Before She Met Me Read online

  Praise for Julian Barnes’s

  BEFORE SHE MET ME

  “Few will be able to resist its easy humor and almost insidious readability.… Barnes has succeeded in writing one of those books that keeps us up until 2:00 a.m.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Barnes’s books … celebrate the human imagination, the human heart, the boisterous diversity of our gene pool, our activities, our delusions.… They thrill the mind and the emotions; and he achieves, without tricks or puns, what Nabokov loved: esthetic bliss.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Julian Barnes [is] one of today’s most rewarding writers.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “There is an irresistible blend of wit and intelligence in his work.”

  —New Statesman

  “Frighteningly plausible … stunningly well done.”

  —Guardian

  “Julian Barnes is one of a handful of innovative English novelists who have succeeded in pulling the English novel out of the provincial rut in which it lay.”

  —Newsday

  “[Julian Barnes] demonstrates what a fabulous independent voice can accomplish when it keeps kicking away the crutches of contemporary fiction.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “[Barnes] is not merely a dazzling entertainer … he is a no-nonsense moralist as well, and is as dexterous with the darker elements of betrayal and pain as with the farcical mechanics of love and clashing temperaments.”

  —The New Yorker

  Julian Barnes

  BEFORE SHE MET ME

  Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England, in 1946, was educated at Oxford University, and now lives in London. His first six novels—Metroland, Before She Met Me, Flaubert’s Parrot, Staring at the Sun, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, and Talking It Over—have brought him international acclaim.

  ALSO BY Julian Barnes

  Metroland

  Flaubert’s Parrot

  Staring at the Sun

  A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

  Talking It Over

  The Porcupine

  Copyright © 1982 by Julian Barnes

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain in hardcover by Jonathan Cape, London, in 1982.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barnes, Julian. Before she met me / Julian Barnes.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79778-0

  I. Title. [PR6052.A6657B4 1992]

  823’.914—dc20 92-50091

  v3.1

  To Pat

  Man finds himself in the predicament that nature has endowed him essentially with three brains which, despite great differences in structure, must function together and communicate with one another. The oldest of these brains is basically reptilian. The second has been inherited from the lower mammals, and the third is a late mammalian development, which … has made man peculiarly man. Speaking allegorically of these brains within a brain, we might imagine that when the psychiatrist bids the patient to lie on the couch, he is asking him to stretch out alongside a horse and a crocodile.

  Paul D. MacLean, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases,

  Vol. CXXXV, No 4, October 1962

  II vaut mieux encore être marié qu’être mort.

  Molière, Les Fourberies de Scapin.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ONE Three Suits and a Violin

  TWO In flagrante

  THREE The Cross-Eyed Bear

  FOUR Sansepolcro, Poggibonsi

  FIVE Sawn-Offs and Four-Eyes

  SIX Mister Carwash

  SEVEN On the Dunghill

  EIGHT The Feminian Sandstones

  NINE Sometimes a Cigar …

  TEN The Stanley Spencer Syndrome

  ELEVEN The Horse and the Crocodile

  ONE

  Three Suits and a Violin

  The first time Graham Hendrick watched his wife commit adultery he didn’t mind at all. He even found himself chuckling. It never occurred to him to reach out a shielding hand towards his daughter’s eyes.

  Of course, Barbara was behind it. Barbara, his first wife; as opposed to Ann, his second wife—the one who was committing the adultery. Though naturally, at the time he didn’t think of it as adultery. So the response of pas devant wasn’t appropriate. And in any case, it was still what Graham called the honey time.

  The honey time had begun on April 22nd, 1977, at Repton Gardens, when Jack Lupton introduced him to a girl parachutist. He was on his third drink of the party. But alcohol never helped him relax: as soon as Jack introduced the girl, something flickered in his brain and automatically expunged her name. That was what happened at parties. A few years earlier, as an experiment, Graham had tried repeating the person’s name as they shook hands. “Hullo, Rachel,” he’d say, and ‘Hullo, Lionel,’ and ‘Good evening, Marion.’ But the men seemed to think you homosexual for it, and eyed you warily; while the women asked politely if you were Bostonian, or, perhaps, a Positive Thinker. Graham had abandoned the technique and gone back to feeling ashamed of his brain.

  On that warm April night, leaning against Jack’s bookshelves and away from the turmoil of warbling smokers, Graham gazed civilly across at this still anonymous woman with neatly-shaped blondeish hair and a candy-striped shirt that was silk for all he knew.

  ‘It must be an interesting life.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘You must … travel around a lot.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Give demonstrations, I suppose.’ He imagined her cart-wheeling through the air while scarlet smoke hissed from a canister strapped to her ankle.

  ‘Well, that’s the other department, really.’ (What department was that?)

  ‘It must be dangerous, though.’

  ‘What—you mean … the flying?’ Surprising, Ann thought, how often men were scared of aeroplanes. They never bothered her.

  ‘No, not the flying bit, the other bit. The jumping.’

  Ann put her head on one side by way of interrogation.

  ‘The jumping.’ Graham placed his glass on a shelf and flapped his arms up and down. Ann put her head further on one side. He grasped the middle button of his jacket and gave it a sharp, military downward tug.

