The Post-Birthday World. Lionel Shriver

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      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 faith in the whole project,” she was hurtling through this tunnel toward not romance, but cynicism.