The Post-Birthday World (22 page)

This was Irina’s first live snooker tournament, and at first she missed the whisper of BBC commentary from urbane old-timers. There was a starkness to the contest unadorned with historical tidbits, its shots not foreshadowed with, “Oooh, this is a tricky one, Clive!” The sound of the game was so different, with all the wah-wah quiet, the empty space. But gradually as the second frame got under way she began to appreciate the purity of the exercise without a murmurous voice-over telling you what to think—why this shot is problematic, whether a player has got position on the pink. Absent chitchat, the reverberation of the balls echoed for seconds through the hall, and reds rattled in the jaws before tumbling into pockets with the suspenseful resonance of a drum roll. The competitors gliding about the table in total silence provided the game an atmosphere less of sport than of rite, like the mystical, unfathomable progress of Catholic mass when still conducted in Latin. Following the game was a more demanding business sans Clive Everton’s spoon-feeding. You had to pay more attention.

Irina was indeed having trouble paying attention. Lawrence’s face in the rain that morning constantly interposed itself—that devastating wobble, the weak waggle of his farewell wave.

On stage before several hundred spectators, Ramsey did not seem to belong to her in any but the most fractional sense. The crowd made her both proud of him for being such a star, and resentful of these strangers for making him one—since apparently he was a toy she would have to share. She could lay claim to such a parsimonious slice of the man that his very attractiveness became a torture.

What was she doing here? Having wandered off by herself to the south coast of England, she felt like an impetuous grade-school runaway—who, with no source of food and nowhere to sleep, grows rapidly aware that the whole project is wrongheaded, but who insists on plowing down the street with a stuffed bunny and fistful of Oreos until the cops scoop the kid into a cruiser. Maybe walking out this afternoon was an act of sheer bloody-mindedness, nothing more.

According to the monitor overhead, while she’d been drifting Ramsey had lost another three frames in a row. Irina forced herself to focus on the fifth frame. The pattern repeated itself: Ramsey built a substantial but less than consummate lead. Once the Rocket horned in, Ramsey spent the rest of the frame sipping Highland Spring.

Irina may have been in no mood for sport, but she gradually found the spectacle more engrossing. The two players’ styles so mirrored each other that the match seemed the supreme expression of Lawrence’s axiom that ultimately in snooker you “play against yourself.” For if Ronnie O’Sullivan had ever studied anything in his life (which was questionable), he had studied Ramsey Acton’s snooker game. Indeed, the match took on an Oedipal flavor, the son out to slay the man who sired him.

But in Oedipal contests, the younger contender reliably enjoys the advantage. Snooker was visibly fresher to O’Sullivan; he was more engaged by its vicissitudes, more gleeful over its command. By contrast, Ramsey looked faintly wearied by configurations that, although no constellation of snooker balls is ever, strictly, repeated again, he had broadly seen before—and before and before. His quiet, seemly satisfaction when a ball went in appeared subtly overshadowed by foreknowledge that there were more shots to come—more matches, more tournaments, more seasons—and the next mischievous sphere was not predestined to be so obliging. Wisdom and perspective are the compensatory comforts of old men, and little service the moment.

Thus Ramsey played fast; O’Sullivan played faster. Ramsey took on pots improbably long; O’Sullivan took on pots that were longer. Ramsey cracked in colors with the velocity of Mighty Casey at the bat; O’Sullivan upped the technological ante, and launched them to oblivion with the force of a particle accelerator.

Irina had given up trying to clap with extravagant pitch and pace to draw Ramsey’s eye; her seatmate’s concerned looks had made her selfconscious. The lighting on stage haloed the table and left the audience in murk; he couldn’t see her. She scrambled for a Plan B. Presumably access to Ramsey Acton would be as blocked after the match as it was beforehand in the lobby. How would she ever get him the message that the woman he loved was within arm’s reach? She’d no notion in which hotel he was staying, and that frosty booking agent was unlikely to volunteer an address.

At the interval, the score a discouraging six-two, the players retreated to their dressing rooms, and Irina dared to pipe, “Ramsey!” But he was too accustomed to hearing his name called from an audience, and disappeared without a backward glance.

It didn’t help that her seatmate was now convinced he had given away his extra ticket to a lunatic. As they both stood to stretch, Irina submitted with the lameness of the well-adjusted, “O’Sullivan’s really on fire tonight.”

