Before She Met Me Read online

  ‘And …’ Graham, who had been drying, turned away and started folding napkins, so that when Ann answered she wouldn’t be able to catch his eye. ‘ … did you?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ From the direction of her voice he knew she was looking at him. ‘Just once, I think.’

  ‘No more than a sneeze.’

  ‘Not much.’

  Graham patted the napkins flat, picked up a teaspoon that didn’t need washing, carried it over to the sink and slipped it into the water. As he did so, he kissed Ann on the side of the neck and made a little sneezing noise. Then he kissed her again, in the same place.

  He liked the way she answered him directly. She was never coy, or sly, or evasive. She never took the line, which she justifiably might, of ‘You haven’t earned the knowledge’. She just told him, and that was that. He liked it this way: if he asked, he got told; if he didn’t ask, he didn’t get told. Simple. He picked up the coffee tray and wandered off to the sitting-room.

  Ann was glad she’d got out of acting when she had—which was a few months before she met Graham. Eight years was quite enough for her to realize the random correlation that existed between talent and employment. A variety of stage, television and, latterly, film work, had convinced her that at her best she was really quite good; which was precisely not good enough for her.

  She had wrangled with herself for some months and finally got out. Not out into resting, but out into something full-time and different, by cleverly using Nick Slater’s friendship to ease her into Redman and Gilks. (It had been clever not only not to sleep with him before he made the offer, but to make it clear that even if he did give her the job she still wouldn’t. He had seemed relieved, almost respectful, when faced with such intransigence. Perhaps that was the best way, she thought later, the modern way: nowadays you get jobs by not sleeping with people.) And it had worked out. Within three years she was deputy chief buyer, with a six-figure budget, as much travel as she wanted, and hours which, though sometimes long, were determined by her own efficiency. She had sensed an unfamiliar stability entering her life even before she met Graham; now, things felt solider than ever.

  On the Thursday Graham rang Barbara and haggled briefly about the bills.

  ‘But why does she need so many clothes?’

  ‘Because she needs them.’ (The classic Barbara answer: take a chunk of your sentence and simply repeat it. Less work for her, plus time saved for preparing the next answer but one.)

  ‘Why does she need three bras?’

  ‘She needs them.’

  ‘Why Does she wear them all at once—one on top of the other?’

  ‘One on, one clean, and one in the wash.’

  ‘But I paid for three only a few months ago.’

  ‘You may not have noticed, Graham, and I doubt if you care, but your daughter’s growing. She’s changing … size.’

  He wanted to say, ‘Oh, you mean she’s busting out all over’; but he no longer had confidence in jokes with Barbara. Instead he quibbled mildly.

  ‘She’s growing that fast?’

  ‘Graham, if you constrict a growing girl, there is untold damage that can be done. Bind up the body and you affect the mind; it’s well known. I really didn’t know your meanness went as far as that.’

  He hated these conversations; not least because he suspected that Barbara half-invited Alice to listen in and then rouged her side of the argument accordingly.

  ‘Fine. Okay. Fine. Oh, and by the way, thanks for the delayed wedding present, if that’s what it was.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The wedding present. I take it that’s what Sunday afternoon was.’

  ‘Ah. Yes; glad you liked it.’ For once, she sounded a bit defensive, so he instinctively pushed again.

  ‘Though I really can’t imagine why you did it.’

  ‘Can’t you? Can’t you imagine?’

  ‘No, I mean, why you should be interested … ’

  ‘Oh, I just think you ought to know what you’ve let yourself in for.’ Her tone was precise and maternal; he felt his position slipping.

  ‘Nice of you.’ Bitch, he added to himself.

  ‘Don’t mention it. And I think it’s important for Alice to see the sort of influence her father’s currently under.’ He didn’t miss that currently.

  ‘But how did you find out Ann was in it? She isn’t exactly on the poster.’

  ‘I have my spies, Graham.’

  ‘Come on, how did you find out?’ But all she would say was,

  ‘I have my spies.’

