The Post-Birthday World. Lionel Shriver

about cars. But she liked this one—that it was a classic from 1965, but unrestored, with its leather upholstery well worn; that it was valuable rather than merely expensive. Ramsey’s driving was aggressive, full of accelerating thrusts and sudden downshifts. In contrast to the delicate articulation of his body, a refinement in his face, a social deference or even shyness, and a conspicuous fluidity of motion, all of which legislated toward a subtle collective effeminacy, Ramsey drove like a man. Although his rash weavings in and out of lane and close shaves with adjacent bumpers would ordinarily have made her edgy, the manoeuvrings were precise, boldness twinned with calculation perfectly replicating the authority with which he negotiated a snooker table. She trusted him. Besides, if Irina theoretically believed that modern women should be independent and forceful, all that, the truth was that old-fashioned passivity could be sumptuous. Total abnegation of responsibility presented the same appeal of sleep, and the ecstasy of surrender helped to explain why once a year, for fifteen minutes a go, Irina fell in love with her dentist. If the active deliciousness of being ferried about and paid for was little observed of late and potentially on the way to extinction, it was all the more intoxicating for being retrograde.

      “So what you done today?” asked Ramsey.

      “I made pies,” said Irina festively. “They’re therapeutic.”

      “Why’d you need therapy?”

      “When Lawrence is away … I can get a bit out of kilter. You wouldn’t think it, but I have another side, and—it has to be controlled.”

      “What happens when it ain’t?”

      Silence best implied that they were both better off not finding out. “So what did you do today?”

      “I practised a bit, but mostly agonized all afternoon over where to take you to dinner.” From most men this would have been flattering horseshit, but Ramsey had a funny naïveté about him, and was probably telling the truth.

      “Are you satisfied with your decision?”

      “I’m never satisfied.” As he tossed his keys to a parking attend ant, Irina waited for Ramsey to open her door. The queen-bee routine wasn’t like her, but sometimes acting out of character was like breaking out of jail.

      The Japanese would put the emphasis of Omen on the second syllable, but the name of the restaurant still exuded a foreboding. Omen was small and exclusive-looking, their table more exclusive still, up a few steps at the back and on its own. If Irina had dreaded being cooped up with Ramsey in the mortifying coziness of her own flat, Omen’s premiere seating was no less claustrophobic. When Ramsey reached to pull the curtain, Irina asked could he please keep it open, “for air.” With an expression of perplexity, he obliged. They’d only read through the starters when a young man skipped up the stairs to their table, clutching a menu.

      “Oi, Ramsey!” the young man whispered, as one feels compelled to in Japanese restaurants. “Could you give us an autograph? That’s right, just across the top there, like.” He had slid his menu beside Ramsey’s chopsticks.

      “No problem, mate.” Ramsey withdrew a slender gold ballpoint from his inside pocket; everything he owned seemed to reiterate the taut, sleek design of his body, and the signature itself was spidery, like his fingers.

      “Blinding! Pity about that kick in the Embassy,” the fan commiserated. Given Ramsey’s involuntary wince, the “kick” must have been in the teeth. Leave it to strangers to blunder across your raw nerve. “Would’ve had the frame and match as well!”

      “Everybody gets kicks,” said Ramsey, shrugging fatalistically about the tiny grains of chalk that can send the cue ball veering off its trajectory. What an odd profession, in which one can be undone by a speck.

      “Cheers, mate!” The fan waved his menu, which Omen would now forgo, and nodded cockily at Irina. “You snooker blokes get all the lookers! What’s left for us?”

      “That’s why you wanted to close the curtain,” said Irina. This wasn’t the first time that Ramsey had been hit up for an autograph when they’d been on the town, and usually Irina had found the adulation fun. Just now, she felt possessive of his company during an evening that had recently yawned before her, and now seemed short.

      “Too late; cat’s out. Jude, now—she hated autograph hounds something fierce.”

      “The interruption?”

      “That bird not only hated snooker fans, she hated the idea of snooker fans,” he said, wiping his hands on a hot towel. “To Jude, snooker players were like schoolboys who can stand ten-p pieces on their end at lunch. Fair play to them, and no harm done, but you don’t ask for their autograph.”

      The waitress took their orders; feeling extravagant, Irina added à la carte additions to the deluxe sashimi platter of sea urchin and sweet shrimp.

      “If Jude thought snooker was trivial,” Irina resumed, “why did she marry you?”

      “I’d money and stroke, and she could hold my occupation in contempt. Best of both worlds, innit?”

      “Didn’t she think it was nifty, you on TV, at least at first?”

      “Yeah, no mistake. But it’s queer how the thing what attracted you to someone is the same as what you come to despise about them.”

      Irina dangled a translucent slice of cucumber. “If Jude’s relationship to my illustrations is any guide, you’ve got a point. You do know what she said?”

      Ramsey tapped a chopstick on the table. “I wager she wasn’t no diplomat. But you ever wonder if one or two of her observations weren’t spot on?”

      “How could I think what she said was ‘spot on’ and still keep working at all?”

      “She did think your composition was brilliant, and that your craftsmanship was class. But there was something, in them first few books, a wildness—it’s gone missing.”

      “Well, you don’t just go put ‘wildness’ back. ‘Oh, I’ll add a little wildness!’ ”

      He smiled, painfully. “Don’t get your nose in a sling. I was only trying to help. Making a hash of it as well. I don’t know your business. But I did think you was right talented.”

      “Past tense?”

      “What Jude was on about—it’s hard to put into words.”

      “Jude didn’t have a hard time putting it into words,” Irina countered bitterly. “Adjectives like flat and lifeless are very evocative. She put her sniffy disapproval into action, too, and commissioned another illustrator for her preachy story line. I had to toss a year’s worth of work.”

      “Sorry, love. And you was bang on—what we was talking about, it’s not something you can add like a pinch of salt. It’s not out there, it runs through you. Same as in snooker.”

      “Well, I guess illustration isn’t as fun for me as it used to be. But what is?”

      Her degenerative expectations seemed to sadden him. “You’re too young to talk like that.”

      “I’m over forty, and can talk however I please.”

      “Fair enough—you’re too beautiful to talk like that, then.”

      Lawrence was wont to describe her as cute, and though Ramsey was a bit out of order the more serious adjective was refreshing. Self-conscious, Irina struggled with the oily strips of eel. “If I am, I didn’t used to be. I was a scrawny kid. Knobby, all knees.”

      “What a load of waffle. Never met a bird what wasn’t proud of being skinny.”

      “But I was also a klutz. Gawky, ungraceful. Do you think that’s boasting, too?”

      “It’s hard to credit. Wasn’t your mum a ballerina?”

      Irina was always amazed when anyone remembered