what’s rung up. Your—” He was clearly about to say husband. “—Anorak Man got a memory for figures. Like my own phone number. I should get you a mobile.”
“That’s a nice offer, but Lawrence and I have already decided that they’re too expensive. He might find it. I’d have a terrible time explaining why I had one. My, there are a thousand ways to be found out, aren’t there?”
“Yeah. Even when there’s nothing to find.”
“Your birthday? You would call that nothing? If I were yours?”
“You are mine,” he said softly. “Last night. You slept with him, didn’t you?”
“Obviously I slept with him. We share the same bed.”
“That ain’t what I mean and you know it. He’s been out of town. A bloke’s been out of town and he comes home, he shags his wife.” He went ahead and used the word.
“All right, then. Yes. If I didn’t want to, he’d know something was up.”
“I don’t like it. I ain’t got no right to say that, but I don’t like it.”
“I didn’t, either,” she admitted. “I only—got anywhere by thinking about you. But it was foul, imagining another man.”
“Best you’re in his arms thinking about me than the other way round, I reckon.”
“Being in your arms and thinking about you appeals to me more.”
“So when can you get your luscious bum to Mile End?”
The pattern was probably typical: you spent the abundance of the call talking about how you shouldn’t be doing this, and its tail-end discussing the particulars of how you would. It would’ve been nice to feel special.
On the tube, people stared. Both men and women. It wasn’t her short denim skirt and skimpy yellow tee that were turning heads. She had a look. Her fellow passengers mightn’t have identified the look per se, but they recognized it all the same. People had babies all the time, coupled all the time, yet the look must have been rare. Sex was rare. You’d never know it, from the hoardings overhead in this carriage—the bared busts promoting island holidays, the come-on toothpaste smiles. But the adverts were meant to torment commuters with what they were missing.
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 tranquillity. 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 had 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 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