  THREE

  The Cross-Eyed Bear

  Jack Lupton answered the door with a smouldering cigarette lodged in the side of his beard. He stretched his arms out, pulled Graham in, dropped a hand on his shoulder, belted him on the bottom, and finally propelled him down the hall bellowing,

  ‘Graham, you old cunt, in you go.’

  Graham couldn’t help smiling. A lot of Jack was bullshit, he suspected, and that lot came under regular analysis among his friends; but in person he was so uncompromisingly amiable, so noisily open and so physical that you immediately forgot the precise terms of yesterday’s derision. The matiness may have been assumed, part of an act to make you like him; but if so, it worked, and as it continued without hesitation or change of key—in Graham’s case, for five or six years—you ended up not needing to worry about its sincerity.

  The cigarette trick had started as a joky short-cut to character. Jack’s beard grew wirily enough for him to park a Gauloise in it safely, at a point halfway along the jawbone. If he was chatting up a girl at a party, he’d go off to fetch some drinks and free his hands by tucking his lighted cigarette into his beard (sometimes he would light one specially to set up the effect). On his return, a chunky blur of bonhomie, he’d adopt one of three courses, depending on his appraisal of the girl. If she seemed sophisticated, or acute, or even just alert, he’d casually extract the cigarette and go on smoking (this established him, he assured Graham, as ‘a bit of an original’). If she seemed dim or shy or charmproof, he’d leave the cigarette there for a minute or two, talk about a book—though never one of his own—and then ask for a smoke (this proved him to be ‘one of those clever, absent-minded writers with his head in the clouds’). If he couldn’t fathom her at all, or thought she was crazy, or was quite drunk himself, he’d simply leave the cigarette until it smouldered its way down to his beard, then look puzzled and ask, ‘Can you smell something burning around here?’ (this established him as ‘really a terrific character, a bit wild, probably a bit self-destructive, you know, like real artists, but so interesting’). When using this third ploy, he would normally accompany it with some serpentine inventions about his childhood or his ancestry. It did, however, have its dangers. He’d once inflicted a bad burn on himself in pursuit of an attractive but strangely enigmatic girl. He couldn’t imagine she hadn’t noticed the cigarette, and his rising incredulity paralleled his increasing pain; later, he discovered that while he’d been off fetching them drinks the girl had taken out her contact lenses: the smoke from his cigarette had been irritating her eyes.

  ‘Coffee?’ Jack bashed Graham on the shoulder again.

  ‘Please.’

  The ground floor of Jack’s Repton Gardens flat had been knocked through, from front bay to back kitchen; they were sitting in the crepuscular middle section, which Jack used as a living room. In the bay stood his desk, with a piano stool in front of it; his electric typewriter was barely visible beneath the contents of an upturned litter bin. Jack had once explained to Graham his theory of creative chaos. He was by nature a very tidy person, he claimed, but his art demanded mess. The words simply refused to flow, apparently, unless they sensed that there was some sexy anarchy out there on which their ordered form could make an impact. Hence the litter of paper, magazines, brown envelopes and last season’s pools coupons. ‘They need to feel there’s some point in being born,’ Jack had explained. ‘It’s like those aboriginal tribes where the women part
urate on to piles of old newspapers. Same principle. Same newspapers, probably.’

  As Jack took his chunky form off to the kitchen extension he pivoted slightly on one leg and farted, quite loudly.

  ‘Not I, But the Wind,’ he muttered, almost to himself, but not quite.

  Graham had heard that one before. He’d heard most of them before; but didn’t really mind. As Jack had gradually become a better-known novelist, as his fame permitted him self-indulgence and eccentricity, he’d taken to farting quite a lot. Nor were they the embarrassed exhalations of a senescent sphincter; they were rowdy, worked-at, middle-aged farts. Somehow—Graham didn’t even understand the process—Jack had made it into an acceptable mannerism.