“They say Ronnie’s got more natural talent than the game’s ever seen,” he said, and promptly fled.

Irina plopped back down with an eye-roll. She’d already heard this old saw about O’Sullivan two dozen times. Was this what her future held in store? Fielding snooker clichés and anodyne statements of the obvious night after night?
At least Ramsey’s assessments had more nuance. To wit, while the doughy World #1 Stephen Hendry and the slouching bad-boy Ronnie O’Sullivan might seem to vie for the title of Best Snooker Player Ever Born, Ramsey had observed that the two young men claimed distinctly different crowns. Where Hendry had mastery, O’Sullivan had inspiration; where Hendry went at the game like a job, O’Sullivan made it an art. Like a good schoolboy, Hendry seemed to understand the nature of geometry; like a riveting evangelical, O’Sullivan seemed to understand the nature of the universe. Hendry was all knowledge, O’Sullivan all instinct, and—however inexplicably—intuition is more captivating than intelligence every time. (Something clicked: no wonder Lawrence couldn’t abide O’Sullivan.) Yet as Ramsey and his reincarnation returned to the stage, Irina registered a sinister corollary: intelligence is reliable, and inspiration, with no warning, can fail you.
This time, Irina didn’t clap at all. She didn’t feel like it. She rested her hands in her lap, resignation lending her deportment a measure of repose. This whole Bournemouth mission was turning out a fiasco, and giving over to point-blank disaster was relaxing. After the anguish of leaving Lawrence and the chill scuttle to Waterloo with neither gloves nor toothbrush, under a Tinkertoy umbrella in the rain, she would probably have to find a hotel room in the area and curl on a cold mattress by herself. Ramsey was perfectly wretched about retrieving his phone messages.
Maybe it was the fact that alone in the audience she
wasn’t
clapping. Maybe Ramsey’s sixth sense switched on at last. Or maybe Ramsey finally took advantage of the interval to retrieve his goddamned voice mail. For whatever reason, he turned to look squarely at the second row, sighting Irina McGovern as if lining up a color with a pocket.
He smiled.
Now, in tournaments Ramsey smiled seldom. He was certainly not given to smiling when behind six-two and being roundly beaten by his own double. But when he deigned to, he transformed not only his countenance, but his whole surround, so that the snooker table at his side seemed illuminated not by lights overhead but by the refractive radiance of his tall, white teeth. It was not merely a smile of warmth, of kindness, of graciousness, as given his reputation you’d expect, but it contained an element of the zany, the manic, the alarming. It was not, entirely, a nice smile. It was anarchic—and now freshly festive with indifference. After spotting a certain someone in the audience, Ramsey Acton
couldn’t be arsed
whether he recouped his losses in this match, for it seemed that earlier in the day he had won a much more considerable contest.
Irina’s returning expression was mild, though it might have appeared, in its very gentleness, a little smug. She leaned back in her seat, which suddenly seemed more comfortable, and crossed her legs. Her seatmate, who’d been flapping his program in desperation to avoid talking to her, peeked at this erstwhile
bint
with new respect.
Ramsey’s demeanor on the dais eased like a raw egg spreading on a plate. The high-pitched vibration that had jittered off his figure through the first session lowered to a steady thrum. In defiance of his famous fleetness, his motions grew dreamy, almost torpid. Ronnie broke, but this time when one long if notionally pottable red emerged from the pack, Ramsey coolly ignored it. He played a safety instead, landing the white behind the yellow so snugly that he snookered Ronnie from every red on the table.
It was like that. Ronnie loved to play fast, so Ramsey dragged the pace to a crawl. Ronnie loved to pot, so Ramsey paralyzed the table with safeties. Once O’Sullivan’s rhythm was destroyed, Ramsey began to bait the cocky parvenu by leaving tantalizing but frankly ridiculous balls available that he knew the boy could never resist. Ronnie tried for each of these unlikely shots and missed. Ramsey’s masterful handling of not only the balls but of his opponent raised the question of whether Irina herself had been as astutely manipulated. If so, she could only admire him. Presently he was making his way about the table in the very same lithe, languid manner in which he negotiated her body.
