The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  While the afternoon session had been painful—fundamentally, Ramsey could not play—the evening one was mortifying. Irina had seen her husband’s game slip out of kilter; she had never seen him rude. Yet once O’Sullivan was up ten frames to nil, Ramsey grumbled something like “Poncy wanker!” Whatever he said, it drew a caution, and any more “ungentlemanly conduct” risked expulsion from the match. When O’Sullivan accomplished a remarkable break of 133, Ramsey didn’t quietly tap the edge of the table, snooker’s equivalent of tipping one’s hat, but rolled his eyes. Since O’Sullivan responded with table manners that would have wowed Amy Vanderbilt—always leaving the final black genteelly on the baize after a clearance—the two opponents had perfectly exchanged roles, as if Ramsey were ceding not only the final, but his soul. Higgins had defied the courteous conventions of the sport from arrogance; Ramsey would only defy them from self-loathing.

  Of the chaps in black T-shirts, only G and O made an appearance. After the interval, they had taken their own advice and gone.

  The carnival concluded, she knocked gently on Ramsey’s dressing room. This time he opened the door. He was still unkempt, but his face, ashen and lined, was somber. For all the theatrics with the Highland Spring bottle, it had surely contained no more than water.

  Ramsey said nothing. He let her wrap her arms around his rumpled waistcoat, and draped his own lifelessly around her back. She put her palm to his cheek, and assured him she’d be right back; she informed the reporters outside the door that Mr. Acton was indisposed, and there would be no postsession interviews. When she returned, Ramsey was still standing motionless in his dressing room. She fetched his coat from the couch, and held it out; he stuffed his arms numbly into the sleeves. There was something sinister about the fact that on the way to the limo, as she fended off thrust microphones, Ramsey put up not a word of ritual protest that even his wife was forbidden to lay a hand on the lovely Denise. But had she not remembered to pick up his cue herself, he’d have left it behind on the floor.

  Alas, the charade was not yet over. The final of the World Championship is best of thirty-five frames, a marathon traditionally played over four sessions and two days. That Sunday night, Ramsey allowed himself to be fed in their room, woodenly lifting the fork to his mouth like a grave-digger’s spade. He drank no alcohol, and plenty of water. He continued to say nothing. He got ten hours’ sleep, clutching Irina like a pillow, after which he showered, shaved, and ate a fortifying breakfast that he didn’t appear to taste. Methodically he donned his black slacks, white shirt, and pearl-colored waistcoat, all freshly cleaned and pressed by the hotel. His dickie-bow was perfectly horizontal.

  When he walked on stage for the afternoon session, no trace remained of his Alex Higgins impersonation of the previous night. His bearing was dignified, his comportment polite. The fact was that he played extremely well, more than holding his own by the interval at three frames to one.

  But the day before Ronnie O’Sullivan had made Crucible history by winning the first sixteen frames on the bounce. He needed only two frames out of the next nineteen to clinch the title. Of course, technically Ramsey could still win the championship. But before the interval he had lost the single frame that he could afford to, meaning that he would now have to take fifteen frames straight to prevail. Even in the most celebrated dark-horse victory in snooker, the legendary World final of 1985, the terrier Dennis Taylor had never lagged behind the purportedly unbeatable Steve Davis by more than eight frames.

  When the players emerged for the second half of the session, Irina could imagine the commentary that must have run on the BBC: grudging admiration from Clive Everton, who would have been deeply affronted by Ramsey Acton’s poor sportsmanship the day before, conceding that this afternoon Swish was “showing plenty of bottle.” Ramsey did not go quietly. His form was exquisite, his breaks substantial. There were no self-destructive bouts of braggadocio at the sacrifice of position. His safeties were calibrated, his snookers fiendish. He took three more frames in a row. He would give these fine people who paid money to see him an excellent show.

  But Ramsey was fifty years old. He was no longer quite the player he once was, and he had never been superhuman. In the session’s final frame, he barely missed a fantastically difficult yellow, and let Ronnie in. O’Sullivan cleared the table. Ramsey’s firm concessionary handshake, his sustained locking of eyes during which he even managed a smile, delivered a congratulations for Ronnie O’Sullivan’s first World Championship title that seemed as heartfelt as anyone could ask for. He was far too much of a pro to blub on camera, but his wife was close enough to detect that his eyes glistened.

