The debriefing in the Royal Bath bar after Ramsey’s narrow victory over John Parrott was jovial enough. His colleagues were all curious about how Irina knew Ramsey; “We’ve both been divorced from the same woman” made a convenient shorthand. The while, Ramsey ensured that she always had a fresh drink (everyone was getting hammered), and that some part of his body was always touching hers (the barest contact sent her whole body humming like a toaster), although his grip on
Denise
in the opposite hand was discernably tighter. When John Parrott told the terrible tale of having the cue with which he had won the 1991 World Championship stolen from his car at Heathrow, Ramsey rejoined, “Serves you right, you tosser! I’d sooner lock a live dog in the boot than leave the cue behind in a car park.” “Aye!” cried John Higgins, “sooner leave the wife in the boot!” and Karen chided with a biff, “Don’t give him ideas!” Much merriment was derived from one of Ramsey’s attacking pots that evening, after which the cluster had miraculously settled to leave a clear path for the pink to the corner pocket, “like the parting of the Red Sea!” Granted, after the third retelling Irina was unable to muster more than a polite smile. If it was one of those I-guess-you-had-to-be-theres, she had been there, and it didn’t help.
So the banter was lively, but whenever being amusing escalated from option to obligation Irina grew dull-witted. Dazed by the superficial spangle of wordplay and silly stories, she began to crave substance, if not gravity. Talking to these people was like eating cotton candy, until she didn’t want more sugar but a steak. Midway through a
fascinating
twentyminute debate over whether a draft in Purbeck Hall had made the top cushions too springy, Irina reflected that Ramsey’s profession had little or no
moral content.
Oh, there were occasional issues of honor (calling the ref’s attention to your own foul) or humility (that apologetic tip of the head when you fluke a pot). But in the main, snooker was about excellence for its own sake. The game’s beauty, its limitation as well, was that it didn’t matter. It didn’t save Tutsis in Rwanda, or a farmer’s beloved cattle from mad cow. Some nights Irina was sure to find relief in a world outside the news; on others she feared that she was bound to find the pageant frivolous and empty.
During a lull, she even resorted to Princess Di. While she’d been sad at first, a bit abstractly, as she would have been over the untimely demise of any young woman she didn’t know, after weeks of mawkish public mourning Irina had reluctantly come to share Lawrence’s view that the nationwide hair-tearing, breast-beating, and rending of garments was an exercise in mass hysteria, and that rather than represent a salutary emotional catharsis it demonstrated that the British had lost a grip—that there were, effectively, no real English people left. Yet as soon as the hallowed subject was raised in the bar, the company in unison composed their faces in stricken solemnity, leaving Irina to reconsider uttering the adjectives
maudlin
and
bathetic.
A mention that her mother was born in the Soviet Union went nowhere; presumably, then, Russians didn’t play much snooker. For any conversational tendril that curled beyond the purview of the snooker circuit died on the vine. While these characters had played across the globe from Hong Kong to Dubai, a typical international anecdote involved Alex Higgins playing drunk and shirtless in Bombay. Parrott regaled the bar with a tale about Zimbabwe, where the local butcher had stapled the cloth to the table; “You could see the staples jutting out!” collapsed the company into gales of laughter. By this point, Irina knew better than to press Parrott for his take on Robert Mugabe’s plan to confiscate white farmland. Like Anne Tyler characters, these accidental tourists traveled in a hermetic capsule all done up in green baize.
So maybe it wasn’t so surprising. But once she slid onto the brocade spread in the suite, one conspicuous omission came home: no one, not once, had ever asked what she did for a living herself.
It was official: later that week, the fact that Ramsey Acton had hooked up with “a sultry Russian beauty” was published in
Snooker Scene.
The trashy little snippet got everything about “Irina McGavin” all wrong, but she cherished her copy as a keepsake.
Ramsey rolled on to conquer all the way through the semis. If his game had previously been missing some intangible final ingredient, Irina’s arrival in Ramsey’s life must have added that last half-teaspoon of cayenne that makes a dish sing. How often Irina herself had battled with a sauce as Ramsey had wrangled for thirty years with his snooker game, only at the last minute lighting upon the smidgen from her overflowing spice rack that suddenly bound a dissonant jumble of penultimate flavors into a triumphant melange. At forty-seven, Ramsey Acton appeared to have discovered love and mastery in a fell swoop.
