The Post-Birthday World. Lionel Shriver

       Ramsey says to Lawrence, “I’m in love with your wife.”

      This one line, that is the vision. It poses neither question nor solution. It merely frames a predicament. The scene stops there, for there is nowhere for it to go. Were the confrontation to carry on—Lawrence might say gruffly, “Well, that’s tough luck,” and Ramsey might return quietly, “Whose tough luck?”—the perfect impasse would remain. However little Irina herself “pertains,” Irina and only Irina has the power to move this encounter beyond face-off, to advance the plot.

      Especially this second scenario was sufficiently trite that it ought to have embarrassed her. But she wasn’t embarrassed. It was too interesting. I’m in love with your wife. Irina wasn’t Lawrence’s wife. Yet the word arose in her mind’s eye because it was true. Whatever the law might dictate, Irina was Lawrence’s wife.

      In the days she’d been capable of focusing on more than her own misery, Irina had registered what the dramas and thrillers of the sort that Lawrence fed their voracious VCR were abundantly about. In the main, films place protagonists in a moral quandary, or test their mettle with trials by fire. Yet few members of the audience ever confront the cinematic dilemma in real life. Most people don’t have to figure out how to blow the whistle on government conspiracies without getting themselves killed. Most people aren’t pledged to take an assassin’s bullet to protect the president. World War II is over, and the standard Western mother is not likely to have to choose between the lives of her two children in a concentration camp.

      By contrast, there is one province in which, sooner or later, virtually everyone gets dealt a leading role—hero, heroine, or villain. Performance in this arena is as fierce a test of character as being tempted to sell nuclear secrets to Beijing. Unlike the slight implications of quotidian dilemmas that confront the average citizen in other areas of life—whether to report cash income on your taxes—the stakes in this realm could not be higher. For chances are that at some point along the line you will hold in your hands another person’s heart. There is no greater responsibility on the planet. However you contend with this fragile organ, which pounds or seizes in accordance with your caprice, will take your full measure.

      Irina had liked to think of herself as a decent person. Yet in this most telling of spheres her behaviour had grown disreputable overnight. While she might have preferred to regard her two-timing as “out of character,” it is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing. Ipso facto, her furtive afternoons with Ramsey Acton were necessarily in character. For that matter, barring the onset of brain-wasting diseases like variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, there may be no such thing as behaving “out of character.” Should what you get up to fail to comport with who you think you are, something is surely inaccurate (and likely optimistic) about who you think you are. Since Irina had not consumed enough British beef to blame vCJD, she was not therefore “a decent person,” but a duplicitous, traitorous tramp whose attachments were shallow, whose word, implicit or otherwise, meant nothing, and who was hell-bent on defiling the finest elements both of her life and in herself.

      Yet every time her eyes found Ramsey’s face—which had a delightful way of changing ages depending on the light; since over the course of five minutes it could flicker from adolescent devil-may-care to middle-aged gravity, then on to the fatalistic resignation of an old-timer, she often felt in the presence, cradle-to-grave, of a whole man—she felt good, and not the indulgent, petty feeling-good of eating chocolate. When he touched her—and he needn’t cup her bare breasts or sidle fingers up under her skirt; holding her hand would do it, or resting his forehead on her temple—she experienced the sense of revelation that physicists must enjoy, when they believe they’ve finally put together that elusive theory of everything, located the one prion or quark that binds all matter. In the moment, it was impossible to conceive of this feeling as wicked. In Ramsey’s arms, her attraction to this remarkable snooker player (of all things) not only seemed “good,” made her “feel good,” but seemed an attraction to The Good—to an absolute that made all life worth living, rejection of which would be both morally reprehensible and inhuman. Only back in the Borough flat, and confronted with a man who had bestowed on her nothing but generosity and did not deserve to be repaid for his devotion with coldness and perfidy, did Irina feel unclean.

      On the morning of August 31, Irina trotted once more numbly to the newsagent for a Sunday Telegraph. En route, she upbraided herself for imputing internal turmoil to strangers, for her fellow pedestrians seemed universally to look stricken. She allowed herself a touch of irritation at having to weave past so many laggards, trolling the pavements in a narcotic daze. More bizarrely, at the newsagent customers were murmuring to one another, as if all the rules of city life had been suspended for the day.

      Alarming headlines were inconclusive, photos consuming most of the front pages.

      Brow furrowed, Irina scurried back to their building, to find the girl from the ground-floor flat sitting on a lower stair with her head in her hands. Irina had never learned her name, but wasn’t so devoted to the chilly etiquette of urban life herself, nor grown so callous in her recent self-absorption, that she would angle her way blithely around a crumpled fellow tenant sobbing her heart out.

      Irina put a hand, just, on the girl’s shoulder. “Are you okay? Do you need any help? What’s wrong?”

      Again, with London protocol so drastically revised that Westminster could as well have issued a decree, the girl didn’t merely snuffle that she’d be fine, thanks, but began to gush. “My boyfriend doesn’t understand! He’s furious with me! He says I didn’t even cry like this when his mother died. But I just can’t believe it! I’m gutted! It’s so sad!”

      Irina shyly unfolded the paper in her hand, which she had halved not so much for ease of carrying as out of respect. “I’m sorry, I just got up, and the papers only …”

      Overcome, the girl could now only nod. “B-both. Both of them.”

      This turn of the wheel wasn’t quite in the same league as the collapse of the Soviet Union, but in Britain it came close.

      “This is absolutely incredible.” Closing the door, she hugged the headline to herself. “Diana!”

      “What’s that cow up to now?” said Lawrence. She knew he would light into one of his cruel imitations. “Oh,” he said in falsetto, lowering his head and batting his eyelashes, “I’d love to help the underprivileged, but I just ate five jars of marshmallow fluff, and have to go throw up! While I’m stuffing my whole hand down my throat, could you tell those nice people that was not cellulite in my thighs? I’d just been sitting on a chenille bedspread! Afterwards, can I tell that story about Charles saying, ‘Whatever love is’? Because with so many dresses I only wear once, it’s important to keep the commoners feeling sorry for me!”

      “Are you quite finished?”

      “Just getting started!”

      “Because she’s dead,” Irina announced.

      “Get out.”

      “She and Dodi Fayed were being chased by photographers and crashed in a tunnel in Paris.” Irina delivered the news with spiteful triumph. Not often did she see Lawrence speechless (all he could manage was, “Wow. That’s weird”), and watching him flounder was satisfying. “So maybe the next time you start to say something vicious about someone you hardly know, you should stop to think that any day you could find out they’re dead, and consider how you’d feel.”

      Over the national keening of the next few weeks, Irina took the jarring death of the “people’s princess” personally. In narrative terms, Diana’s story had lurched from genre to genre. Like Irina’s once-charmed romance with Lawrence Trainer, a fairy tale had soured to soap opera, and then hurtled towards tragedy.