Before She Met Me (16 page)

‘I think your case is a bit special.’

‘Maybe it’s the public thing as well—thinking of other people seeing her up there. A sort of public cuckolding.’

‘Her films weren’t like
that
, were they? And I wouldn’t think many of the audience were nudging one another and saying, Hey, isn’t that Graham’s missus? As she wasn’t at that time anyway.’

‘No, true.’ Maybe the public thing wasn’t the case. But the visual thing was. He lapsed into silence. Jack continued peacefully with his inward dictionary-flipping. After a bit Graham said,

‘What are you thinking?’

Ah, shit; he was actually working on
windbag
. Better improvise.

‘Nothing much, to be honest Nothing helpful. I was just wondering what “Feminian” means.’

‘ …?’

‘I wonder if it’s a real geological term, or if Kipling just made it up. It sounds so close to “feminine” that I suppose it must be real, but I’ve never found it in a dictionary. Or maybe he did make it up, but miscalculated a bit.’

‘ …?’

If that doesn’t make him go, Jack thought, nothing will.

But instead Graham replied,

‘Do you know what I discovered the French for?’

‘ … ’

‘You ever seen a bull’s balls?’

‘Mmm.’ Which didn’t mean Yes or No, but Get on with it.

‘Huge, aren’t they? And all long, you could almost play rugger with them, couldn’t you?’

‘ … ’

‘We were passing a butcher’s in France—in Castres—and saw some in the window. I mean, they must have been bull’s, I can’t think of anything that size, unless they were horse’s, but this wasn’t a horse-butcher’s, so I suppose that rules out … ’

‘ … ’

‘And I said to Ann, Let’s go in and ask what they are, and she giggled a bit and said, Well, it’s obvious what they are, isn’t it, and I said, Yes we know what they
are
but let’s find out what they’re
called
, and we went in and there was this very precise French butcher, very finickity, looked as if he knew how to cut meat without making it bleed, and Ann
said to him, “Can you tell us what those are,” pointing at the tray, and you know what he said?’

‘ … ’

‘He said, “Ce sont des frivolités, Madame.” Isn’t that good?’

‘Not bad.’

‘And then we thanked him and walked out.’

‘ …’ (I didn’t think you bought them for sandwiches, for Christ’s sake.)

‘Frivolités
.’ Graham murmured the word again and nodded to himself, like an old man suddenly warmed by the thought of a picnic forty years ago. Jack stirred himself to a final comment.

‘Actually, there’s a bloke in America with no past, you know.’

‘Nnn?’

‘Really. I read about it. Seems he was fencing, and his opponent’s foil went right up his nose and into his brain. Destroyed his memory. He’s been like that for twenty years.’

‘Amnesia,’ said Graham, peeved by this irrelevance.

‘No, not really. It’s better than that. Or worse, I suppose—I mean, the piece I read didn’t say whether the bloke was happy or not. But the point is, he can’t form any new memories either. Forgets everything straight away. Think of that—no archives at all. Maybe you’d like that?’

‘ … ’

‘Wouldn’t you? No archives—just the present? Like staring out of a train window all the time. The cornfield, the telegraph poles, the washing lines, the tunnel: no connections, no causation, no sense of repetition.’

‘ …’

‘They could probably do it for you. Fork up the sniffer and bob’s your auntie. I expect you can get it on the National Health by now.’

Graham sometimes wondered if Jack was taking him seriously.

For several weeks after they returned from France things held together. Ann found herself watching Graham in a way she half-recognized without ever having experienced before. She was watching him as you might watch an alcoholic or a potential suicide, tacitly giving him marks for performing quite ordinary actions, like eating his breakfast cereal, and changing gear, and not falling through the television screen. Of course, she was sure he wasn’t either of those things—an alcoholic or a potential suicide. It was true he drank a bit more than he used to; and it was also true that Jack, in his own tactful way, had hinted to her that Graham was completely off his head. But Ann knew better. She knew her husband better for a start; and she also knew Jack. He always preferred life to be lurid and people to be crackers, because that made things more interesting. It somehow seemed to justify his vocation.

After the curse went away, Ann waited for Graham to want to make love to her; but he didn’t seem very keen. She would generally go to bed first; he would make some excuse and stay downstairs. When he did come to bed he would kiss her on the forehead and then get into his sleeping position almost at once. Ann minded, but also didn’t mind: she’d rather he didn’t if he didn’t want to; the fact that he didn’t try faking it meant, she supposed, that there was still an honest bond between them.

Often he slept badly, kicking out clumsily in his dreams at imaginary opponents, mumbling and making sharp squeaks like a panicking rodent. He fought with his bedclothes and she would find, on getting up before him, that his side of the bed had come completely untucked.

