty easily. Now I can’t remember what you look like.”

“I can remember your face. But there’s two of them. A Before and After. In the After, you look like a different person. More beautiful. More 3D. More complicated.”

“I’ve been feeling that way,” she said. “Unrecognizable, to myself. It’s not all to the good. I liked looking in the mirror and having some idea who was staring back.”

Despite a nominal sexual rectitude, they had already developed the long, thick silences of lovers—those characteristic pauses whose laden dead air has to carry everything that has nothing to do with words. Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.

“Did you tell him?”

“I promised you that I wouldn’t.”

“I know, but did you tell him anyway?”

“I keep my word.” With every second of this phone call, she was breaking her word. How confounding, that her hasty promise to Ramsey already weighed more than a decade’s worth of implicit vows to Lawrence.

“I cannot—” He stopped, as if consulting a crib sheet. “Because of the snooker and that, you may’ve got the wrong end of the stick. But I don’t fancy anything tatty. With me, it’s all or nothing.”

“What if it were all, then?”

“You got Lawrence.” His voice was stone. “You’re happy. You got a life.”

“I thought I did.”

“You got to stop. You didn’t know what you was doing. You got too much to lose.” The lines were dull and empty.

“I can’t stop,” she said. “Something has taken hold of me. Did you ever see Dangerous Liaisons? John Malkovich keeps repeating to Glenn Close, ‘It’s beyond my control.’ He’s almost sleepwalking into a catastrophic relationship with Michelle Pfeiffer, like a zombie or a drug addict. It’s beyond my control. It’s not supposed to be an excuse. Just the truth. I feel possessed. I can’t stop thinking about you. I’ve always been a practical person, but I’m having visions. I wish I were exaggerating, or being melodramatic, but I’m not.”

“The film, I’ve not seen it,” he said. “Does it end well?”

“No.”

“Sure there’s a reason the film came to mind. What happens to the bird?”

“Dies,” Irina admitted.

“And her bloke?”

“Dies,” Irina admitted.

“Tidy. In real life, love, it’s messier than that, innit? I think it’s worse.”

“There is, in the movie,” she said, struggling, “a certain—lethal redemption.”

“Outside the cinema, you can forget your violins. It’ll kill you all right, but you’ll still be left standing. Trouble off-screen ain’t that you can’t survive, but that you do. Everybody survives. That’s what makes it so fucking awful.”

Ramsey had a philosophical streak.

Irina had an obstinate one. “It’s beyond my control.”

“It’s up to me, then.” The gentleness was forbidding. “I got to stop it for you.”

Irina was glad she’d skipped breakfast, because she suddenly felt sick. “I don’t need anyone looking out for my interests. Lawrence has been doing that for years, and now look. I don’t need taking care of.”

“Oh, yes you do,” he whispered. “Everyone does.”

“You can’t make me stop. It’s not even your right.”

“It is my responsibility,” he said, capturing Malkovich’s robotic tone in the movie he’d not seen. “I can see that now. I’m the only one can stop it.”

Her tears were mean and hot. This was robbery. What she had discovered in that basement snooker parlour belonged to her.

“You said—yesterday.” His temporal reference jarred. Their parting seemed months ago. “I woke something up in you. Maybe you could take what you found with me, and bring it to Lawrence. Like a present.”

“What I found with you,” she said, “was you. You are the present. In every sense. My ‘waking up’ with all three of us in bed together might feel crowded.”

“Nobody said anything about bed.”

“No one had to.”

“We’re not doing that.”

“No,” she agreed. “For the moment at least, we won’t.”

“I won’t be your bit on the side.”

“I don’t want to have an affair either.”

“Then what do you want?”

At that instant, Irina might have been spirited blindfolded in a car, then released to a neighbourhood of London that she didn’t recognize. How did she find her way home? It was an interesting area from the looks of it, so did she want to go home? She’d been kidnapped. Now Stockholm syndrome had set in, and she was fond of her captor.

“I want to see you as soon as possible.”

Another roaring sigh. “Is that smart?”

“It has nothing to do with intelligence.”

He groaned, “I’m dying to see you as well.”