In fact, by spotting her in the audience, Ramsey seemed to have discovered the female in the strategic respect. After all, when playing a younger, more vigorous revamp of your own game, you’re not going to beat it with the fatigued forty-seven-year-old version. Ramsey would never defeat O’Sullivan with power and aggression, but with guile—with feline deviousness and cunning. With the kind of snooker that O’Sullivan despised. With the kind of snooker that
Ramsey
despised: slow, boring, and sneaky. Since Ramsey knew his own game, he knew what was wrong with it. He knew that momentum players get tripped up when they have to keep rising from their seats only to play a single shot and sit back down. He knew that the one side of the game he himself had neglected to practice as a young prodigy was safety play, which he had odiously shoved down his own throat in middle age.
After losing four games straight in this frumpy fashion to level the score, Ronnie unraveled. He took on ever more ludicrous pots, and missed them more lavishly—while Ramsey grew only more coy. By the end of the session, it was Ronnie playing what Lawrence deemed “demolitionderby snooker,” cracking balls every which way but in the pockets. Manly snooker was held up to ridicule, and girly snooker, at nine-seven, won the day.
As the lights rose, Irina’s seatmate turned to her with a deferential nod. “So you’re mates with Ramsey Acton?”
Irina messed with her wet jacket. “I thought I mentioned that in the lobby.”
“So you did. Known him long, like?”
“Awhile,” she said vaguely. The young man’s sudden solicitousness was creepy. Lacking a powerful hankering after celebrity on her own behalf, Irina had an immeasurably small hankering after celebrity by association. She had no intention of plying scraps of inside gossip on Ramsey Acton the way some folks post letters from famous writers on eBay. Thus when her seatmate asked whether it was true that, having opposed Ramsey’s becoming a snooker pro from his childhood, his parents had refused to attend a single tournament, Irina didn’t parley, “Yes, and even at forty-seven that hurts his feelings,” but claimed to have no idea.
The audience dispersed. Minions collected programs and sweet wrappers, shooting her curious looks. Ramsey would be doing his interview with the BBC. Seat 2F was, as they say in the detective trade, her “PLS”— point last seen. Sometimes when two people are trying to find each other, the best thing one of you can do is stay put. She’d come a long way in every sense today, and the prospect of wandering the conference center and forlornly failing to intersect with a certain snooker player only to end up in a Novotel whose room service had cut off at ten p.m. was unbearable.
The wait provided the leisure to fret over her appearance. Not wanting to subject Lawrence to watching her dress up for having sex with another man, this morning she’d grabbed her black jeans, woven velour sweater, and black tennis shoes—all of which she’d been wearing the previous afternoon. Had been wearing, in fact, for three days running, so the clothes were stale. The jeans fit her all right, but their cut was unfashionable; the sweater was huge. Worse, the dark, morose outfit had gotten soaked in the London downpour, and had only dried to the point that it made her itch. Evaporation had given her a chill, and she couldn’t stop trembling. The clasp of her clammy hands looked jarringly pious. Grooming in public was frowned upon, but the urge to comb her hair grew obsessive.
She also needed to
get her head showered
in not only the literal but the colloquial sense. She needed to get a grip. She was waiting for Ramsey, but all she could think about was Lawrence. She wondered if he’d eaten anything. She wondered if he’d made himself popcorn, though he didn’t know the right oil-to-kernel ratio or the ideal flame setting on the range. She wondered if he’d changed clothes after standing out in the rain that afternoon. She wondered what it was like to walk out of a love nest, and back into a bachelor pad. Likely you didn’t think in trashy expressions like
love nest
and
bachelor pad.
She fought the impulse to find a pay phone and ring home—how could Trinity Street not still seem like home?—and ask if he was all right, or grant him official permission this of all nights to pour a stiff second drink. She wanted to blurt into the receiver that she loved him, which under the circumstances was inane, or even insulting.
Fifteen minutes passed. The ushers might have shooed her away, if not for a seized quality to this remnant in the second row—the weird clutch of her hands, that huddled posture of the homeless—which made her seem, if not dangerous, at least
difficult.
