The Post-Birthday World (61 page)

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“I just met Ramsey’s parents for the first time,” said Irina, twirling the stem of her wine glass. “They were nice—very British and civilized. But I’ll tell you what was hilarious: they don’t talk like Ramsey at all. None of this South London

d’ya fink?
and
baffroom
and
I kant do it, neever.
Perfectly BBC. His father is a history professor at Goldsmiths College, and could practically stand in for Paxman.”

“So was Ramsey’s accent put on?”

“Oh, I don’t think so, not put on. Learned, is all.”
“Yeah,” said Lawrence. “I bet it doesn’t help you in snooker, with
the

lads,
to sound like Jeremy Paxman.”
“Still, what’s heartbreaking?” she said. “I bet it would have meant a
hell of a lot more to Ramsey if they’d skipped his funeral, and come to
one World Championship final.”
Their storied restaurant so enticingly around the corner from the
church, Irina and Lawrence had slipped off after the service for a quick
drink at Club Gascon. Otherwise Lawrence would have melted away,
since some things don’t change; he still hated social occasions of any description. So she’d been unable to cajole him into attending the big memorial do later that afternoon.
“Are you sure?” she’d pressed. “Stephen Hendry, Ronnie O’Sullivan,
John Parrot—all the snooker stars will be there.”
“Nah,” he’d said. “I’m not family or a close friend; I’d just feel uncomfortable.” It had been nice of him to come to the funeral, though.
Ramsey would have been touched.
“What do you think’s behind all that?” he wondered. “The parental
standoff?”
“Oh, I guess they warned him if he dropped out of school and pursued
this absurd snooker lark he’d ruin his life. Then he ends up on TV for
thirty years. Some people just can’t stand to be wrong. You should know.
You’re not that different.”
“Hey, did you get a load of Jude?”
Irina laughed. The sensation was such a relief that it also served as a
reminder that she hadn’t been doing much laughing for quite some time.
“I know! God, what a drama queen! All that sobbing and flopping about!
Anyone looking on would have thought she was the widow, and not an ex
he divorced eight years ago.”
“She’s a pill,” said Lawrence, with a viciousness that used to bother
her so much, and now seemed strangely sweet. “Using somebody’s death
as an occasion to draw attention to yourself is totally low-rent. Hey, do
you want something to eat?”
“With the memorial thing . . . We don’t have time, but thanks.” He squinted. “You’re too thin.”
“Well. You can imagine, with everything . . . You know, the last several months . . . Baking rhubarb-cream pies hasn’t been at the top of my
agenda.”
“I guess you’ve had a pretty hard time.”
“Yup,” she said. “I have.”
Of course, this week she’d been ragged. For the living, death is thievery, and she’d suffered a householder’s outrage just as surely as if someone had busted in and stolen her stereo. But there were respites. Just
now she felt tranquil, reflective. There was something to this mortality
business. It made life seem so big and sad and strange. Funny, how the
most glaring fact staring you in the face from the crib had a tendency to
slip the mind. For most of her life, she’d had to drag it out for contemplation from time to time as a discipline, the fact that everybody dies. So funerals were an opportunity of sorts, sitting you in the pew to face the
music. Too, she was so happy to see Lawrence. They’d not met for such a
long time. The feeling between them had an unexpected repose, an improbable ease.
“Ramsey,” said Lawrence. “He was all right.”
“Ramsey,” said Irina, “was what I would call a
lovely man.
You’re what
I would call a
fine man.
”
“Oh, I don’t know how fine,” he said, looking away.
“No, you are,” she insisted firmly. “A
fine man.
An interesting distinction, don’t you think?”
“So what do women prefer? For their men to be
fine
? Or
luuuuvly
?” “Oh, whichever a woman ends up with, she’ll wonder if she wouldn’t
rather have the other.”
“I’m afraid I said a few things about Ramsey along the way that I feel
bad about now.”
“You had your reasons.” She patted his hand. “Don’t worry about it.” Touching him, however briefly, felt foreign, yet this was a man with
whom she had had sexual intercourse for years. But when you split, you
rammed intimacy into reverse. She’d seen him pee thousands of times,
but now if he went into the loo and it was just the two of them, she bet
he’d close the door.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever admitted this to you outright,” said Irina.
“I’ve always wanted you to think of me as ambitious—you know, a serious professional and all. And I do—or I used to, and I suppose I will
again—enjoy what I do, and try to do it well. But the truth is, there’s
only one thing I’ve ever really wanted more than anything else, and it
isn’t professional success. I could live without that. The only thing I can’t
live without is a man. That must sound dreadful, out in the open! But at
the risk of sounding gormless, I wanted true love that lasts. I think even
growing old could be interesting so long as I got to do it alongside someone else. I wanted companionship. Maybe not to the last dying breath;
someone has to go first. But at least into my seventies? The thing is—I
thought that was a modest ambition. I thought setting my sights that
low, I had some chance of getting what I wanted. And now even with so
meager a goal, I’ve failed it. I can bear being on my own, don’t misunderstand me. It’s
okay.
But I didn’t think I was asking that much, Lawrence.
Especially since I was willing to make a compact with the universe that
I’d sacrifice everything else for it—money, fame, prestige; saving the world, finding a cure for cancer. So I feel cheated. All I asked was to stroll
into the sunset with a hand to hold, and I’m denied even that.” Lawrence had been through his own trial by fire, and the annealed
version was more thoughtful. He stroked his chin. “Maybe it
isn’t
a modest ambition. Maybe you were asking for the moon.”
She smiled. She liked him.
“Besides,” he added, “just because a relationship doesn’t last forever,
doesn’t see you to your seventies or to until you croak, doesn’t make it
meaningless. If it did, then everything would mean squat. What lasts
forever? Nothing and nobody. Look at us. I think we had a damned good
