Читать книгу The Post-Birthday World - Lionel Shriver - Страница 8

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.

Some friends regarded Irina-and-Lawrence as a factual matter, like the existence of France. Others relied on the couple as a touchstone, proof that it was possible to be happy; the role was a burden. Irina had a few companions who’d little time for Lawrence, and found him paternalistic or gruff; they regarded Lawrence as a friendship tax, the cost of doing business. But one way or the other, she didn’t care.

Love having come to her neither easily nor early, Irina accepted the fact that any minor contribution she might make to human affairs would have nothing to do with unprecedented achievement in courtship. No one would ever recount the peaceable, convivial union of a children’s book illustrator and a think-tank research fellow as one that launched ships or divided nations. No modern-day Shakespeare would squander his eloquence on the ordinary happiness—if there is such a thing—that percolated within a modest flat in Borough through the 1990s.

Nevertheless, Irina regarded her relationship with Lawrence as a miracle. He was a devoted, funny, and intelligent man, and he loved her. She didn’t care if feminists would have maintained that she didn’t need a man; she did need a man, more than anything on earth. When Lawrence was out of town, the flat seemed to generate an echo. She would not, any longer understand why she was here, in both the general sense of alive, and the specific sense of on a Georgian square just south of London Bridge. Many were the solitary evenings that she might have worked late in her studio, but the opportunity would be wasted. She would walk from room to room. Pour a glass of wine and leave it standing. Drizzle the stainless-steel drain board with corrosive to remove the lime scale. (So mineral was London’s tap water—reputed to have cycled through more human bodies than any liquid on the planet, and leaving a white, crusty ghost behind every evaporated drop—that it might have stood sheerly upright on the counter like the Cliffs of Dover without a glass.) But suddenly the energy required to wipe the glop away would elude her. She would go to bed, and wake to a reek in the kitchen from the chemicals left to seethe.

Shameful or not, having a man who loved her and whom she loved in return was the most important thing in Irina’s life. It wasn’t that she didn’t have strong and abiding subordinate affections, for Irina was far more sociable than Lawrence, and had put much effort into building a whole new set of comrades when they moved to London in 1990. Yet there were hungers that friends could never satisfy, and when you made the slightest bid to get them to feed this particular appetite they ran a mile. Moreover, it wasn’t that she cared nothing for her “art,” even if two histrionically self-involved parents in film and dance impelled her to couch the word in sour quotation marks. The illustrations, when they were working, were a joy. But the joy was greater when Lawrence eased up behind her while she was drawing, and purled peevishly in her ear that it would be nice to eat.

Monogamy had been effortless. Over nine years, Irina had been attracted to one of Lawrence’s colleagues from the Blue Sky Institute for exactly half an hour—at the end of which the man rose for another round of drinks, and she noticed that his backside was pear-shaped. That was that, like a scratchiness in your throat when you don’t end up coming down with a cold.

The period of solitary confinement while Lawrence was in Sarajevo had passed less painfully than most, but it is in the nature of the absence of pain that one fails to take note of it. Though she commonly prepared time-consuming meals for Lawrence without complaint, it was still festive to get out of fixing complete dinners with vegetables and grains. Alone, Irina had taken to skipping the whole nonsense altogether and working through the dinner hour. At around ten p.m., famished and pleasantly tired, she’d been downing a large, gooey slice of Tesco chocolate-cappuccino cake, whose very purchase was out of character; now on the eighth day of Lawrence’s Bosnian departure, she was on her third box. Later she played the sappy music that Lawrence detested—Shawn Colvin, Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos, all those girl singers recently in vogue who deployed excessive vibrato in the exaltation of gloom, or to declare brassily that they had no need for men and you knew they were lying. Unsmitten by Lawrence’s disapproving glare—his mother was an alcoholic—she’d been pouring herself a tiny nightcap before bed. Lawrence would never have countenanced cognac more than once a month. But he might have appreciated that the fumes of brandy swirled into heady reflections on how lucky she was to have found him, how eagerly she looked forward to his coming home.

In all, then, the week had been self-possessed. She’d allowed herself the little indulgences of the unwatched, including the gradual, contemplative incineration of a secret packet of cigarettes. But she’d made headway on her drawings, and a woman of Irina’s slight dimensions could afford a little cake. In two days, it was back to trout and broccoli, and she’d be sure to air the living room of its incriminating nicotine taint.

Thus when Irina woke that Saturday she was startled to discover that her smug self-possession had cracked like an egg. It was ridiculously late, after eleven, and she would normally arise by eight. Groggily she reconstructed that after that disquieting phone call with Ramsey, she had not, as she ought to have, cradled the receiver and flossed. There was, she recalled, a second brandy. In the kitchen, the chocolate-cappuccino cake was decimated. That’s right, she’d stood fretfully at the counter, slicing smaller and smaller pieces until there was nothing left. And oh dear, she had cranked up the volume of Little Earthquakes so high that a downstairs neighbour had arrived at the door in a bathrobe to complain. There would be hell to pay if Lawrence got wind of that, since he had only last month banged on the door below to get them to “put a lid on the salsa,” and he “didn’t mean the kind you dump on tacos, either.”

Befuddled, Irina put on the large stove-top espresso pot. Armed with a second cup, in the studio she could do no more with the half-finished drawing than stare. It was not possible to work. Clearly her finite reserve tank in Lawrence’s absence would last exactly eight days but not ten. Suddenly a whole lonely day and night and day again threatened only a debauched wooze of back-to-back fags, entire bottles of brandy, and endless fingerfuls of crass commercial icing whose main ingredient was lard.

Leaving for Borough Market, where she always shopped on Saturdays, she slammed the door resolutely behind her. Irina was going wobbly, and Irina had to be contained.

At the bustling covered market near London Bridge, the crowd was as ever abrasive with American accents. While it was irrational to bristle at the company of compatriots, one of the traits that Americans seem to share is a common dislike of running into one another in foreign countries. Perhaps it was having that mirror held up, reflecting an image so often loud, aggressive, and overweight. Irina didn’t have a big problem with being American herself (everyone has to come from somewhere, and you don’t get to choose), although, a second-generation Russian on her mother’s side, she had always presumed her nationality to have an opt-out clause. Maybe she winced a bit at the familiar skirl piping from Monmouth Coffees (“La-a-a-rry, they’re out of decaf Guatema-a-la!”) because she enjoyed the feeling of Britain being somewhere else, a sensation increasingly difficult to preserve in a town colonized by Pizza Hut and Starbucks. When she overheard another Yank inquire about the location of South-wark Street, with a hard R, it was hard not to feel tarred with ignorance by association.

