The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver Read Free Book Online Page B

end of their evening a secret from Lawrence. Though Irina had always considered secrets between partners perfect poison, she nursed a competing theory about small secrets. She may have sneaked a cigarette or two not so much because she enjoyed the nicotine rush itself, but because she enjoyed the secret. She wondered if you didn’t need to keep a few bits and pieces to yourself even in the closest of relationships—especially in the closest, which otherwise threatened to subsume you into a conjoined twin (who did not take drugs ) that defied surgical separation. The odd fag in his absence confirmed for her that when Lawrence walked out the door she did not simply vanish, and preserved within her a covert capacity for badness that she had treasured in herself since adolescence, when she’d occasionally flouted her straight-A persona by cutting school with the most unsavory elements that she could find.
“Sure, why not?”
As she negotiated the steps from their nook in high heels, each stair took such acute concentration that putting one foot before the other was like reciting a little poem. Again, that hand hovered at the small of her back, not touching.
    Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not having brought a jacket. One degree higher, and a skim of sweat might have glistened at her hairline. But at this precise degree, she required neither wrap nor breeze. Were there a word for such a temperature, there would have to be a corollary for the particular ecstasy of greeting it—the heedlessness, the needlessness, the suspended lack of urgency, as if time could stop, or should. Usually temperature was a battle; only at this exact fulcrum was it an active delight.
    They strode the pavement a few millimeters closer than was quite the form. Fault, maybe nothing that evening had had anything to do with fault, but as for that short stroll down Charing Cross, she would feel sure in recollection that she was the one who’d walked fractionally too close to him.
    Yet by the time the attendant retrieved the Jaguar, Irina was flustered. The easy flow of conversation in Omen had gagged to a dribble, their former awkwardness with each other restored in force. This was nuts. She’d had too much to drink (that was four
    large sakes). She couldn’t even remember what it felt like to get stoned, which precluded wanting to. She’d left the rhubarb-creams cooling on the counter, and needed to get the pies in the fridge. She was tired—or ought to be. Lawrence might ring; with no answer at two a.m., he’d imagine something terrible had happened. Yet last-minute extrication would seem cowardly, and conclude Ramsey’s birthday on a note of rejection. Well, she could tell Lawrence if he rang that they’d hit one of those ludicrous traffic jams you found in London at the most improbable hours. Sometimes when you make a mistake, you just have to go with it.
    The mood in the car was somber. Rather than jaunting off to party, Irina might have been one of those rigid British kids of yore being dragged off to sit the eleven-plus, which could determine whether she ended up conducting heart-bypass surgery or scrubbing public toilets.
    Most of Ramsey’s colleagues were raised in down-and-dirty enclaves like East Belfast, or the rougher bits of Glasgow. When snooker players from dodgy parts began to pull in winnings, the first thing they did was move out. But Ramsey was raised in Clapham, then properly rough-andready, but now a fatuous, self-congratulatory area full of pokey but surprisingly expensive terraced housing that would merit the label “twee.” Perhaps to maintain his proletarian street cred, once Ramsey had taken a few titles, the first thing he did was move to the working-class heartland of the Cockney East End.
    Of course, you could hardly call it suffering. He owned a whole Victorian