Before She Met Me Read online

  ‘Ann … ’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When you went to Italy … ’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘With Benny … ’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Was there … was there … I was just wondering … ’

  ‘It’s better to say it than not to say it.’

  ‘Was there … well, was there … I shouldn’t think you can remember … ’ He looked at her mournfully, pleadingly, hopefully. She longed to be able to give him the answer he wanted. ‘ … But was there anywhere you went that you can remember—that you can remember definitely … ’

  ‘Yes, love?’

  ‘ … that you had the curse?’

  They began to laugh quietly together. They kissed a little awkwardly, as if neither of them had expected to kiss; and then Ann firmly folded up the map.

  But the next day, when Graham got home a few hours before Ann, he found himself straying back to her bookshelves. He knelt in front of the third shelf from the bottom and looked at her travel books. A couple of guides to London, one to the Pennines—they didn’t mean anything. A student guide to San Francisco; James Morris on Venice; Companion Guides to Florence (of course) and the South of France; Germany, Spain, Los Angeles, India. He didn’t know she’d been to India. Who’d she been to India with, he wondered; though with not much zest, or jealousy for that matter, perhaps because he had little desire to go there himself.

  He pulled out the handful of maps wedged at the end of the shelf. It was hard to tell straightaway which cities they were of, because Ann hadn’t bothered to fold them back—as he would have done—so that the title page was on the outside. He wondered if this carelessness was common to most women; he wouldn’t be surprised if it were. Women, after all, were unreliable in their spatial and geographical awareness. They often had no natural sense of North; some even had problems telling left from right (like Alison, his first girlfriend; whenever she was asked to give directions in a car, she would hold up a fist and look at it—as if there were a big sticky label on its back saying either RIGHT or LEFT—and then read off to the driver what her hand said). Was it all conditioning, he wondered; or brain structure?

  Women, it seemed, also had no easily acquired mental map of cities. Graham had once seen an illustration of the human body in which the size of each part was represented according to the sensitivity of its surface area: the resulting homunculus displayed an enormous head with African lips, hands like baseball gloves, and a thin, pickled body in between. He ought to have remembered the size of the genitals, but couldn’t. Ann’s private map of London, he thought, would be similarly distorted and unbalanced: at its southern end a vastly inflated Clapham, leading by a series of wide arteries to Soho, Bloomsbury, Islington and Hampstead; there would be an inflated bubble down towards Knightsbridge, and another across at Kew; while joining them up would be lots of jumbled areas with names in tiny print: Hornsey on top of Ealing and south of Stepney, the Isle of Dogs moored next to Chiswick Eyot.

  Perhaps this was why women—Graham now made the smooth generalization out from Ann—never folded maps up properly: because the overall conception of the city was unimportant to them, so that there was no ‘right order’ from which to start. All of Ann’s maps had been put away as if they’d been interrupted in mid-use. This made them more personal and, Graham suddenly realized, more threatening to him. A map, for him, once folded back into its proper order, lost its user’s stamp: it could be lent or given away without touching on any feelings of attachment. Looking at Ann’s awkwardly squashed maps with their overruled creases was like seeing a clock stopped at a certain, significant time; or—and worse, he realized—like reading her diary. Some of the maps (Paris, Salzburg, Madrid) had biro marks on them: crosses, circles, street numbers. The sudden particularities of a life previous to him. He stuffed the maps back into their place.

  Later that evening he asked, in as mild and neutral a tone as he could manage,

  ‘Ever fancy going to India?’

  ‘Oh, we wouldn’t want to go there, would we?’ Ann seemed quite surprised.

  ‘I don’t much; I just wondered if you’d ever been interested.’

  ‘I think I was once, and I read up about it, but it seemed depressing, so I gave up wanting to go.’

  Graham nodded. Ann looked quizzically at him; but he didn’t answer her unspoken why, and she decided not to voice it.