“I could take the tube up. Mile End, right?”

“A lady like you got no business on the tube. I’ll call by.”

“You can’t come here. Yesterday. You shouldn’t have come here, either. You’re too recognizable from television.”

“See what this is like? It’s a horror show! Like an affair already, without the good bit.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“You know the alternative.”

“That is not an option. I have to see you.” A whole new side of herself, this wilfulness. It was heady.

“It’s a long walk from the tube.”

“I’m a sturdy creature.”

“You are a rare and delicate flower to be kept from the randy, filthy eyes of East End low-life.” He was only half-joking. “What about Lawrence?”

“He’s at work. He rings here during the day, but I could say I went shopping.”

“You’ll have nil to show for it.”

“A walk, a fruitless trip to the library? I could get my messages remotely from your house, and ring him back.”

“You ain’t very good at this.”

“I take that as a compliment.”

“Most of them office phone systems give a read-out of the number what’s rung up. Your—” He was clearly about to say husband. “—Anorak Man got a memory for figures. Like my own phone number. I should get you a mobile.”

“That’s a nice offer, but Lawrence and I have already decided that they’re too expensive. He might find it. I’d have a terrible time explaining why I had one. My, there are a thousand ways to be found out, aren’t there?”

“Yeah. Even when there’s nothing to find.”

“Your birthday? You would call that nothing? If I were yours?”

“You are mine,” he said softly. “Last night. You slept with him, didn’t you?”

“Obviously I slept with him. We share the same bed.”

“That ain’t what I mean and you know it. He’s been out of town. A bloke’s been out of town and he comes home, he shags his wife.” He went ahead and used the word.

“All right, then. Yes. If I didn’t want to, he’d know something was up.”

“I don’t like it. I ain’t got no right to say that, but I don’t like it.”

“I didn’t, either,” she admitted. “I only—got anywhere by thinking about you. But it was foul, imagining another man.”

“Best you’re in his arms thinking about me than the other way round, I reckon.”

“Being in your arms and thinking about you appeals to me more.”

“So when can you get your luscious bum to Mile End?”

The pattern was probably typical: you spent the abundance of the call talking about how you shouldn’t be doing this, and its tail-end discussing the particulars of how you would. It would’ve been nice to feel special.

On the tube, people stared. Both men and women. It wasn’t her short denim skirt and skimpy yellow tee that were turning heads. She had a look. Her fellow passengers mightn’t have identified the look per se, but they recognized it all the same. People had babies all the time, coupled all the time, yet the look must have been rare. Sex was rare. You’d never know it, from the hoardings overhead in this carriage—the bared busts promoting island holidays, the come-on toothpaste smiles. But the adverts were meant to torment commuters with what they were missing.

This was not a journey that Irina McGovern had ever expected to take. However firmly resolved to keep her skirt zipped, she wasn’t fooling herself. She was taking the train to cheat.

With no explanation over the loudspeaker, the train lurched to a standstill. Sitting for fifteen minutes under a quarter-mile of rock was so commonplace on the Northern Line, the city’s worst, that none of the passengers bothered to look up from their Daily Mails. In relation to the eccentricities of Underground “service,” regular riders would have long since passed through the conventional stages of consternation, despair, and long-suffering, and graduated to an imperturbable Zen tranquillity. One could alternatively interpret the passengers’ expressions of unquestioning acceptance as sophisticated, or bovine.

Yet the train gave Irina literal pause. First Ramsey and now this very carriage was insisting, You have to stop.

Unbidden, a memory tortured from a few years before, when she and Lawrence had been sharing their traditional bowl of predinner popcorn. Recently moved into the Borough flat, they weren’t yet in the habit of grabbing blind handfuls in silence in front of the Channel 4 news.

“Obviously, there are no guarantees,” she’d mused, searching out the fluffiest kernels. “About us. So many couples seem fine, and then, bang, it’s over. But if anything happened to us? I think I’d lose faith in the whole project. It’s not that we’ll necessarily make it. But that if we don’t, maybe nobody can. Or I can’t; same difference.”