On the other hand, out from under Lawrence’s influence, Irina sometimes indulged in what she privately termed mental kindness. The exercise had nothing to do with how she acted; as a woman who had grown up treated rather badly by classmates, she had developed a chronic horror of treating anyone badly herself. It didn’t have to do with what she said. It had to do with what went on in her head. There were merits to being nice in your mind—to hearing a fellow American mispronounce Southwark and deliberately choosing to think, Why don’t Brits cut us a little slack? Americans would never expect a Londoner to know that Houston was pronounced Hyooston in Texas, but Howston in Manhattan. Surely that beat grumbling sotto voce, “You stupid twat.” Of course, you could empathize or denounce your heart out within the privacy of your thoughts, and neither improve anyone’s day nor injure their feelings. Still, Irina was convinced that what went on in her mind mattered, and silently cast strangers in the gentlest possible light as a discipline. If nothing else, internal generosity made her feel better.

Mental kindness was not a concept she had shared with Lawrence, who was more apt to indulge in the likes of mental laceration. He was awfully hard on people, especially anyone he considered of inferior intelligence. His favourite word was moron. That harshness could be contagious; Irina had to guard against it. However, she should really exercise mental kindness first and foremost on Lawrence himself.

For one thing, Lawrence liked to keep his life simple, restricted to a few close friends and mostly to Irina, period—who had extravagantly benefited from admission to his tiny pantheon of the beloved. Scornfulness was a form of population control. Since you couldn’t invite the whole gamut of your acquaintances from your vegetable seller to your plumber for tea, you needed a filter. It just so happened that Lawrence’s filter was made of very fine mesh indeed.

For another thing, Lawrence was a genuine example of what was once standard-issue in the States but had latterly become an endangered American type: the self-made man. Lawrence clung fiercely to his condescension because his fingernails were sunk so precariously into the cerebral heights of a lofty British think tank. His upbringing was anything but intellectual. Neither of his parents had more than a high school education, and growing up in Las Vegas was hardly propitious preparation for earning a doctorate in international relations from an Ivy League school. A childhood of crass casinos had left him with a terror of being sucked back—into a world of lengthy debates over the quality of the eggs Benedict at the Bellagio. So all right, he was scathing, and sometimes had to be encouraged to give other people a break, to emphasize their finer qualities and to forgive their flaws. But it behooved her to see Lawrence’s tendency to pillory as itself such a flaw, and worthy of her own forgiveness.

She purchased Italian black kale, smoked boar sausage, and a malicious fistful of chilies from flirtatious vendors who didn’t know her name but had come to recognize her face. All too aware that going through the placid paces of marketing was slapping a superficial gloss of normalcy over an alarmingly unstable foundation, Irina also bought an armful of rhubarb to keep herself gainfully occupied when she got home.

Restored to the flat, she set about industriously constructing two rhubarb-cream pies, one for the freezer and one for Lawrence’s homecoming. She increased the recipe’s measure of nutmeg by a factor of five. A reserved woman of moderate inclinations to all appearances, Irina expressed an insidious attraction to extremes through decorative matters like seasoning, and few diners at her table suspected that her flair in the kitchen owed largely to a better-than-average mastery of the multiplication table. Fortunately, the fiddly lattice tops concentrated a mind that kept fragmenting like the fine strips of crust. Her hands weren’t precisely shaking, but they moved in spasmodic jerks, as if under strobe. (That cognac—surely there hadn’t been a third?) Lawrence wasn’t coming home a moment too soon. She strained against it on occasion, but maybe she needed his stern regimentation and sense of order. Without Lawrence, Irina would obviously turn overnight into a chain-smoking, cake-hoovering, brandy-addled hag.

The pies came out beautifully, the egg and sugar bubbling through the lattice into brittle browned hats, the acidic sting of rhubarb spiking the air throughout the flat, but pastry only saw her through to about five What’s more, while the pies were in the oven, she did something she very rarely got up to in the last few years, since Lawrence anyway, and once the pies were cooling, she did it again.

Six o’clock. Irina wasn’t prone to dithering over her appearance; most of her clothes were offbeat secondhand items from Oxfam outlets, for during their tenure here London had officially topped the charts as the most expensive city in the world. Ordinarily allowing fifteen minutes to dress was ample. Two hours was ridiculous.

Yet this evening, allowing a mere two hours was cutting it close.

The bed grew heaped with discarded blouses. Flailing in and out of frocks, she recalled a charming project from a few years ago titled I’ve Nothing to Wear!, about a little girl who hurricanes through her entire wardrobe one morning, flinging outfit after outfit from her chest of drawers. Lines from the book returned: “I do not like the button holes, I do not like the collar! If I wear the polka dot, I’ll bawl and shriek and holler!” The narrative arc had been predictable (big surprise, the little girl finally chooses to wear the first thing she’d put on), but the clothing flying through the air had a Futurist energy, and the illustrative opportunities had been rich.

Yet contrary to feminine convention, Irina was striking pose after critical pose in the full-length bedroom mirror with an eye to looking as dowdy as possible. While early in this melee she had toyed with the notion of the pale blue sleeveless that last year had threatened to keep Ramsey in their living room all the way to breakfast, she’d immediately chucked the idea. Was she insane? Instead she rummaged through the wardrobe’s nether regions for the longest skirts, the crummiest fits, and the least becoming colours she could find. Alas, Irina didn’t own a lot of ugly clothes, a lack she’d never before had occasion to rue.

This exercise in perversity was a waste. Ramsey was sure to select a ritzy restaurant where her few flashier garments would not look out of place. Lawrence always wore the most slovenly gear he could get away with, and on the few occasions she dared to don something chic he grew flustered: “It’s only a Blue Sky cocktail party. No need to make a big deal out of it.”

