This was not a journey that Irina McGovern had ever expected to take. However firmly resolved to keep her skirt zipped, she wasn’t fooling herself. She was taking the train to cheat.
With no explanation over the loudspeaker, the train lurched to a standstill. Sitting for fifteen minutes under a quarter-mile of rock was so commonplace on the Northern Line, the city’s worst, that none of the passengers bothered to look up from their Daily Mails. In relation to the eccentricities of Underground “service,” regular riders would have long since passed through the conventional stages of consternation, despair, and long-suffering, and graduated to an imperturbable Zen tranquility. One could alternatively interpret the passengers’ expressions of unquestioning acceptance as sophisticated, or bovine.
Yet the train gave Irina literal pause. First Ramsey and now this very carriage was insisting, You have to stop.
Unbidden, a memory tortured from a few years before, when she and Lawrence has been sharing their traditional bowl of predinner popcorn. Recently moved into the Borough flat, they weren’t yet in the habit of grabbing blind handfuls in silence in front of the Channel 4 news.
“Obviously, there are no guarantees,” she’d mused, searching out the fluffiest kernels. “About us. So many couples seem fine, and then, bang, it’s over. But if anything happened to us? I think I’d lose faith in the whole project. It’s not that we’ll necessarily make it. But that if we don’t, maybe nobody can. Or I can’t; same difference.”
“Yeah,” Lawrence agreed, tackling the underpopped kernels that she’d warned him could damage his bridgework. “I know people say this, and then a couple of years later they’re raring to go again, but for me? This is it. We go south? I’d give up.”
The feeling had been mutually fierce. For Irina, Lawrence had always been the ultimate test case. He was bright, handsome, and funny; they were well suited. They’d made it past the major hurdles—that ever-rocky first year, Lawrence’s professional foundering before he found his feet at Blue Sky, several of Irina’s illustration projects that never sold, even moving together to a foreign country. It should be getting easier, shouldn’t it? Coming up on ten years, it should be a matter of coasting. They’d worked out the kinks, smoothed out serious sources of friction, and their relationship should be gliding along like one of those fancy Japanese trains that ride on a pillow of air. Instead, with no warning, they had jolted to a dead stop between stations, to stare out windows black as pitch. Overnight, their relationship had converted from high-tech Oriental rail to the Northern Line.
Why hadn’t anyone warned her? You couldn’t coast. Indeed, her very sense of safety had put her in peril. Ducking into that Jaguar in a spirit of reckless innocence, she wasn’t looking over her shoulder, and it was the unwary who got mugged. That was exactly how she felt, too. Mugged. Clobbered. She might as well have taken that rolling pin on Saturday afternoon and bashed her own brains in.
Unceremoniously, the train shuddered, chugged forward, and gathered speed. Her respite, the Underground’s graciously sponsored interlude for second thoughts, drew formally to a close. These other passengers had places to go, and couldn’t wait indefinitely for a lone, well-preserved woman in her early forties to get a grip.
If Lawrence was indeed the test case, and thus to go terminal with Lawrence was to “lose faith in the whole project,” she was hurtling through this tunnel toward not romance, but cynicism.
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 meager resistance she had put up to streaking toward 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 PLAY. “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. Maybe she’d been lucky. Lawrence hadn’t remarked on her chin, or detected white wine on her breath. They’d polished off two bottles of sauvignon blanc, while Ramsey had insisted on playing her a flecked video of some famous 1985 snooker match on his flat-screen TV in the basement—which could not compete with the sport on his couch. Though she’d only managed a bite of the smoked salmon and beluga, the fish might still linger, and she’d cadged more than one of Ramsey’s Gauloises. Not taking any chances, Irina brushed her teeth. It wasn’t her custom to brush her teeth at seven p.m., but she could always claim to have burped a little stomach acid or something. Discouragingly, even when you didn’t want to get good at this sort of thing, you got good at it anyway.
It wasn’t like Lawrence not to sniff out the wine. He had a nose like a hound. That meant he may have noticed her chin, too, and the hint of smoked fish. In the living room, his concentration on Jon Snow was excessive.
“I’ll have the popcorn in a minute!” she said brightly from the doorway. “And for dinner, how about pasta?” She’d forgotten to take the chicken out to thaw.
“Whatever.” One more report on mad cow disease could not have been that compelling. The British government had been slaughtering those poor animals by the tens of thousands for months.
“I could make the kind with dried chilies and anchovies that you especially like!”
“Yeah, sure.” He looked over and smiled, gratefully. “That would be great. Make it hot. Make it a killer.”
Pasta was far more than she need have offered. He was already accepting crumbs.