  After that he stopped worrying about India. He worried a lot about Italy, and Los Angeles, and the South of France, and Spain and Germany, but he did at least have no cause to worry about India. There was not a single Indian in India, he reflected, who had ever seen Ann walking side by side with someone who wasn’t him. That was a solid, unshiftable fact. It left, of course, all the Indians in England, Italy, Los Angeles, the South of France, Spain and Germany, any number of whom might have seen her arm in arm with Benny or Chris or Lyman or Phil or whoever. But these Indians were vastly outweighed by Indian Indians, absolutely none of whom (except perhaps on an overseas holiday—now that was a thought) could ever possibly have so seen her.

  India was safe. South America was safe. Japan and China were safe. Africa was safe. Europe and North America weren’t safe. When the television news came on with stories about Europe or the States, he occasionally found his attention wandering. When he read the morning paper he often skimmed the unsafe areas of the world; but since he still allowed the same amount of time for the paper as before, he gradually found himself knowing a lot more about India and Africa than he ever needed, or indeed wanted, to know. Quite without any serious inquisitiveness he managed to acquire a thorough familiarity with Indian politics. He knew about Japan too. In the departmental common room he found himself turning to Bailey, a scruffy gerontologist who had wandered in by mistake, and saying,

  ‘Did you see that Narita airport lost sixteen million pounds in its first four months of operation?’ To which Bailey had replied interestedly,

  ‘Male menopause already?’

  On his afternoons alone at the house, Graham found himself more and more on the lookout for evidence. Sometimes he wasn’t sure what constituted evidence; and sometimes, in the course of his forays, he wondered whether he didn’t secretly enjoy finding that proof which he told himself he feared and hated. The effect of his driven searches was to re-acquaint himself with almost all of Ann’s possessions; only now he saw them in a different, more tainted light.

  He opened the walnut box in which she kept her foreign coins. Inside, it was divided into twelve square sections, each compartment lined with purple velvet. Graham stared at the leftover currency. Lire meant Benny, or that other fellow, or —well, he had to admit it—himself, and their five days in Venice after they were married. Nickels, quarters and a single silver dollar meant Lyman. Francs meant Phil, or that creep with the jeep—Jed, or whatever he called himself. Marks meant, oh stuff it. And this, Graham thought, picking up a large silver coin, what about this? He read round its edge: R.IMP.HU.BO.REG.M.THERESIA.D.G. Then the other side: ARCHID.AUSTR.DUX.BURG.CO.TY.178O.X. He smiled to himself. A Maria Theresa krone. Nothing doing there, at least.

  He played the same game with her wicker basket full of book matches. She didn’t smoke, but collected matches from restaurants, hotels, clubs—anywhere that gave them away. The only difficulty he struck, as he rooted through the relics of careless cocktails and drunken dinners, of dozens upon dozens of wholly Grahamless occasions, was working out whether or not Ann had actually been to the places whose free publicity he was now sifting. Friends knew her collecting habit, and would look out for particularly garish or obscure items to add to her basket. Graham had even encouraged them to. So how could he get his bearings? There was no point in getting jealous unless you were accurate about it; or so it seemed to Graham.

  Irritated by this uncertainty, he moved on to Ann’s shelves and started hunting for books which she was unlikely to have bought for herself. Several of them he had already identified as presents from her previou
s escorts. These he pulled out, almost for old times’ sake, and read the inscriptions: ‘to my … ’, ‘with love from’, ‘with much love from’, ‘love and kisses from’, ‘x x x from’. What a dreary bunch, Graham thought: they might as well get some printed labels if that’s all they were going to say. Then he pulled out Ann’s copy of Gormenghast. ‘To my little squirrel, who always remembers where the nuts are kept’. Bloody Jed—yes he was called Jed, as the scrawny signature of a quite well-educated orang-utan confirmed; the creep with the jeep. Yes, well, that was expected. He would have given her Gormenghast. At least the bookmark showed she hadn’t got past page thirty. Quite right too. Gormenghast, he repeated contemptuously to himself. And Jed. What had Ann once said about him? ‘It was a brief, therapeutic affair.’ Therapeutic? Well, he supposed he could understand. And brief: he was pleased about that, and not just for the obvious reason. He didn’t want the house cluttered up with the collected works of Tolkien and Richard Adams as well.

