“I’m dying to eat in tonight,” she said by the snack pavilion. “Do you mind?”
“Sounds a bother,” he said. “Shopping and chopping and washing up?”
“I’ve been yearning for one night of quiet normalcy.”
“Like with Lawrence.”
“Like with you, you dope. And you’ve taken me out every night since October. The least I can do in return is make you dinner.”
Thus they wandered to the Safeway on Roman Road, drawing numerous salutations from passers-by. Sometimes the kindness of strangers was touching, but today she wished they’d leave Ramsey alone. In the vegetable aisle, as Irina was contemplating stir-fried eggplant with big hunks of garlic, Ramsey tossed organic broccoli into their cart. She’d nothing against broccoli, but it wasn’t on the menu.
“You know, I do this dish with eggplant—aubergine,” she began tactfully.
“Can’t say as I fancy aubergine,” he said, grabbing carrots and zucchini.
“For tonight—you have something in mind?”
He shrugged. “I stay in, I always eat the same thing: steamed vegetables on brown rice.”
“But you’re a snooker player!” she exploded in consternation. “When you people aren’t throwing your money around, you’re supposed to eat chips and beans-on-toast! Not macrobiotic goody-goody, it’s all wrong!”
“Us people,” he said flintily, “don’t have to eat rubbish just to suit the stereotypes of punters like you.”
Irina looked in exasperation at the packet of chilies in her hands. “I was going to make you kung pao chicken.”
“What’s that?” he asked suspiciously.
“It’s hot.”
“You mean spicy? I don’t eat spicy. I never understand, why mix food and torture.” True, he never ordered dishes with any kick. Even at Best of India, he’d always gone for the chicken tikka, a gloppy British bastardization about as fiery as tomato soup.
“My mother claims that my unnatural appetite for hot food is defiant. She says that it all hails from when she put Tabasco on my thumb as a toddler, to keep me from sucking it. I sucked it anyway, though the Tabasco made my eyes water. Seems I got to like it.”
Ramsey raised an eyebrow. “I can think of something else we can put Tabasco on.”
“Mmm. Might sting a bit.” Alas, no amount of flirtation resolved a clash in tastes whose disappointment for Irina was strangely piercing.
“Go ahead and make pow-pow chicken if you want,” Ramsey urged. “I can do the vegetables and rice on my own.”
“I’m not going to make myself a separate dinner.” Putting the chilies resignedly back, Irina muttered, “Bozhe moi! My mother would have had better luck putting me off sucking my thumb if she’d coated it in steamed vegetables and brown rice.”
When she picked up a liter of milk, Ramsey said, “I don’t eat dairy.”
Irina crossed her arms. “I’ve watched you eat dairy for the last seven months. Scallops with saffron cream? Did you think that Oscar’s used blenderized tofu?”
“I eat out, I make exceptions.”
“But you eat out every night.”
“All the more reason that when I kip back home I knock off the lactose. Otherwise there’s nothing for the saffron cream to be an exception to.”
Irina frowned. Such minor incompatibilities should be negligible in the face of true love; still she battled an absurd impression that Ramsey’s dietary fastidiousness was catastrophic. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re kidding yourself, and you’re a hypocrite.”
“Blimey! Heavy hitting for Safeway.”
“I have strong feelings about food.”
“So you can understand as how I might have strong feelings as well.”
“Most people do.”
At last they were agreed on something. Yet to confirm that otherwise they were batting a perfect score of zero, she had to ask: “You do at least like popcorn?”
“Sticks in me gut. And tastes like polystyrene, don’t it?”
“If you say so,” she said miserably, and carted her four bags of Dunn’s River kernels back to their shelf.
They strolled back down Roman Road with their boring groceries, each carrying excessive weight in one hand that they might hold hands with the other. “By the way,” said Irina, “I suspect my mother’s Tabasco story is apocryphal.”
“Apoca-what…?”
“Oh, never mind.”
Ramsey dropped her hand. “It cuts me to the quick when you do that.”