5
THE BEDCLOTHES WERE SEDUCTIVE, but, with Lawrence up, the swaddling lost its appeal. The dream eluding capture had been unsettling—something about the Beatles in her bedroom, mocking her undersized breasts. Lawrence would sometimes let her sleep in, but whenever Irina arose and found him away to work she felt dolorous and cheated. So she crawled out of bed. Even if they didn’t chat much in the morning, percolating side by side without having to talk was its own pleasure, and it was nice to begin the day as a team.
After trotting off to buy a Telegraph, she yawned back to the kitchen in painter’s pants and a soft, floppy button-down, entering into the clockwork of their morning routine. Some people found the infinite iterations of home life tedious. For Irina, its rhythms were musical; the shriek of the grinder was the day’s opening fanfare. She welcomed a refrain to which she could almost hum along: the gurgle and choke of the stove-top espresso pot, the roar and strangle of the steamer wand as she whipped the milk to froth. If duplicating the same proportions every morning lent her coffee preparation an inevitable monotony, she wouldn’t opt for too little milk just because making her coffee badly was different. There was nothing tiresome about having established that, because Lawrence liked his toast on the dark side, the ideal setting on the toaster was halfway between 3 and 4. The properties of repetition, she considered, were complex. Up to a point, repetition was a magnifier, and elevated habit to ritual. Taken too far, it could grow erosive, and grind ritual to the mindless and rote. In kind, the pound of surf, depending on the tides, could either deposit sand on the shore, or wear it away.
While Irina was not averse to variety—sometimes the coffee was from Ethiopia, others from Uruguay—overall, variety was overrated. She preferred variation within sameness. If you were voracious for constant change, you ran out of breakfast beverages in short order. She had some appreciation for folks with a greed for sensation, who were determined, as an old boyfriend used to say, “to squeeze the orange” and press fresh experience from every day. But that way lay burnout. There were only so many experiences, really—a depressing discovery in itself—and surely you were better off trying to replicate the pleasing ones as often as possible.
Furthermore, she reflected, steaming the milk with her signature teaspoon of Horlicks malted-milk powder (which rounded the edge off the acid), that impression of “infinite” repetition—of having coffee and toast over and over and over, numbingly into the horizon—is an illusion. Boredom with routine is a luxury, and one unfailingly brief. You are awarded a discrete number of mornings, and are well advised to savor every single awakening that isn’t marred by arthritis or Alzheimer’s. You will drink only so many cups of coffee. You will read only so many newspapers, and not one edition more. You glory in silent communion with your soul mate at the dining table a specific, quantifiable number of times—so inclined, you could count them—before, wham, from one calamity or another at least one of you isn’t there anymore. (Not so long ago, Irina had feared a falling-out, one that would shake her faith in “the whole project,” but that anxiety had been latterly eclipsed by the more powerful fear that Lawrence would die. Thus a growing sense of security in one realm begot an accelerating sense of menace in another, one in which “the whole project” was jeopardized in a more absolute regard.) Whenever Irina
read those listings in news articles, of how many meals the average person totals over a lifetime, how many years he spends sleeping, how many individual instances he will go to the loo, she was never dazzled by all those digits, but humbled by their paltriness and finitude. According to the actuarial average, this was one of only seventy-eight summers that she was likely to sample, and forty-two were dispatched. It was shocking.
“Been out all last week,” said Lawrence through his toast. “Work’s really piling up. I’m going to have to get a move on.”
“Don’t bolt your food!” she chided. “And if you drink your coffee too fast, you’ll burn your throat. Why not take it easy, read a few pages of The End of Welfare?”
“I concentrate better at the office.”
“Wouldn’t you like another piece of toast? It’s that gorgeous loaf from Borough Market, and it doesn’t last. Eat it while it’s fresh.”
“Nah,” said Lawrence, wiping the crumbs from his mouth. “Gotta go.”
“Did you see this mad cow article?” Irina was shamelessly trying to keep him home a few minutes longer, as she’d once wrapped around her father’s ankle when he had another six-week shoot to coach movie dialogue in California and was trying to get out the door. “Now that the price of mince is down to 49p a pound, beef sales are starting to soar. Have you read about what CJD is like? But never mind risking a long, slow death as your brain turns to sponge if you can save a quid or two on dinner. It doesn’t make any sense! At £1.39, nobody will touch the stuff because it might kill you, but at 49p no problem?”
“Pretty good deal! How about hamburgers tonight?”
“Not on your life. We’re having chicken.”
Irina saw him to the door, and managed to stall his departure with more small-talk until she bid Lawrence a reluctant do svidanya.
The Post-Birthday World Page 11