  Though Ramsey Acton had defended his honor with a short-of-humiliating final score of eighteen-six, there would be no fourth session; ticket-holders for the evening performance could apply for free passes next year. So inexorable was this result that for the Monday afternoon session Jack Lance had not even bothered to come.

  THUS THE SPLENDID NEWS that Irina received within a fortnight of their return to Victoria Park Road could have been better timed. To her amazement, a jubilant call from Snake’s Head informed her that Frame and Match had just been short-listed for the prestigious Lewis Carroll Medal, an international award for children’s literature renowned for moving copies with its distinctively embossed gold sticker on the cover. She hadn’t a clue how her obscure volume had ever come to the attention of the judges, for half of its modest print run of two thousand had already been returned by January. The sheer unexpectedness of her good fortune would have buoyed her all the more under ordinary circumstances.

  These were no ordinary circumstances. Ramsey would hardly eat. He slept long hours, and took afternoon naps. He still burrowed into snooker biographies, and read Snooker Scene cover to cover, but when he did so he scowled. He disappeared for hours at a time to his table in the basement, firmly closing the door behind him, and lending his wife an unease of a piece with her what is he doing in there? when he locked himself for ages in the loo. On the one occasion that she’d bridged the battlements to bring him to the phone, she discovered him sprawled on the floor, surrounded by rails and bolts, with a crazed look on his face. “Jack has an exhibition match lined up, if you’re interested,” she said, and he quipped without looking up, “Already made an exhibition of myself, didn’t I?” In response to her puzzlement over why one end of the table was disassembled, he mumbled something like, “Too much rebound. Table’s unplayable.” It had been a little like coming upon Jack Nicholson typing “All work and no play” thousands of times in The Shining, and she’d left him to it.

  So rather than race down the stairs and pound on the basement door exuberantly demanding admission, Irina rested the receiver in its cradle and returned to the series of black-and-white still-lifes she’d been doodling in rapidographs. The little smile rising over her notebook was all she permitted herself in celebration.

  Once she’d sat on the news for a week—the moment never seemed right—she had to admit that she was dreading its delivery, and that she resented dreading it. Ramsey conducted his whole occupational life in the limelight. Even as runner-up at the Crucible he’d earned almost £150,000; he may have rued the fact, but his performance had been on TV. Now with one light in her own life she felt compelled to hide it under a bushel.

  However, the medal’s organizers were anxious to arrange a date for the prize-giving dinner at which all short-listed candidates could be present, and were proposing one of several evenings in September, before which she and her spouse would be flown to New York and put up in a hotel. She had to give them an answer, including whether Ramsey would like to go. So during an arbitrary and until that point lackluster dinner at Best of India in latter May (the brown-rice-and-vegetable rule guaranteed that they ate out virtually every night), Irina unveiled her godsend.

  Feigning that the news had come in that very day tainted her cheerful astonishment with a hint of falseness. Hastily, too, she appended that of course she didn’t expect to w
in—as, she supposed, she didn’t—although being short-listed might sell “a few” extra copies. After all, she said, the scope of the Lewis Carroll Medal may have been “international,” but it hailed from Manhattan; the likelihood of its being awarded to a book about a sport that Americans didn’t know from Parcheesi was negligible.

  Ramsey kissed her across the table, nipped next door to the off-license for a bottle of plonk champagne, and returned to propose that they schedule a fabulously expensive dinner some other night to celebrate. Nevertheless, when she explained why Frame and Match would never win, he agreed—lighting into another bitter riff on the gobsmacking ignorance of snooker that he’d encountered in Brighton Beach. He assured her that of course he’d accompany her to the ceremony in September—provided it did not interfere with the Royal Scottish Open. After only a few minutes, their discussion of her good fortune gave way to talk of which tournaments Ramsey would enter next season.

  As the week proceeded and blended into the next, they did go out to dinner numerous times, but never officially to acknowledge her shortlisting, and somehow the promised occasion never quite materialized.