  And it wasn’t just that he made it acceptable once it had happened. Graham sometimes thought he planned it. Once, Jack had rung up and insisted that he help him choose a squash racquet. Graham protested that he’d only ever played squash three times—once with Jack, when he’d been sent scurrying around the court towards a heart attack—but Jack refused to accept his disclaimers of authority. They met in the sports department of Selfridges, and though Graham could quite plainly see the squash and tennis racquets over to their left, Jack had dragged him off on a tour of the whole floor. After about ten yards, though, he suddenly stopped, did his pre-fart pivot so that his back was towards a slanting row of cricket bats, and sounded off. As they walked on, he muttered sideways to Graham,

  ‘The Wind in the Willows.’

  Five minutes later, when Jack had decided that maybe after all he’d stick with the racquet he’d got, Graham wondered if it hadn’t all been planned that way; if Jack hadn’t simply found himself with time and a joke on his hands, and telephoned Graham to help him get rid of both.

  ‘Okay, boyo.’ Jack (who wasn’t Welsh) handed Graham a mug of coffee, sat down, took a sip of his own, plucked the cigarette from his beard and puffed on it. ‘Sympathetic novelist lends sensitive ear to worried academic. Fifteen pounds—make that guineas—per hour; unlimited sessions. And make it something I can, with all my transformational powers, turn into a two hundred quid story minimum, and that’s my little joke. Shoot.’

  Graham fiddled with his glasses for a few seconds; then took a sip of coffee. Too soon: he felt some taste-buds getting burned out by the heat. He wrapped his hands round the mug and stared into it.

  ‘It’s not that I want you to give me specific advice. It’s not that I want you to confirm to me a certain line of action that I’m too timid to adopt without a second opinion. I’m just worried, I sort of can’t get over how I’m reacting to … to what it is I’m reacting to. I, well, I didn’t know about this sort of thing. And I thought, Jack’s got more experience of the whole caboodle than I have, may even have had attacks of it himself, probably knows someone who has, anyway.’

  Graham looked up towards Jack, but the steam from the coffee had misted his glasses; he saw only a brownish blur.

  ‘Old matey, you’re about as clear as a bugger’s back passage so far.’

  ‘Ah, sorry. Jealousy,’ Graham said suddenly. Then, trying to be helpful, ‘Sexual jealousy.’

  ‘No other kind in my experience. Hmmm. Sorry to hear it, old darling. The little lady been playing with fire, has she?’ Jack wondered why on earth Graham had come to him—him of all people. His tone became even more familiar. ‘Never can tell, that’s what I say. Never can tell what you’ve got until it’s too late, and by then it’s tweezers round your tassle.’ He waited for Graham to continue.

  ‘No, it’s not that. Good God, that would be awful. Awful. No, it’s sort of … retrospective, it’s all retrospective. It’s all about chaps before me. Before she met me.’

  ‘Ah.’ Jack became more alert; and more puzzled still why Graham had come to him.

  ‘Went to a film the other day. Crappy film. Ann was in it. Some other fellow—won’t tell you his name—was in it too, and later it came out that Ann was, had, had been to bed with him. Not much,’ Graham added quickly, ‘once or twice. Didn’t—you know—didn’t go out with him or anything.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘I went back to see that film three times in one week. The first time I thought, you know, interesting to have another look at the fellow’s face: I hadn’t really paid him that much attention the first time. So I had another look, and I didn’t like the face much, but then I wouldn’t, would I? And then I found myself going back again, twice more. It wasn’t even a local cinema, it was up in Holloway. I even rearranged a class one day so that I could get out to it.’

  ‘And—and what was it like?’

  ‘Well, the first time—that’s to say the second time altogether—it was … funny as much as anything. The … bloke was acting some sort of minor mafia person, but I knew—Ann had told me—that he came from the East End, so I was listening carefully, and he couldn’t even sustain the accent for more than three words in a row. And I thought, why couldn’t Ann have gone to bed with a better actor? And I sort of laughed at him, and I thought, well, I may not be Casanova, but I’m a sodding better academic than you’ll ever be a good actor. And I remembered Ann saying she thought he’d been doing shaving commercials lately, and I thought, poor sod, maybe that film was the high point of his professional career and he’s all twisted up with failure and envy and guilt and occasionally he’s standing in the dole queue and he finds himself thinking wistfully about Ann and what’s become of her, and when I came out of the cinema I thought, “Well, stuff you, matey, stuff you.”