“Yeah,” Lawrence agreed, tackling the underpopped kernels that she’d warned him could damage his bridgework. “I know people say this, and then a couple of years later they’re raring to go again, but for me? This is it. We go south? I’d give up.”

The feeling had been mutually fierce. For Irina, Lawrence had always been the ultimate test case. He was bright, handsome, and funny; they were well suited. They’d made it past the major hurdles—that ever-rocky first year, Lawrence’s professional foundering before he found his feet at Blue Sky, several of Irina’s illustration projects that never sold, even moving together to a foreign country. It should be getting easier, shouldn’t it? Coming up on ten years, it should be a matter of coasting. They’d worked out the kinks, smoothed out serious sources of friction, and their relationship should be gliding along like one of those fancy Japanese trains that ride on a pillow of air. Instead, with no warning, they had jolted to a dead stop between stations, to stare out windows black as pitch. Overnight, their relationship had converted from high-tech Oriental rail to the Northern Line.

Why hadn’t anyone warned her? You couldn’t coast. Indeed, her very sense of safety had put her in peril. Ducking into that Jaguar in a spirit of reckless innocence, she wasn’t looking over her shoulder, and it was the unwary who got mugged. That was exactly how she felt, too. Mugged. Clobbered. She might as well have taken that rolling pin on Saturday afternoon and bashed her own brains in.

Unceremoniously, the train shuddered, chugged forward, and gathered speed. Her respite, the Underground’s graciously sponsored interlude for second thoughts, drew formally to a close. These other passengers had places to go, and couldn’t wait indefinitely for a lone, well-preserved woman in her early forties to get a grip.

If Lawrence was indeed the test case, and thus to go terminal with Lawrence was to “lose faith in the whole project,” she was hurtling through this tunnel toward not romance, but cynicism.

It was really rather wretched, thought Irina as she scuttled with trepidation from the Mile End tube stop up Grove Road, that you couldn’t will yourself to fall in love, for the very effort can keep feeling at bay. Nor, if last night’s baffling blankness on Lawrence’s arrival was anything to go by, could you will yourself to stay that way. Least of all could you will yourself not to fall in love, for thus far what meagre resistance she had put up to streaking towards Hackney this morning had only made the compulsion more intense. So you were perpetually tyrannized by a feeling that came and went as it pleased, like a cat with its own pet door. How much more agreeable, if love were something that you stirred up from a reliable recipe, or elected, however perversely, to pour down the drain. Still, there was nothing for it. The popular expression notwithstanding, love was not something you made. Nor could you dispose of the stuff once manifested because it was inconvenient, or even because it was wicked, and ruining your life and, by the by, someone else’s.

Even more than that kiss over the snooker table—and the proceeding eighteen hours had effectively constituted one long kiss—today she was haunted by that deathly moment when Lawrence had walked in the door and she felt nothing. Its disillusionment grew more crushing by the hour. She wasn’t disillusioned with Lawrence; it wasn’t as if the scales had fallen from her eyes and she could suddenly see him for the commonplace little man he had always seemed to others. Rather, with the turn of a house key, every romantic bone in her body had been broken. Her faithfulness and constancy with Lawrence had long formed the bedrock of her affection for her own character. This was the relationship that had been torn asunder. The weekend’s transgression had violated the fundamental terms of her contract with herself, and disillusioned her with herself. She felt smaller for that, and more fragile. She felt ordinary, and maybe for the first time believed the previously outlandish myth that like everyone else she would get old and die.

Yet as she advanced, a spell descended. Victoria Park had a fairy-tale quality, with its quaint, peaked snack-pavilion, its merry fountain splashing in the middle of the lake, the long-necked birds taking wing. Children patted the water from the shore. With every step through the park, the frailty that had hobbled her up Grove Road fell away. She felt young and nimble, the heroine of a whole new storybook, whose adventure was just beginning.

Moreover, as she drew closer to her turn onto Victoria Park Road, something alarming was happening to the landscape.

In 1919, on top of Copps Hill in Boston, a ninety-foot-wide storage vat for the production of rum burst its seams and sent 2.5 million gallons of molasses flooding onto the city. The wall of molasses rose fifteen feet high and reached a velocity of thirty-five miles per hour, drowning twenty-one Bostonians in its wake.

