The Post-Birthday World (49 page)

Thus the splendid news that Irina received within a fortnight of their return to Victoria Park Road could have been better timed. To her amazement, a jubilant call from Snake’s Head informed her that

Frame and Match
had just been short-listed for the prestigious Lewis Carroll Medal, an international award for children’s literature renowned for moving copies with its distinctively embossed gold sticker on the cover. She hadn’t a clue how her obscure volume had ever come to the attention of the judges, for half of its modest print run of two thousand had already been returned by January. The sheer unexpectedness of her good fortune would have buoyed her all the more under ordinary circumstances.

These were no ordinary circumstances. Ramsey would hardly eat. He slept long hours, and took afternoon naps. He still burrowed into snooker biographies, and read

Snooker Scene
cover to cover, but when he did so he scowled. He disappeared for hours at a time to his table in the basement, firmly closing the door behind him, and lending his wife an unease of a piece with her
what is he
doing
in there?
when he locked himself for ages in the loo. On the one occasion that she’d bridged the battlements to bring him to the phone, she discovered him sprawled on the floor, surrounded by rails and bolts, with a crazed look on his face. “Jack has an exhibition match lined up, if you’re interested,” she said, and he quipped without looking up, “Already made an exhibition of myself, didn’t I?” In response to her puzzlement over why one end of the table was disassembled, he mumbled something like, “Too much rebound. Table’s unplayable.” It had been a little like coming upon Jack Nicholson typing “All work and no play” thousands of times in
The Shining,
and she’d left him to it.

So rather than race down the stairs and pound on the basement door exuberantly demanding admission, Irina rested the receiver in its cradle and returned to the series of black-and-white still-lifes she’d been doodling in rapidographs. The little smile rising over her notebook was all she permitted herself in celebration.

Once she’d sat on the news for a week—the moment never seemed right—she had to admit that she was dreading its delivery, and that she resented dreading it. Ramsey conducted his whole occupational life in the limelight. Even as runner-up at the Crucible he’d earned almost £150,000; he may have rued the fact, but his performance had been on TV. Now with one light in her own life she felt compelled to hide it under a bushel.

However, the medal’s organizers were anxious to arrange a date for the prize-giving dinner at which all short-listed candidates could be present, and were proposing one of several evenings in September, before which she and her spouse would be flown to New York and put up in a hotel. She had to give them an answer, including whether Ramsey would like to go. So during an arbitrary and until that point lackluster dinner at Best of India in latter May (the brown-rice-and-vegetable rule guaranteed that they ate out virtually every night), Irina unveiled her godsend.

Feigning that the news had come in that very day tainted her cheerful astonishment with a hint of falseness. Hastily, too, she appended that of course she didn’t expect to win—as, she supposed, she didn’t—although being short-listed might sell “a few” extra copies. After all, she said, the scope of the Lewis Carroll Medal may have been “international,” but it hailed from Manhattan; the likelihood of its being awarded to a book about a sport that Americans didn’t know from Parcheesi was negligible.

Ramsey kissed her across the table, nipped next door to the off-license for a bottle of plonk champagne, and returned to propose that they schedule a fabulously expensive dinner some other night to celebrate. Nevertheless, when she explained why

Frame and Match
would never win, he agreed—lighting into another bitter riff on the gobsmacking ignorance of snooker that he’d encountered in Brighton Beach. He assured her that of course he’d accompany her to the ceremony in September—provided it did not interfere with the Royal Scottish Open. After only a few minutes, their discussion of her good fortune gave way to talk of which tournaments Ramsey would enter next season.

As the week proceeded and blended into the next, they did go out to dinner numerous times, but never officially to acknowledge her shortlisting, and somehow the promised occasion never quite materialized.

* * * Although while dressing for the reception in the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue Irina was understandably nervous, the scale of her anxiety seemed disproportionate. Over and over she had recited to herself that it was enough to be nominated, and indeed she knew in her gut that

Frame and Match
would never clinch the Lewis Carroll. Clapping and smiling and acting implausibly exhilarated on someone else’s account was bound to be an ordeal, but one short and survivable. So the source of her fretfulness while she wrestled with her unruly hair had little to do with girding for defeat.

By happy or unhappy coincidence, depending on your perspective, this very week Lawrence Trainer was scheduled to be in New York—for some dreary conference called “The Growth of Global Civil Society.” He had long been her greatest supporter, and the four years that had elapsed since they’d parted had surely transformed him from jilted lover to comrade. He’d sounded so thrilled for her when she e-mailed him news of the Lewis Carroll in May (Ramsey’s being home all the time had precluded confiding cups of coffee near Blue Sky for the entire summer). Besides, this was her party, and it was her right. So she’d invited Lawrence to come tonight, and he’d accepted.

