Before She Met Me Page 16

  ‘Used to belong to the Tesco school of fiction,’ he had once explained. ‘You know: pile it high, sell it cheap. Thought that if people had a choice between some 200-page bit of smart wankery at four quid, or 400 pages of my gutsy stuff at five quid, they’d see which was the better bargain. And I was right of course; they did prefer my stuff. But after half a dozen bleedings of my life’s blood, I thought, hey, aren’t I screwing myself a bit? It’s twice as long, but do I get twice the royalties? Then I saw all these chick novelists turning out monographs, and I thought, Jack boy, you can do that and leave a hand free for what-you-will at the same time. So I did, and you know, I’m beginning to see the point of all this minimalism. It’s easy on the bum, that’s what.’

  In the neo-Firbank period, Jack’s toasts and teases continued. A phrase of Ann’s; a description of her breasts; a mannerism while making love; a dress. The more evidence Graham found, the easier it became to find yet more; and in the exhilaration of his critical pursuit he seemed to forget the precise significance of what he was finding out.

  Only later, when he assembled the torn-out evidence—which added up to half the length of a late-period Lupton—did he stop for thought. Then, as he read through the collected evidence of the Jack-Ann affair, as he watched Ann’s body arch up towards Jack, and Jack stick his smelly beard into Ann’s face in the mistaken belief that stale nicotine was an aphrodisiac (it couldn’t be, Graham insisted, it couldn’t be), the anaesthetic wore off and the pains returned. He held his stomach with one hand, his chest with the other, and rocked forwards as he sat on the floor by the torn-out pages. Then he began slipping sideways and he keeled over into a foetal position; his hands slipped between his thighs, and he lay on the floor like a sick child. He shut his eyes and tried, as he used to when he was a boy, to think of something different, external, exciting. He thought of a game of village cricket, until the spectators turned into a football crowd chanting ‘Carwash, carwash’. He thought of abroad, until Benny drove by in his silver Porsche on the way to Arezzo, and casually flung a pair of knickers out of the window. He thought of giving a class on Bonar Law, until all his students put their hands up at the same time and demanded to go into the film industry. Finally, he thought of his childhood, back before Ann and Jack and Barbara, back to the time when there had only been his parents to pacify; the years before betrayal existed, when there was only tyranny and subservience. He worked hard at holding in place the memory of that circumscribed time; gradually he retreated into it and pulled its certainties up around his ears; and then he fell asleep.

  Over the next few days Graham read and re-read the passages from Out of the Dark and the later works. There could be no doubt at all. Jack’s affair with Ann had started in 1971, had continued during the time he was first getting to know Ann, and then through all their marriage. Hot Certainties, The Doused Fire and Rage, Rage contained the necessary evidence. If he allowed six months—a year at maximum—for the publishers to produce the book, this meant that the passages in The Doused Fire where ‘Jack’, lightly disguised as an exbomber pilot whose face has been refashioned by plastic surgery, has a healing relationship with ‘Ann’, a Scottish nurse with a mole in the right place for once, were written during the first year of their marriage. The infidelity didn’t even lapse then, Graham thought; not even then.

  A week or so later, Graham telephoned Sue in the country, having first prepared himself to wrong-number Jack if by any chance he answered.

  ‘Sue, it’s Graham.’

  ‘Graham … oh, Graham.’ She sounded relieved at having guessed the right Graham, rather than actually pleased. ‘Jack’s in London.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Go ahead. I’m not all that busy.’ She still didn’t sound welcoming.

  ‘Could we meet, Sue? In London one day?’

  ‘Graham … well … what’s it about?’

  ‘I don’t want to tell you now.’

  ‘Just as long as it isn’t something you think I ought to know. As long as you don’t think you know what’s good for me.’

  ‘It’s not like that. It’s sort of, well, about you and me …’ He did sound serious.

  ‘Graham, I didn’t know you cared. Better late than never, anyway.’ She gave a skittish giggle. ‘Let me look at my diary. Yes, just as I thought. I can offer you any day between now and the end of the decade.’

  They fixed on a date a week ahead.

  ‘Oh and Sue … ’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you think it odd if I said … if I said I hope you don’t tell Jack we’re having lunch together.’