“Do what?” Irina stopped and turned to him. “What did I do?”
Ramsey rested his load on the pavement. “Whenever you use a word I don’t know, or mention some news story that’s passed me by—”
“You mean, like the death of Princess Di?”
Their eyes met, and they took the measure of each other. Ramsey only concluded after a beat that she was teasing, for the remark was right on the edge of something else. He put on an expression of shock-horror. “You mean, she’s dead?”
Irina clapped his shoulder. “Sorry to break it to you.”
“Why, my appetite’s clean gone to shite, then,” he said gamely, picking up the groceries and walking on. “We’ll skip our tea and I’ll blub my eyes out instead.”
“At this point, weeping really won’t suffice, friend,” she said, falling into step. “Only suttee would make the slightest impression.”
“Sauté?”
“Just a joke.” She reached for his hand again, but he pulled it away.
“You done it again,” he said sharply. “Never mind. It’s patronizing. I know you like my dick. But you seem to think my head’s just a Global Positioning System for transporting it to your fanny.”
“Look—you explain a joke and it’s not funny.”
“You think I’m a donut.”
“What’s a donut?”
“A Yank should know what a donut is.”
“When an American says donut he generally aims to eat it.”
“There now, see? Even if it ain’t funny, you want me to explain myself.”
“All right,” she said. “Suttee. The custom in India whereby a widow throws herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre to be burned alive.”
“Bit over the top.”
“Something like being buried with your possessions—a wife being one of them. It’s a big feminist issue on the subcontinent.”
“Fair enough. That weren’t so bad, was it? ’Cause for me it were interesting. And what about a-pack-of-whatsits?”
“Pack of … apocryphal?” She smiled and squeezed his hand. “More or less, a pack of bull. It means mythical.”
“Why didn’t you say mythical then?”
“Because if I change the word I’d rather use on the assumption you wouldn’t understand it, that would be patronizing. Still, I’m sorry. I don’t think you’re a donut. You live in a very”—she scrambled for a better word than narrow—“rarefied world. I may have a larger vocabulary than you do, because I went to college, and I didn’t skip high school to hang out in snooker halls. But I also don’t earn hundreds of thousands of pounds a year for my celebrated attacking game. As for current events, living with Lawrence I didn’t have any choice but to keep up—because we spent virtually all our time together talking about politics. That’s not a boast. It’s actually appalling.”
RAMSEY’S HUGE OLD-FASHIONED KITCHEN retained its original Victorian fixtures, for he had purchased the house before London’s scourge of “renovation”—the mysterious practice of facilitating a substantially higher price for a property because you had gone to the trouble of ruining it. Ramsey’s cabinetry was solid oak, his old double-sink proper porcelain. The tiles were slate, the cold gray counters not crushed marble with epoxy resin but the real thing, and the massive Aga cooker was a museum piece. But Ramsey’s meager utensils comprised one dull knife and a wooden spoon; he had one small pot (rice) and one large (vegetables) and one of those rinky-dink basket steamers that were always los
ing leaves.
As she set about the dispiriting business of sawing broccoli into florets, Irina inquired further after the parameters of her new cooking regime: No butter. No cheese. No processed flour or grains. No red meat. No salt. No sugar.
“You say no sugar, but what do you think sauvignon blanc is made of?” she asked, nodding at his brimming glass the size of a goldfish bowl.
“All the more reason not to bung more in,” said Ramsey, perched on a stool by the long wooden table.
“And what about soy sauce?”
“Soy sauce is the business.”
“But soy sauce is chock-full of sodium, much more than a sprinkle of table salt.”
Ramsey shrugged. “I like it.”
“And I like Irish butter, parmesan, and New York strip!”
“Go ahead.”
“We’ll not sit down to separate meals. Before long we’d sleep in separate beds.”
“How do you figure?”
“I can’t explain, I just know there’s a relationship. We have to be able to eat together. But where did all this ascetic nonsense come from? Were you kidnapped by a killjoy cult?”
