The Post-Birthday World. Lionel Shriver

      She steered clear of the telephone at first, relishing the opportunity to think straight, or if not straight at least alone. Besides, Lawrence could always come back, having forgotten something, and she wouldn’t want to have to explain to whom she was speaking. By nine-thirty, her timing was poor, but Irina couldn’t be bothered with the niceties of Ramsey’s night-owl hours when her whole life was falling apart and that was his fault.

      “Hallo?”

      Irina deplored callers who failed to identify themselves. “Hi,” she said shyly.

      The silence on the other end seemed interminable. Oh, God, maybe what was for her an exotic journey on a magic carpet was for Ramsey a casual grapple on the rug. Maybe he really was the ladies’ man the magazines made him out to be, and she should hang up before she made a bigger fool of herself than she already had.

      A sigh broke, its rush oceanic. “I’m so relieved to hear your voice.”

      “I was worried I’d wake you.”

      “That would involve my ever having got to sleep.”

      “But you didn’t get a wink the night before! You must be hallucinating.”

      “Since I let you go—yeah. I been worried I am.”

      “I started to worry that—that for you, it didn’t mean anything.”

      “It means something,” he said heavily. “Something shite.”

      “… It doesn’t feel shite.”

      “It’s wrong.” What he must have intended as emphatic came out as helpless.

      “Strange,” she said. “Not long ago, I’d have been able to conjure your face pretty easily. Now I can’t remember what you look like.”

      “I can remember your face. But there’s two of them. A Before and After. In the After, you look like a different person. More beautiful. More 3D. More complicated.”

      “I’ve been feeling that way,” she said. “Unrecognizable, to myself. It’s not all to the good. I liked looking in the mirror and having some idea who was staring back.”

      Despite a nominal sexual rectitude, they had already developed the long, thick silences of lovers—those characteristic pauses whose laden dead air has to carry everything that has nothing to do with words. Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.

      “Did you tell him?”

      “I promised you that I wouldn’t.”

      “I know, but did you tell him anyway?”

      “I keep my word.” With every second of this phone call, she was breaking her word. How confounding, that her hasty promise to Ramsey already weighed more than a decade’s worth of implicit vows to Lawrence.

      “I cannot—” He stopped, as if consulting a crib sheet. “Because of the snooker and that, you may’ve got the wrong end of the stick. But I don’t fancy anything tatty. With me, it’s all or nothing.”

      “What if it were all, then?”

      “You got Lawrence.” His voice was stone. “You’re happy. You got a life.”

      “I thought I did.”

      “You got to stop. You didn’t know what you was doing. You got too much to lose.” The lines were dull and empty.

      “I can’t stop,” she said. “Something has taken hold of me. Did you ever see Dangerous Liaisons? John Malkovich keeps repeating to Glenn Close, ‘It’s beyond my control.’ He’s almost sleepwalking into a catastrophic relationship with Michelle Pfeiffer, like a zombie or a drug addict. It’s beyond my control. It’s not supposed to be an excuse. Just the truth. I feel possessed. I can’t stop thinking about you. I’ve always been a practical person, but I’m having visions. I wish I were exaggerating, or being melodramatic, but I’m not.”

      “The film, I’ve not seen it,” he said. “Does it end well?”

      “No.”

      “Sure there’s a reason the film came to mind. What happens to the bird?”

      “Dies,” Irina admitted.

      “And her bloke?”

      “Dies,” Irina admitted.

      “Tidy. In real life, love, it’s messier than that, innit? I think it’s worse.”

      “There is, in the movie,” she said, struggling, “a certain—lethal redemption.”

      “Outside the cinema, you can forget your violins. It’ll kill you all right, but you’ll still be left standing. Trouble off-screen ain’t that you can’t survive, but that you do. Everybody survives. That’s what makes it so fucking awful.”

      Ramsey had a philosophical streak.

      Irina had an obstinate one. “It’s beyond my control.”

      “It’s up to me, then.” The gentleness was forbidding. “I got to stop it for you.”

      Irina was glad she’d skipped breakfast, because she suddenly felt sick. “I don’t need anyone looking out for my interests. Lawrence has been doing that for years, and now look. I don’t need taking care of.”

      “Oh, yes you do,” he whispered. “Everyone does.”

      “You can’t make me stop. It’s not even your right.”

      “It is my responsibility,” he said, capturing Malkovich’s robotic tone in the movie he’d not seen. “I can see that now. I’m the only one can stop it.”

      Her tears were mean and hot. This was robbery. What she had discovered in that basement snooker parlour belonged to her.

      “You said—yesterday.” His temporal reference jarred. Their parting seemed months ago. “I woke something up in you. Maybe you could take what you found with me, and bring it to Lawrence. Like a present.”

      “What I found with you,” she said, “was you. You are the present. In every sense. My ‘waking up’ with all three of us in bed together might feel crowded.”

      “Nobody said anything about bed.”

      “No one had to.”

      “We’re not doing that.”

      “No,”