  ALTHOUGH WHILE DRESSING FOR the reception in the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue Irina was understandably nervous, the scale of her anxiety seemed disproportionate. Over and over she had recited to herself that it was enough to be nominated, and indeed she knew in her gut that Frame and Match would never clinch the Lewis Carroll. Clapping and smiling and acting implausibly exhilarated on someone else’s account was bound to be an ordeal, but one short and survivable. So the source of her fretfulness while she wrestled with her unruly hair had little to do with girding for defeat.

  By happy or unhappy coincidence, depending on your perspective, this very week Lawrence Trainer was scheduled to be in New York—for some dreary conference called “The Growth of Global Civil Society.” He had long been her greatest supporter, and the four years that had elapsed since they’d parted had surely transformed him from jilted lover to comrade. He’d sounded so thrilled for her when she e-mailed him news of the Lewis Carroll in May (Ramsey’s being home all the time had precluded confiding cups of coffee near Blue Sky for the entire summer). Besides, this was her party, and it was her right. So she’d invited Lawrence to come tonight, and he’d accepted.

  Irina might have stuck by the decision without regrets had she informed Ramsey well in advance that Lawrence was coming to the awards dinner and brooked no argument, or even given Ramsey the illusion of being consulted on the matter before she issued the invite. But no. Every night in August when she’d considered raising the attendance of her “comrade” with Ramsey, she’d felt sick to her stomach—though not quite as sick as she felt now, with the reception to start in half an hour, and Ramsey in for a big surprise.

  To make matters worse, one of the other five short-listed authors was his ex-wife.

  “That’s a right skimpy dress, pet,” said Ramsey behind her as she messed in the vanity’s mirror. “The hem’s not two inches from your fanny.”

  “Badger me enough, and I’ll tuck it around my waist.”

  He ran a finger into her cleavage. “You planning some sort of jacket?”

  “That’s right,” said Irina. Her application of eyeliner was so unsteady that she looked like Boris Karloff. “I spent two hundred quid on this thing, so of course I’m going to cover it up with a large burlap sack.”

  “No, you’re going to swan into that do downstairs half-starkers, and every tosser in the room will want to fuck you.”

  “You used to like it when I looked sexy.” Lord, did nothing ever change? He reminded her of Lawrence.

  “I love it when you look sexy—shut in a cupboard with a padlock.”

  She turned from the mirror as he was slipping on his jacket and said, “Wow!” She’d grown inured to his snooker gear, but rarely saw him in a proper tuxedo. “You’re the one belongs locked in a closet.”

  It would take many more compliments than that to placate her husband. For all the hotel rooms they’d shared, this was the first time they’d ever checked in under his wife’s name. He’d bristled when the porter called him “Mr. McGovern,” and his abrupt anonymity on arrival in JFK yesterday had put his nose out of joint. On opening Ramsey Acton’s passport, the immigration agent hadn’t raised an eyebrow, and his “Welcome to the United States” was the same bored greeting that he shoveled at every other tourist in the queue.

  “If you don’t stop pacing like that,” she said, “we’re going to be dunned for leaving runnels in the carpet. Are you edgy about seeing Jude?”

  “Not particularly. Though with you tricked out like that, I reckon she’ll be jealous.”

  “Why? She divorced you.”

  “Birds don’t like it when you fancy their discards. Like when you rustle round in somebody’s rubbish and pull out a right serviceable knick-knack. Suddenly they get to thinking, Oi, give that back! That’s a right serviceable knickknack!”

  “I worry that Jude assumes we were carrying on while you were still with her.”

  “So?” Ramsey slid his palms into the hollows of her hipbones. “Let her.”

  SO POWERFULLY WAS IRINA distracted by the impending arrival of Lawrence Trainer that she’d given little thought to Jude Hartford, whose path she’d not crossed since their falling-out five years ago. As she and Ramsey descended in the gilt elevator, an encounter with the woman was imminent. Most people would field an uncomfortable reunion of this nature by rising above—extending limp congratulations for being short-listed, making no allusion to previous unpleasantness nor even to the incongruous fact that Jude and Ramsey used to be married, and presenting a united front of seamless connubial contentment. But since social awkwardness always brought out in Irina that bizarre confessional incontinence, chances were she would within minutes blurt that Ramsey was irrationally jealous, had probably started to drink too much, and picked fights at the drop of a hat—all to a woman sure to use any unattractive intelligence to smear Irina behind her back.