As she hacked through the vegetables, Ramsey explained that in the early 80s he went through a crisis. As a teenager he was a prodigy, setting records left and right; when he first turned pro, he cut a swath through tournaments with the ease of an electric lawn mower. But then Steve Davis and Alex Higgins hit the circuit, and he was “caught between the stools.”
“Steve Davis was kind of the Stephen Hendry of his day, wasn’t he?”
“Right—dull as ditch water. The poncy, eat-all-your-mushy-peas sort of chap; plays terrible slow. I can’t tell you how hacked off the punters got in them days, when Davis won another bloody World Championship. And on the other hand, there was Higgins. The Jack the Lad, the bad boy. Fast and nasty. More press off the table than on. Overrated in terms of product, but—a genius all the same,” Ramsey begrudged. “Wearing all manner of paisley rubbish and silly hats. You know Higgins got a medical exemption from wearing a dickie bow? He passed off some waffle about having a skin condition!”
“Ramsey, the guy is now an inch from one of those homeless men in trash bags who wash in bus stations. Why does he still make you mad?”
“’Cause I fell between the stools!” (A mantra.) “I’d not coldcock opponents in the hospitality room nor play fancy dress to offend the refs. I couldn’t compete with Higgins for being a rank shite, and didn’t try. But I couldn’t compete with Davis for boring, perfect git. If nothing else, I were a mite hip.”
“We were talking about salt,” said Irina. Pressing the dull blade into the carrots hurt her hand. “Surprise! Somehow we end up talking about snooker instead.”
“Maybe I talk round the houses ’cause this period ain’t my favorite to recollect. Dropped off the circuit. Drunk as a sack, most days. Lived on crisps, burnt through all the dosh. I ain’t got much time for blokes what think falling into the gutter takes talent. But I will say your Ramsey Acton don’t do nothing by halves.”
“So what pulled you out of it?” asked Irina warily. Men always seemed to tell tales of self-abasement with pride, and she delivered the cliché with a sour twist: “You finally hit bottom?”
“No such thing as bottom. Things can always get worse. No, what turns around any man, love?”
“Whole grains?”
“A bird, of course. Ariana. I told you about her.”
When he’d first mentioned the woman in Shanghai, she’d found the name annoying. “You mean the dumb, long-suffering one.”
“She sees me play at Pontins when I’m seventeen and never forgets it, right? So round about ’85, Ariana finds me in a pub in Manchester giving the barkeep a bollocking over last orders. Sweeps in like an angel. Puts me on a strict brown-rice diet, and drives me to the local snooker club every day. It’s a bastard, but I get my game back. Though I fancy it ain’t never been the same as before. You never trust something you lose, even if you find it again. Like a bird, come to think of it. She messes about and comes back, you can kiss and make up, but you’re never so cozy as you was.”
Chopping with an eye only to dumpy old steamed vegetables was laborious. All the joy of cooking was gone if she couldn’t add chopped chicken thighs, peanuts, and mounds of nefarious chilies. “Seems you have a history of women following you around and wiping your nose. Sometimes I get the impression that what you hold against Jude is she wasn’t a step-’n’-fetch-it bootlick.”
“What’s up your arse?”
“For one thing,” she said, leaning into a carrot, “it’s up my arse that I’m making the crappiest dinner I’ve ever prepared in my life, mostly to service some superstition of yours that dates back to the 1980s. You totally ignore these nutritional edicts on the road, meaning most of the year. Why should I cook as if I’m at a Zen ashram just so you can touch base with a conversion on the road to Damascus with some ass-kiss vegetarian slag?”
“Damascus?”
“Never mind.”
“Call it superstition, it’s all the same to me,” he said coolly. “When the season’s through, I like to clean out the system. Purify. Find that a laugh if you like. Anorak Man would.”