Calling time in this sartorial musical chairs, the intercom buzzer blared. Like a kindergartner lunging at the nearest empty seat, she was stuck with the outfit she had on: a straight-cut navy skirt that did reach nearly to the knee, though with that ubiquitous latex sizing its cling to her hips was woefully snug. At least the short-sleeved white top didn’t expose bare shoulders; better still, multiple launderings had worn a small hole in the neckline, lending the outfit a satisfying shabbiness. In fact, the ensemble was gloriously dull. Blue and white had the sexless connotations of sailor suits or high school football colours, and she fisted her dark hair into a hasty ponytail without using a comb. However, slipping into the only shoes that would go, she was exasperated to note that the high-heeled white sandals—broken down, ten years old if a day—tightened her calves and emphasized her slender ankles. Nuts, she concluded. I should have worn slacks.

Determined that she would not have him up for a drink, she grabbed the receiver and shouted, “Be right down!” and clattered out the door.

Out front, Ramsey stood propped against his opalescent-green Jaguar XKE, smoking a cigarette. Irina wouldn’t, of course, encourage anyone to smoke, but the habit suited him. On the phone his silences gaped, but in person he could fill the gaps with reflective exhalations. Leaning but perfectly straight, Ramsey himself resembled a snooker cue set against the car; his limbs reiterated the same attenuated taper. Saying nothing—what was wrong with the man?—he took her in as she strode from the step, inhaling the image along with a last drag. Flicking the half-smoked fag to the gutter, he sidled beside her without a word, ushering her to the passenger seat. His hand hovered near the small of her back but never quite touched her waist, as a parent keeps an arm at the ready with an unsteady toddler who wants to cross the room without help.

Nestled into the bucket seat not even having said hello either, Irina was visited by a sensation that she’d first experienced in high school, after her mother—grudgingly—had acceded to braces, and the hateful hardware had come off. It had taken a long time for it to sink in that boys suddenly seemed to find her a draw, and in truth this elevation of status from over twenty-five years ago had still not sunken in. Still, there had been certain evenings like this one, when she would be ushered into a young man’s car. The feeling was not of being attractive precisely, but rather of not having to entertain. It was breathtaking: to be ensconced in another person’s company, yet to be relieved of the relentless minute-by-minute obligation to redeem one’s existence—for there is some sense in which socially we are all on the Late Show, grinning, throwing off nervous witticisms, and crossing our legs, as a big hook behind the curtains lurks in the wings. Hands clasped calmly in her lap as the Jaguar surged from the kerb, staring serenely ahead as it lurched to a stop at the light, Irina realized that right at this moment the fact of her presence alone was its own redemption. Though she’d agonized over how to carry a conversation with Ramsey Acton, he was already exuding the purr of the supremely contented, giving every indication that he would remain just as contented for the rest of the night should she continue to say nothing.

“Sushi?” he asked by the third intersection.

“Yes.” It was marvellous: she needn’t defer graciously to whatever plans he had made, or effuse about how Japanese was just the thing. Yes would suffice.

As the Jaguar thrummed over Blackfriars Bridge, Irina unwound her window. The air was the temperature of bathwater whose heat was beginning to fade, but still warm enough for a lingering soak. The midsummer evening was light. Lambent vermilion flared in the windows of tall buildings and made the whole city look on fire. Stained glass flamed in St. Paul’s, as if the Nazis had successfully bombed the cathedral after all. Sheets of incendiary sunlight flashed across the Thames, like an oil slick to which some rascal had touched a match. Meanwhile, the Jaguar communicated every little bit of gravel to the bucket seat like a pea to a princess.

“These days, everyone wants to drive so high up,” she said at last. “Those SUVs. When I was growing up, all the cool people tucked down as close to the road as possible.”

“I’m yesterday’s man in every way,” said Ramsey, “if you believe my press.”

“If they mean your taste in cars, I’m all for it.”

Commonly she didn’t give two hoots about cars. But she liked this one—that it was a classic from 1965, but unrestored, with its leather upholstery well worn; that it was valuable rather than merely expensive. Ramsey’s driving was aggressive, full of accelerating thrusts and sudden downshifts. In contrast to the delicate articulation of his body, a refinement in his face, a social deference or even shyness, and a conspicuous fluidity of motion, all of which legislated toward a subtle collective effeminacy, Ramsey drove like a man. Although his rash weavings in and out of lane and close shaves with adjacent bumpers would ordinarily have made her edgy, the manoeuvrings were precise, boldness twinned with calculation perfectly replicating the authority with which he negotiated a snooker table. She trusted him. Besides, if Irina theoretically believed that modern women should be independent and forceful, all that, the truth was that old-fashioned passivity could be sumptuous. Total abnegation of responsibility presented the same appeal of sleep, and the ecstasy of surrender helped to explain why once a year, for fifteen minutes a go, Irina fell in love with her dentist. If the active deliciousness of being ferried about and paid for was little observed of late and potentially on the way to extinction, it was all the more intoxicating for being retrograde.

“So what you done today?” asked Ramsey.

“I made pies,” said Irina festively. “They’re therapeutic.”

“Why’d you need therapy?”

“When Lawrence is away … I can get a bit out of kilter. You wouldn’t think it, but I have another side, and—it has to be controlled.”

“What happens when it ain’t?”

Silence best implied that they were both better off not finding out. “So what did you do today?”

“I practised a bit, but mostly agonized all afternoon over where to take you to dinner.” From most men this would have been flattering horseshit, but Ramsey had a funny naïveté about him, and was probably telling the truth.

“Are you satisfied with your decision?”

“I’m never satisfied.” As he tossed his keys to a parking attend ant, Irina waited for Ramsey to open her door. The queen-bee routine wasn’t like her, but sometimes acting out of character was like breaking out of jail.

The Japanese would put the emphasis of Omen on the second syllable, but the name of the restaurant still exuded a foreboding. Omen was small and exclusive-looking, their table more exclusive still, up a few steps at the back and on its own. If Irina had dreaded being cooped up with Ramsey in the mortifying coziness of her own flat, Omen’s premiere seating was no less claustrophobic. When Ramsey reached to pull the curtain, Irina asked could he please keep it open, “for air.” With an expression of perplexity, he obliged. They’d only read through the starters when a young man skipped up the stairs to their table, clutching a menu.

“Oi, Ramsey!” the young man whispered, as one feels compelled to in Japanese restaurants. “Could you give us an autograph? That’s right, just across the top there, like.” He had slid his menu beside Ramsey’s chopsticks.

“No problem, mate.” Ramsey withdrew a slender gold ballpoint from his inside pocket; everything he owned seemed to reiterate the taut, sleek design of his body, and the signature itself was spidery, like his fingers.

