The Post-Birthday World (15 page)

“I wonder why
that
would be.”
“He’s such a purist about loyalty. If I ever allow that I’ve been attracted to someone else, he’ll slam the door in my face. And I’d destroy his friendship with Ramsey. I don’t think I can say anything without being sure what I want to do.”
“Lawrence is a good man, Irina. They’re thin on the ground.
Think twice.
”

“You’re panting!”

door with his back, Ramsey massaged her fingers with his own.
“I ran. We don’t have much time.”
“Get in here, pet, you’ll catch your death. Your hands!” They crossed the threshold, hips locked like freight cars. Closing the

It was a minor malady, and common: Raynaud’s disease, which sent the small blood vessels of the extremities into spasm at even moderately cool temperatures. Now that September had kicked in, the problem had returned. When it was diagnosed, Lawrence had suggested, for working in the studio during the day, a pair of fingerless gloves.

Not bad advice. But when she’d explained the ailment to Ramsey at Best of India last week, he’d instinctively reached across the table, working the corpse-cold flesh until its temperature conformed to the touch of a live woman.

A minor distinction, or so it would seem. Lawrence came up with a technical solution, and Ramsey a tactile one. But for Irina the contrast was night-and-day. Oh, she’d rarely complained. Big deal, she got cold hands; there were worse fates. Lawrence had even bought her those fingerless gloves, which helped a bit. But on some winter nights out her hands got so stiff that she couldn’t turn the front-door key, and she’d have to knock with her foot. Yet not once had Lawrence massaged her fingers with his own until they warmed. He was a considerate man, ever drawing her attention to up-and-coming publishers, and she never lacked for little presents, sometimes for no occasion at all. But she didn’t first and foremost crave professional advice, or thoughtful trinkets. She wanted a hand to hold.

“Brandy?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t,” she said, accepting a snifter. “I was on edge at dinner, and went through a bottle of wine like seltzer.”