Irina might have stuck by the decision without regrets had she informed Ramsey well in advance that Lawrence was coming to the awards dinner and brooked no argument, or even given Ramsey the illusion of being consulted on the matter before she issued the invite. But no. Every night in August when she’d considered raising the attendance of her “comrade” with Ramsey, she’d felt sick to her stomach—though not quite as sick as she felt now, with the reception to start in half an hour, and Ramsey in for a big surprise.

To make matters worse, one of the other five short-listed authors was his ex-wife.

“That’s a right skimpy dress, pet,” said Ramsey behind her as she messed in the vanity’s mirror. “The hem’s not two inches from your fanny.”
“Badger me enough, and I’ll tuck it around my waist.”
He ran a finger into her cleavage. “You planning some sort of jacket?”
“That’s right,” said Irina. Her application of eyeliner was so unsteady that she looked like Boris Karloff. “I spent two hundred quid on this thing, so of course I’m going to cover it up with a large burlap sack.”
“No, you’re going to swan into that do downstairs half-starkers, and every tosser in the room will want to fuck you.”
“You used to like it when I looked sexy.” Lord, did nothing ever change? He reminded her of
Lawrence.
“I love it when you look sexy—shut in a cupboard with a padlock.”
She turned from the mirror as he was slipping on his jacket and said, “Wow!” She’d grown inured to his snooker gear, but rarely saw him in a proper tuxedo. “You’re the one belongs locked in a closet.”
It would take many more compliments than that to placate her husband. For all the hotel rooms they’d shared, this was the first time they’d ever checked in under his wife’s name. He’d bristled when the porter called him “Mr. McGovern,” and his abrupt anonymity on arrival in JFK yesterday had put his nose out of joint. On opening
Ramsey Acton
’s passport, the immigration agent hadn’t raised an eyebrow, and his “Welcome to the United States” was the same bored greeting that he shoveled at every other tourist in the queue.
“If you don’t stop pacing like that,” she said, “we’re going to be dunned for leaving runnels in the carpet. Are you edgy about seeing Jude?”
“Not particularly. Though with you tricked out like that, I reckon she’ll be jealous.”
“Why? She divorced you.”
“Birds don’t like it when you fancy their discards. Like when you rustle round in somebody’s rubbish and pull out a right serviceable knickknack. Suddenly they get to thinking,
Oi, give that back! That’s a right serviceable knickknack!
”
“I worry that Jude assumes we were carrying on while you were still with her.”
“So?” Ramsey slid his palms into the hollows of her hipbones. “Let her.”

So powerfully was Irina distracted by the impending arrival of Lawrence Trainer that she’d given little thought to Jude Hartford, whose path she’d not crossed since their falling-out five years ago. As she and Ramsey descended in the gilt elevator, an encounter with the woman was imminent. Most people would field an uncomfortable reunion of this nature by rising above—extending limp congratulations for being shortlisted, making no allusion to previous unpleasantness nor even to the incongruous fact that Jude and Ramsey used to be married, and presenting a united front of seamless connubial contentment. But since social awkwardness always brought out in Irina that bizarre confessional incontinence, chances were she would within minutes blurt that Ramsey was irrationally jealous, had probably started to drink too much, and picked fights at the drop of a hat—all to a woman sure to use any unattractive intelligence to smear Irina behind her back.

Clutching Ramsey’s hand, Irina entered the events room to mark Jude’s presence at the far end by the drinks table—though in that floorlength ivory kaftan the woman might easily be mistaken for a refreshments tent. When Jude turned with a swirl toward the entranceway, her outsized expression of astonished joy took a fraction of a moment to arrange itself. Like Lawrence of Arabia leading the charge on Aqaba, Jude flapped across the room with her arms extended wide, and as the dervish advanced, Irina feared the expression on her own face was one of horror.

“Darling!” Jude smothered her ex-friend in a shimmer of upscale synthetic. “And don’t you look

divine
!” Irina’s “You, too!” was weak. Billows of fabric failed to disguise the fact that Jude had put on weight. Yet she still emanated that distinctive hysteria—a desperation for a fineness of life that, like a gnat, was only surer to elude her the more frantically she snatched after it. “And Ramsey. You dear man!” Jude brought his forehead to her lips as if delivering a blessing.
“Jude,”
he replied. As if that said it all.