In much the same manner, a wave of engulfing sweetness was breaking over Victoria Park, lotus trees glistening with such a sugary gleam that she might have leaned over and licked them. The dark lake stirred deliciously, like a wide-mouthed jar of treacle. The very air had caramelized, and breathing was like sucking on candy. Without question, the vessel bursting its seams and coating the whole vicinity with syrup was that house.

Ascending the gaunt Victorian’s steep stone steps, she felt a stab of apprehension. As of her callous apathy when Lawrence walked in last night, Irina’s affections were officially unreliable. She was, after all, a shrew now, who shouted at hardworking wage-earners for wanting a piece of toast—a fickle harpy who took fancies one minute, and went cold the next. Ramsey had seemed all very fetching on Sunday, but this was Monday. There was no certainty that the countenance she confronted across this threshold would foster anything but more barbarous indifference.

Yet, today anyway, this apparently was not the case. That face: it was beautiful.

Slipping his long, dry fingers along the bare skin under her short-cut tee, he slid them round to the small of her back, where not long ago they had hovered so tantalizingly, not touching. She emitted a little groan. He swept her through the door.

She barely beat Lawrence home. The answer-phone light was blinking. Yanking a comb through her tangled hair, she pressed “Please hang up and try again. Please hang up and try again”—pleasant but insistent, the British female voice pronounced “again” to rhyme with “pain.” Through some peculiarity of Blue Sky’s phone system, this was the recording that consumed the full thirty-second limit on the machine whenever Lawrence rang up and didn’t leave a message. He seemed to have taken the woman’s advice. As “Please hang up and try again” droned in a demented nonstop singsong, she counted: he had rung five times.

Behind her, the lock rattled, sending her heart to her throat. “Irina?” It had only been a day, but he had already dropped the lilting addition of her middle name. “Hey!” He dropped his briefcase in the hall. “Where have you been all afternoon?”

“Oh,” she scrambled, “running a few errands.”

Wrong. People who have lived together for years were never “running errands.” She could have said she was at Tesco because they were low on Greek yogurt, or at the hardware store at Elephant & Castle because the lightbulb in the studio desk light had burnt out—that’s what you say to the man you live with. Because Irina knew all about the exactingly particular nature of domestic reportage, her failure to heed its form was tantamount to wearing a sandwich board that announced in big block letters, BEHOLD MY CHEATING HEART. Then again, she may have envied many a talent—her sister’s for ballet, Lawrence’s for politics. But a knack for duplicity? She didn’t want to get good at this.

“I thought you were all hot to trot to get some work done today.”

“I don’t know. It just wasn’t flowing. You know how that is?”

“Since you’re suddenly so secretive about your drawings, no I don’t know.” She followed him limply to the kitchen, where he fixed himself a peanut-butter cracker. His motions were jagged. Those five unanswered messages had stuck in his craw.

“Anything up today at Blue Sky?”

“It’s mooted the IRA ceasefire will be reinstated soon.” His tone was clipped. “But nothing that would interest you … What are you wearing that getup for?”

She crossed her arms over her exposed midriff, a style that seemed suddenly too young. “Felt like it. It’s started to bother me that I wear rubbish all the time.”

“Americans,” he snarled, “say trash.”

“I’m half Russian.”

“Don’t pull rank. You have an American accent, an American passport, and a father from Ohio. Besides, a Russian would say khlam, or moosr. Not rubbish, da?” When no longer trying to please, Lawrence’s Russian improved dramatically.

“What’s—” Yet another British expression, What’s got up your nose? would only rile him further. “What’s bothering you?”

“You took my head off this morning because you were so anxious to get to work. I called around ten, it was busy, and by ten-thirty you were already gadding about. As far as I can tell, you’ve been out all day. Have you gotten anything done? I doubt it.”

“I’m a little blocked.”

“You’ve never indulged in that arty-farty—rubbish. A real pro sits down and does the job, whether or not she feels like it. Or that’s what you used to say.”

“Well. People change.”

“Apparently.” Lawrence scrutinized her face. “Are you wearing lipstick?”