  Clutching Ramsey’s hand, Irina entered the events room to mark Jude’s presence at the far end by the drinks table—though in that floor-length ivory kaftan the woman might easily be mistaken for a refreshments tent. When Jude turned with a swirl toward the entranceway, her outsized expression of astonished joy took a fraction of a moment to arrange itself. Like Lawrence of Arabia leading the charge on Aqaba, Jude flapped across the room with her arms extended wide, and as the dervish advanced, Irina feared the expression on her own face was one of horror.

  “Darling!” Jude smothered her ex-friend in a shimmer of upscale synthetic. “And don’t you look divine!” Irina’s “You, too!” was weak. Billows of fabric failed to disguise the fact that Jude had put on weight. Yet she still emanated that distinctive hysteria—a desperation for a fineness of life that, like a gnat, was only surer to elude her the more frantically she snatched after it. “And Ramsey. You dear man!” Jude brought his forehead to her lips as if delivering a blessing. “Jude,” he replied. As if that said it all.

  A tall, squarish character ambled from behind. He exuded a languorous cannot-be-bothered-to-try-to-please that generally correlates with having money. When Jude introduced Duncan Winderwood grandly as the “tenant of my affections,” he said in a plummy accent, “I’m so terribly pleased to make your acquaintance,” employing that pro forma aristocratic graciousness meant less to make you feel loved than to ram down your throat how civilized he was. Irina instinctively disliked him, and she could tell that he didn’t care. Being British, Duncan was the one man in the room who would almost certainly recognize Ramsey Acton, but his interaction with her husband was brief and bland.

  “Isn’t this a coincidence,” Irina submitted aimlessly. “About the Lewis Carroll.”

  “Pish and tosh! To be honest, it isn’t a coincidence!” Jude cried, laughing through the sentence. “Talent will out, don’t you think? Talent will out!” She seemed to have forgotten all about having impugned Irina’s work as “
flat” and “lifeless.”

  “There’s no way mine will win,” said Irina. “The subject matter is too obscure.” When Ramsey shifted at her side, she appended quickly, “For Americans, I mean.”

  “To be honest, I did think your illustrating a book about snooker was good for a giggle,” said Jude. “Didn’t you used to think snooker was a big bore?”

  “I’ve gotten—a lot more interested,” said Irina faintly.

  “I suppose you haven’t had much choice!”

  “You made a choice, I recollect,” Ramsey intruded brutally. “To rubbish my profession at every opportunity.”

  “I think what Ramsey’s trying to say,” said Irina, “is that we all need a drink.”

  Fortified with a glass of red that was tempting fate with all that white sailcloth, Jude exclaimed, “I was simply floored when I read you two had got married!”

  “It was certainly a surprise to us,” said Irina forcefully. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Mind! To be quite honest, maybe back in the day we should have switched places at the dinner table and saved us all a pack of trouble!” Jude’s conversational tic was beginning to wear, even if to be honest had spread like genital herpes among the British bourgeoisie. Much as its counterpart plague among the young—D’ya know what I mean?— conveyed a persistent and often justifiable insecurity about an ability to speak English, the repeated insertion of to be honest seemed to imply that unless otherwise apprised you could safely assume that the speaker was lying.

  “Ramsey, you old dog,” she continued. “I worried that I missed something in the Guardian social pages about a big shindig. Not that you look a year over forty-nine, sweetie, but didn’t you turn fifty last year? I pictured you letting out the Savoy with the haut monde.”

  “We didn’t fancy a lot of fuss.” His delivery was grim. For his fiftieth the summer before, Irina had taken Ramsey’s admonishments that he “didn’t fancy a lot of fuss” at face value, and repeated the homemade sushi spread that had so overwhelmed him in 1995. His eyes had continually darted beyond the candlelight, as if a hundred well-wishers would soon spring from the shadows. It emerged that she hadn’t read his signals correctly—no apparently meaning no only in cases of date rape.