  ‘He has his own life,’ she replied sharply. ‘I have mine.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Could her implication have been clearer, Graham wondered as he put down the phone. Yes, he supposed it could, but even so … Especially as he’d rung her completely out of the blue. He hadn’t seen her for over a year and, well, after all, he didn’t really like her much, did he? That natural vivacity which friends praised was a bit close, in Graham’s view, to unfocused aggression.

  The following week he sat in Tardelli’s over a Campari and soda, at a table tucked away round a corner. He pondered the best way to get the final corroboration he sought. He couldn’t just ask for it, that was certain.

  ‘Graham, darling, the adulterers’ table—you were serious.’

  ‘ …?’

  ‘You mean you didn’t know?’ She was still holding her face out towards him. He half-rose, kicking a table leg as he did so, and touched his lips to her cheek. Had they been on kissing terms before? He wasn’t sure.

  ‘I asked for a quiet table,’ he replied, ‘I said we wanted an undisturbed lunch.’

  ‘So you didn’t know that this is the official adulterers’ table?’

  ‘No, really.’

  ‘How disappointing.’

  ‘But no one can see you here.’

  ‘That’s just the point. You’re out of sight, but in order to get to the table or go for a pee or anything, you have to declare yourself to the whole restaurant. It’s famous, darling—maybe not in your circles, but certainly in ours.’

  ‘You mean people deliberately sit here?’

  ‘Of course. It’s much pleasanter than putting an announcement in The Times. It’s a brilliant form of discreet publicity, I always think. You announce a liaison while pretending to yourself to be hiding it. Eases the guilt, but gets the news around. Ideal solution. I’m surprised more restaurants don’t have tables like this.’

  ‘Is there likely to be anyone here you know?’ Graham wasn’t sure whether to act pleased or apprehensive.

  ‘Who can tell? Don’t worry, love, I’ll take care of you when they pop their heads round the corner and pretend to be looking for someone else.’ She patted his arm reassuringly.

  After that, Graham decided there was only one way to let the lunch run. He acted the shy flirt, risking an occasional light touch, and gauchely getting caught stealing glances at her. Distantly, genially, he went along with the received opinion that she was a pretty woman; but he didn’t confront the question very seriously.

  Since Graham had not, it seemed, come to discuss her husband’s infidelities, that was precisely what Sue talked to him about. Since he had not come to press his cause with a today-or-forget-it urgency, she talked, as an analogue, about her own occasional affairs; about the difficulties of conducting any liaison in the country without being found out; and about her townee’s fears of bucolic revenge, of pitchforks, and balers, and feed silos. For a moment, as the second carafe was emptied and they were waiting for their coffee, Sue’s tone hardened.

  ‘You know what I call the way Jack goes on? I call it the Stanley Spencer syndrome. Know about that?’

  Graham indicated that he didn’t.

  ‘And the fact that I was Jack’s second wife makes it even more appropriate.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘When Stanley Spencer got married for the second time, do you know what happened
on the wedding night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He sent his new wife ahead on the honeymoon, like an advance crate of luggage, went home, and fucked his first wife.’

  ‘But … ’

  ‘No, no, wait for it. Not that. Then he went off to join his second wife and sat her down on the beach and explained to her that an artist had exceptional sexual needs, and that he now proposed to keep two wives. His art required it, and his art came first. Cold-blooded little dwarf,’ she added, as if Spencer were a drinking companion of her husband’s. ‘And that’s what Jack’s got, to a certain extent. He’s smart enough not to put it like that, but deep down it’s what he believes. Sometimes when I’m at home I stand in front of the row of books he’s written and I find myself thinking, I wonder how many fucks went into that one?’

  ‘Well, you know what Balzac used to say—“There goes another novel.” ’ Graham felt uneasy, not sure whether this remark was reassuring or the opposite.

