The Post-Birthday World (60 page)

The waiter asked if there was something wrong with their orders, and they demurred that they just weren’t hungry; he cleared the dishes and brought the bill. Though Ramsey would ordinarily whisk it up right away, the tab stayed untouched on the table. “Here, let me,” said Irina, reaching for it. “You’ve taken me out so many times.”
“I might just take you up on that,” he said sheepishly.
The tension was gone. If she’d made a fool of herself, so be it, and now they were able to sip the wine and catch up like the old friends they would apparently remain. She bummed a Gauloise. “It occurred to me after I rang this morning that you might be playing in the Masters this week,” she said. “But I haven’t seen you on the BBC once this season. Have I missed something?”
“Missed the fact I retired. It were Jude’s idea, though I could see the merit. Go out on a high note, swan off into the sunset with that Crucible trophy. She’d notions about me commentating, or flogging some product on the telly. Can’t say I got the energy of late . . . But I could sure use the fees, like. Fact is, I’m a bit skint.”
“
You?
Short of money?”
He sighed. “I ain’t
husbanded my resources,
as they say. Jude, you know, she’s bloody high upkeep, and somehow that $50,000 she won in New York never made an appearance. So with all the travel in style to Spain and that, my winnings from the Crucible burnt up like autumn leaves by the end of the year.
“But it’s queer,” he mused. “Talk about the way your mind keeps coming back to some turning point, like that moment of yours over my snooker table? I been known to place the odd wager on me own matches, see. And I were
this close
”—he held his thumb and forefinger a quarterinch apart—“to putting my last hundred grand on a flutter in that 2001 final. But me and Jude’d started up again by then, and that woman—well, you know how she feels about snooker. I figure she did a number on my head. I just couldn’t quite get up the confidence that I’d win. I got so far as to picking up the phone, but put it down again. Jesus wept! Would have cleaned up, at eight-to-one. I’d be taking you out tonight to the poshest joint in town, after trousering eight hundred grand.”
They walked together in silence to the end of Roman Road, where Irina would turn left toward the tube. It was depressing, the evening being yet so young that she needn’t worry about making the last train.
Putting a hand on each of her shoulders, he turned her into the orange of the streetlight. “Irina, that night of my birthday”—
burfday
—“it weren’t all in your head. But
timing is everything.
”

It is late. After eight p.m., or even nine. With no need to greet her returning warrior, no nightly obligation to provide freshly popped corn, pink pork escalopes, broccoli with orange sauce, she needn’t cut short her rambling constitutionals. These lunatic walkabouts have reached ever further afield these last two months—through Green, St. James, and Hyde Parks, on to Regent’s or, today, all the way to Hampstead Heath. She has traipsed without respite for five hours, and will return to Borough fatigued. Wearing herself out is the idea. Then, in those first weeks, wandering the city in an abstemious stupor had been purely about keeping herself from the liquor cabinet, the wine, the packet of fags she no longer has to hide.

She is wearing the faded blue polo neck. A faint golden ghost still haunts the left breast. She refuses to toss the shirt in the rag bag. Lawrence had scrubbed at the curry stain for ten minutes with pre-treatment over the sink. She has every reason to have soured on such memories. But who could wring acrimony from any partner, ex or otherwise, having labored to rescue a tattered top because he loves it, or loves it because he loves her? Once loved her. As for the pretty red scarf at her neck, it was a present from Indonesia, which he brought back after a conference in Jakarta. While doubtless he’d been on the junket with
her,
she cannot shred it in a rage. To the contrary, the trove of this and every other gift that populates the flat, freshly finite, has grown more precious.

As she trudges the last leg home along the Thames, the lights of the South Bank across the river glimmer with the Shakespeare and Pinter that Lawrence would never make time for. Unencumbered by a workaholic, she could now attend all the theater that she likes. She doesn’t like. Climbing the slope of Blackfriars Bridge, she feels Hampstead Heath in her knees. Why, she’s walked fifteen miles today, if not twenty.

A waste of time. She should be getting started on the new illustrations. The commercial success of
Ivan
has increased the pressure to produce—and isn’t that the way. Not long ago, no one gave two hoots about Irina McGovern’s next children’s book, and she’d have given her right arm to be in the position she’s in today. Now that she has the audience, she wishes it would go away. If Ramsey’s humiliating thanks-but-no-thanks when she threw herself at the poor man in February is any guide, there must be some rule of the universe that says, “All right, you can have what you want, but not while you still want it.” Circumstances reversed, Lawrence would take refuge in his work—in its dryness, its coldness, its dullness even. Yet she isn’t able to bury herself blindly in a drawing in the same spirit. The darkest, most morbid of artwork still draws on a vitality that she cannot rouse.