When the winner of the other semi was a freak success, a weedy, green young player named Dominic Dale ranked #54, Ramsey regarded the final as a mere formality. Having once himself been a young, unproven player subject to blithe condescension from old hands, he should have known better. But one of the things you lose in the wisdom of age is the wisdom of youth. Education is not a steady process of accrual, but a touch-and-go contest between learning and forgetting, like frantically trying to fill a sink faster than it can empty through an open drain— which is why Dominic Dale and his ilk would eternally capitalize on the underestimation of their “betters.”
After the final they dined at Oscar’s, their planned celebration now downgraded to a quiet tête-à-tête for the licking of wounds. By now, she and Ramsey had established a ritual twin order of scallops with saffron cream, wild bass with morels, and a side of spinach.
“It stands to reason,” Irina said over the starter, “that if winning the Grand Prix would mean something, then coming second in the Grand Prix means something, too.”
Ramsey mashed a scallop vengefully with his fork. “It means I lost.” Irina rolled her eyes. “Inability to take satisfaction in anything short of total victory is a formula for a miserable life. When do you ever achieve total victory?”
“When you win the World at the Crucible,” said Ramsey promptly.
“I think we should talk about something else besides snooker.”
“What else is there?”
She examined his face. He wasn’t joking.
During his winning streak, dinnertime conversation had ranged their lives like a great heath, stopping to examine every little copse and pool: Ramsey’s growing concern that to break the standoff with his parents someone would have to die first; Irina’s reasons for demurring from fine art; her sister’s gushy manner as overcompensation for resentment (“Killing with kindness,” she’d noted, “is still murder”); her ambition to finally visit Russia, and her odd regret that now she’d never experience the grisly Soviet Union proper; the comical lengths to which certain female fans had gone—sometimes dogging him from town to town for whole seasons—to get Ramsey into bed. Although there was one gloomy grove that Irina was prone to avoid—her anguish over how Lawrence was managing her desertion—in the main these rhetorical ambles had been bracing and far-flung. Now that Dominic Dale had, it was said, “played above himself” (a curious concept, in Irina’s view—that you could ever play better than you knew how), Ramsey had fallen in a hole.
“We could talk about the fact that, while this is a very nice hotel, I’m looking forward to going home.”
Ramsey looked up sharply. “To Lawrence?”
“No, silly. To Victoria Park Road. Remember that quaint establishment? It’s called
your house.
”
“And when do you figure that would be?”
“Tomorrow, I assume.”
“The Benson and Hedges Championship starts in Malvern tomorrow.”
Irina’s fork drooped. “Malvern. Where the hell is Malvern.”
“Don’t you worry about where Malvern is. Jack’s made all the arrangements.”
“How long does that last?” she asked limply.
“Twelve days.”
“Oh,” she said. The saffron sauce didn’t seem as lively tonight; maybe she was getting tired of it. “What’s after—Malvern?”
“The Liverpool Victoria UK Championship in Preston, of course.”
“Of course,” she said faintly. “And how much time is there between this Malvern thing and the Liverpool what’s-it?”
“Mmm,” he said, massacring his last scallop. “Between the B&H final and the first round in Preston? Three, four days. Have to check the schedule. Ask Jack.”
“When do you take some time
off
?”
“Let’s see,” he reflected. “There’s a week between the Liverpool Victoria and the German Open in Bingen am Rhein. Good fortnight at Christmas. And we haven’t decided whether to enter the China Open this year.”
“Tell me that the China Open is played in Leicester Square.”
“Shanghai,” he said breezily. “If we give it a miss, there’s a handful of days to put our feet up at the end of February. But if we do go for Shanghai, it’d be daft not to do the Thailand Masters in Bangkok straight after.”
“Maybe I’m missing something, but when is all this time off?” “In May. After the World.”
“May,” she said heavily. “It’s now October.”
“There’s the exhibition circuit after the tour’s done, but that’s up to me.”
“Ramsey. I can’t go with you to all these tournaments. I have work to do.” Though he professed to adore her illustrations, Ramsey never seemed to take her occupation seriously as an activity as well as a product. Yet despite herself, she remembered with relief that she’d left her passport carelessly in her handbag ever since the last trip to Brighton Beach. “Oi, but you got to!” he cried. “I’ll not play for shite without you there!”
