the southern boundary of Hackney. Irina had been to the house a handful of times when collaborating with Jude, and it was here they had come to the verbal blows that severed the friendship. High on a kind of bloodlust, Jude had impugned a great deal more than Irina’s illustrations, castigating her for being such a “doormat” with Lawrence and deriding an enviable domestic contentment as “sleepwalking.” All because Irina had dared to suggest that Jude’s latest narrative, Big Mouth, was a little obvious (of her story—about a dog that barks all the time and no one can abide, until while he’s barking he inhales a tossed ball and can’t bark anymore, and then the whole family adores him—Irina had remarked, “Even kids will be able to tell that you’re just trying to get them to shut up”), not to mention illogical (“But Jude,” she had submitted tentatively, “if you inhale a ball you don’t stop talking, do you? You choke to death”). Jude had accused Irina of being “passive-aggressive,” a term widely misappropriated of late to mean “aggressive,” and cited her literalism about the ball as typical of the stodgy, hidebound universe that Irina had come to inhabit. As the Jaguar surged into the drive, the memory smarted.
Irina didn’t play the princess, and opened her own car door. Yet following Ramsey up the shadowy steps of his stoop still took on the sinister portent of a fairy tale, as if she were entering Oz or the castle of Gormenghast, where different laws applied, nothing was as it appeared, and the walls of libraries would fold back to reveal secret dungeons. She could hear the narrative of the last two minutes in that waltzing, emphatic cadence with which people compulsively read to children: Irina climbed the big steps to the tall man’s dark manor. The giant door creaked open and then closed behind her with a boom and a click.
Too late, the little girl remembered that her mother had warned her never, ever to get into a strange man’s car! True, Irina’s mother had never warned her not to go into a strange man’s house, especially when not safeguarded by her stalwart friend Lawrence. But that was because her mother had never imagined that her daughter was a moron.
The interior was still appointed with Oriental carpets and dark antiques, but some of the more valuable-looking pieces that Irina remembered were missing. For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep the past itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it. Here, a darker rectangle on the rug marked where the leather sofa once rested, and four deep depressions in the carpet evidenced the departure of a thick pink marble sideboard that Irina had once admired. Ghostly white squares on the cream-coloured walls hovered as the ultimate in abstract expressionism, whereas the original artwork that had once adorned the ground floor had been far more conservative. Yet Ramsey could afford to replace whatever Jude had made off with. Either he was attached to the image of himself as an ascetic, or keen to keep a grievance visually fresh.
Ramsey poured two generous measures of cognac. Jude having absconded with the sofa and armchairs, there was nowhere to sit. Said Ramsey, “Let’s go downstairs.”
Ah. The dungeon.
Irina trailed him to the basement. Ramsey switched on the lamp over his snooker table, which imbued the expanse of green baize and its gleaming mahogany frame with a sacred aspect, bathing the rest of the cavernous room in the subdued, worshipful glow of a cathedral. Dark leather couches lined his private parlour like pews, and Irina sipped gravely from her snifter as if from a communion chalice. This was the heart of the house, doubtless where Ramsey spent most of his time. The rack of cues caught the lamplight. A cabinet held dozens of trophies; in a row, six upright crystal runner-up platters from the World Championship grimaced across the top shelf like bared teeth. The walls were adorned with glassed posters of tournaments and exhibition games, from Bangkok to Berlin—décor that Jude had graciously allowed her ex to keep. Chances were that Jude had rarely ventured here, and Ramsey’s option on repairing downstairs had probably facilitated the marriage’s lasting a whole seven years. Irina felt admitted to a sanctum of sorts. The close, golden lighting, the otherworldly sumptuousness of the leather upholstery as she sank into it, and the plush, regal crimson pile under her sandals all enhanced the sensation of having entered a secret magic kingdom through a wardrobe or looking-glass.
Ramsey retrieved a medieval-looking wooden box. Though Irina had herself narrowed the distance between them on Charing Cross those few scandalous millimetres, he assumed a seat on the far opposite side of the couch, pressing into the arm. Reverently, he withdrew a packet of Swan papers, a one-sided razor blade, and a pewter pillbox, upending the box to spill its dark, dense lump onto the table before them. After slitting a Gauloise with the blade, he laid tobacco along a fag paper. Flicking his slender silver lighter, he wafted the hash over the flame, pinched a soupçon of softened resin, and sprinkled its grains evenly across the joint. The black specks dropping from his fingertips recalled dark potions that had sent Sleeping Beauty to her long slumber, or felled Snow White to the cold ground.
The joint he passed on to Irina, extending his arm since she was so far away, was exquisitely slim and uniform, tapering to a fine point. She acceded to two tokes, shaking her head strenuously when offered a third. Ramsey shrugged, and polished off the rest himself.
To whatever degree she had dreaded from Ramsey the long associative rambles that cannabis can induce, much less the whooping giggle-fits the drug seems to elicit only in movies, her foreboding was misplaced. Ramsey stood from the couch and proceeded to ignore her. He opened his case, assembled the cue, and centred a frame of balls. He broke delicately on the left-hand side. When he pocketed a loose red with a deep screw, the white cannoned into the cluster, scattering the reds into easy pickings.
Like the dope, the exhibition was juvenile. He’d asked her to his house, and had therefore some obligation to play the host. Dragging her to his basement for this display was the kind of childish bid to impress you should really have got beyond by forty-seven.
Be that as it may, Irina had only seen Ramsey play on TV, and in three dimensions the twelve-by-six-foot table yawned much larger than it appeared on screen. Up close, the accuracy of his shots, the surety of their selection, and the unearthly precision with which every pot set him up for the next ball seemed inhuman. As he swung from shot to shot, Ramsey’s black silk jacket wafted in the breeze from the open windows on the light well. The balls appeared to roll sweetly to their appointed pockets of their own accord, passing one another and missing by a hair, but never touching unless Ramsey planned to capitalize on the contact. The luminous balls as they swept the baize were mesmerizing; the colours seemed to pulse. The breeze lifted the fine hairs on Irina’s bare arms, the air once more neither warm nor cold. The marijuana resin seemed mild, and Irina wondered why she had let herself get so tied up in knots over the prospect of such a commonplace narcotic’s effects.
Ramsey had racked up another frame and Irina had taken an abstemious sip from her snifter, when—something happened. The dope, it turned out, was not mild. After only two tokes, it was not mild by a mile. The neutrality of the air gave way, and under the plain white blouse her breasts began to heat, like seat-warmers in expensive cars. Irina rarely thought about her breasts. Lawrence had cheerfully admitted that he “wasn’t a tit man,” and since her de facto husband never lavished them with any attention—never even touched them to speak of—Irina saw no reason to pay them any especial mind herself. Now they seemed to be rebelling against the neglect, for an infrared of her body would portray them in the molten vermilion that earlier that evening had flamed in the windows of St. Paul’s. Aghast, Irina was half-convinced they had begun to glow, and wrapped her arms across her chest, as she had the night before when risking, “When we talk, I feel naked” in Russian to Ramsey on the phone.
This feeling, of being wired with electric coils that some mischief-maker had switched on high, proceeded to spread. Her abdomen throbbed, sending waves of alarming warmth up to her diaphragm and down her thighs. Irina was chagrined. This was not a sensation that a decent woman had any business suffering