Nearing the flat, she surveys the heavy postindustrial neighborhood with its Victorian remnants of red brick. She searches for her former sense of satisfied ownership, of having annexed a brave new world far from Brighton Beach, where her mother makes her feel clumsy and plain. Instead she feels like a foreigner again, and wonders what she’s doing here. It was Lawrence’s job at Blue Sky that had brought them to Britain. Now rather than savor the flavorful local expressions—“a bit of a dust-up”; “that knocks the competition into a cocked hat”—Britain just seems like any old somewhere else, somewhere she doesn’t belong. The city is awash with Americans anyway, and, latterly, with nouveau riche Russians on package holidays, who speak in a savvy, post-Soviet slang she can’t decipher. She doesn’t feel special. Worse, she feels abandoned, as if having deplaned during a layover, only for the flight to take off without her. Maybe shipping back to the US would keep at bay this confusing sensation she has almost nightly: an overweening ache to go “home” when she’s already there.

At the door of the flat, she fumbles with her keys. The stairwell’s timer-light is out. She hasn’t been on top of things lately; she never remembers to ring the management company during office hours. The flat too is dark. Lately she keeps the drapes drawn during the day. She gropes for the switch. It is killingly silent. Ironically, she had joined her neighbors in a ten-year campaign to have Trinity Street gated down the middle to block through traffic. A shortcut to a major route south, the narrow, historic road had choked bumper-to-bumper during rush hours. For years, she had railed from these windows at the drivers, who were loud and rude. Within days of Lawrence’s departure, Southwark Council had come through. Now that she has what she wished for, the stillness outside is oppressive. She misses the rev of engines and irritable honk of horns, which might have provided a reassuring sense of human bustle nearby.

To the surprise of her former self, she turns on the TV. After battling Lawrence for years over telly OD, now she, too, keeps it yammering the whole night through. Well, television is a creditable substitute for heavy traffic, and she’s not going to play Scrabble alone.

BBC2 announces the upcoming broadcast of the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield. She hastens to change the channel. She won’t torture herself. It’s not only that Ramsey has retired.

He rang up not long after her botched propositioning of the poor fellow at Best of India, to make sure that she was all right. She suggested, awkwardly, that maybe they could be friends. Grown-ups don’t usually tender friendship so baldly, and she’d sounded like little Ivan in her own unaward-winning book. Ramsey hemmed and hawed. Finally he must have feared that he was hurting her feelings, and came clean.

She apologized for not noticing in the restaurant, because she had been too absorbed in her own devastation. Now that she has stopped by Hackney several times, she finds that Ramsey’s illness provides them a common quality of convalescence—if she is to indulge the conceit that Ramsey is getting better. Some afternoons she intersects with visiting snooker stars. Stephen Hendry and, more surprisingly, Ronnie O’Sullivan are especially attentive, and she feels sheepish about ever having dismissed Hendry as boring, or O’Sullivan as uncouth. In person, Hendry has a sly sense of humor, O’Sullivan a heart. She brings the odd shepherd’s pie or rice pudding, which she doubts that Ramsey eats. They are not close enough—yet, anyway—for her to help him with what he really requires: sponge baths, or assistance with the bedpan. Of course, he does have a day nurse from the NHS, a terribly possessive middle-aged Irishwoman who is obviously a snooker fan, and who is always trying to get visitors to cut it short. Upstairs, she teases Ramsey that the nurse fancies him like mad. Frail and preternaturally aged, he finds the joke much funnier than she intends. Despite the sadness of it all, she is relieved to have found someone else to care for. When he urges her to go live her own life, she assures him that he is doing her the favor, and she means it.