  ‘Ah,’ he said finally, ‘thought you were a parachutist.’ The lower half of Ann’s face formed itself into a smile, then her eyes moved slowly from sceptical pity to amusement. ‘Jack said you were a parachutist,’ he repeated, as if the reiteration and the attributed authority made it more likely to be true. In fact, of course, the opposite was the case. It was doubtless another example of what Jack called ‘making the knees-up go with a swing you silly old cunt’.

  ‘So in that case,’ she replied, ‘you aren’t a historian and you don’t teach at London University.’

  ‘Good God no,’ said Graham. ‘Do I look like an academic?’

  ‘I don’t know what they look like. Don’t they look like everybody else?’

  ‘No they don’t,’ said Graham, quite fiercely. ‘They wear glasses and brown tweed jackets and have humps on their backs and mean, jealous natures and they all use Old Spice.’ Ann looked at him. He had glasses and a brown corduroy jacket.

  ‘I’m a brain surgeon,’ he said. ‘Well, not really. I’m working my way up. You have to practise on other bits first: stands to reason. I’m on shoulders and necks at the moment.’
r />   ‘That must be interesting,’ she said, uncertain how far to disbelieve him. ‘It must be difficult,’ she added.

  ‘It is difficult.’ He shifted his glasses on his nose, moving them sideways before settling them back exactly where they had been before. He was tall, with an elongated, squared-off face and dark brown hair erratically touched with grey, as if someone had shaken it from a clogging pepper pot. ‘It’s also dangerous.’

  ‘I should think it is.’ No wonder his hair was like that.

  ‘The most dangerous part,’ he explained, ‘is the flying.’

  She smiled; he smiled. She wasn’t just pretty; she was friendly as well.

  ‘I’m a buyer,’ she said, ‘I buy clothes.’

  ‘I’m an academic,’ he said. ‘I teach history at London University.’

  ‘I’m a magician,’ said Jack Lupton, loafing at the edge of their conversation and now canting a bottle into the middle of it. ‘I teach magic at the University of Life. Wine or wine?’

  ‘Go away, Jack,’ said Graham, firmly for him. And Jack had gone away.

  Looking back, Graham could see with urgent clarity how beached his life had been at that time. Unless, of course, urgent clarity was always a deceptive function of looking back. He had been thirty-eight then: fifteen years married; ten years in the same job; halfway through an elastic mortgage. Halfway through life as well, he supposed; and he could feel the downhill slope already.

  Not that Barbara would have seen it like this. And not that he could have expressed it to her like this either. Perhaps that was part of the trouble.

  He was still fond of Barbara at the time; though he hadn’t really loved her, hadn’t felt anything like pride, or even interest, in their relationship, for at least five years. He was fond of their daughter Alice; though, somewhat to his surprise, she had never excited any very deep emotions in him. He was glad when she did well at school, but doubted if this gladness was really distinguishable from relief that she wasn’t doing badly: how could you tell? He was negatively fond of his job too; though a bit less fond each year, as the students he processed became callower, more guiltlessly lazy and more politely unreachable than ever.

  Throughout the fifteen years of his marriage, he’d never been unfaithful to Barbara: because he thought it was wrong, but also, he supposed, because he’d never really been tempted (when gusset-flashing girl students crossed their legs at him, he responded by giving them the more difficult essay options; they passed on the news that he was a cold fish). In the same way, he’d never thought of shifting his job, and doubted if he could find one elsewhere which he could do as easily. He read a great deal, he gardened, he did the crossword; he protected his property. At thirty-eight, it felt a bit like being retired already.

  But when he met Ann—not that first moment at Repton Gardens, but later, after he’d conned himself into asking her out—he began to feel as if some long-broken line of communication to a self of twenty years ago had suddenly been restored. He felt once more capable of folly and idealism. He also felt as if his body had begun to exist again. By this he didn’t just mean that he was seriously enjoying sex (though of course he did mean this too), but that he had stopped picturing himself as merely a brain lodged within a container. For at least ten years he had found a diminishing use for his body; the location of all pleasure and emotion, which had once seemed to extend right to the edge of his skin, had retreated to the small space in the middle of his head. Everything he valued went on between his ears. Of course, he looked after his body, but with the same sort of muted, impassive interest he showed towards his car. Both objects had to be fuelled and washed at varying intervals; both went wrong occasionally, but could usually be repaired.

  893–8013: how had he found the nerve to make that call? He knew how: by fooling himself. He’d sat at his desk one morning with a list of phone calls and had slipped ‘her’ number into the middle of them. Halfway through rancorous haggling about timetables and resigned expressions of interest from editors of learned journals he found himself confronted by ‘her’ ringing tone. He hadn’t asked anyone (any woman, that was) out to lunch (well, a non-professional lunch) for years. It had never seemed … relevant. But all he had to do was identify himself, check that she remembered him, and ask away. She accepted; what’s more, she said yes to the first day he suggested. He’d liked that; it had given him the confidence to leave his wedding ring on for the lunch. He had, for a moment, considered removing it.