  Graham began to play a game with himself, based on Strip Jack Naked. He had to find the books on Ann’s shelves which had been given her by other people. If he didn’t find one such book in four tries, he lost the game. If he got one on the fourth go, he had another turn; if he got one after only two gos, he saved himself two gos, and so had six chances in the next round.

  With just a little cheating he managed to keep this game going for about twenty minutes, though by that time the pleasure of the hunt obscured less and less adequately the glumness of victory. As he sat on the floor and looked at the pile of books which represented his winnings, he felt the approach of a daunting sadness. On top lay a copy of The End of the Affair. ‘Don’t think unkindly of me. It has been wonderful. In time you’ll see that too. It’s been almost too good. M.’ Ha—Michael. Just the sort of prickish thing he would put. It’s been almost too good. What he really meant was, ‘Why didn’t you behave badly so that I could leave you without any guilt?’ Michael, the good-looking sporty one with—so Ann assured him—an engaging way of shaking his head and blinking shyly at you. That was how Ann had described him. Graham thought of him as the prick with the tic.

  It made him sad. It made him feel aggressive in an unfocused way, and it made him feel self-pitying; but mostly it made him feel straight sad. Perhaps now was the right time to try one of Jack’s solutions. Not that he’d gone to Jack for solutions; not really. But it was a harmless thing to try. Well, he thought harmless. And Ann wouldn’t be home for at least an hour and a half.

  Graham went to his study with a certain feeling of self-mockery. Apart from anything else, it was silly that his study was the only safe hiding-place. He pulled out a drawer of his filing cabinet; the drawer marked 1915–19. The manila files all presented their open sides to the eye, except for one. This he took out, turned the right way up, and extracted from it a pink, candy-striped paper-bag. Where to go? Not downstairs, in case Ann came back unexpectedly. Not in the bedroom—that would be far too much like adultery. Stay here? But where? Not at his desk; that would feel all wrong. He decided reluctantly on the bathroom.

  Graham hadn’t masturbated since he was eighteen, since the evening before the morning when he’d asked Alison, his first girlfriend, for a date. That decision had increased his confidence about asking her out, and so afterwards, in pious gratitude, he’d made his renunciation final. Besides, he hadn’t been happy about the guilt. He’d always masturbated in the lavatory at home; either before or immediately after his colonic activities, so that if he was quizzed about where he’d been, he wouldn’t actually be lying. This reduced the guilt a little, but it still hung around sycophantically.

  He also hadn’t masturbated, he realized, since the days when people thought about it as ‘masturbation’: that cool, frowning medico-Biblical word. There’d been other words around, no doubt, but ‘masturbation’ was what it always felt like. Masturbation, fornication, defecation: serious words from his childhood, representing activities to be pondered before being indulged in. Nowadays it was all wanking and fucking and shitting, and no one thought twice about any of them. Well, he used shitting himself; a bit, privately. Jack, of course, talked about wanking quite casually, and fucking as well. Graham was still a little tentative about both usages. ‘Wanking’, after all, was such a quiet, domestic, guiltless sort of word: it made it sound like a home craft.

  Twenty-two years since he had last masturbated. Wanked. And several different flats and houses where he hadn’t. He sat on the lavatory seat and looked around; then got up and pulled the cork-topped linen box over towards him. Where it had come from there were four sharp depressions in the carpet, one at each corner of a rectangle of dust. Graham settled back on the lavatory seat, pulled the linen box in closer and put his paper bag on top of it. Then he lowered his trousers and pants to his ankles.

  That didn’t feel very comfortable. He stood up, closed the lid of the lavatory, and laid a towel across the top. Then he settled back. He took a breath, reached into the bag and pulled out the two magazines he had hastily bought from an Indian newsagent on his way back from a distant cinema. He’d tried to look puzzled when he bought them, as if they were really for someone else; but he expected he had only managed to look furtive.

  One was Penthouse, which he’d heard of; the other Rapier, which he hadn’t. He laid them side by side on the linen box and read the contents lists on the covers. He wondered about the title of Rapier. Was it meant to indicate a world of buccaneering sexuality, where Errol Flynn was king? Or was it merely, perhaps, the comparative form of the adjective ‘rapy’? Rapier than thou?

