Before She Met Me (15 page)

No, the reason Graham dreaded the zoo was because he knew it would make him sad. Shortly after his divorce came through, he’d been discussing visiting rights with Chilton, a cup-of-coffee colleague whose marriage had also broken down.

‘Where does she live, your daughter?’ Chilton had asked.

‘Sort of, well it’s hard to describe. In the old days you’d have said Saint Paneras, in the days of the old boroughs, but you know the North London line … ’

Chilton didn’t let him finish; not out of irritation, but simply because he already had enough information.

‘You’ll be able to take her to the zoo then.’

‘Oh. Actually I’d been thinking of taking her—well, this Sunday, anyway—up the M1 for tea in a motorway café. Thought that might be something new.’

But Chilton had merely smiled at him knowingly. When, a few weeks later, Ann also implied by a casual remark that she assumed he’d be taking Alice to the zoo that Sunday, Graham hadn’t replied, and had carried on reading. Of course, he should have made the connection when Chilton mentioned it. Sunday afternoon was always visiting time: at hospitals, cemeteries, old people’s homes, and the houses of separated families. You couldn’t take the child back to where you lived because of imagined pollution from some mistress or second wife; you couldn’t take it far in the allotted time; and you had to think about tea and lavatories, the two main obsessions of the afternoon child. The zoo was North London’s answer: fun, morally okay by the other parent, and stuffed with tea and lavatories.

But Graham didn’t want to join in. He imagined the zoo on Sunday afternoons: a few tourists, the occasional keeper, plus sad assemblies of fake-cheerful middle-aged single parents holding on unnecessarily, desperately, to children of various sizes. A time traveller suddenly set down there would conclude that the human race had given up its old
method of reproduction, and in his absence had perfected parthenogenesis.

So Graham decided to head off sadness, and never took Alice to the zoo. Once, prompted perhaps by Barbara, his daughter had mentioned its existence, but Graham had taken a firm moral line on the iniquity of keeping animals in captivity. He mentioned battery hens several times, and while his remarks might have sounded pompous to an adult, they struck Alice as high good sense: like most children, she was idealistic and sentimental about Nature, viewing it as something different from Man. Graham, for once, had scored over Barbara with his seemingly principled stand.

Instead, he took Alice to tea-shops and museums and once, unsuccessfully, to a motorway café. There, he failed to allow for her fastidiousness at seeing food for every possible meal lined up democratically behind the counter. The sight of a steak and kidney pudding at four o’clock quite wrecked Alice’s chances of appreciating a cupcake.

When it was fine, they walked in parks and looked in the windows of shops that were closed. When it rained, they sometimes just sat in the car and talked.

‘Why did you leave Mummy?’

It was the first time she had ever asked, and he didn’t know what to say. Instead, he turned the ignition just far enough to start the electrical systems, then switched on the wipers for one clearing sweep. The blur in front of them ceased, and they looked down across a damp park at a pick-up game of football. Within a few seconds the rain had washed the outlines of the players back into hazy patches of colour. Suddenly, Graham felt lost. Why weren’t there guides to what you should say? Why wasn’t there a consumers’ report on broken marriages?

‘Because Mummy and I weren’t happy together. We weren’t … getting on.’

‘You used to tell me you loved Mummy.’

‘Yes, well I did. But it sort of stopped.’

‘You didn’t tell me it stopped. You went on telling me you loved Mummy right up to when you left.’

‘Well, I didn’t want to … upset you. You had exams and things.’ What things? Her periods?

‘I thought you left Mummy for, for her.’ The ‘her’ was neutral, unstressed. Graham knew that his daughter was aware of Ann’s name.

‘Yes I did.’

‘So you didn’t leave Mummy because you weren’t getting on. You left her because of
her
.’ Stressed this time, and not neutral.

‘Yes; no; sort of. Mummy and I weren’t getting on for a long time before I left.’

‘Karen says you ran off because you were feeling middle-aged and wanted to dump Mummy on the scrapheap and swap her for someone younger.’

‘No, it wasn’t like that.’ Who was Karen?

There was a silence. He hoped the conversation was over. He fiddled with the ignition key, but didn’t turn it.