  ‘The second time—the third time—I suppose that was the puzzle. Why did I go back then? I just did. I felt I … ought to. I felt I had a hunch: a hunch about myself, that’s all I can say. I was probably in a funny mood, and I couldn’t work out why I was in the cinema anyway—this was when I’d rearranged the class—and I sat through the incredibly boring first half hour or so, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to feel but somehow I knew it wasn’t going to be the same as before. I suppose I should have left then.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, some childhood puritanism about getting my money’s worth.’ Actually, that wasn’t right. ‘No, it was more than that. I tell you what I think it was: it was feeling I was near something dangerous. It was the expectation of not knowing what to expect. Does that sound—cerebral?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Well it wasn’t. It was very physical in fact. I was trembling. I felt I was going to be let into a great secret. I felt I was going to be frightened. I felt like a child.’

  There was a pause. Graham slurped at his coffee.

  ‘And were you frightened? Tumble-drier tum-tum?’

  ‘Sort of. It’s hard to explain. I wasn’t frightened of this fellow, I was frightened about him. I felt very aggressive, but in a completely unspecific way. I also felt I was going to be sick, but that was something separate, extra. I was very … upset, I suppose I’d say.’

  ‘Sounds like it. What about the last time?’

  ‘Same again. Same reactions in the same places. Just as strong.’

  ‘Did it wear off?’

  ‘Yes—in a way. But it just comes back whenever I think about it.’ He stopped. It felt as if he’d finished.

  ‘Well, since you don’t want my advice, I’ll give it you. I’d say, stop going to the movies. I didn’t know you liked them anyway.’

  Graham didn’t seem to be listening.

  ‘You see, I told you about the film at such length because it was the catalyst. That was what sparked it all off. I mean, obviously I knew about some of Ann’s chaps before me; I’d even met a few of them. Didn’t know them all, of course. But it was only after the film that I started to care about them. It suddenly began to hurt that Ann had been to bed with them. It suddenly felt like … I don’t know—adultery, I suppose. Isn’t that silly?’

  ‘It’s … unexpected.’ Jack deliberately didn’t look up. Bonkers was the first word that had come to mind.

  ‘It’s silly. But I’ve begun thinking ab
out them all in a different way. I’ve begun caring about them. I lie in bed waiting to go to sleep and it’s like Richard the Third before that battle … Whichever one it was.’

  ‘Not your period?’

  ‘Not my period. And half the time I’m wanting to line them all up in my head and take a good look at them, and half the time I’m too afraid to let myself do so. There are some whose names I know, but I don’t know what they look like, and I just lie there filling in their faces, making up identikit pictures of them.’

  ‘Hmmm. Anything else?’

  ‘Well, I’ve tracked down a couple of other films Ann was in and gone to see them.’

  ‘How much have you told Ann?’

  ‘Not everything. Not about going to the films again. Just bits about getting upset.’

  ‘And what does she say?’

  ‘Oh, she says she’s sorry I’m jealous, or possessive, or whatever the right word is, but it’s quite unnecessary and it’s nothing she’s done—it isn’t, of course—and maybe I’m overworking. I’m not.’

  ‘Anything to be guilty about yourself? Any little naughties you might be transferring?’

  ‘Christ no. If I was faithful to Barbara for fifteen years or whatever, I wouldn’t be thinking of straying from Ann after this length of time.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You don’t say that very convincingly.’

  ‘No, sure. In your case—sure.’ He did sound convincing now.

  ‘So what do I do?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want advice?’

  ‘No, I mean, where am I? Is any of this familiar to you?’

  ‘Not really. I’m not too bad on current jealousies. I’m terrific on adultery—my type, not yours: I’ve got a good line of advice on that any time you need it. Well, all right … But stuff in the past I’m not so hot on.’ Jack paused. ‘Of course, you could get Ann to lie to you. Get her to tell you she hadn’t when she had.’