“Blinding! Pity about that kick in the Embassy,” the fan commiserated. Given Ramsey’s involuntary wince, the “kick” must have been in the teeth. Leave it to strangers to blunder across your raw nerve. “Would’ve had the frame and match as well!”

“Everybody gets kicks,” said Ramsey, shrugging fatalistically about the tiny grains of chalk that can send the cue ball veering off its trajectory. What an odd profession, in which one can be undone by a speck.

“Cheers, mate!” The fan waved his menu, which Omen would now forgo, and nodded cockily at Irina. “You snooker blokes get all the lookers! What’s left for us?”

“That’s why you wanted to close the curtain,” said Irina. This wasn’t the first time that Ramsey had been hit up for an autograph when they’d been on the town, and usually Irina had found the adulation fun. Just now, she felt possessive of his company during an evening that had recently yawned before her, and now seemed short.

“Too late; cat’s out. Jude, now—she hated autograph hounds something fierce.”

“The interruption?”

“That bird not only hated snooker fans, she hated the idea of snooker fans,” he said, wiping his hands on a hot towel. “To Jude, snooker players were like schoolboys who can stand ten-p pieces on their end at lunch. Fair play to them, and no harm done, but you don’t ask for their autograph.”

The waitress took their orders; feeling extravagant, Irina added à la carte additions to the deluxe sashimi platter of sea urchin and sweet shrimp.

“If Jude thought snooker was trivial,” Irina resumed, “why did she marry you?”

“I’d money and stroke, and she could hold my occupation in contempt. Best of both worlds, innit?”

“Didn’t she think it was nifty, you on TV, at least at first?”

“Yeah, no mistake. But it’s queer how the thing what attracted you to someone is the same as what you come to despise about them.”

Irina dangled a translucent slice of cucumber. “If Jude’s relationship to my illustrations is any guide, you’ve got a point. You do know what she said?”

Ramsey tapped a chopstick on the table. “I wager she wasn’t no diplomat. But you ever wonder if one or two of her observations weren’t spot on?”

“How could I think what she said was ‘spot on’ and still keep working at all?”

“She did think your composition was brilliant, and that your craftsmanship was class. But there was something, in them first few books, a wildness—it’s gone missing.”

“Well, you don’t just go put ‘wildness’ back. ‘Oh, I’ll add a little wildness!’ ”

He smiled, painfully. “Don’t get your nose in a sling. I was only trying to help. Making a hash of it as well. I don’t know your business. But I did think you was right talented.”

“Past tense?”

“What Jude was on about—it’s hard to put into words.”

“Jude didn’t have a hard time putting it into words,” Irina countered bitterly. “Adjectives like flat and lifeless are very evocative. She put her sniffy disapproval into action, too, and commissioned another illustrator for her preachy story line. I had to toss a year’s worth of work.”

“Sorry, love. And you was bang on—what we was talking about, it’s not something you can add like a pinch of salt. It’s not out there, it runs through you. Same as in snooker.”

“Well, I guess illustration isn’t as fun for me as it used to be. But what is?”

Her degenerative expectations seemed to sadden him. “You’re too young to talk like that.”

“I’m over forty, and can talk however I please.”

“Fair enough—you’re too beautiful to talk like that, then.”

Lawrence was wont to describe her as cute, and though Ramsey was a bit out of order the more serious adjective was refreshing. Self-conscious, Irina struggled with the oily strips of eel. “If I am, I didn’t used to be. I was a scrawny kid. Knobby, all knees.”

“What a load of waffle. Never met a bird what wasn’t proud of being skinny.”

“But I was also a klutz. Gawky, ungraceful. Do you think that’s boasting, too?”

“It’s hard to credit. Wasn’t your mum a ballerina?”

Irina was always amazed when anyone remembered biographical details mentioned years ago. “Well, not a performing one, after she had me. Which she never let me forget. Anyway, I disgusted her. I wasn’t limber. I couldn’t do splits or tuck my heels behind my head. I could barely touch my toes. I was constantly knocking things over.” Irina talked with her hands; with a smile, Ramsey moved her green tea out of reach.

“Oh, it was worse than that,” she went on. “I guess plenty of kids aren’t Anna Pavlova. But I had buck teeth.”

Ramsey angled his head. “Looks like a fine set of chops to me.”

“I don’t think my mother would have sprung for them, but luckily my father paid for braces. Really, my front teeth weren’t just a little crooked. They hung out of my mouth and rested on my lower lip.” Irina demonstrated, and Ramsey laughed.

“Well, you helped explain something,” he said. “You’re not—aware of yourself. You are beautiful, and I hope you don’t mind me saying so. But you don’t know it.”

Abashed, Irina reached for her sake cup only to discover that it was empty; she pretended to take a slug. “My mother’s much more beautiful than I am.”

“Even allowing that were ever true,” he said, signalling for another round of sake flagons, “you must mean she was.”

“No, is. At sixty-three. In comparison to my mother, I’m a schlub. She still works out on a bar, for hours. All on three sticks of celery and a leaf of lettuce. Sorry—half a leaf.”

“She sounds a right pain in the arse.”

“She is—a right pain in the arse.”

Their sashimi platters arrived, and the chef was such an artist—the spicy tuna was bound with edible gold leaf—that eating his creation seemed like vandalism.

“Me,” said Ramsey, surveying his platter with the same respectful look-don’t-touch expression with which he’d met Irina by his car, “I watch buff birds strut the pavement, first thing goes through my head ain’t, ‘Blimey, love a bit o’ that, ’ey!’ but, ‘Bloody hell, she must spend all day in the gym.’ I don’t see beauty; all I see is vanity.”

“Great excuse for skipping sit-ups: oh, I wouldn’t want to look ‘vain.’ ”

“No chance of that, pet.”

Irina frowned. “You know, something changed when that tin came off my teeth. Too much changed. It was sort of horrifying.”

“How’s that?”

“Everyone treated me like a completely different person. Not just boys, but girls. You’ve probably been good-looking all your life, so you have no idea.”

“Am I?”

“Don’t be coy. It’s like me pretending to be ashamed of having been skinny.” Worried that she was encouraging something that she shouldn’t, she added, “I only mean, you have regular features.”

“Grand,” he said dryly. “I’m overcome.”

“I’m convinced that decent-looking people—”

“I fancy good-looking better.”

