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,” she agreed. “For the moment at least, we won’t.”
“I won’t be your bit on the side.”
“I don’t want to have an affair either.”
“Then what do you want?”
At that instant, Irina might have been spirited blindfolded in a car, then released to a neighbourhood of London that she didn’t recognize. How did she find her way home? It was an interesting area from the looks of it, so did she want to go home? She’d been kidnapped. Now Stockholm syndrome had set in, and she was fond of her captor.
“I want to see you as soon as possible.”
Another roaring sigh. “Is that smart?”
“It has nothing to do with intelligence.”
He groaned, “I’m dying to see you as well.”
“I could take the tube up. Mile End, right?”
“A lady like you got no business on the tube. I’ll call by.”
“You can’t come here. Yesterday. You shouldn’t have come here, either. You’re too recognizable from television.”
“See what this is like? It’s a horror show! Like an affair already, without the good bit.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“You know the alternative.”
“That is not an option. I have to see you.” A whole new side of herself, this wilfulness. It was heady.
“It’s a long walk from the tube.”
“I’m a sturdy creature.”
“You are a rare and delicate flower to be kept from the randy, filthy eyes of East End low-life.” He was only half-joking. “What about Lawrence?”
“He’s at work. He rings here during the day, but I could say I went shopping.”
“You’ll have nil to show for it.”
“A walk, a fruitless trip to the library? I could get my messages remotely from your house, and ring him back.”
“You ain’t very good at this.”
“I