  The two girls on the covers, each, by some magazine publishers’ convention, exposing only one nipple, struck Graham as extremely beautiful. Why did such girls need to take their clothes off? Or was there some connection between being extremely beautiful and wanting to take your clothes off? Most likely, the connection was between being extremely beautiful and being offered helpful sums of money to take your clothes off. He expected that was it.

  He took a deep breath, looked down at what he used to call his penis but now wasn’t so sure, grasped it in his right hand, and turned the cover of Rapier with his left. Another contents page, illustrated this time by a photograph of a deep, pink ravine, topped with a tropical rain forest. It had been raining in the ravine too, by the look of it. Graham was fascinated and slightly appalled. Next came a few pages of readers’ letters, also illustrated with topographical shots, then an eight-page photo-spread of another extremely beautiful girl. On the first page she was sitting in a wicker chair wearing only a pair of knickers; then she was naked and playing with her nipple; then with her … down there anyway; until by the eighth page she appeared to be trying to turn her … thing inside out, as if it were a trouser pocket. On this last page, while Graham’s brain gawped, his semen (as he used to think of it, but now also wasn’t quite sure) came spurting out, quite unexpectedly. It sprayed over the left arm of his sweater, over the linen box, and over the girl contortionist.

  In a panic, as if he had a maximum of two seconds in which to do it, Graham seized some lavatory paper and began swabbing down his sleeve, his magazine, his for want of a better word penis, and the linen box. To his dismay he saw that the cork top of the box now bore several damp, rather slimy marks. He flushed the soggy paper down the lavatory and wondered what to do. The stains somehow didn’t look like simple water stains. What could he say he’d spilt—aftershave? shampoo? He thought of dribbling a few drops of shampoo on to the linen box as well, so that when Ann asked (as when his father had asked) he could at least not lie to her. But what if the shampoo made a different sort of mark? Then he’d have to say he’d spilt some shampoo and some aftershave. That didn’t sound very likely. Then he realized he’d been in the bathroom for barely five minutes. Ann still wouldn’t be back for ages. He could sit it out and see what happened to the stains.

  It hadn’t been a particularly good … wank, as he supposed he’d better start calling it. Too short, too sudden, and t
oo alarming at the end to be consciously enjoyed. But then he’d been more than surprised by his material. He leaned back against the lavatory cistern and opened Penthouse. He read the list of contents and turned to the drink column. Sound enough; if rather jocosely written. Then the motoring column, a fashion feature, and a science fiction story about what would happen to men when robots could be built which were not only better lovers than their fleshly rivals, but were also capable of impregnating women. Then he read the letters column, and the editorial replies, which struck him as full of sound advice.

  By this time he noticed two occurrences: his cock, as he now thought he would call it, was beginning to get hard again while he read a letter from a Surrey housewife gratified by the number of dildoid-shaped objects available to the dedicated self-pleasurer; and his semen (he didn’t feel ready for spunk yet) seemed to have quite dried out. In for a penny, he said to himself jollily, and began to wank again, only this time with more care, interest and pleasure, at the beginning, and in the middle, and at the end.

  FIVE

  Sawn-Offs and Four-Eyes

  ‘Well, well, well, my little birdy. Now this is what the poet calls a surprise.’

  ‘Jack, are you busy? I won’t stay long.’

  ‘Well, it’s not the greatest come-on I’ve heard, but it’ll do.’

  Jack squashed himself none too efficiently against the wall, and felt Ann brush him slightly as she went past. She walked quickly into his long, all-purpose room and sat down without hesitation. Jack closed the front door carefully and followed her, smiling a little.

  ‘Coffee?’ Ann declined with her head. She was looking as pretty nowadays as Jack could ever remember: a smart, serious prettiness, all of whose elements matched.

  ‘Jack, I’ve come to get history straight.’

  ‘Oh dear. I thought it was going to be another session of marriage guidance. And I don’t mind telling you which partner I’d rather see stretched out on my couch.’