“—All right, then, good-looking people. They haven’t a clue that how they’re treated—how much it has to do with their appearance. I even bet that attractive people have a higher opinion of humanity. Since everybody’s always nice to them, they think everybody’s nice. But everybody’s not nice. And they’re superficial beyond belief. It’s depressing, when you’ve been on the other side. You get treated like gum on somebody’s shoe, or worse, like nothing. As if you’re not just unsightly, you’re unseeable. Ugly people, fat people, even people who just aren’t anything special? They have to work harder to please. They have to do something to prove out, whereas when you’re pretty to look at you don’t have to do anything but sit there and everybody is plumb delighted.”

Irina wasn’t accustomed to talking so much. Early in that speech Lawrence would have interrupted that she had made her point, so enough already. When Ramsey said nothing to shut her up, he induced the little falling sensation of anticipating resistance and meeting none, like unexpectedly stepping off a kerb.

“Having buck teeth in junior high,” she rounded up unsteadily, “must be ideal preparation for getting old. For pretty people, aging is a dumb shock. It’s like, what’s going on? Why doesn’t anyone smile at me at checkout anymore? But it won’t be a shock for me. It’ll be, oh that. That again. Teeth.”

“Rubbish. You’ll still be ravishing at seventy-five.”

“Dream on, buddy,” she said with a smile. “But you—you have that telltale face of a boy all the girls were a-swoon over in high school. Grammar school,” she corrected.

“Hate to disappoint you, sunshine, but I didn’t go to grammar school. Secondary modern. I failed the eleven-plus.”

“That must have been painful.”

“I wasn’t fussed, was I? I aimed to be a snooker player. Jesus God, I bunked off school more than I went.”

“Still, I can see it. You were the kind of kid that the eyesores like me would all have hopeless crushes on from the back row, while you went out with the only girl in class who’d had breasts since she was ten.” The image came readily. Maybe it was the Peter Pan effect of playing games all day, but Ramsey still looked adolescent. Even his hair, turning less grey than white, gilded in candlelight to surfer-blond.

“I may have had my options,” he conceded. “But only in hindsight. In them days, girls scared my bollocks off. I’m thirteen, right? A bird named Estelle, a year or two older, takes me to her room and pulls her shirt off. I stare at her Beatles posters—anywhere but at her chest—mumble something about snooker practice, and scarper to the push-bike. I hadn’t a monkeys’ what I was meant to do.”

“You left her there, standing in her room, with her shirt off? I bet she loved that.”

“Seem to recollect she never spoke to me again.”

“But you figured it out eventually. What to do.”

“Matter of fact, I’m not sure I have done.”

“I could steer you toward a few birds-and-bees how-tos, but I should warn you they’re mostly targeted at ages five to eight.”

“To be honest, the most erotic memories of my life ain’t of shagging at all,” he reflected. “I did have a girlfriend in senior school, you was right about that. And she did have breasts, but they were small. Small and perfect. We was inseparable, and I wager the rest of the school assumed we was bonking our brains out. We wasn’t. Denise was tiny, and dark-haired, like you. Quiet. She spent every night she could get away at Rackers, the local snooker club in Clapham, watching me cane fellas twice my age for a fiver a frame. I’d give her the dosh to hold, and my coat, and she knew the signal for ‘the competition’s getting bolshie, so do a runner sharpish.’ She liked to chalk my cue.”

“Sounds metaphorical.”

“Well, there’s something to be said for getting your cue chalked, full stop, and not in any filthy sense. When I cleared up my last frame, I’d walk her home. She’d carry my case. I’d hold her hand. We always walked through Clapham Common and stopped midway at the same bench. We snogged there, for hours. It sounds innocent; I reckon it was. Them kisses, they were so endless, and each one so different … I wasn’t really busting to do anything else. I didn’t feel cheated. Though best nobody warned me that at sixteen I was experiencing the highlight of my erotic life. I still have dreams about Denise, and that bench on the Common.”

Irina felt the squirm of an emotion that she was reluctant to name. In the early days with Lawrence, they, too, had whiled away hours on the battered brown couch in her apartment on West 104th Street, giving each other mouth-to-mouth. But those memories had grown too precious. At some indeterminate point in perhaps the second year they lived together she noticed that they no longer kissed—really kiss-kissed, the way Ramsey meant, even if they still pecked good-bye. It probably wasn’t fair to blame it all on Lawrence, but Irina couldn’t resist the impression that he had stopped kissing her. They had a robust sex life, and it seemed insensible to focus on the deficits of sensory window-dressing. Yet lately when she watched actors smooching in movies, Irina felt a confusing admixture of alienation—what obscure anthropological custom is this, the pressing of lips?—and jealousy.

“Kissing,” she ventured wistfully. “It’s more emotional than sex, isn’t it? Especially these days, maybe it means more.”

“I’d not want to do down shagging, but snogging might be more fun.”

In the subsequent conversational lull, Irina bore down on her sashimi platter, now pleasantly vandalized. The creamy slabs of fish lolled indolently from her chopsticks, their fleshy texture indefinably obscene. The taste was clear and unmuddied, a relief after nine days of chocolate-cappuccino cake, whose clinging coffee icing left a residual sludge.

“So how long you been married?” asked Ramsey formally.

“Well, technically,” she admitted, nibbling a giant clam, “we’re not.”

Ramsey clapped his chopsticks to his platter. “But the bloke calls you his wife!”

“I know. He says he’s forty-three, and too old to have a ‘girlfriend.’ ”

“So he marries you, don’t he? Seems sloppy.”

“Lawrence hates pomp. Anyway, these days your only real security is good intentions. You can’t get married in the same way you used to, not since the advent of ready divorce. So it doesn’t matter. I know how he feels.”

“He adores you,” said Ramsey. “It’s one of the things I like about visiting you two. You and Lawrence, you’re like—Gibraltar.”

“What about you? Going to try again?”

“Figure I about packed it in.”

“Everyone says that after a divorce, and it’s always nonsense.”

“Fair enough. But it’s crap of you to try and rob me of such a comforting fancy.”

Her loyalty to Lawrence firmly reestablished, Irina could afford to be nosy. “May I take that to mean that you aren’t seeing anyone?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.”

There was no reason to be pleased. “But aren’t snooker players constantly hit on by groupies? Like Estelle, who drag you to their rooms and tear off their shirts?”

“It’s not as bad as football; snooker is massively a blokes’ sport. But it’s not so different to school. I got”—he paused decorously—“options.”