“You played
for shite
for thirty years without me there.” “If you must do, take the work along, then. We’ve loads of downtime.”
Which they had thus far spent fucking, talking, drinking, and—well, fucking. Little wonder that Irina was skeptical of making time for long hours of drawing in hotel rooms. “Maybe,” she said dubiously. “Do you always play this hard?”
“You should know. You and me’s played powerful hard upstairs.” He reached across the table for her hands. “See, when I leave for Bournemouth I haven’t a baldy if I’ll ever see you again. I reckon on balance, what with Lawrence being a decent, clever chap what’s never raised a hand to you, why would you bolt for a ne’er-do-well snooker player? So I tell Jack to enter me in the whole calendar. I figure I’ll need something to take my mind off you something desperate.
“Now I’m on the play lists. But that ain’t necessarily so terrible. I done this circuit all on my own since I were eleven years old. My parents thought a snooker player a bare notch above juvenile delinquent, and I’d to raise the entry fee for junior tournaments hustling middle-aged tossers at Rackers in Clapham. Got more than one hiding when they was none too pleased to lose a fiver to a cocky sprog as well. It’s been a lonely life, whatever you read in them snooker rags. I never had nobody. Jude got so she hated snooker, hated snooker players, not to mention me, and sure as fuck hated parking her bum at any snooker tournament. I can’t make you come with me, and I’ll understand if you don’t. But if there’s any fairness in this life, I must finally be owed a bird what will raise a glass with me after six hours on the bounce at the table.”
“I have a life, too,” she said gently.
“Sure you do, pet.” An offhand tone belied that he understood anything of the sort. “Take it one tournament at a time. But at least come with me to Malvern.”
“All right,” she said reluctantly. “But only Malvern.”
Spirited from the Royal Bath in another limousine while she was a little hungover, Irina never did sort out where Malvern was—aside from being somewhere in Worcestershire, of which she saw little enough during their play-all-night, sleep-all-day schedule that in her mind it remained not a county but a steak sauce.
Though she couldn’t recall agreeing to accompany him to the UK Championship per se, she next found herself manifested in Preston as if by
Star Trek
transporter room. Nightly after the matches were played, Irina reported for duty at Squares, the massive bar around the corner from the Guildhall; apparently three or four rounds with the lads were included in her job description. She liked to think she was getting a bit better at snooker shop talk, but still found it draining. So she retired from one such session toward the end of the first week with equal parts selfcongratulation and relief.
Yet on return to their hotel room, Ramsey began ominously, “You know,
ducky.
Speaking to the opposition, you got to watch your tongue. They may seem all very hail-fellow-well-met, but them’s the competition as well. Best you never forget that.”
“What did I say,” said Irina guardedly, swallowing
“Coming from you, it means something different.”
this time.
“This palaver about the World.”
“That you’ve lost six World Championship finals is a fact. It’s not a deep dark private secret, but a detail on which Clive Everton comments every time you play.”
“Since you were eavesdropping on my conversation, did you hear what
I said?”
“I weren’t
eavesdropping.
I
overheard.
”
“I said it was common to interpret those six losses as clutching, as
wanting it too much, or wanting it not enough, as collapsing under the ultimate pressure. In sum, as a character flaw. I said to the contrary you lost each of those matches for different reasons, and the impression of pattern is an illusion. I said sometimes you just don’t make a shot because you don’t make a shot, period. It doesn’t mean that your mother didn’t love you or you hate yourself or you’re suffering from fear of success. Since what I said was distilled from listening to you go on at length over countless bottles of wine, I
thought
you’d appreciate my efforts.”
“Nice try, ducky, but too sophisticated by half for this lot. All they hear is Ramsey Acton’s own bird thinks he’s washed up. It’s like you was running me down.”
“I wasn’t running you down!” Irina wondered what happened when people who perceived imaginary slights on every corner were insulted for real. Nevertheless, hypersensitivity was ingenious as a tactic. An outraged reaction to the most harmless remark suggested that nothing short of apocalypse would ensue after a proper put-down, helping to ensure that before criticizing him sincerely she would think twice.