  ‘And then I have another look at the books, and I think about Jack screwing around all these years, and I think, I don’t really mind that much, not after the first hurt of it, and after all I’ve had some fun myself, but what I really resent when I look at his ten novels lined up on the shelf, what I really can’t forgive him for, is that they aren’t bloody better than they are. I sometimes feel like saying to him, “Look, Jack, you can forget the books, just forget them. They aren’t that good. Give them up and concentrate on the screwing. You’re better at that.” ’

  Graham thought of the torn-out sections of Rage, Rage, The Domed Fire and Out of the Dark. Then he began what he had very carefully prepared.

  ‘Sue, I hope you won’t misunderstand me. I thought it would be nice to … to …’ he stumbled a bit, deliberately, ‘to have lunch with you, to see you, because we’ve been out of touch for a while, and I’ve always thought we, I, don’t see enough of you. I don’t want you to think I’ve got some motive of neatness, or revenge or anything.’ She looked puzzled, and he hurried on. ‘I mean, we all knew about Jack and Ann in the old days, and that’s not at all surprising, and anyway, if they hadn’t been, um, lovers then I might not have met her, so I suppose in a way I’m even sort of a bit grateful.’ Graham felt his show of timid honesty was going quite well; now came the tricky part.

  ‘But I did get a shock, I have to admit it, when I found out they’d never really stopped having an affair. It gave me quite a stab. I only discovered about six months ago. Apart from anything to do with Ann, I felt a sense of friendship betrayed, and all those emotions people tell us are old-fashioned. I was quite bitter about Jack for a while, but I suppose in a way it’s helped me understand Ann’s … needs a bit more. I suppose if I’d rung you then you’d have had reason to doubt my purpose. But, well, that hiccup is over, and I’m quite resigned to it, and then when I found myself thinking how nice it would be to see you again, I examined my motives and once I could give them a clean bill of health I got on the phone. And … and here we are now, I suppose you could say.’

  Graham looked down at his empty coffee cup. He was pleased with the cautious, limp ending. Pushing two separate lines at the same time was a good idea. Just when he was wondering if he dared look up, Sue leaned across and placed a hand on his forearm. He raised his head and met a bright smile.

  ‘I suppose you could.’ She liked his shyness. She smiled, encouragingly, once more, and all the time she was thinking, The bastard, the bastard, the fucking Stanley Spencer Jack Lupton bastard. Why hadn’t she guessed? Jack never really gave up his old girlfriends. Maybe he thought they’d stop buying his books if he stopped fucking them. But she clamped down on these feelings. Mustn’t let Graham see that she was upset, that she hadn’t known, that it would need a hell of a lot more than a few fake smiles on a Friday night to pacify her this time. Don’t spoil your chances, girl, don’t splash the water; this one will have to be reeled in gently.

  ‘Maybe I should have told you,’ she went on, ‘but I’m afraid I always work on the cancer rule. If they don’t ask, you don’t tell them; and if they do ask but really want to be told No, then you still say No. I’m sorry you had to find out from a third party, Graham.’

  He smiled wanly, thinking of his deception. She smiled sympathetically, thinking of hers. Sue thought that revenge-fucking Graham might prove quite salutary.

  ‘I hope you won’t think me old-fashioned,’ he said, continuing his act, ‘but I’ve actually got to take a class in about an hour. Can we, can we meet again next week perhaps?’

  Sue found his lack of presumption charming. None of those terrible lines chaps sometimes used, like ‘Keep the afternoon free’ and ‘I’m a bachelor at the moment’. She leaned across and kissed him on the lips. He looked surprised.

  ‘That’s the advantage of the adulterers’ table,’ she said cheerfully. She was pleased he hadn’t tried to grope her or anything during lunch. She hoped this passiveness didn’t go too far. Still, it made a nice change. Jack, for instance, by this stage would be under the table, his beard bringing a rash like razor-burn to some gullible tart’s inner thighs. Would Graham take his glasses off in bed?

  They kissed goodbye outside the restaurant, Sue already with her mind on the same time, same place, the next week, and whatever might follow. Graham was also looking ahead, but in quite a different direction.

  ELEVEN

  The Horse and the Crocodile

  It was only offal, Graham found himself repeating under his breath as he drove to Repton Gardens. It was all offal. Well, not quite all, but it was the offal that came out on top. He’d spent forty years fighting it, and could now perceive the irony of his life: that the years when he’d thought of himself as a failure—when the whole mechanism seemed to be quietly and painlessly running down—were in fact the time of success.