A tall, squarish character ambled from behind. He exuded a languorous cannot-be-bothered-to-try-to-please that generally correlates with having money. When Jude introduced Duncan Winderwood grandly as the “tenant of my affections,” he said in a plummy accent, “I’m so

“Isn’t this a coincidence,” Irina submitted aimlessly. “About the Lewis
terribly
pleased to make your acquaintance,” employing that pro forma aristocratic graciousness meant less to make you feel loved than to ram down your throat how civilized he was. Irina instinctively disliked him, and she could tell that he didn’t care. Being British, Duncan was the one man in the room who would almost certainly recognize Ramsey Acton, but his interaction with her husband was brief and bland.

Carroll.”

“Pish and tosh! To be honest, it
isn’t
a coincidence!” Jude cried, laugh
ing through the sentence. “Talent will out, don’t you think?
Talent will
” She seemed to have forgotten all about having impugned Irina’s
out!
work as “flat” and “lifeless.”
“There’s no way mine will win,” said Irina. “The subject matter is too
obscure.” When Ramsey shifted at her side, she appended quickly, “For
Americans, I mean.”
“To be honest, I
did
think your illustrating a book about snooker was
good for a giggle,” said Jude. “Didn’t you used to think snooker was a big
bore?”
“I’ve gotten—a lot more interested,” said Irina faintly.
“I suppose you haven’t had much choice!”
“You made a choice, I recollect,” Ramsey intruded brutally. “To rubbish my profession at every opportunity.”
“I think what Ramsey’s trying to say,” said Irina, “is that we all need a
drink.”
Fortified with a glass of red that was tempting fate with all that white
sailcloth, Jude exclaimed, “I was simply floored when I read you two had
got married!”
“It was certainly a surprise to
us,
” said Irina forcefully. “I hope you
don’t mind.”
“Mind! To be quite honest, maybe back in the day we should have
switched places at the dinner table and saved us all a pack of trouble!”
Jude’s conversational tic was beginning to wear, even if
to be honest
had spread like genital herpes among the British bourgeoisie. Much as
its counterpart plague among the young—
D’ya know what I mean?
—
conveyed a persistent and often justifiable insecurity about an ability to
speak English, the repeated insertion of
to be honest
seemed to imply that unless otherwise apprised you could safely assume that the speaker was
lying.
“Ramsey, you old dog,” she continued. “I worried that I missed something in the
Guardian
social pages about a big shindig. Not that you look
a year over forty-nine, sweetie, but didn’t you turn fifty last year? I pictured you letting out the Savoy with the haut monde.”
“We didn’t fancy a lot of fuss.” His delivery was grim. For his fiftieth
the summer before, Irina had taken Ramsey’s admonishments that he
“didn’t fancy a lot of fuss” at face value, and repeated the homemade sushi
spread that had so overwhelmed him in 1995. His eyes had continually
darted beyond the candlelight, as if a hundred well-wishers would soon
spring from the shadows. It emerged that she hadn’t read his signals
correctly—
no
apparently meaning
no
only in cases of date rape. The hall was growing packed, and the event’s organizers pulled both
couples away to meet the foundation directors, journalists, and judges.
Although Irina read apology in the judges’ eyes (sorry, but we didn’t vote
for you), they did all heap praises on
Frame and Match,
talking up the vibrancy of the colors, the freshness of her material . . . Starved of serious
approbation for most of her career, Irina was perplexingly deaf to the tributes. Compliments were empty calories, like popcorn.
She explained to the group that the lipstick-red, the lemony yellow,
and the creamy green merely duplicated snooker balls as faithfully as
she knew how. “As a matter of fact,” she added, “snooker first took off in
the UK as a spectator sport because of the advent of color television. The
BBC needed programming that was literally colorful. So the show
Pot
was born, the players became national celebrities, and what started
Black
as a haphazard, mostly amateur game got organized into rankings and
tournaments and high-stakes purses.”
Jude’s expression was pitying:
Oh, my poor darling, you
have
had an
earful.
“Ramsey”—Irina pulled him forward—“was on
Pot Black
all the
time!” Alas, she only put him on the spot. The group could follow up
with no better than, “So you’re a snooker player!” and Ramsey could return with no better than, “Yeah.” Silence.
In the midst of this conversational maw, Lawrence made his entrance. Obviously, Irina might as well have invited a suicide bomber from the
West Bank, or the Mask of the Red Death. But the moment she met
Lawrence’s deep-set brown eyes from across the room, they flushed with a
