The Post-Birthday World. Lionel Shriver
It was really rather wretched, thought Irina as she scuttled with trepidation from the Mile End tube stop up Grove Road, that you couldn’t will yourself to fall in love, for the very effort can keep feeling at bay. Nor, if last night’s baffling blankness on Lawrence’s arrival was anything to go by, could you will yourself to stay that way. Least of all could you will yourself not to fall in love, for thus far what meagre resistance she had put up to streaking towards Hackney this morning had only made the compulsion more intense. So you were perpetually tyrannized by a feeling that came and went as it pleased, like a cat with its own pet door. How much more agreeable, if love were something that you stirred up from a reliable recipe, or elected, however perversely, to pour down the drain. Still, there was nothing for it. The popular expression notwithstanding, love was not something you made. Nor could you dispose of the stuff once manifested because it was inconvenient, or even because it was wicked, and ruining your life and, by the by, someone else’s.
Even more than that kiss over the snooker table—and the proceeding eighteen hours had effectively constituted one long kiss—today she was haunted by that deathly moment when Lawrence had walked in the door and she felt nothing. Its disillusionment grew more crushing by the hour. She wasn’t disillusioned with Lawrence; it wasn’t as if the scales had fallen from her eyes and she could suddenly see him for the commonplace little man he had always seemed to others. Rather, with the turn of a house key, every romantic bone in her body had been broken. Her faithfulness and constancy with Lawrence had long formed the bedrock of her affection for her own character. This was the relationship that had been torn asunder. The weekend’s transgression had violated the fundamental terms of her contract with herself, and disillusioned her with herself. She felt smaller for that, and more fragile. She felt ordinary, and maybe for the first time believed the previously outlandish myth that like everyone else she would get old and die.
Yet as she advanced, a spell descended. Victoria Park had a fairy-tale quality, with its quaint, peaked snack-pavilion, its merry fountain splashing in the middle of the lake, the long-necked birds taking wing. Children patted the water from the shore. With every step through the park, the frailty that had hobbled her up Grove Road fell away. She felt young and nimble, the heroine of a whole new storybook, whose adventure was just beginning.
Moreover, as she drew closer to her turn onto Victoria Park Road, something alarming was happening to the landscape.
In 1919, on top of Copps Hill in Boston, a ninety-foot-wide storage vat for the production of rum burst its seams and sent 2.5 million gallons of molasses flooding onto the city. The wall of molasses rose fifteen feet high and reached a velocity of thirty-five miles per hour, drowning twenty-one Bostonians in its wake.
In much the same manner, a wave of engulfing sweetness was breaking over Victoria Park, lotus trees glistening with such a sugary gleam that she might have leaned over and licked them. The dark lake stirred deliciously, like a wide-mouthed jar of treacle. The very air had caramelized, and breathing was like sucking on candy. Without question, the vessel bursting its seams and coating the whole vicinity with syrup was that house.
Ascending the gaunt Victorian’s steep stone steps, she felt a stab of apprehension. As of her callous apathy when Lawrence walked in last night, Irina’s affections were officially unreliable. She was, after all, a shrew now, who shouted at hardworking wage-earners for wanting a piece of toast—a fickle harpy who took fancies one minute, and went cold the next. Ramsey had seemed all very fetching on Sunday, but this was Monday. There was no certainty that the countenance she confronted across this threshold would foster anything but more barbarous indifference.
Yet, today anyway, this apparently was not the case. That face: it was beautiful.
Slipping his long, dry fingers along the bare skin under her short-cut tee, he slid them round to the small of her back, where not long ago they had hovered so tantalizingly, not touching. She emitted a little groan. He swept her through the door.
She barely beat Lawrence home. The answer-phone light was blinking. Yanking a comb through her tangled hair, she pressed “Please hang up and try again. Please hang up and try again”—pleasant but insistent, the British female voice pronounced “again” to rhyme with “pain.” Through some peculiarity of Blue Sky’s phone system, this was the recording that consumed the full thirty-second limit on the machine whenever Lawrence rang up and didn’t leave a message. He seemed to have taken the woman’s advice. As “Please hang up and try again” droned in a demented nonstop singsong, she counted: he had rung five times.
Behind her, the lock rattled, sending her heart to her throat. “Irina?” It had only been a day, but he had already dropped the lilting addition of her middle name. “Hey!” He dropped his briefcase in the hall. “Where have you been all afternoon?”
“Oh,” she scrambled, “running a few errands.”
Wrong. People who have lived together for years were never “running errands.” She could have said she was at Tesco because they were low on Greek yogurt, or at the hardware store at Elephant & Castle because the lightbulb in the studio desk light had burnt out—that’s what you say to the man you live with. Because Irina knew all about the exactingly particular nature of domestic reportage, her failure to heed its form was tantamount to wearing a sandwich board that announced in big block letters, BEHOLD MY CHEATING HEART. Then again, she may have envied many a talent—her sister’s for ballet, Lawrence’s for politics. But a knack for duplicity? She didn’t want to get good at this.
“I thought you were all hot to trot to get some work done today.”
“I don’t know. It just wasn’t flowing. You know how that is?”
“Since you’re suddenly so secretive about your drawings, no I don’t know.” She followed him limply to the kitchen, where he fixed himself a peanut-butter cracker. His motions were jagged. Those five unanswered messages had stuck in his craw.
“Anything up today at Blue Sky?”
“It’s mooted the IRA ceasefire will be reinstated soon.” His tone was clipped. “But nothing that would interest you … What are you wearing that getup for?”
She crossed her arms over her exposed midriff, a style that seemed suddenly too young. “Felt like it. It’s started to bother me that I wear rubbish all the time.”
“Americans,” he snarled, “say trash.”
“I’m half Russian.”
“Don’t pull rank. You have an American accent, an American passport, and a father from Ohio. Besides, a Russian would say khlam, or moosr. Not rubbish, da?” When no longer trying to please, Lawrence’s Russian improved dramatically.
“What’s—” Yet another British expression, What’s got up your nose? would only rile him further. “What’s bothering you?”
“You took my head off this morning because you were so anxious to get to work. I called around ten, it was busy, and by ten-thirty you were already gadding about. As far as I can tell, you’ve been out all day. Have you gotten anything done? I doubt it.”
“I’m a little blocked.”
“You’ve never indulged in that arty-farty—rubbish. A real pro sits down and does the job, whether or not she feels like it. Or that’s what you used to say.”
“Well. People change.”
“Apparently.” Lawrence scrutinized her face. “Are you wearing lipstick?”
Irina almost never wore makeup, and wet her lips. “No, of course not. It’s been, you know, a little warm. Just chapped is all.”
When Lawrence left to turn on the Channel 4 news, Irina slipped into the loo to check her face. Her lips were a bruised cherry-red; her chin was rug-burn pink. Ramsey had needed a shave.