As usual, he led her to the basement, where they nestled onto a leather couch with the light over the snooker table switched on. The expanse of green baize glowed before them like a lush summer field; they might have been picnicking in a pasture.
“I feel awful,” she said. “I told Betsy about us, and—”
“You oughtn’t have told her.”
“I had to tell someone.”
“You oughtn’t have told her.”
“Betsy can keep a secret!”
“Nobody keeps another git’s secret like they do their own—and most people can’t keep them. Not even you, pet, if tonight’s a measure.” He sounded bitter.
“I can’t talk to Lawrence. You’re hardly objective. If I didn’t confide in someone I was going to go mad.”
“But what’s between you and me is private. You’re turning what we got into dirt. What secretaries titter about over coffee. It’s soiling.”
“It’s soiled anyway.”
“That ain’t my fault.”
“It’s mine?”
“Yeah,” he said to her surprise. “You got to decide. I might keep up with this carry-on, against my better judgment. If it weren’t for one thing. Irina, love—
you’re making a horlicks of my snooker game.
”
Irina wanted to pitch back,
Oh, so what?
but she knew better. “What do I have to do with your snooker game?”
“You’ve spannered my concentration. I’m lining up a safety shot, and all what’s running through my head is when you’ll ring. Instead of rolling snug up against the balk cushion with the brown blocking the pack, the white ends up smack in the middle of the table on an easy red to the side pocket.”
“Oh, what a tragedy, that your practice game is off, when I’m repaying the kindest man in my life with duplicity and betrayal!”
Ramsey withdrew his arm coolly from around her shoulders. “The very kindest?”
“Oh, one of the kindest, then,” she said, flustered. “This isn’t a competition.”
“Bollocks. Of course it’s a competition. Naïveté don’t suit you, ducky.”
“I hate it when you call me that.” The way Ramsey pronounced the anachronism (nobody in Britain these days said
ducky
outside West End revivals of
My Fair Lady
), it sounded like anything but an endearment. She hugely preferred
pet.
The northern usage may have been equally eccentric, but it was tender, and—pleasingly—she’d never heard him address as
pet
anyone but her. “I have so little time. We shouldn’t waste it fighting!”
Ramsey had retreated to the far end of the couch. “I told you from the off. I ain’t into anything cheap. We been sneaking about for near on three months now, and that’d be three months longer than I ever mean to smarm round behind a mate’s back and roger his bird.”
“But we haven’t—”
“Might as well have. I had my arm up your fanny to the elbow.” (In Britain,
fanny
was not part of the anatomy that one would pat affectionately in public.) “Tell that to Anorak Man and ask if it really matters that it ain’t my dick. Fifty-to-one odds he’d not shake my hand for being so respectful, but punch me in the gob. It’d be a fair cop as well. I’m bang out of order, I am, and so are you.”
Irina bowed her head. “You don’t have to try so hard to make me feel bad. I feel awful already, in case you were worried.”
“But I don’t
want
you to feel shite, do I?
I
don’t want to feel shite. I don’t want to think of you leaving here tonight and going to bed barearsed with another fella. I don’t want to and I don’t have to and I
won’t.
”
Irina had started to cry, but Ramsey made a show of hardness, as if her tears were a gambit. “If I was a bird, I’d be fancied a right mug. Letting some more or less married bloke mess about with me during the day. But I’m a bloke, so instead I’m a Jack the Lad. Hand in the knickers, and it costing me no more than the odd chardonnay.
“That’s the way your man in the street thinks, but it ain’t the way I think, darling.
I
think I’m a right mug. You slink in here and rub up against my trousers like a cat itching her backside on a post, and then it’s, Blimey, look at the time! And you nip out the door again—leaving me with the post. I got no moral objection to self-abuse, but it’s well short of a proper good time.”
“You shouldn’t talk about us like that,” she sniffled. “Or me like that. It’s ugly.”
“We been making it ugly! Bugger it, woman!” Ramsey socked a fist into his opposite palm.
“I want to fuck you!”
Despite her miserable curl at the far end of the sofa, Irina felt a twinge, as if he had her on a string, and could tug at the tackle between her legs like a toy on wheels. Thus her pride at his declaration was dovetailed by resentment. It was all very exhilarating to have conceived a consuming infatuation against the placid backdrop of her reserved relationship with Lawrence. But there was no opting out; she could not nibble at sexual obsession when it suited her. The craving was constant, and with Ramsey now removed by three feet even the brief deprivation was unbearable. “I want to fuck you, too,” she mumbled morosely.
“You treat me like a rent boy! It’s been long enough. You rubbish me, and you rubbish us. You rubbish yourself. If you’re right and Lawrence ain’t twigged yet, you can nip back to your happy home and stay. Or you can get your bum into my bed and stay. You cannot have him and me both. ’Cos I am shattered. I am half demented. Waiting for you to show tonight, I couldn’t pot the colors on their spots, and I could pot the colors on their spots standing on a fruit crate when I were seven.”
“Three months may seem like an eternity to you, but I’ve nearly ten years with Lawrence at stake here. I have to be sure of myself. There’d be no going back.”
“There ain’t never no going back! In snooker, you learn the hard way that every shot is for keeps. I got no time for prats who hair-tear about
Oi, if only I’d not used quite so deep a screw on the blue.
Well, you didn’t. You potted the blue, or you didn’t. You’re on the next red, or you ain’t. You live with it. You make the best call you can in the moment, and then you deal with the consequences. Right now, it’s your visit. You’re in amongst the balls. You got to decide whether to go for the pink or the black, full stop.”
“Is Lawrence the pink? Because I don’t think he’d appreciate the color.”
Ramsey looked unamused.
“Sorry,” she continued with a nervous smile, “it’s just,
Reservoir Dogs
is one of his favorite movies, and there’s this scene where Steve Buscemi whines about why does he have to be ‘Mr. Pink’ . . . Oh, never mind.”
“I’m entered in the Grand Prix next month,” said Ramsey levelly. “I got to get tournament ready, and I got to be able to concentrate. In the best of all possible worlds, I’d ask you to come with me to Bournemouth. But that’s obviously a nonstarter.”
“Oh, but I would love to—”
“I mayn’t have made world champion,” he plowed on, “but I been in six championship finals, and got an MBE from the Queen. That mayn’t mean much to a Septic Tank”—he had taught her Cockney rhyming slang for
Yank
—“but it does mean something to me. I won’t be treated like a bauble by a bird who’s snug as a bug with another bloke but needs a bit of buzz. And I won’t play in a bent match. I’d never have played a single frame if I knew from the off that the trophy was pledged to another fella.”
The monologue had all the earmarks of a rehearsed speech. But Irina was starting to get a feel for Ramsey, and she didn’t think so. He was a performer, and his game was the soul of spontaneity. This show had taken an improvisational turn at her imprudent outburst about betraying “the kindest man in her life”—though her more considerable imprudence may have been impugning the paramount importance of
snooker.
Impetuously, he had gone with the turn and kept going. His voice sounded measured; the discussion itself was out of control. She could already sense where this was leading, and her cheeks drained. It was all she could do to keep from leaping across the sofa to clap a hand on his mouth.
“I don’t want to see you again before the Grand Prix,” he said. “And that’d be no love notes neither, nor blubbing on the blower. When I come back to London, I only want you to rock up on my doorstep if you told Lawrence you’re in love with me, and him and you is finished.”
If Ramsey was being melodramatic and had had a fair bit to drink, his it’s-him-or-me ultimatum made unpleasantly good sense. Yet he couldn’t resist taking his levelheaded proposal that one step further that would make it hasty, foolhardy, and scandalously premature: “And that ain’t all,
ducky.
When you leave Lawrence, if you leave Lawrence, you don’t tuck in upstairs as me in-house personal slag.
You marry me.
Got that?
You marry me,
and toot-sweet. At forty-seven, I got no use for long engagements.”
As proposals go, this one was less bended-knee woo than assault. His delivery had been cruel, his clear intention to make what was already a terrible choice only the more stark. There would be no “trial separation” from Lawrence, no sampling of Ramsey’s wares like one of those small squares of Cheshire at Borough Market with no obligation to buy. On the other hand, no man had ever asked Irina to marry him before, in any tone of voice. His furious demand, flung at her from three feet like a wet rag, prickled the back of her neck.
“Ramsey—I didn’t even marry Lawrence, after nearly ten years.”
“I rest my case.”