‘Daddy, was it …’ Out of the corner of her eye he could see her frown. ‘Was it romantic love?’ She pronounced it tentatively, as if this was the first time she’d used this foreign phrase.

You couldn’t say you didn’t know what that meant. You couldn’t say, That isn’t a real question. There were only two boxes available for answers, and you had to tick one of them quickly.

‘Yes, I think you could say it was.’

Saying it—without knowing what it meant, or how the answer would affect Alice—made him feel sadder than if he’d taken her to the zoo.

One, Graham thought. Why was there jealousy—not just for him, but for lots of people? Why did it start up? It was related to love in some way, but that way wasn’t quantifiable or comprehensible. Why did it suddenly start wailing in his
head, like the ground warning system in an aircraft: six and a half seconds, evasive action,
now
. That was what it felt like sometimes, inside Graham’s skull. And why did it pick on him? Was it some bit of fluky chemistry? Was it all dished out at birth? Did you get given jealousy the way you got given a big bottom or poor eyesight, both of which Graham suffered from. If so, maybe it wore off after a while; maybe there was only enough jealousy chemical in that soft box up there for a certain number of years. Perhaps; but Graham rather doubted it: he’d had a big bottom for years, and
that
showed no signs of easing up.

Two. Given that for some reason there had to be jealousy, why should it operate retrospectively? Why was it the only major emotion that seemed to? The others didn’t. When he looked at photos of Ann as a girl and a young woman, he felt a natural wish-I’d-been-there wistfulness; and when she told him about some childhood punishment unjustly inflicted on her, he felt protectiveness gurgle up inside him. But these were distanced emotions, felt through gauze; they were easily stirred and easily calmed—calmed by the simple continuance of the present, which wasn’t the past. This jealousy, however, came in rushes, in sudden, intimate bursts that winded you; its source was trivial, its cure unknown. Why should the past make you crazy with emotion?

He could think of only one parallel. Some of his students—not many, not even most, but one a year, say—did get incensed about the past. He had a case at present, that ginger-haired boy, MacSomething (God, nowadays it took a whole year to learn their names, and then you never saw them again; you might as well not bother), who became quite enraged by the failure of good (as he saw it) to triumph over evil in History. Why hadn’t
x
prevailed? Why did z beat
y?
He could see MacSomething’s puzzled, angry face staring back at him in classes, wanting to be told that History—or at any rate historians—had got it wrong; that
x
had in fact gone into hiding and turned up years later at w; and so on.
Normally, Graham would have ascribed such reactions to—what?—immaturity; or, more specifically, to some local cause like a churchy upbringing. Now he wasn’t so sure. MacSomething’s rage against the past involved complex emotions about a medley of characters and events. Perhaps he was suffering from a retrospective sense of justice.

Three. Why did retrospective jealousy exist
now
, in the last quarter of the twentieth century? Graham wasn’t a historian for nothing. Things died out; rages between nations and continents settled down; civilization
was
becoming more civil: you couldn’t deny it, to Graham’s eye. Gradually, he didn’t doubt, the world would calm down into a gigantic welfare state devoted to sporting, cultural and sexual exchange, with the accepted international currency being items of hifi equipment. There would be the occasional earthquake and volcanic eruption, but even Nature’s revenges would be sorted out in time.

So why should this jealousy linger on, unwanted, resented, only there to bugger you around? Like a middle ear, only there to make you lose your sense of balance; or like an appendix, only there to flare up insolently and have to be taken out. How did you take out jealousy?

Four. Why should it happen to him, him of all people? He was, he knew, a very sensible person. Barbara had naturally tried to make him believe that he was a grotesque egomaniac, a monstrous lecher, a heartless emotional dwarf; but that was only understandable. Indeed, the fact that Graham understood it proved to him yet again how sensible he was. Everyone had always called him sensible—his mother comfortingly, his first wife sneeringly, his colleagues applaudingly, his second wife with that fond, mocking, half-askance look in her eye. That’s what he was, and he liked being it.

Moreover, it wasn’t as if he was one of the world’s great lovers. There’d been Barbara, then Ann, and that was more or less all. What he had felt for Barbara had probably been exaggerated by the jaunty novelty of first emotion; while
what he felt for Ann, complete as he knew it to be, had arisen warily. And in between? Well, in between, there had been occasions when he’d tried to spur himself into feeling something approaching love; but all he’d ever come up with was a sort of urgent sentimentality.