Irina almost never wore makeup, and wet her lips. “No, of course not. It’s been, you know, a little warm. Just chapped is all.”

When Lawrence left to turn on the Channel 4 news, Irina slipped into the loo to check her face. Her lips were a bruised cherry-red; her chin was rug-burn pink. Ramsey had needed a shave. Maybe she’d been lucky. Lawrence hadn’t remarked on her chin, or detected white wine on her breath. They’d polished off two bottles of sauvignon blanc, while Ramsey had insisted on playing her a flecked video of some famous 1985 snooker match on his flat-screen TV in the basement—which could not compete with the sport on his couch. Though she’d only managed a bite of the smoked salmon and beluga, the fish might still linger, and she’d cadged more than one of Ramsey’s Gauloises. Not taking any chances, Irina brushed her teeth. It wasn’t her custom to brush her teeth at seven, but she could always claim to have burped a little stomach acid or something. Discouragingly, even when you didn’t want to get good at this sort of thing, you got good at it anyway.

It wasn’t like Lawrence not to sniff out the wine. He had a nose like a hound. That meant he may have noticed her chin, too, and the hint of smoked fish. In the living room, his concentration on Jon Snow was excessive.

“I’ll have the popcorn in a minute!” she said brightly from the doorway. “And for dinner, how about pasta?” She’d forgotten to take the chicken out to thaw.

“Whatever.” One more report on mad cow disease could not have been that compelling. The British government had been slaughtering those poor animals by the tens of thousands for months.

“I could make the kind with dried chilies and anchovies that you especially like!”

“Yeah, sure.” He looked over and smiled, gratefully. “That would be great. Make it hot. Make it a killer.”

Pasta was far more than she need have offered. He was already accepting crumbs.

chapter three

The bedclothes were seductive, but, with Lawrence up, the swaddling lost its appeal. The dream eluding capture had been unsettling—something about the Beatles in her bedroom, mocking her undersized breasts. Lawrence would sometimes let her sleep in, but whenever Irina arose and found him away to work she felt dolorous and cheated. So she crawled out of bed. Even if they didn’t chat much in the morning, percolating side by side without having to talk was its own pleasure, and it was nice to begin the day as a team.

After trotting off to buy a Telegraph, she yawned back to the kitchen in painter’s pants and a soft, floppy button-down, entering into the clock-work of their morning routine. Some people found the infinite iterations of home life tedious. For Irina, its rhythms were musical; the shriek of the grinder was the day’s opening fanfare. She welcomed a refrain to which she could almost hum along: the gurgle and choke of the stove-top espresso pot, the roar and strangle of the steamer wand as she whipped the milk to froth. If duplicating the same proportions every morning lent her coffee preparation an inevitable monotony, she wouldn’t opt for too little milk just because making her coffee badly was different. There was nothing tiresome about having established that, because Lawrence liked his toast on the dark side, the ideal setting on the toaster was halfway between 3 and 4. The properties of repetition, she considered, were complex. Up to a point, repetition was a magnifier, and elevated habit to ritual. Taken too far, it could grow erosive, and grind ritual to the mindless and rote. In kind, the pound of surf, depending on the tides, could either deposit sand on the shore, or wear it away.

While Irina was not averse to variety—sometimes the coffee was from Ethiopia, others from Uruguay—overall, variety was overrated. She preferred variation within sameness. If you were voracious for constant change, you ran out of breakfast beverages in short order. She had some appreciation for folks with a greed for sensation, who were determined, as an old boyfriend used to say, “to squeeze the orange” and press fresh experience from every day. But that way lay burnout. There were only so many experiences, really—a depressing discovery in itself—and surely you were better off trying to replicate the pleasing ones as often as possible.