  And things had carried on as straightforwardly as that. He, or she, would say, ‘Why don’t we … ’; she, or he, would reply, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; and the decision was made. None of that speculation about motives which marriage to Barbara constantly involved. You didn’t really mean that, Graham, did you? When you said x you really meant y, didn’t you, Graham? Living with you is like playing chess against someone with two ranks of knights, Graham. One evening in the seventh year of their marriage, after a dinner almost without tension, when Alice had gone to bed and he felt as soothed and happy as had seemed then to be possible, he had said to Barbara, exaggerating only a little,

  ‘I feel very happy.’

  And Barbara, who was scouring the final crumbs from the dinner-table, had wheeled round, pink rubber gloves wetly aloft, as if she were a poised surgeon, and answered,

  ‘What are you trying to get out of?’

  There had been similar exchanges, before and after, but this one stuck in his mind. Maybe because he really hadn’t been trying to get out of anything. And afterwards, he found himself pausing before he told her he loved her, or was happy, or that things were going well, weren’t they, and he’d first ponder the question: is there anything Barbara might think I’m trying to evade or diminish if I go ahead and tell her what I’m feeling? And if there wasn’t, he’d go ahead and tell her. But it did take the spontaneity out of things.

  Spontaneity, directness, the mending of communication lines to his body: Ann had introduced him not just to Pleasure (many might have done that) but to its intricate approaches, its mazy enjoyment; she even managed to freshen for him the memories of pleasure. The pattern of this introduction never varied: first, a thrust of recognition as he saw how Ann did something (ate, made love, talked, even just stood or walked); then, a period of mimetic catching-up, until he felt at ease in the presence of that particular pleasure; finally, a state of thankfulness edged (he didn’t understand how it could be, at first, but it was) with queasy resentment. Grateful as he was to her for teaching him, approving as he did of her having found out first (without that, how could he ever have learnt?), he sometimes ran up against a residual, nervous vexation that Ann had got there before him. After all, he was seven years older than her. In bed, for instance, her confident easiness often seemed to him to be showing up (criticizing, mocking almost) his own cautious, stiff-jointed awkwardness. ‘Hey, stop, wait for me,’ he thought; and at other times, with more resentment, ‘Why didn’t you learn this with me?’

  Ann was aware of this—she made Graham make her aware of it, as soon as she sensed it—but it didn’t seem a threat. Talking would surely make it go away. Besides, there were many areas where Graham knew far more than she did. History was a library of closed books to her. The news was uninteresting because it was inevitable, uninfluenceable. Politics bored her, except for the brief gambler’s thrill she felt at Budget time, and the slightly more protracted thrill during general elections. She could just about name the important members of the Cabinet; except that she was normally one Cabinet behind.

  She liked travelling, which Graham had almost given up (it was another activity which took place mainly between his ears). She liked modern art and old music; she hated sport and shopping; she loved food and reading. Graham found most of these tastes congenial, and all understandable. She used to like the cinema—she had, after all, had small parts in a number of films—but didn’t want to go any more; which was fine by Graham.

  When Ann met him she wasn’t on the lookout. ‘I’m thir
ty-one,’ she had recently replied to an overconcerned uncle who stared pryingly at the third finger of her left hand, ‘I’m not on the shelf, and I’m not on the lookout.’ She no longer expected each party, each dinner to disclose a perfect partner—or even an adequate one. Besides, she had already grasped the baffling, comic disparity between intentions and results. You wanted a brief, almost contactless affair, and you got fond of his mother; you thought he was good but not wet, and discovered an adamantine selfishness behind his modest, drink-fetching appearance. Ann didn’t consider herself disillusioned or (as some of her friends thought her) unlucky; she merely judged herself wiser than when she had started. So far, she thought, as she considered the uneasy ménages à trois, the tear-drenched abortions, and the niggling, low-grade relationships some of her friends let themselves in for, she’d got through pretty unscathed.

  It was in Graham’s favour that he wasn’t particularly good-looking; Ann told herself it made him more authentic. Whether or not he was married was a neutral factor. Ann’s girlfriends decreed that once you reached thirty, the men you met (unless you turned cradle-snatcher) tended to be either homosexual, married or psychotic, and that of the three, the married men were obviously the best. Sheila, Ann’s closest friend, maintained that in any case married men were preferable to single men because they smelt nicer: their wives were always having their clothes dry-cleaned. Whereas the bachelor’s jacket, she declared, was all cigarette smoke and armpits.

  Ann’s first affair with a married man had troubled her; she felt, if not exactly a thief, at least a white-collar criminal. But this didn’t last long; and nowadays she argued that if marriages went stale, that was hardly her fault, was it? If men strayed, it was because they wanted to; if you took a principled stand, shoulder to shoulder with your fellow-woman, that wouldn’t change anything. You wouldn’t get any thanks for your negative virtue; the husband would soon move on to some tramp; and the wife would never know about your silent support. So, as she sat over lunch with Graham for the first time and noticed his wedding-ring, she only thought, Well, that gets me out of that question. It was always difficult when you had to ask. Sometimes they assumed you were wanting them to lie, and so they did, and then you were tempted into needlessly sarcastic comments like, ‘You’re terribly good at ironing.’