Irina stopped chopping. The remains of her appetite rolled off like her last slice of zucchini. This evening was signally failing to embody the “normalcy” she had craved. But normalcy as she once understood it was apparently a thing of the past. So far she and Ramsey had either been high as kites—on booze, on sex, or simply on each other—or anguishing over the latest dreadful abuse she’d visited on poor Ramsey without even noticing. In walking out on Lawrence she had unwittingly repudiated the steady-as-she-goes, and for the moment she was undecided as to whether swapping the glassy waters of popcorn-and-TV for the stormy swoop, lurch, and plummet of these last seven months was a criminal swindle or the biggest bargain of her thrifty life. In any event, once you were pitching down the sheer bank of a breaker in open seas, it really didn’t do much good to contemplate whether it would have been wiser or more relaxing to be paddling in circles on a duck pond.
“It’s disappointing for me!” said Irina, still holding the knife. “Find it pathetic if you want, but I like to feed people!”
“You are feeding me.”
“I’m feeding you—yuck-nothing!”
“But it’s what I want. So why ain’t that making you happy as Larry?”
“Because I like to make things. It’s not so different from illustration—which I also used to do a fair bit in the olden days. I like to prepare dishes that are interesting and exciting and beautiful. This is the culinary equivalent of stick figures and lollipop trees!”
“So it ain’t really for me a jot. You cook for your private satisfaction, not to feed people. You want me to tell you how good it is and how clever you are.”
“Oh, crap! You like to give your audience a good game, don’t you?” Analogies to her own work clearly fell on deaf ears. “Well, making brown rice and steamed vegetables every night is like sinking the colors on their spots over and over again!”
“Sod it,” said Ramsey, rising from his stool and sweeping all the vegetables Irina had chopped in a single motion with his forearm to the floor. “Let’s go out.”
Irina stood looking down at the litter of florets and arduously sliced carrots. She bristled at the waste. Still, her skin tingled. Hitherto Ramsey had picked all the fights, and it had been energizing not to sink into an injured little funk for once, but to get mad.
Ramsey raised her chin. “What’s this really about? Can’t all be broccoli.”
Irina closed her eyes; her exhale shuddered. “Lawrence loved my cooking.”
“Anorak Man’s just the other side of the river,” said Ramsey, pulling her hips to his. “I could drive you there in twenty minutes. I wager he’d be chuffed to see you. Tell him the whole lark’s been a mistake. If we motor, we could get you back in time to stir up a right nice supper. With sugar and salt and stacks of
red hot chilies.”
This was hardly the first time Ramsey had made this generous offer, and had he done so from across the room it would have been a declaration of war. But his arms around her back made all the difference, and she looped his neck with her hands. “Don’t be a donut. But let’s sit down a sec. Pour me a glass of that sauvignon. There is one thing we have to talk about, and you’re right. It’s not broccoli.”
They repaired to the snooker room downstairs and settled on the couch. Irina cadged one of Ramsey’s Gauloises, spewing the smoke in a high stream that celebrated not having to endure Lawrence’s disapproving glare, and putting from her mind that her daily intake, never in days past exceeding one or two fags at the most, had stealthily risen to half a pack.
“I can live without my clothes and household stuff,” she said, tucked under Ramsey’s arm. “But I’ve left a project unfinished. I’ve got to get my drawings and art supplies. So be prepared for the fact that I’m going to have to drop by and see Lawrence.”
The arm around her stiffened. “Why see the bloke? He works, don’t he? You still got keys? We can go together, and clear off all your kit whilst he’s away.”
“Look.” Irina sat up, with the pretense of tapping an ash. “I don’t want Lawrence to come back from work one day, and all this stuff has vanished without so much as how-do-you-do. It’s too brutal. Besides… I want to make sure he’s okay.”
“How okay is the bloke going to be, if his bird’s left him? Let him get on with it!”
“Hold on. You’re not expecting that I’ll never see him again, are you?”
“That’s bang on what I’m expecting! You’re the wife now, no mucking about!”
“It would be one thing if he’d beaten me or cleaned out my bank account”—she took a hefty slug of the sauvignon—“but he’s been the soul of kindness and generosity, and I won’t repay that with cold-bloodedly turning my back!”