Mercifully, the electricity has never returned; the prongs no longer even clatter against the socket.
Timing is everything.
On her own account, she has resolved to eat proper meals with vegetables. Yet so far by the time she gnaws through some crackers and cheese, she can’t get it together to steam broccoli. (After these insane walkabouts, she’s losing weight. But if she’s honest, she makes up for plenty of lost calories with alcohol.) As she stands over the cutting board to catch the crumbs, her eyes roam the rows of spices beside the stove: juniper berries, wild thyme, onion seeds. Now that she has no one to cook for, the spices will stale. The oils in the exotic condiments will go rancid—aubergine pickle, Thai satay.
smoker.
The time may come soon that she’ll have to go through all this crap, because the flat is too large and dear for a single tenant. A second month in a row, on April 1 the rent was quietly deducted from Lawrence’s current account. She can’t allow him to keep paying her expenses if he doesn’t live here. He should have canceled all the direct debits weeks ago—the TV license, the council tax bill. She resolves, weakly, to pay him back. Nevertheless, a gnawing anxiety of her abrupt single life is money. Maybe it’s a girl thing. She has salted away over a hundred grand of her own. But no nestegg could be large enough to make her feel as safe as she did for fifteen years, most of them with little in the bank—yet with a strong, capable, resourceful man as her protector.
She has learned the hard way that there is no safety. That there never was any safety. So it is the illusion of safety that she misses, nothing more. Ruefully, she conjures what has long been her touchstone, the apotheosis of refuge—that tent holding its own against the elements in Talbot Park when she was fourteen. In the end, it was a token of false security, really, of the dangers of ever allowing yourself to imagine that you’ll be okay. Because she should have sealed the seams. By three a.m., the tiny drops along the stitching had joined to streams. A dark line of waterlog was crawling from the feet of their sleeping bags predatorily toward the necks, and the girls got cold. Shaking and drenched, they had huddled down the muddy path to a pay phone outside the office, which was closed. But now there was no one to ring, like Sarah’s mother, to take her home.
She uncorks a Montepulciano. She will dispatch the bottle by self-deceivingly small measures. Thank God the vodka is finished. She has not
allowed herself to replace it. She flops into the rust-colored armchair. She
has yet, after more than two months, to splay on his green sofa. She lights a
fag, her third of the day, one of the dubious privileges of solitude. She is
free to kill herself by degrees without being hounded. But she misses his
castigation. The voice in her own head is tinnier, and merely whispers that
she will quit altogether “soon” or “next month.” During those first few
weeks, she got up to a pack a day. She didn’t care. She has clawed that
back to half. Still, the carpet has begun to exude the telltale reek of a
smoker’s lair. A real
The drags are contemplative. It’s nice here. But she despairs that she
interested
made all the decorating decisions herself, which leaves her surrounded with
only her own purchases, her own tastes. He lived so lightly here. Rather
than feel tormented by numerous reminders, she wishes that he’d left more
behind. His coffee glass—she bought even that. His clothes—stowed; she
would have to open drawers and wardrobes to go looking for her own sadness. There had been some laundry, but that was tenderly folded weeks ago,
and now if she presses those flannel shirts to her face they smell only of
Persil.
She did come across the electric clippers last week, recalling the only
time she cut his hair. There is something sensual about cutting a man’s
hair, intimate, animal, like a chimpanzee’s grooming of burrs from the
coat of her mate. She’d gloried so in the project that he grew impatient. The
cut came out too short in the front, and he’d announced peremptorily that
next time it was back to the Algerian barber on Long Lane. The clippers
were an emblem, therefore, of a failed experiment, and of an afternoon on
which he’d not been kind. So it didn’t make a lot of sense to have switched
on the appliance, to have gripped the vibrating column—it stirred her like
a sexual aid—but you could apparently wax nostalgic about bad memories. It hadn’t made a lot of sense, either, when she’d bowed her head onto
his small oak desk—he’d taken his computer with him that morning; he
had known that he wasn’t coming back. Resting her forehead on the wood,
the way Muslims touch the floor when they pray, she’d petted that desk
like a dog. But then, it was very late, and that was before she’d run out of
vodka.
If she knows she should be angry, outrage would further wear her out. Besides, she does not for a moment believe that Lawrence delighted in his subterfuge. He may well have revulsed himself, but in so doing he had also
himself—in himself—and fascination was much more likely Lawrence’s downfall than delight. Moreover, a sense of complicity in her fate has done nothing but compound. Granted, on a few evenings she’d made an effort to shift the program in bed. She’d made that bid or two to get him to make love to her while looking her square in the eye. She’d asked him about his fantasies. But she hadn’t tried very hard. She’d been afraid, though of what? She’d been lazy. So she can’t get up a head of steam over that tart at Blue Sky. If it hadn’t been Bethany Anders, it would have been some secretarial floozy who wasn’t as smart. Because as it transpired, Lawrence didn’t like fucking turned to the wall any more than she did. As it transpired, Lawrence had missed kissing, too. His pursuit of Bethany made Lawrence seem less virtuous, but more ambitious.
weather
Simply vanishing like that had been brutal, and she should be angry about that, too. Still, he did ring up soon after, to apologize. And she understands. Lawrence may have toyed with being “bad.” But he is at core a staunchly moral person. Ergo, the one thing he cannot bear is being in the wrong. He might be able to face her. He cannot face himself. It is his sole cowardice.
Irina thinks a lot about what she feels. By her third glass and fifth fag, Lawrence’s more practical conventions commend themselves. Pretty soon she will have to nip all this feeling in the bud, and start deciding what to do.
Another slab of Port Salut. Of course, the most sensible solution to feeling peckish this time of night would be popcorn. Even for the slightly drunk, the high-fiber, low-fat snack would take five minutes to fix. Scores of seasonings beckon from the spice rack. But she tried going through the motions once. Blossomed like a wedding bouquet, the untouched bowlful made her cry. There are four unopened bags of kernels in the cupboard, and at some point she’ll throw them away.
Unsteadily, she turns off the tube, chains the door, turns down the heat. These small rituals and even brushing her teeth she no longer takes for granted. Only recently has she not woken to unwashed highball glasses and smeary knives in the sink, her teeth furred, the whole flat chidingly toasty, the heat having run full-blast all night. The self-control required to get herself to bed, and once in, to get out again, she has had to rebuild from scratch, like a stroke victim relearning the words
and
pail.
Under the winter duvet, now too hot, she considers masturbating, but declines. She doesn’t know what to fantasize about anymore. And this is crazy, but the unfathomable, half-painful sensation of sexual arousal now seems faintly evil.
Atonement,
She flips a few pages of Ian McEwan’s
and registers nothing. Par for the course, and clinching today’s perfect score of zero accomplishments from morning to night. That arduous walk to Hampstead Heath was not only fruitless, but visually blighted: she kept mistaking a curled brown leaf for excrement, white flowers in a meadow for trash. Following on such an unproductive afternoon, she should be disgusted with herself. But she is not. She is well pleased. By hook or by crook, one more day is over.