“Did Jude leave you feeling burnt?”

“Jude left me knackered. Nil was never enough. We buy a house in Spain; it should have been in Tuscany. I mean, good on her, she’s a bird what has high expectations of life, and that’s brilliant. Honest to fuck, it’s bloody brilliant. Still, when you’re bollixing them expectations—when all you got to do is walk into a room to make your wife want to top herself from disappointment—well, it wears you out. Can’t say as I’ve totally recovered.

“Jude got ideas of things,” he speculated. “When real life didn’t come across she kept trying to yank reality round to the idea ’stead of the other way round. Know what I’m saying? Snooker trains you out of that. After every shot, it’s a whole new frame. You live with the balls the way they lay, and not the way they were a minute ago when you had the whole break planned out. She’d an idea of what it would be like to write children’s books, which didn’t include rejections or crap sales or having to compromise with illustrators like you. You know, she pictured touring libraries and reading aloud to gobsmacked six-year-olds, all big-eyed with chins in their hands. Fucking hell, she should have played snooker, if that’s the sort of crowd she wanted. For that matter, I’m afraid she started out with a right unrealistic picture of living with a snooker player. The lonely humdrum of me being on the tour most of the year was a shock. So she rides me to come back to London between tournaments, meantime having worked up this notion of me, this airbrushed photo like, and then when I do what she asks and Actual Ramsey rocks up, she just acts ticked off.

“I reckon the short of it is,” he said, ordering a fourth round of sake, “it’s got to be perfect, or I’m not interested. Like you and Lawrence.”

For years Irina had imagined that only the presence of Jude and Lawrence had made it possible for her to while away so much as ten minutes at table with Ramsey Acton. Yet apparently since 1992 those two hadn’t been facilitating Irina’s tentative relationship to Ramsey. They’d been getting in the way.

Thus by their shared dish of green-tea ice cream, the occasion had taken on the quality of a school holiday. Lawrence would be appalled. If Lawrence were here, he’d have been nursing his single Kirin beer through his chicken teriyaki (he hated raw fish), frowning at Irina’s second sake, and by her third publicly abjuring that she had had enough; a fourth he’d not merely have discouraged but would have vetoed outright. He’d have been disgusted that she accepted an unfiltered Gauloise at the end of the meal, waving the smoke from his face and later recoiling from her breath in their minicab home—“You smell like an ash can!”—as if, had she forgone the fag, he would ever think to kiss her in the back of a taxi. It was nearly one, and he’d long before have pulled back his chair and stretched with theatrical exhaustion because it was time to leave. He wasn’t obsessed with germs, but she had a funny feeling he wouldn’t have liked the fact that she and Ramsey were sharing the same bowl of ice cream. Of this much she was certain: were Ramsey to propose to them both, as he did to Irina while she regretfully stubbed out her Gauloise, that they head back to his house on Victoria Park Road to get stoned, Lawrence would have dismissed the notion as preposterous. He might have smoked a bit back in the day, but Lawrence was a grown-up now, Lawrence didn’t do drugs of any description any longer, and that meant, ipso facto, that Irina didn’t do drugs, either.

Then again, Lawrence wasn’t here, was he? That was the holiday.

So what if she said yes, and then confessed to Lawrence on his return from Sarajevo that she had stumbled off to Ramsey’s to get stoned? He’d rebuke her for acting “juvenile.” He’d remind her that she always clammed up when she got high—recalling the last time they’d tried marijuana back in ’89 on 104th Street, when she’d gawked silently at the paisley wallpaper for three hours. Curiously, the one thing Lawrence would fail to observe would be that she was (or so it was said) a handsome woman; that while Irina was married in all but law, Ramsey had been divorced for eighteen months and had made a point of the fact that he was available; that going back to his house at this hour, to smoke dope no less, could therefore be dangerously misconstrued. Why was that the one thing that Lawrence would never say? Because it was the main thing. And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer.

Nonetheless, an acceptance of Ramsey’s outré invitation would emphatically entail keeping the end of their evening a secret from Lawrence. Though Irina had always considered secrets between partners perfect poison, she nursed a competing theory about small secrets. She may have sneaked a cigarette or two not so much because she enjoyed the nicotine rush itself, but because she enjoyed the secret. She wondered if you didn’t need to keep a few bits and pieces to yourself even in the closest of relationships—especially in the closest, which otherwise threatened to subsume you into a conjoined twin (who did not take drugs) that defied surgical separation. The odd fag in his absence confirmed for her that when Lawrence walked out the door she did not simply vanish, and preserved within her a covert capacity for badness that she had treasured in herself since adolescence, when she’d occasionally flouted her straight-A persona by cutting school with the most unsavory elements that she could find.

“Sure, why not?”

As she negotiated the steps from their nook in high heels, each stair took such acute concentration that putting one foot before the other was like reciting a little poem. Again, that hand hovered at the small of her back, not touching.

Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not having brought a jacket. One degree higher, and a skim of sweat might have glistened at her hairline. But at this precise degree, she required neither wrap nor breeze. Were there a word for such a temperature, there would have to be a corollary for the particular ecstasy of greeting it—the heedlessness, the needlessness, the suspended lack of urgency, as if time could stop, or should. Usually temperature was a battle; only at this exact fulcrum was it an active delight.

They strode the pavement a few millimetres closer than was quite the form. Fault, maybe nothing that evening had had anything to do with fault, but as for that short stroll down Charing Cross, she would feel sure in recollection that she was the one who’d walked fractionally too close to him.

Yet by the time the attendant retrieved the Jaguar, Irina was flustered. The easy flow of conversation in Omen had gagged to a dribble, their former awkwardness with each other restored in force. This was nuts. She’d had too much to drink (that was four large sakes). She couldn’t even remember what it felt like to get stoned, which precluded wanting to. She’d left the rhubarb-creams cooling on the counter, and needed to get the pies in the fridge. She was tired—or ought to be. Lawrence might ring; with no answer at two, he’d imagine something terrible had happened. Yet last-minute extrication would seem cowardly, and conclude Ramsey’s birthday on a note of rejection. Well, she could tell Lawrence if he rang that they’d hit one of those ludicrous traffic jams you found in London at the most improbable hours. Sometimes when you make a mistake, you just have to go with it.