And since he acknowledged all this about himself, it did seem particularly unfair that he was the one who was being punished. Others kicked the fire but he got burned. Or maybe this was the whole point of it. Maybe this was where Jack’s analysis of marriage, Jack’s Cross-Eyed Bear, came in. And maybe Jack’s theory, correct as far as it went, didn’t go far enough. What if it wasn’t something in the nature of marriage—in which case, being Jack, you could blame ‘society’ and then go off and be unfaithful until you felt better about it—but something in the nature of love? That was a much less pleasant thought: that the thing everyone pursued always went wrong, automatically, inevitably, chemically. Graham didn’t like the thought of it.

‘You could fuck one of your students.’

‘No I couldn’t.’

‘Course you could. Everyone does. That’s what they’re
for
. I know you’re not a looker, but they don’t really mind at that age. It’s probably more of a turn-on if you’re
not
a looker—if you’re a bit smelly or fucked-up or depressed. I call it Third World sex. There’s a lot of it about, but especially at that age.’

Jack was only trying to be helpful; Graham was practically sure of that.

‘Well, I sort of think it’s wrong, you see. I can we are meant to be
in loco parentis
, and it would seem a bit like incest.’

‘The family that plays together, stays together.’

Actually, Jack wasn’t particularly trying to be helpful. He was a bit fed up with Graham’s constant visits. He’d made lots of perfectly good suggestions—that Graham should lie, that he should wank, that he should have a foreign holiday
—and he found that his therapist’s bag was more or less empty. In any case, he’d only felt half-sorry for Graham in the first place. Now, he felt almost more inclined to fool around with his friend than indulge him.

‘ … and in any case,’ Graham was continuing, ‘I don’t want to.’

‘Appetite comes with eating.’ Jack cocked an eyebrow, but Graham stolidly took the remark as no more than a platitude.

‘The funny thing is—I mean, the thing that’s most surprised me about it all—is that it’s so visual.’

‘ …?’

‘Well, I’ve always been a words man myself. I would be, wouldn’t I? It’s always been words that have most affected me. I don’t like pictures much; I’m not interested in colours or clothes; I don’t even like pictures in books; and I hate films. Well, I used to hate films. Well, I still do, though in a different way, of course.’

‘Yes.’ Jack waited for Graham to come to the point. This, he realized, was why he preferred sane people to crazy people: crazy people took so long to come to the point; they thought you wanted a Red Rover tour of their psyche before they showed you Buckingham Palace. They thought that everything was interesting, that everything was relevant. Jack tried to think up a new joke. Could he do anything with Edgar Wind? Or what about a wind quintet? No, that would be straining the old sphincter a bit. And they didn’t seem to have wind duos.

‘But it was a surprise that the visual thing really triggered it off … ’

Wasn’t there a River Windrush somewhere? Hmmm, might take a bit of planning.

‘ … I mean, obviously I
knew
when Ann and I married that it wasn’t like when Barbara and I married. And of course Ann was always completely straightforward with me about chaps … about her life … before she met me … ’

Do it as you tripped up and you could have a
windfall
. Maybe an apple as prop? Down at the coast and you could have Come wind or high water; maybe use that with the washing-up?

‘… so I knew some of their names, and I might even have seen a photo or two, though of course I didn’t look hard; and I knew what jobs they’d done, and some were younger than me of course and some were better-looking and some were richer and some were probably better in bed, but it was all right. It was … ’

Windhover. Windlass. Windjammer. Jack suppressed a half-chuckle, and politely turned it into a grunt.

‘ … it really was. And then I went to see
Over the Moon
and it all changed. Now why should I, who have been untouched by the visual for my whole life, suddenly go under like that? I mean, haven’t you thought about it yourself—it must affect you, professionally, I mean, if some people get more out of films than books.’

‘I always say you can take a book anywhere. Can’t see a film on the can, can you?’

‘No, that’s true. But seeing my wife there, up there on the screen, it was all quite different. I mean the visual—the visual is just a lot more powerful than the word, isn’t it?’