warmth that put out of mind, however temporarily, the scale of her mistake. Ramsey’s gray-blue irises could wash oceanic, as available as open
water, but something about their very color gave them also the terrifying
capacity to go cold. Yet despite the scorn that often issued from Lawrence’s
mouth, it was in the nature of that particular shade of umber that his eyes
could express a limited set of emotions: tenderness, gratitude, injury, and
need. When they lived together she had often chafed at the shabbiness of
his dress; now those familiar dark Dockers and the threadbare buttondown with no tie made her smile. In fact, everything about Lawrence that
once vexed her now entranced her instead. She loved his fundamental
humility, at such odds with his intellectual bluster as The Expert. She
loved his slumped, unassuming posture. She loved the fact that at an occasion of this nature he could always be relied upon to hold up his end of
things; you could throw Lawrence into any social pool, and he would
swim. She loved his rigidity and discipline, all just a cover for a raging
terror of the gluttony, intemperance, and sloth that would surely ensue
should he ever step off the straight and narrow. She loved that Lawrence
Trainer was truly able to be “happy for” another person’s good fortune,
and his demeanor as he advanced glowed with his present happiness for
hers. Lastly, while she may long before have lost touch with the urge to
tear off his clothes, she still loved his face. She loved his carved, haunted,
beautiful face.
It was a toss-up whether Ramsey would find the more unforgivable
her invitation to Lawrence in the first place, or her expression when he
walked in. Either way, when she glanced at her husband, Ramsey’s eyes
had made ready use of their capacity to go cold.
Lawrence diffidently pecked her cheek. “Congratulations!” “Thank you,” she said. Ramsey put his left arm around her shoulders
and pulled her tight, his hand mashing her upper arm. “Ramsey? Lawrence happened to be in town, and so I asked him to come.” “
Happened
to be in town. Ain’t that lucky.”
“Hey, Ramsey!” Lawrence heartily shook Ramsey’s free hand. “No
hard feelings. Really, it’s great to see you.”
“Anorak Man,” said Ramsey. With Irina, the epithet had morphed to
caustic slur, a token of his refusal to dignify her former partner with a
proper name; to Lawrence’s face, the handle inevitably resumed a measure
of the affection with which it had first been coined. But Ramsey didn’t
want
to feel any of his old fondness for Lawrence. Even less did he wish to
confront the awful truth that Lawrence Trainer was a nice man. “Hey, congratulations on making it to the final in Sheffield this year!”
said Lawrence. “What does that make, eight?”
“You should know.” Ramsey could hardly talk, so furious was he to be
having this conversation at all. “You’re the boffin.”
This mashing business with Ramsey’s left hand had grown actively
unpleasant. “Lawrence, let me get you your
one
glass of wine,” said Irina,
discreetly disengaging from her husband’s clasp. In science fiction, when
parallel universes collide, the molecular integrity of the whole world is
often imperiled, and now she knew why.
“Listen,” said Lawrence quietly beside the bar service. With twenty
feet separating the two men, the atomic particles of the room settled
again. “I checked out your competition at Barnes and Noble. Man, you’re
a shoo-in! Those other entries totally suck! I mean, get a load of that piece
of shit that Jude wrote—and now that I get a look at her,
load
is the word.
When I came across the title, I bust a gut!”
In
Children of Size,
a chunky little girl is smitten by a boy at school, and
to win his favor she goes on all manner of diets. Hungry all the time, the
once cheerful protagonist grows peevish. The
tenant of her affections
finally
bewails that he had been smitten with her as well, until she became so unpleasant. Behold, he likes a bit of heft. The little girl learns to eat sensibly
and to love her own body, even if she would never be thin—happy ending. “You know, Ramsey didn’t seem too thrilled I showed up,” said Lawrence. “I could just have a quick drink and go. I don’t want to ruin the
evening for you. It’s your night.”
“Davay gavoreet po-russki, ladno?”
she asked, and continued in hushed
Russian. “Yes, it’s my night. Which means I should be able to have you here if I want to. And you belong here. You kept me going in illustration
through some tough years. Please don’t go. Please?”
“I’ll stay if you want me to,” he assured her. “But why is he still so
touchy, after all this time?” Lawrence’s Russian was surprisingly fluid.
“Mozhet byt potomy shto on vidit shto yavsyo yeshcho tebya lyublu.”
Embarrassed, Lawrence switched to English again. “You only love me
in a way. Maybe you should tell him I’m getting married. That might
