The Post-Birthday World. Lionel ShriverЧитать онлайн книгу.
what do you want?”
At that instant, Irina might have been spirited blindfolded in a car, then released to a neighbourhood of London that she didn’t recognize. How did she find her way home? It was an interesting area from the looks of it, so did she want to go home? She’d been kidnapped. Now Stockholm syndrome had set in, and she was fond of her captor.
“I want to see you as soon as possible.”
Another roaring sigh. “Is that smart?”
“It has nothing to do with intelligence.”
He groaned, “I’m dying to see you as well.”
“I could take the tube up. Mile End, right?”
“A lady like you got no business on the tube. I’ll call by.”
“You can’t come here. Yesterday. You shouldn’t have come here, either. You’re too recognizable from television.”
“See what this is like? It’s a horror show! Like an affair already, without the good bit.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“You know the alternative.”
“That is not an option. I have to see you.” A whole new side of herself, this wilfulness. It was heady.
“It’s a long walk from the tube.”
“I’m a sturdy creature.”
“You are a rare and delicate flower to be kept from the randy, filthy eyes of East End low-life.” He was only half-joking. “What about Lawrence?”
“He’s at work. He rings here during the day, but I could say I went shopping.”
“You’ll have nil to show for it.”
“A walk, a fruitless trip to the library? I could get my messages remotely from your house, and ring him back.”
“You ain’t very good at this.”
“I take that as a compliment.”
“Most of them office phone systems give a read-out of the number 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