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fingers.
“Blinding! Pity about that kick in the Embassy,” the fan commiserated. Given Ramsey’s involuntary wince, the “kick” must have been in the teeth. Leave it to strangers to blunder across your raw nerve. “Would’ve had the frame and match as well!”
“Everybody gets kicks,” said Ramsey, shrugging fatalistically about the tiny grains of chalk that can send the cue ball veering off its trajectory. What an odd profession, in which one can be undone by a speck.
“Cheers, mate!” The fan waved his menu, which Omen would now forgo, and nodded cockily at Irina. “You snooker blokes get all the lookers! What’s left for us?”
“That’s why you wanted to close the curtain,” said Irina. This wasn’t the first time that Ramsey had been hit up for an autograph when they’d been on the town, and usually Irina had found the adulation fun. Just now, she felt possessive of his company during an evening that had recently yawned before her, and now seemed short.
“Too late; cat’s out. Jude, now—she hated autograph hounds something fierce.”
“The interruption?”
“That bird not only hated snooker fans, she hated the idea of snooker fans,” he said, wiping his hands on a hot towel. “To Jude, snooker players was like schoolboys who can stand ten-P pieces on their end at lunch. Fair play to them, and no harm done, but you don’t ask for their autograph.”
The waitress took their orders; feeling extravagant, Irina added à la carte additions to the deluxe sashimi platter of sea urchin and sweet shrimp.
“If Jude thought snooker was trivial,” Irina resumed, “why did she marry you?”
“I’d money and stroke, and she could hold my occupation in contempt. Best of both worlds, innit?”
“Didn’t she think it was nifty, you on TV, at least at first?”
“Oi, no mistake. But it’s queer how the thing what attracted you to someone is the same as what you come to despise about them.”
Irina dangled a translucent slice of cucumber. “If Jude’s relationship to my illustrations is any guide, you’ve got a point. You do know what she said?”
Ramsey tapped a chopstick on the table. “I wager she weren’t no diplomat. But you ever wonder if one or two of her observations wasn’t spot on?”
“How could I think what she said was ‘spot on’ and still keep working at all?”
“She did think your composition was brilliant, and that your craftsmanship was class. But there were something, in them first few books, a wildness—it’s gone missing.”
“Well, you don’t just go put ‘wildness’ back. ‘Oh, I’ll add a little wildness!’ ”
He smiled, painfully. “Don’t get your nose in a sling. I were only trying to help. Making a hash of it as well. I don’t know your business. But I did think you was right talented.”
“Past tense?”
“What Jude was on about—it’s hard to put into words, like.”
“Jude didn’t have a hard time putting it into words,” Irina countered bitterly. “Adjectives like flat and lifeless are very evocative. She put her sniffy disapproval into action, too, and commissioned another illustrator for her preachy story line. I had to toss a year’s worth of work.”
“Sorry, love. And you was bang on—what we was talking about, it ain’t something you can add like a pinch of salt. It ain’t out there, it runs through you. Same as in snooker.”
“Well, I guess illustration isn’t as fun for me as it used to be. But what is?”
Her degenerative expectations seemed to sadden him. “You’re too young to talk like that.”
“I’m over forty, and can talk however I please.”
“Fair enough—you’re too beautiful to talk like that, then.”
Lawrence was wont to describe her as cute, and though Ramsey was a bit out of order the more serious adjective was refreshing. Self-conscious, Irina struggled with the oily strips of eel. “If I am, I didn’t used to be. I was a scrawny kid. Knobby, all knees.”
“What a load of waffle. Never met a bird