and Irina had to be contained.
At the bustling covered market near London Bridge, the crowd was as ever abrasive with American accents. While it was irrational to bristle at the company of compatriots, one of the traits that Americans seem to share is a common dislike of running into one another in foreign countries. Perhaps it was having that mirror held up, reflecting an image so often loud, aggressive, and overweight. Irina didn’t have a big problem with being American herself (everyone has to come from somewhere, and you don’t get to choose), although, a second-generation Russian on her mother’s side, she had always presumed her nationality to have an opt-out clause. Maybe she winced a bit at the familiar skirl piping from Monmouth Coffees (“La-a-a-rry, they’re out of decaf Guatema-a-la!”) because she enjoyed the feeling of Britain being somewhere else, a sensation increasingly difficult to preserve in a town colonized by Pizza Hut and Starbucks. When she overheard another Yank inquire about the location of South-wark Street, with a hard R, it was hard not to feel tarred with ignorance by association.
On the other hand, out from under Lawrence’s influence, Irina sometimes indulged in what she privately termed mental kindness. The exercise had nothing to do with how she acted; as a woman who had grown up treated rather badly by classmates, she had developed a chronic horror of treating anyone badly herself. It didn’t have to do with what she said. It had to do with what went on in her head. There were merits to being nice in your mind—to hearing a fellow American mispronounce Southwark and deliberately choosing to think, Why don’t Brits cut us a little slack? Americans would never expect a Londoner to know that Houston was pronounced Hyooston in Texas, but Howston in Manhattan. Surely that beat grumbling sotto voce, “You stupid twat.” Of course, you could empathize or denounce your heart out within the privacy of your thoughts, and neither improve anyone’s day nor injure their feelings. Still, Irina was convinced that what went on in her mind mattered, and silently cast strangers in the gentlest possible light as a discipline. If nothing else, internal generosity made her feel better.
Mental kindness was not a concept she had shared with Lawrence, who was more apt to indulge in the likes of mental laceration. He was awfully hard on people, especially anyone he considered of inferior intelligence. His favourite word was moron. That harshness could be contagious; Irina had to guard against it. However, she should really exercise mental kindness first and foremost on Lawrence himself.
For one thing, Lawrence liked to keep his life simple, restricted to a few close friends and mostly to Irina, period—who had extravagantly benefited from admission to his tiny pantheon of the beloved. Scornfulness was a form of population control. Since you couldn’t invite the whole gamut of your acquaintances from your vegetable seller to your plumber for tea, you needed a filter. It just so happened that Lawrence’s filter was made of very fine mesh indeed.
For another thing, Lawrence was a genuine example of what was once standard-issue in the States but had latterly become an endangered American type: the self-made man. Lawrence clung fiercely to his condescension because his fingernails were sunk so precariously into the cerebral heights of a lofty British think tank. His upbringing was anything but intellectual. Neither of his parents had more than a high school education, and growing up in Las Vegas was hardly propitious preparation for earning a doctorate in international relations from an Ivy League school. A childhood of crass casinos had left him with a terror of being sucked back—into a world of lengthy debates over the quality of the eggs Benedict at the Bellagio. So all right, he was scathing, and sometimes had to be encouraged to give other people a break, to emphasize their finer qualities and to forgive their flaws. But it behooved her to see Lawrence’s tendency to pillory as itself such a flaw, and worthy of her own forgiveness.
She purchased Italian black kale, smoked boar sausage, and a malicious fistful of chilies from flirtatious vendors who didn’t know her name but had come to recognize her face. All too aware that going through the placid paces of marketing was slapping a superficial gloss of normalcy over an alarmingly unstable foundation, Irina also bought an armful of rhubarb to keep herself gainfully occupied when she got home.
Restored to the flat, she set about industriously constructing two rhubarb-cream pies, one for the freezer and one for Lawrence’s homecoming. She increased the recipe’s measure of nutmeg by a factor of five. A reserved woman of moderate inclinations to all appearances, Irina expressed an insidious attraction to extremes through decorative matters like seasoning, and few diners at her table suspected that her flair in the kitchen owed largely to a better-than-average mastery of the multiplication table. Fortunately, the fiddly lattice tops concentrated a mind that kept fragmenting like the fine strips of crust. Her hands weren’t precisely shaking, but they moved in spasmodic jerks, as if under strobe. (That cognac—surely there hadn’t been a third?) Lawrence wasn’t coming home a moment too soon. She strained against it on occasion, but maybe she needed his stern regimentation and sense of order. Without Lawrence, Irina would obviously turn overnight into a chain-smoking, cake-hoovering, brandy-addled hag.
The pies came out beautifully, the egg and sugar bubbling through the lattice into brittle browned hats, the acidic sting of rhubarb spiking the air throughout the flat, but pastry only saw her through to about five What’s more, while the pies were in the oven, she did something she very rarely got up to in the last few years, since Lawrence anyway, and once the pies were cooling, she did it again.
Six o’clock. Irina wasn’t prone to dithering over her appearance; most of her clothes were offbeat secondhand items from Oxfam outlets, for during their tenure here London had officially topped the charts as the most expensive city in the world. Ordinarily allowing fifteen minutes to dress was ample. Two hours was ridiculous.
Yet this evening, allowing a mere two hours was cutting it close.
The bed grew heaped with discarded blouses. Flailing in and out of frocks, she recalled a charming project from a few years ago titled I’ve Nothing to Wear!, about a little girl who hurricanes through her entire wardrobe one morning, flinging outfit after outfit from her chest of drawers. Lines from the book returned: “I do not like the button holes, I do not like the collar! If I wear the polka dot, I’ll bawl and shriek and holler!” The narrative arc had been predictable (big surprise, the little girl finally chooses to wear the first thing she’d put on), but the clothing flying through the air had a Futurist energy, and the illustrative opportunities had been rich.
Yet contrary to feminine convention, Irina was striking pose after critical pose in the full-length bedroom mirror with an eye to looking as dowdy as possible. While early in this melee she had toyed with the notion of the pale blue sleeveless that last year had threatened to keep Ramsey in their living room all the way to breakfast, she’d immediately chucked the idea. Was she insane? Instead she rummaged through the wardrobe’s nether regions for the longest skirts, the crummiest fits, and the least becoming colours she could find. Alas, Irina didn’t own a lot of ugly clothes, a lack she’d never before had occasion to rue.
This exercise in perversity was a waste. Ramsey was sure to select a ritzy restaurant where her few flashier garments would not look out of place. Lawrence always wore the most slovenly gear he could get away with, and on the few occasions she dared to don something chic he grew flustered: “It’s only a Blue Sky cocktail party. No need to make a big deal out of it.”
Calling time in this sartorial musical chairs, the intercom buzzer blared. Like a kindergartner lunging at the nearest empty seat, she was stuck with the outfit she had on: a straight-cut navy skirt that did reach nearly to the knee, though with that ubiquitous latex sizing its cling to her hips was woefully snug. At least the short-sleeved white top didn’t expose bare shoulders; better still, multiple launderings had worn a small hole in the neckline, lending the outfit a satisfying shabbiness. In fact, the ensemble was gloriously dull. Blue and white had the sexless connotations of sailor suits or high school football colours, and she fisted her dark hair into a hasty ponytail without using a comb. However, slipping into the
