The Post-Birthday World Read Online Free PDF Page A

purchased Italian black kale, smoked boar sausage, and a malicious fistful of chilies from flirtatious vendors who didn’t know her name but had come to recognize her face. All too aware that going through the placid paces of marketing was slapping a superficial gloss of normalcy over an alarmingly unstable foundation, Irina also bought an armful of rhubarb to keep herself gainfully occupied when she got home.
    Restored to the flat, she set about industriously constructing two rhubarb-cream pies, one for the freezer and one for Lawrence’s homecoming. She increased the recipe’s measure of nutmeg by a factor of five. A reserved woman of moderate inclinations to all appearances, Irina expressed an insidious attraction to extremes through decorative matters like seasoning, and few diners at her table suspected that her flair in the kitchen owed largely to a better-than-average mastery of the multiplication table. Fortunately, the fiddly lattice tops concentrated a mind that kept fragmenting like the fine strips of crust. Her hands weren’t precisely shaking, but they moved in spasmodic jerks, as if under strobe. (That cognac—surely there hadn’t been a third?) Lawrence wasn’t coming home a moment too soon. She strained against it on occasion, but maybe she needed his stern regimentation and sense of order. Without Lawrence, Irina would obviously turn overnight into a chain-smoking, cakehoovering, brandy-addled hag.
    The pies came out beautifully, the egg and sugar bubbling through the lattice into brittle browned hats, the acidic sting of rhubarb spiking the air throughout the flat, but pastry only saw her through to about five p.m. What’s more, while the pies were in the oven, she did something she very rarely got up to in the last few years, since Lawrence anyway, and once the pies were cooling, she did it again.
    Six o’clock. Irina wasn’t prone to dithering over her appearance; most of her clothes were offbeat secondhand items from Oxfam outlets, for during their tenure here London had officially topped the charts as the most expensive city in the world. Ordinarily allowing fifteen minutes to dress was ample. Two hours was ridiculous.
    Yet this evening, allowing a mere two hours was cutting it close. The bed grew heaped with discarded blouses. Flailing in and out of frocks, she recalled a charming project from a few years ago titled
    I’ve Nothing to Wear!, about a little girl who hurricanes through her entire wardrobe one morning, flinging outfit after outfit from her chest of drawers. Lines from the book returned: “I do not like the button holes, I do not like the collar! If I wear the polka dot, I’ll bawl and shriek and holler!” The narrative arc had been predictable (big surprise, the little girl finally chooses to wear the first thing she’d put on), but the clothing flying through the air had a Futurist energy, and the illustrative opportunities had been rich.
Yet contrary to feminine convention, Irina was striking pose after critical pose in the full-length bedroom mirror with an eye to looking as dowdy as possible. While early in this melee she had toyed with the notion of the pale blue sleeveless that last year had threatened to keep Ramsey in their living room all the way to breakfast, she’d immediately chucked the idea. Was she insane? Instead she rummaged through the wardrobe’s nether regions for the longest skirts, the crummiest fits, and the least becoming colors she could find. Alas, Irina didn’t own a lot of ugly clothes, a lack she’d never before had occasion to rue.
This exercise in perversity was a waste. Ramsey was sure to select a ritzy restaurant where her few flashier garments would not look out of place. Lawrence always wore the most slovenly gear he could get away with, and on the few occasions she dared to don something chic he grew flustered: “It’s only a Blue Sky cocktail party. No need to make a big deal out of it.”
Calling time in this sartorial musical