  It was clever stuff, offal, he reflected as he passed the Staunton Road carwash for the hundredth time since it all began. Clever stuff. And of course he hadn’t been a pushover: that’s why he had lasted forty years in the first place. It got to other people much more quickly. But it got to everyone in the end. With him it had taken the long, slow, circuitous route, and finally chosen someone quite unexpected as its instrument. Ann, who loved him; whom he loved.

  It hadn’t changed much since the Middle Ages, since Montaillou, since the time they believed literally in offal: in blood, liver, bile, and so on. What was the latest theory which Jack—Jack of all people—had explained to him? That there were two or three different layers of the brain constantly at war with one another. This was only a different way of saying that your guts fucked you up, wasn’t it? All it meant was that the battle-plan and the metaphor had shifted about two feet six up your body.

  And the battle was always lost, that was what Graham had been taught to recognize. The offal came out on top. You could delay it for a while, by desiccating your life as much as possible; though this only made you more of a prize later. The real division in the world wasn’t between those who had lost the battle and those who hadn’t yet fought it; but between those who, when they lost the battle, could accept defeat, and those who couldn’t. Maybe there was some little broom-cupboard of the brain where that was decided too, he reflected with glum irritation. But people did divide that way. Jack, for instance, accepted his defeat, didn’t seem to notice really, even turned it to his advantage. Whereas Graham couldn’t accept it now, and knew he would never be able to. Which was also ironic, because Jack was altogether a more pugnacious and truculent character; Graham saw himself as something very close to the mild, amiable, slightly put-upon figure that others perceived.

  ‘Ah, mmm, telephone,’ Jack muttered, answering the door after some considerable time. Then he hurried off down the hall.

  ‘No, my little coronary,’ Graham could hear as he took off his mac and hung it on the peg. ‘No, look, not now, I’ll ring you back …’ Graham patted his jacket pockets ‘… don’t know. Not too long … arriveheari.’

  Graham reflected th
at even a few days ago he might have been interested in whoever Jack was talking to; might it be Ann? Now, it simply didn’t matter. There could have been a trail of familiar underclothes smirking at him from the stairs and still Graham wouldn’t have been bothered.

  Jack seemed a bit flustered. ‘Just a little birdie whispering in my ear,’ he said jovially by way of explanation. ‘Come in, corky.’ He grinned uneasily. Turning into the sitting-room, he farted, for once without commentary.

  ‘Coffee?’ Graham nodded.

  It had only been a few months since he’d been sitting in the same chair, tremulously offering to Jack his fretful ignorances. Now he sat, listening to Jack tinkling at the coffee mugs with a spoon, and felt he knew it all. Not knew it all in the straightforward factual sense—about Jack and Ann, for instance—but knew it all in the wider sense. In the old stories, people grew up, struggled, had misfortunes, and eventually came to ripeness, to a sense of being at ease with the world. Graham, after forty years of not struggling very much, felt he had come to ripeness in a few months, and irrevocably grasped that terminal unease was the natural condition. This sudden wisdom had disconcerted him at first; now he felt calm about it. As he pushed his hand into his jacket pocket, he admitted that he might be misunderstood; he might be thought of as merely jealous, merely crackers. Well, that was up to them.

  And the advantage of probably being misunderstood in any case, he said to himself as Jack handed him a mug, was that you didn’t have to explain. You really didn’t. One of the more contemptible features of the flicks he’d been going to see in recent months was the smug convention under which characters were called upon to explain their motives. ‘I killed you because I loved you too much,’ blubbed the lumberjack with the dripping chainsaw. ‘I felt this great like ocean of hate man welling up inside of me, and I had to ex-plode,’ puzzled the violent but likable black teenage arsonist. ‘I guess I never could get Daddy out of my system, that’s why I fell for you,’ frankly admitted the now dissatisfied bride. Graham had winced at such moments, at the haughty gap between life and dramatic convention. In life you didn’t have to explain if you didn’t want to. Not because there was no audience: there was, and one habitually thirsty for motive at that. It was just that they didn’t have any rights; they hadn’t paid any box-office money to your life.