The mood in the car was sombre. Rather than jaunting off to party, Irina might have been one of those rigid British kids of yore being dragged off to sit the eleven-plus, which could determine whether she ended up conducting heart-bypass surgery or scrubbing public toilets.

Most of Ramsey’s colleagues were raised in down-and-dirty enclaves like East Belfast, or the rougher bits of Glasgow. When snooker players from dodgy parts began to pull in winnings, the first thing they did was move out. But Ramsey was raised in Clapham, then properly rough-and-ready, but now a fatuous, self-congratulatory area full of pokey but surprisingly expensive terraced housing that would merit the label “twee.” Perhaps to maintain his proletarian street cred, once Ramsey had taken a few titles, the first thing he did was move to the working-class heartland of the Cockney East End.

Of course, you could hardly call it suffering. He owned a whole Victorian house on Victoria Park Road, the southern boundary of Hackney. Irina had been to the house a handful of times when collaborating with Jude, and it was here they had come to the verbal blows that severed the friendship. High on a kind of bloodlust, Jude had impugned a great deal more than Irina’s illustrations, castigating her for being such a “doormat” with Lawrence and deriding an enviable domestic contentment as “sleepwalking.” All because Irina had dared to suggest that Jude’s latest narrative, Big Mouth, was a little obvious (of her story—about a dog that barks all the time and no one can abide, until while he’s barking he inhales a tossed ball and can’t bark anymore, and then the whole family adores him—Irina had remarked, “Even kids will be able to tell that you’re just trying to get them to shut up”), not to mention illogical (“But Jude,” she had submitted tentatively, “if you inhale a ball you don’t stop talking, do you? You choke to death”). Jude had accused Irina of being “passive-aggressive,” a term widely misappropriated of late to mean “aggressive,” and cited her literalism about the ball as typical of the stodgy, hidebound universe that Irina had come to inhabit. As the Jaguar surged into the drive, the memory smarted.

Irina didn’t play the princess, and opened her own car door. Yet following Ramsey up the shadowy steps of his stoop still took on the sinister portent of a fairy tale, as if she were entering Oz or the castle of Gormenghast, where different laws applied, nothing was as it appeared, and the walls of libraries would fold back to reveal secret dungeons. She could hear the narrative of the last two minutes in that waltzing, emphatic cadence with which people compulsively read to children: Irina climbed the big steps to the tall man’s dark manor. The giant door creaked open and then closed behind her with a boom and a click.

Too late, the little girl remembered that her mother had warned her never, ever to get into a strange man’s car! True, Irina’s mother had never warned her not to go into a strange man’s house, especially when not safeguarded by her stalwart friend Lawrence. But that was because her mother had never imagined that her daughter was a moron.

The interior was still appointed with Oriental carpets and dark antiques, but some of the more valuable-looking pieces that Irina remembered were missing. For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep the past itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it. Here, a darker rectangle on the rug marked where the leather sofa once rested, and four deep depressions in the carpet evidenced the departure of a thick pink marble sideboard that Irina had once admired. Ghostly white squares on the cream-coloured walls hovered as the ultimate in abstract expressionism, whereas the original artwork that had once adorned the ground floor had been far more conservative. Yet Ramsey could afford to replace whatever Jude had made off with. Either he was attached to the image of himself as an ascetic, or keen to keep a grievance visually fresh.

Ramsey poured two generous measures of cognac. Jude having absconded with the sofa and armchairs, there was nowhere to sit. Said Ramsey, “Let’s go downstairs.”

Ah. The dungeon.

Irina trailed him to the basement. Ramsey switched on the lamp over his snooker table, which imbued the expanse of green baize and its gleaming mahogany frame with a sacred aspect, bathing the rest of the cavernous room in the subdued, worshipful glow of a cathedral. Dark leather couches lined his private parlour like pews, and Irina sipped gravely from her snifter as if from a communion chalice. This was the heart of the house, doubtless where Ramsey spent most of his time. The rack of cues caught the lamplight. A cabinet held dozens of trophies; in a row, six upright crystal runner-up platters from the World Championship grimaced across the top shelf like bared teeth. The walls were adorned with glassed posters of tournaments and exhibition games, from Bangkok to Berlin—décor that Jude had graciously allowed her ex to keep. Chances were that Jude had rarely ventured here, and Ramsey’s option on repairing downstairs had probably facilitated the marriage’s lasting a whole seven years. Irina felt admitted to a sanctum of sorts. The close, golden lighting, the otherworldly sumptuousness of the leather upholstery as she sank into it, and the plush, regal crimson pile under her sandals all enhanced the sensation of having entered a secret magic kingdom through a wardrobe or looking-glass.

Ramsey retrieved a medieval-looking wooden box. Though Irina had herself narrowed the distance between them on Charing Cross those few scandalous millimetres, he assumed a seat on the far opposite side of the couch, pressing into the arm. Reverently, he withdrew a packet of Swan papers, a one-sided razor blade, and a pewter pillbox, upending the box to spill its dark, dense lump onto the table before them. After slitting a Gauloise with the blade, he laid tobacco along a fag paper. Flicking his slender silver lighter, he wafted the hash over the flame, pinched a soupçon of softened resin, and sprinkled its grains evenly across the joint. The black specks dropping from his fingertips recalled dark potions that had sent Sleeping Beauty to her long slumber, or felled Snow White to the cold ground.

The joint he passed on to Irina, extending his arm since she was so far away, was exquisitely slim and uniform, tapering to a fine point. She acceded to two tokes, shaking her head strenuously when offered a third. Ramsey shrugged, and polished off the rest himself.

To whatever degree she had dreaded from Ramsey the long associative rambles that cannabis can induce, much less the whooping giggle-fits the drug seems to elicit only in movies, her foreboding was misplaced. Ramsey stood from the couch and proceeded to ignore her. He opened his case, assembled the cue, and centred a frame of balls. He broke delicately on the left-hand side. When he pocketed a loose red with a deep screw, the white cannoned into the cluster, scattering the reds into easy pickings.

Like the dope, the exhibition was juvenile. He’d asked her to his house, and had therefore some obligation to play the host. Dragging her to his basement for this display was the kind of childish bid to impress you should really have got beyond by forty-seven.