Unceremoniously, there he was. On stage. In the usual pearl waistcoat, though he’d taken off the bow tie. When he slung a black leather jacket over his shoulder, white-gold cufflinks caught the house lights. As her gaze rose, Irina realized that for her to be sitting alone in a deserted conference-center auditorium in Bournemouth, it was absolutely crucial that at this moment she be flooded with love. If she was not head over heels for this man, she had no business in this incongruous setting, far from another man whose heart this very night was breaking in two. So when she did meet Ramsey’s eyes, she checked and double-checked her reaction, like patting her coat pockets up and down in a gathering panic to find her wallet.
Pat-pat-pat. No wallet. He looked like a perfectly pleasant gentleman nearing fifty who just happened to be a total stranger.
With the same infuriating languor that had defeated Ronnie O’Sullivan, Ramsey headed for an aisle, and threaded down the row to sit beside her. He propped his long legs on the seat in front, and knocked his head back. He reached for and held her hand, sharing the armrest between them. His clasp was dry from cue chalk. He closed his eyes.
“Crikey,” he said. “Your hands are cold.”
“I forgot my gloves.” She propped her legs in parallel and stared at the ceiling.
Ramsey continued to recline, motionless, holding her hand but without squeezing or fiddling with her fingers. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was praying.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
“How can you tell? Your eyes are closed.”
“I can tell.”
“I look awful. I’m sorry.” The knot in her stomach loosened a bit. She’d been braced for a frontal assault, tongue-down-throat. Passive hand-holding was just right.
“I’m not in very good shape,” she said.
“I could see that. Straight away.”
“I’ve been wondering if I should be trying to catch the last train to London, actually.” Ramsey always made her say what she was thinking. Queer that felt so novel.
“Why aren’t you?”
“You’d seen me. I couldn’t.”
“Still can. I’ll give you a lift to the station if you like.”
“I don’t know if I’ve made the right decision.” It would take some time for it to come home that she might never know.
“Sounds to me like you ain’t made one.”
“Oh, I made one. I’m here, aren’t I?”
Ramsey opened his eyes, turning his head slowly toward her but keeping it rested on the seat, as if he knew that she could withstand introduction to the man with whom she was supposedly in love only by the smallest of increments. “Telling him—were it bad?”
“In some ways, not bad enough. Which made it worse.”
“Did he get angry?”
“Not at first. Later, but he’d earned that.”
“What’d he say when you clued him up it was me?”
“I think you’re off his Christmas card list,” she elided.
“I’ll miss him, a bit,” said Ramsey wistfully.
“Anorak Man.”
“I’ve never felt this way before,” she said. “I’m not the battered-wife type. But I really wanted him to hit me. Hard. It would have been easier.”
“Sounds like he hit you in other ways.”
“He hit me with the fact that he adores me, and that’s not the kind of violence you can hold against people. He’s a wonderful man. I guess I’d forgotten. This would be so much easier if he weren’t a wonderful man.”
“I’m a right wonderful man as well,” Ramsey reminded her.
“I know. It’s hell, frankly. And not fair. There are so few of you out there. I have an embarrassment of riches. It seems greedy. Other women would have every reason to feel resentful that I’m taking more than my share.”
Tentatively, she rested the hollow of her temple against the ball of his shoulder. His white shirt was damp; it must have been hot, under the stage lights. As if soothing a skittish animal, Ramsey curved his arm around her, resettling her head carefully into the crook of his neck. Then he paused, letting her get used to the contact the way you let an unbroken horse accustom itself to the weight of a blanket before you add a saddle.
“This is going to sound stupid,” she said into his stiff, open collar. “But I love him.” She had to tell someone, even the worst possible person.
“I know,” he said, and she admired more than she could say that he absorbed this without flinching, like taking a bullet for the president.
“I liked seeing you play,” she mumbled. “I’m glad you won.”
“I ain’t fussed either way.”
“But you’re only
not fussed
about winning when you win.”
He chuckled. “You got a good feel for this shite.”
“That was sly,” she commended, “the way you messed with O’Sullivan’s head.”
“He’s dead easy to read,” said Ramsey, closing his eyes again.
“Meaning he’s just like you?”
“Like I were.”
“Must have cost your pride,” she said. “All those safeties.”
“I passed Ronnie on his way out of his press conference. Looked at me daggers, he did. Said I ‘played like an old lady.’ ”
An air of normalcy permeated the chitchat, as if the two had been debriefing after snooker matches for years. Not that it felt ordinary. It just felt simple.