Furthermore, she reflected, steaming the milk with her signature teaspoon of Horlicks (which rounded the edge off the acid), that impression of “infinite” repetition—of having coffee and toast over and over and over, numbingly into the horizon—is an illusion. Boredom with routine is a luxury, and one unfailingly brief. You are awarded a discrete number of mornings, and are well advised to savour every single awakening that isn’t marred by arthritis or Alzheimer’s. You will drink only so many cups of coffee. You will read only so many newspapers, and not one edition more. You glory in silent communion with your soul mate at the dining table a specific, quantifiable number of times—so inclined, you could count them—before, wham, from one calamity or another at least one of you isn’t there anymore. (Not so long ago, Irina had feared a falling-out, one that would shake her faith in “the whole project,” but that anxiety had been latterly eclipsed by the more powerful fear that Lawrence would die. Thus a growing sense of security in one realm begot an accelerating sense of menace in another, one in which “the whole project” was jeopardized in a more absolute regard.) Whenever Irina read those listings in news articles, of how many meals the average person totals over a lifetime, how many years he spends sleeping, how many individual instances he will go to the loo, she was never dazzled by all those digits, but humbled by their paltriness and finitude. According to the actuarial average, this was one of only seventy-eight summers that she was likely to sample, and forty-two were dispatched. It was shocking.

“Been out all last week,” said Lawrence through his toast. “Work’s really piling up. I’m going to have to get a move on.”

“Don’t bolt your food!” she chided. “And if you drink your coffee too fast, you’ll burn your throat. Why not take it easy, read a few pages of The End of Welfare?”

“I concentrate better at the office.”

“Wouldn’t you like another piece of toast? It’s that gorgeous loaf from Borough Market, and it doesn’t last. Eat it while it’s fresh.”

“Nah,” said Lawrence, wiping the crumbs from his mouth. “Gotta go.”

“Did you see this mad cow article?” Irina was shamelessly trying to keep him home a few minutes longer, as she’d once wrapped around her father’s ankle when he had another six-week shoot to coach movie dialogue in California and was trying to get out the door. “Now that the price of mince is down to 49p a pound, beef sales are starting to soar. Have you read about what CJD is like? But never mind risking a long, slow death as your brain turns to sponge if you can save a quid or two on dinner. It doesn’t make any sense! At £1.39, nobody will touch the stuff because it might kill you, but at 49p no problem?”

“Pretty good deal! How about hamburgers tonight?”

“Not on your life. We’re having chicken.”

Irina saw him to the door, and managed to stall his departure with more small-talk until she bid Lawrence a reluctant do svidanya.

She tidied up and took the chicken out to thaw, fighting a customary desolation. Even Lawrence’s standard weekday abandonment fostered a little grief.

Once settled in her studio, she had trouble focusing on the next illustration of Seeing Red. The impulse to make a phone call was insistent. Merely a courtesy call, of course. It was plain good form, was it not, when someone has treated you to a sumptuous spread, to thank him for his generosity? She could make it short.

The number in her address book was still under Jude’s name. Her hand rested on the receiver for several seconds, her heart pounding. A courtesy call. She picked up the phone. She put it back in its cradle. She picked it up again.

“Hallo?”

She put the receiver right back down. He’d sounded sleepy. It was too early. And she’d thanked him already, Saturday night, at the door. How silly, to have roused him for nothing. How much sillier, that she was shaking. At least he’d have no way of knowing who rang, only to rudely hang up. He’d assume it was one of those computer-generated phone solicitations, or a wrong number.

Yet as Irina returned to her drawing table, it came to her with a nauseous lurch that he would know. He would know with absolute certainty who had rung, heard his voice, been stricken by an opaque terror, and thrown the receiver to its cradle as if it might bite. In many respects they were near strangers, so it was disconcerting to realize that he knew her that well.

The illustration went no better than before. Whatever had lit her up while she was sketching the arrival of the Crimson Traveller was with-drawing from reach. Yesterday’s inspired effort was the best of the set so far. But no matter how many times she tried, she was unable to recapture the style that Lawrence had described as unusually “bonkers.” If she couldn’t get the same frantic, energized quality into the companion illustrations, she would have to throw the “bonkers” one away. It didn’t match. It stood out. The first introduction of the colour red had seemed alarming, outrageous, electrifying. In each of today’s abortive efforts, red seemed ordinary. Blending side by side with the blues, it made purple all right, but purple seemed ordinary, too. Though now expanded by a factor of two, the palette still felt cramped, and she pined for a Yellow Traveller to release her into the spectrum. She made a note of the idea for the author, that for children to come to a fuller understanding of the nature of colour, a Yellow Traveller toward the end would make sense. Maybe she could imply slyly that the addition would be popular with the Chinese.