Be that as it may, Irina had only seen Ramsey play on TV, and in three dimensions the twelve-by-six-foot table yawned much larger than it appeared on screen. Up close, the accuracy of his shots, the surety of their selection, and the unearthly precision with which every pot set him up for the next ball seemed inhuman. As he swung from shot to shot, Ramsey’s black silk jacket wafted in the breeze from the open windows on the light well. The balls appeared to roll sweetly to their appointed pockets of their own accord, passing one another and missing by a hair, but never touching unless Ramsey planned to capitalize on the contact. The luminous balls as they swept the baize were mesmerizing; the colours seemed to pulse. The breeze lifted the fine hairs on Irina’s bare arms, the air once more neither warm nor cold. The marijuana resin seemed mild, and Irina wondered why she had let herself get so tied up in knots over the prospect of such a commonplace narcotic’s effects.

Ramsey had racked up another frame and Irina had taken an abstemious sip from her snifter, when—something happened. The dope, it turned out, was not mild. After only two tokes, it was not mild by a mile. The neutrality of the air gave way, and under the plain white blouse her breasts began to heat, like seat-warmers in expensive cars. Irina rarely thought about her breasts. Lawrence had cheerfully admitted that he “wasn’t a tit man,” and since her de facto husband never lavished them with any attention—never even touched them to speak of—Irina saw no reason to pay them any especial mind herself. Now they seemed to be rebelling against the neglect, for an infrared of her body would portray them in the molten vermilion that earlier that evening had flamed in the windows of St. Paul’s. Aghast, Irina was half-convinced they had begun to glow, and wrapped her arms across her chest, as she had the night before when risking, “When we talk, I feel naked” in Russian to Ramsey on the phone.

This feeling, of being wired with electric coils that some mischief-maker had switched on high, proceeded to spread. Her abdomen throbbed, sending waves of alarming warmth up to her diaphragm and down her thighs. Irina was chagrined. This was not a sensation that a decent woman had any business suffering in company. Though she conceded that her entire torso probably wasn’t blinking bright red like a railway crossing, she felt sure that her transformation from primly dressed illustrator to human torch would, in however insidious a fashion, begin to show.

Irina slowly turned her head to face the snooker table with trepidation, since in her untoward condition it seemed safest not to move a hair. Yet Ramsey appeared oblivious. His face was suffused with such restful concentration that she wondered if she’d done him a disservice; it looked bad, of course, like showing off, but surely this was just what he did when he got stoned, headed downstairs and shot practice frames, and this is exactly what he’d have done had Irina declined to come back to the house. He had yet to flick her sly, covert glances after a dazzling shot, to confirm that she’d been paying attention. After all, Ramsey’s faultless cuing had been heaped with all manner of praise since he was about eight years old, and it was not for his snooker game that he craved admiration. Funny that it had taken until this very moment to notice—and not in that clinical sense in which she had detailed it to herself before, the way a witness describes particulars like hair colour and height to the police, but really notice-notice—that Ramsey Acton was a rather striking man.

A quite striking man.

In fact, he was devastatingly—vertiginously—attractive.

It would not have been objectively apparent, although her eyes may have widened, bulged a bit, blackened in the centre. But however imperceptible its exterior manifestations, inside the turn she took was anything but subtle.

If Ramsey didn’t kiss her, she was going to die.

“Fancy trying a shot, to get the feel of it?” Ramsey proposed pleasantly, keeping the table between them. It was the first thing he’d said in half an hour.

As a girl, Irina had been wary of surly schoolboy cliques lurking down hallways, certain to make callous remarks as she passed that she had a face like a donkey. She’d experienced her share of test anxiety all the way through to university, and often blanked on answers she knew. She had tended to get fretful when boyfriends drove over the speed limit. Ordinarily she would be able to recall, albeit not at this moment, her anxiety that Lawrence wouldn’t ring again after the first time they’d slept together. In her professional life, she was all too familiar with the inclination to put off opening a publisher’s envelope, which might contain a clipped request that she please collect the fruits of six months’ labour from their crowded offices without delay. In London, she had been through her share of IRA bomb scares in the tube, though after so many hoaxes the chances of blowing up then and there had always seemed distant.

Point being, like most people, Irina was no stranger to fear. She knew what other people were referring to when they used the word. But until 2:35 on the sixth—nay, now the seventh—of July 1997, she may never before have been seized by raw, abject terror.

Summoned, Irina obeyed. Her will had been disconnected, or at least the petty will, the small, bossy voice that made her put dirty clothing in the laundry basket or work an extra hour in her studio when she no longer felt like it. It was possible that there was another sort of will, an agency that wasn’t on top of her or beside her but that was her. If so, this larger volition had assumed control. So eclipsing was its nature that she was no longer able to make decisions per se. She didn’t decide to join Ramsey at the table; she simply rose.

As she negotiated her way to Ramsey’s side, her sense that at any moment she might fall over did not seem to have been occasioned by high heels, hash, or cognac. The precariousness of her balance was in her head, like an inner-ear disorder. Apparently aircraft pilots can grow so discombobulated that they have no idea which direction is up or down. Especially before the advent of navigational instruments, many a pilot in a fog had turned his nose into a dive and ploughed straight into the ground. Even in today’s era of reliable altimeters, an amateur can still grow so convinced of his internal orientation that he defies the readout on his panel and flies into somebody’s house. When one cannot trust so primitive an intuition as which direction is up, surely one’s moral compass was equally capable of fatal malfunction.

As she drew towards Ramsey—whose figure was now traced by a thin, white edge, as if scissored from a magazine—the whole evening snapped into place. He had taken deliberate advantage of the fact that Lawrence was out of town. He had dazzled her with fine dining, and slyly introduced racy, sexual stories from adolescence. He had got her drunk, for centuries a grammatical construction beloved of women who are loath to take responsibility for doing the drinking. In kind, he had got her stoned. He had lured her to his house, where he put on a display of prowess at his snooker table that she might be blinded by his celebrity status. And now this “fancy trying a shot?” gambit took the biscuit. Ramsey, naïve? It was Irina who was naïve, a flighty, airheaded fool who was dropping into her seducer’s arms like an apple from a tree.

The revelation of Ramsey’s chicanery came too late. She couldn’t take her eyes from his mouth, and those grey-blue irises of a wolf, which Betsy had assured her that Ramsey was not. Standing sacrificially at his side, Irina presented herself for slaughter.

He handed her a cue off the rack, saying, “I’ve set up a shot, that red to the centre pocket.” Irina thought, You’ve set something up, buster, that is for damned sure.

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.”