make him feel better.”
Irina cocked her head. “Would I be making that up?”
Lawrence said softly,
“Nyet.”
Irina glanced at her toes before looking up again. “Congratulations. I
guess that’s good news.” She shouldn’t have appended the
I guess,
but she
couldn’t help it.
“Da, na samom dele,”
he said fervently. “Very good news. I hope you
don’t feel bad that you and I, that we never— We didn’t get married but
maybe we should have, and this time around I’m going to do it right.” “Lawrence Trainer!” shrieked the refreshments tent. “Look at the pair
of you, like old times! Why, our old foursome is back! Just a tad mixed
up, that’s all.”
“Hi, Jude,” said Lawrence wearily. He could never stand Jude Hartford.
Jude introduced Duncan, and the toff went into his somnambulant
spiel about how absolutely inexpressibly thrilling it was to meet yet another guest about whom he didn’t give a damn. Without missing a beat
Lawrence returned, “Indeed, frightfully, frightfully delightful to make
your acquaintance as well, old bean,” getting the geezer’s accent to a tee.
For the first time at the reception, something stirred in those muddy
eyes, and Duncan seemed to wake up.
“I say,” said Duncan. “Taking the piss, are we?”
“Got that right,” said Lawrence flatly, and turned away. “I adore you,” Irina whispered.
“You used to,” said Lawrence lightly. “And why not? I’m adorable.”
Something had loosened in him—it was no longer difficult for him to see
her—and Irina realized that he had finally let her go.
For the sit-down dinner in the adjoining room, the Lewis Carroll contestants and their escorts were seated together at a large round front table. Just her luck, Irina’s place card was positioned between Ramsey and
Duncan.
Lawrence was sitting at another table nearby, and Irina kept him wistfully in the corner of her eye, noting how readily he engaged the guests on his either side in heated conversation. Politics, no doubt—Nepal, Chechnya, who knows. Funny, she’d once been irked by
the way he took over socially; now she was charmed to bits. When she asked after the nature of his work, Duncan said that he
“dabbled in a few investments,” ergo he and the Queen had divvied
up the better part of England between them. Irina said, “I can’t say I’ve
ever been very interested in finance,” to which he replied, “Makes the
world go round, my dear,” and she snapped, “Not mine.” There is nothing quite so icy as two people being patronizing to each other, and Irina,
usually a good conversational soldier, concluded abruptly that life was
too short.
But Ramsey wasn’t providing much by way of salvation. His bearing
was stony. His wine glass was drained, and she wished the waiters weren’t
so attentive to refills. She’d married a man who detested small talk, and
who never felt at ease outside the rarefied world of snooker, but Ramsey’s
fish-out-of-water performance this evening was extreme even by the
minimal social standards she had learned to apply to him. Well before her
Great Sin was revealed with the arrival of a certain someone, he had barely
spoken to a soul, and so far this was like navigating a formal dinner with
a houseplant.
“I hate it when they prepare this sort of starter with that dollop of
mayonnaise.
”
Ramsey stared her down with dull incredulity.
“The salmon terrine’s not bad,” she said helplessly, “if you scrape
it off.”
A waiter whisked away Ramsey’s starter untouched. When he proceeded to ignore his main course as well, eyes cut toward him askance. “Not touching your dinner,” she whispered. “It’s a little embarrass
ing.”
“
I
am embarrassing
you
?” he muttered bitterly.
To ruin her own evening, she would have to ask. “Okay. What’s
wrong.”
“You humiliated me.”
The rest of the table having written the pair off as standoffish or bashful, with luck she could bury the tiff beneath their chatter. “I’d have
thought your wife being nominated for a prestigious award would have
made you feel proud instead. My mistake.”
“Oi, you made a mistake, all right. Count on it.” With a raised eyebrow, a waiter cleared off his untouched plate, while a second topped up
Ramsey’s wine.
“May I hazard a guess that this hunger strike has something to do
with my having invited Lawrence?”
“What do
you
think?”
As the waiters cleared the rest of the table, Irina accidentally caught
Jude’s eye. In any fantasies about a chance encounter like this evening’s,
Irina had conjured a gentle display of how perfectly suited she and Ramsey
were for each other, how hopelessly in love. This is what it looks like, she
would have liked to imply, when Ramsey Acton has found the right
woman: he is relaxed, jubilant, sometimes hilarious, and physically exquisite. In this sense, though only in this sense, would Irina have enjoyed
making Jude Hartford jealous. But presently Jude’s eyes stabbed instead