Lawrence rang early afternoon. He often called for no reason, and the more spurious his excuse, the more she was charmed. “Hey, I tried you around ten, and it was busy. Talk to anyone interesting?”

“Oh, you must have tried me at perfectly the wrong point. I picked up the phone to ring Betsy, and then thought better of distracting myself, and put it back.”

What a strange little fib. She might easily have been honest: she’d rung Ramsey to thank him for dinner, had obviously woken him, and, abashed, had simply hung up with what Lawrence would regard as her usual social maladroitness. Yet just now she resisted raising the topic of Ramsey in conversation. Ramsey had become—private. Whatever had passed between them on his birthday belonged to her, and she cherished owning something of which Lawrence was not a part.

“So how’s it going?”

“Lousy. I keep tearing everything up.”

“Give yourself a break! The one you did yesterday was tremendous. Maybe you should take the afternoon off for once. Go for a walk, go to the library. Head up to that place on Roman Road where you found all those cheap Indian spices. While you’re at it, you could go smoke dope with Ramsey and giggle over his video of the Steve Davis–Dennis Taylor match of 1985.”

She should have kept her mouth shut about that joint. “Very funny.”

“Well, I’m not kidding about the match. You should watch a replay someday. It’s the most famous in snooker. Did I ever tell you that story?”

Oh, probably, but if so, Irina hadn’t been listening. How did so many couples grow deaf to each other? Since he would clearly enjoy recounting the famous showdown—again—she encouraged him.

“It was the World Championship at the Crucible. Dennis Taylor—this geeky-looking guy from Northern Ireland, with big dopey-looking horn-rims, right? Well, he’d been on the circuit for thirteen years before he won a single tournament. So Taylor was considered a laughable long-shot against Steve Davis. Who was, you know, God’s gift to snooker by ’85. Reigning champion, and regarded as unbeatable. The final was bound to be a whitewash.

“That’s the way it started, too: Taylor went down seven–zip in the first session. But he rallied in the second, almost evening the score at nine–seven, and in the third session he also finished just two frames down, at thirteen–eleven. Still, all the commentators are saying, isn’t it great that the poor schmuck won’t go down without a fight. Like it’s cute or something.

“But in the final session, Taylor pulls even, at seventeen apiece. First to eighteen, right? So eventually the championship goes down not only to the last frame, but to the last ball. The black, of course. There’s this unbelievable sequence where Taylor misses a double, then Davis fucks up, too, then Taylor takes on a long pot and barely misses, thinks all’s lost and mopes back to his chair as if his pet just died. But it’s a thin cut, and Davis botches his opportunity, too, leaving a pretty easy black. When Taylor potted it for the title, the Crucible went bananas.”

“So it’s a David and Goliath story. Little engine that could.”

“Yeah. And the broadcast of that last session set BBC records. Watched by eighteen million people. Biggest audience any British sportscast had ever garnered. Ramsey says those were the days. Snooker players were like rock stars in the 80s. They lived the life of Riley, and got away with murder, too. Lotta bad boys. Ramsey says the new crop of players is too boring, and that’s why the audience has shrunk.”

Ramsey says. Though he had generously lent the man out for one evening, Lawrence wanted Ramsey back. Like Dennis Taylor, she was disinclined to relinquish a valuable trophy without a fight. “On the contrary. Ramsey says that the new crop of players has gotten too good, and that’s why the audience has shrunk.”

“Same idea,” said Lawrence. “Ramsey says that too good is too boring.”

They both understood they meant good at snooker rather than good as in virtuous. Still, once they finished the call, the line stayed with her.

The concept behind the holiday of Thanksgiving in the States is all very laudable. Nevertheless, it doesn’t work. It is nigh impossible to sincerely count your blessings on the last Thursday of November because you’re supposed to. The occasion is reliably squandered on fretting that the turkey breast is drying out while those last morsels on the inner thighs are still running red.