stretch together. That’s more ‘companionship’ than most people get.” She took only the tiniest sip of white wine. It was midafternoon, the
memorial do was bound to be boozy, and she’d been trying to keep a lid
on her drinking. “You know, the last few days it’s preyed on me. On average, women outlive men by six or seven years, right? Of course, it’s the
last thing you think about when you’re falling in love. But for a woman—
one of the most important things you choose when you pick a mate is
whom you’ll help die.
”
“I won’t need any help,” he said with a grin.
“Oh, yes you will. And I hope you get it.” She fought back the urge to
light a cigarette. Submitting to Lawrence’s scowling disapproval might
have been nostalgic, but she was trying to keep a lid on the fags, too.
“What I just told you. About wanting a partner above all else. Is that a
girl thing?”
“Nah,”
Lawrence dismissed with a sweep of his hand. “Men just won’t
admit it.”
“Thank you. I’ve always felt a little bad about it. Weak.” “It’s a good weakness,” he said heartily. For Lawrence to conceive of
any weakness as “good,” he must really have changed. “It’s the nicest
thing about you.”
In truth, she had also felt bad for quite a while about failing her own
high-flown romantic notions. For years she had loved Lawrence Trainer
and Ramsey Acton at the same time. That had seemed to cast suspicion
on the integrity of both affections, leaving each dilute. But perhaps instead she was doubly blessed, and her passion hadn’t been divided in half, but multiplied by two. After all, it had always been frustrating: if you put the two of them together—Lawrence’s discipline, intellect, and selfcontrol, Ramsey’s eroticism, spontaneity, and abandon—you’d have the perfect man.
“I’ve sometimes wondered whether it really matters all that much, whom you choose to live with, or to marry,” she mused. “After all, there’s something wrong with everybody, isn’t there? Ultimately, we all
settle.
”
“Oh,
it matters,
” he snorted readily.
“I should have asked you before. How’s it going with
Bethany
?” The italics were for old times’ sake.
He raised his eyebrows, then dropped them in defeat. “Not great.”
“I’m sorry.” She surprised herself with the sincerity of her regret.
“She sort of—moved out.”
“Sort of.”
“She thinks I’m stodgy.”
“You are stodgy. It’s adorable. You’ll be a grumpy, irascible old man.”
“I’m already grumpy and irascible.”
“So you’re precocious.”
Reluctantly, she signaled for the bill; she had to get going. The memorial gathering was all the way down in Clapham, at Rackers, Ramsey’s old snooker club. As they idled out the door, Irina asked, “How’s the terrorism biz?”
“You read the papers,” he said. “Thriving. How about you? Anything on the docket?”
“Oh, I’ve been thinking about moving back to the States. Leaving the ghosts behind.”
“Doesn’t always work,” he said lightly. “Ghosts sometimes follow you. I’ve been thinking about moving back to the States myself.”
Out in the summer air, in Smithfield Square, she treated herself to a good look at Lawrence—from some residual embarrassment, they hadn’t quite gazed at each other directly during this whole encounter—and took the measure of her feelings. She loved him, but that wasn’t good enough. The word
love
was required to cover such a range of emotions that it almost meant nothing at all. Since the love we distill for each beloved conforms to such a specific, rarefied recipe, with varying soupçons of
resentment, pity, or lust, and sometimes even pinches of dislike, you really needed as many different words for the feeling as there were people
whom you cared for in your life.
This love was unusually round. She loved all of Lawrence, as he was—
including his harshness with other people, his bad posture, his dependency on television, a pernicious emptiness that all those years together
she’d never been able to fill. At once, she sensed a slackening. Romantic
love is a taut rope, and in some respects a fight, for you are always thrashing against, if not the beloved per se, your own undignified enslavement
to someone else. It was possible that a different kind of love awaits, once
you’ve called the tug-of-war a draw—one that’s loose and kind and safe, a
love that’s relaxing and quiet and easy, like leaning back with a tall vodkaand-tonic and putting your feet up on a porch rail after an exhausting afternoon of sport. Yet it was equally possible that by at last embracing
Lawrence in his entirety, by no longer battling the many shortcomings
she would fix, by no longer being infuriated by the numerous regards in
which he failed an ideal, she had given him up.
“I don’t know why I have an urge to tell you about this, it was such a
long time ago,” she said at last. The silence had been making him nervous, and if she didn’t head him off he was sure to start chattering about
al-Qaeda. “But do you remember when you were away at that conference
in Sarajevo? You pushed me to have dinner with Ramsey on his birthday,
and I didn’t want to go.”
“Yeah, dimly. And?”
“There was a moment, that night. I was overcome with the desire to
kiss him. That may sound like a small temptation, but it wasn’t. I hadn’t
been given to kissing other men, or even wanting to kiss them. In fact, I
had the unshakable conviction, at that juncture, that I was facing,
strangely, the biggest decision of my life. Does that sound crazy? It’s
haunted me ever since.”
“Well. Did you make the right choice?”
“Yes,” she determined, with a little frown. “I think so.”

About the Author

LIONEL SHRIVER is the author of

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
We Need to Talk About Kevin
, the winner of the 2005 Orange Prize. Her other books include
Game Control
,
A Perfectly Good Family
, and
Double Fault
. She lives in London.
Also by Lionel Shriver
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Double Fault
A Perfectly Good Family
Game Control
Ordinary Decent Criminals
Checker and the Derailleurs The Female of the Species

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Designed by Mary Austin Speaker
JACKE T DESIGN BY MARY SCHUCK JACKE T ART © PETE MCARTHUR / VEER

Copyright

THE POST-BIRTHDAY WORLD. Copyright © 2007 by Lionel Shriver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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