On return to the flat, Irina made little effort to disguise the fact that she’d been crying. Since it was past midnight in a town with cosmopolitan pretensions but provincial transport, the tube was shut. Flaunting the coldness of his newfound absolutism, Ramsey hadn’t rung her a cab, but had abandoned her on his stoop to make her way home however she saw fit. The

handshake
at the door was the limit, instigating such a torrent of sobs on her flight from his house that when she finally flagged down a taxi on Grove Road the cabbie had to ask her to repeat the address three times.

Ramsey was not the only one inclined to make a show of his indifference. Failing to comment on her puffy red eyes, Lawrence said stiffly in the living room, “It’s late.”

“I missed the tube. Took forever to find a taxi.”

“You, spring for a cab? Since when do you not look at your watch every five minutes to make sure you can catch the last train?”

“Time got away from me. It’s a Friday night, and the minicabs were all booked up, so I had to wait.” As long as she was lying, she might as well go all the way, and disguise the fact that she had hailed one of those exorbitant black taxis off the street.
“Why didn’t you call to let me know you’d be so late? I might be worried.” He didn’t sound worried. He sounded as if he’d have gladly paid a hoodlum to biff her over the head on the way home.
“Finding a working pay phone would have delayed me even longer.” Her delivery was fatigued, and her heart wasn’t in this.
“If you rang a minicab,” said Lawrence, “you’d already found a working pay phone. And that’s assuming that
Betsy
didn’t have her cell.” His pronunciation of
Betsy
cast doubt on whether Irina had seen the woman at all. Apparently one of the sacrifices of lying, however selectively, was the ability to tell the truth.
“Okay, I just didn’t think of it when I had the chance. I’m inconsiderate.” She added lamely, “Still, maybe it’s time we broke down and bought mobiles.”
“Yeah, that would be great. I could call you, or you could call me, and I’d have no idea where you were, and you wouldn’t have to tell me.”
Irina let the crack slide, as if stoically allowing a spewed gob of spittle to drizzle down her cheek. “If you must know the real reason I’m so late, we had a fight. Betsy and I. It took some sorting out.” The amount of effort required to concoct this transliterated excuse was stupendous, and she wondered why she bothered. It was nearly two a.m. and for an ordinary girls’ night out an improbably long evening.
“What about?”
Irina searched her conversation with Betsy for some scrap to throw him like a bone, but could find little to salvage. “I won’t bore you, it was stupid. But you should know that Betsy’s a big fan of yours. She thinks you’re wonderful.”
“Glad somebody does.” Lawrence got ready for bed.