Yet thankfulness can descend unscheduled. When Lawrence cried “Irina Galina!” at the door that evening, and Irina rejoined from her studio, “Lawrence Lawrensovich!” she was grateful. When he told her about his day over peanut-butter crackers—his contacts had passed on a rumour that the IRA ceasefire would soon be reinstated—she may never have quite understood the fracas in Ulster, nor have kept up with whether its paramilitaries were or were not bombing the bejesus out of Britain these days, nor have comprehended why they would do such a thing in the first place, but still she was grateful—that Lawrence had work that fascinated him, whether or not it fascinated her. That he cared enough to fill her in about what he did during the day and respected her opinion. That were she to ask him, he would patiently explain the ins and outs of Northern Ireland in whatever detail she wished. That he would not take offence if just tonight she gave the exegesis a miss. When they settled in front of the Channel 4 news, she was grateful that she wasn’t a dairy farmer, watching his herd go up in smoke. While she was confessedly growing fatigued with the mad-cow-disease story, by and large British newscasts were superior to their American counterparts—more serious, more in-depth—and she was grateful for that, too.

Preparing their traditional predinner popcorn, Irina was thankful for another routine of perfectly balanced variation within sameness. She had worked out the exact oil-to-kernel ratio that would maximize loft and minimize grease; after experimentation across a range of popcorn brands, she always bought Dunn’s River, the least likely to prove dried out. One shelf of her spice rack was devoted to so many ethnic toppings—Cajun, Creole, Fajita mix—that she could serve a differently seasoned bowlful every day of the month. Tonight she chose black pepper, parmesan, and garlic powder, a favorite combination, and as they decimated the batch she was glad of a snack that you could gorge on that would not fill you up.

Picking up the remnants of cheese at the bottom of the bowl with a moistened forefinger, Irina considered that they were both in perfect health, and sometimes physical well-being could convert from the blank space between ailments to witting pleasure. Entering middle age, they remained a handsome couple; she’d survived a rash bout of chocolate-cappuccino cake, and she still wasn’t fat. No one close to her had recently died. Lawrence, grumbling over when this protracted segment on BSE would ever be over, was conspicuously alive. Dinner—the chicken had been marinating in a deadly Indonesian jerk sauce all afternoon—would be smashing.

Nothing was wrong. Most of all, the air between them was clear. She may have kept quiet about a couple of purely interior moments with Ramsey Acton over the weekend, but she had granted herself permission this afternoon to hold those slight cards close to her chest. If Saturday night’s disquieting temptation had sent a tremor through this flat, the earth had stilled again. It was surely not naïve to believe that neither she nor Lawrence was hiding any great secret from the other. Lawrence was not covertly gambling away their savings at OTB—if he said he went to the gym on his lunch hour, to the gym he went—nor was he going through the motions of heading to the office every day when in truth he’d been sacked months ago. Maybe she did sneak an occasional cigarette, but Irina was not popping amphetamines while Lawrence was at Blue Sky. She hadn’t developed a furtive morning sherry habit, or a stealthy dependence on Valium. Lawrence did not harbour a whole other family in Rome, whom he visited while pretending to attend a conference in Sarajevo. So while it was possible that a pizza delivery boy would press the wrong buzzer, there was no chance that their doorbell would be rung tonight by a sullen teenager whom Lawrence hadn’t admitted to siring years ago, who now wanted money. Irina wasn’t brooding through the news over how to break it to Lawrence that her self-absorbed mother could no longer afford the upkeep of her house in Brighton Beach and would be moving into their spare bedroom next week. Lawrence wasn’t brooding through the news over how to break it to Irina that after all these years he had come to the realization that he was gay. And on Saturday night, Irina hadn’t kissed another man while Lawrence was away.

Some years thanksgiving arrives in the lowercase, in July.

chapter four

On one more exasperating afternoon in August, Irina thumbed through the illustrations for Seeing Red up until the blazing arrival of the Crimson Traveller, 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 dolour 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 bin 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 behaviour 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 travelled 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-grey 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 downstream. 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 centrepiece 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 behaviour 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 pavements 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.