On one such morning she went round and looked at him as he lay on his back asleep and half-exposed. His face was calm, but both his hands were raised beside his head, their palms open and upturned. Her eye travelled down his academic chest with its erratic growth of mousy hair, and on over the thickening waist to the genitals. His cock, smaller
and seemingly pinker than usual, lay at right angles across his left thigh; one of his balls was trapped out of sight; the other, its chicken-skin pulled tight, lay close up underneath his cock. Ann gazed at the moonscape of this ball, at the fissured, bumpy skin, the surprising hairlessness. How puzzling that so much trouble could be caused by so trifling, so odd-looking an organ. Maybe one should just ignore it; maybe it didn’t matter. Looked at in the morning light, while its proprietor lay sleeping, the whole pink-brown outfit struck Ann as strangely unimportant. After a while, it didn’t even look as if it had anything much to do with sex. Yes, that was right: what was nestling at the join of Graham’s thigh wasn’t anything to do with sex at all—it was just a peeled prawn and a walnut.

The butcher wore a blue-striped apron and a straw hat with a blue ribbon round it. For the first time in years, waiting in the queue, Ann thought what a strange contrast the apron and the hat made. The boater implied the idle splash of an oar in a listless, weed-choked river; the blood-stained apron announced a life of crime, of psychopathic killing. Why had she never noticed that before? Looking at this man was like looking at a schizophrenic: civility and brutishness hustled together into a pretence of normality. And people
did
think it was normal; they weren’t astonished that this man, just by standing there, could be announcing two incompatible things.

‘Yes, my lovely?’

She had almost forgotten what she’d come for.

‘Two pork fillets, please, Mr Walker.’

The butcher slapped them like fish on to his broad scale.

‘Half a dozen eggs. Large brown. No, may as well make it a dozen.’

Walker, with his back to Ann, raised an eyebrow quietly to himself.

‘And could I order a Chateaubriand for Saturday?’

As the butcher turned round again he gave her a smile.

‘Thought you’d tire of the old tripe and onions after a while.’

Ann laughed; as she left the shop she thought, What funny things tradesmen say; I suppose it’s part of the patter; all customers must look alike after a while; and my hair
is
dirty. The butcher meanwhile was thinking, Well, I’m glad
he’s
got his job back; or a new one; or whatever.

Ann told Graham about the butcher mistaking her for someone else, but he only grunted in reply. All right, she thought, it’s not
that
interesting, but it’s something to say. Graham was getting more silent and withdrawn. She seemed to do all the talking nowadays. Which was why she found herself bringing up things like the butcher. And when she did, he grunted, as if to say, the
reason
I’m not as talkative as you expect me to be is because you mention such boring things. Once she had been in the middle of trying to describe a new fabric she had seen at work when he suddenly looked up and said,

‘Don’t care.’

‘Don’t Care was made to care,’ she answered instinctively. It was what her grandmother had always replied when, as a child, Ann expressed pert indifference. And if her ‘Don’t care’ had implied genuine recalcitrance, her grandmother used to give the full reply:

There were still three weeks of Graham’s summer holiday left (Ann could never get used to calling it ‘vacation’). Normally, this was one of the best times of the year, when Graham was at his most helpful and jolly. She would go to work happy at the thought of him messing about at home, reading a bit, sometimes making the dinner. Occasionally,
in the last year or two, she had sneaked off work in the middle of the afternoon, getting back sweaty and sexy from the heat and the light clothes she wore and the thump and rattle of the Underground; without speaking they’d agree on why she’d come home early, and they would go to bed with her still damp at all the hinges of her body.

Afternoon sex was the best sex of all, Ann thought. Morning sex she’d had enough of in her time: usually it meant, ‘Sorry about last night but here it is anyway’; and sometimes it meant,
‘This’ll
make sure you don’t forget me today’; but neither attitude charmed her. Evening sex was, well, your basic sex, wasn’t it? It was the sex which could vary from enveloping happiness via sleepily given consent to an edgy, ‘Look, this is what we came to bed early
for
, so why don’t we just get on with it.’ Evening sex was as good or as indifferent, and certainly as unpredictable, as sex could be. But afternoon sex—that was never just a courteous way to round things off; it was keen, intended sex. And sometimes it whispered to you, in a curious way (and even though you were married), ‘This is what we’re doing now, and I still want to spend the evening with you afterwards.’ Afternoon sex gave you unexpected comforts like that.

Once Ann had tried for it since they got back from France. But when she got home, Graham wasn’t there, even though he’d said he’d be in all day. She felt parched and disappointed, and walked round petulantly checking the rooms. She made herself a cup of coffee. As she sipped it, she freewheeled slowly down to disappointment and beyond. They couldn’t make love; he’d just buggered off; whereas if he had any instinct, any nous … She grumbled to herself at men’s structural inability to catch moods, to seize the day. Then she paused: perhaps he had gone out intending to come back in time. What if something had happened? How long does it take you to find out? Who rings you? Within fifteen seconds she had arrived at the predictive pleasure of widowhood. Go on, then, die, don’t come back, see if I care.
In quick succession she saw a bus stalled across the road, a pair of crushed spectacles, an ambulance man’s shroud.

Then she remembered Margie, a schoolfriend who’d fallen, in her mid-twenties, for a married man. He’d left his family, set up house with her, moved in all his things, and got a divorce. They talked about having children. Two months later he was dead of a perfectly normal, extremely rare blood disease. Years afterwards Margie had confessed to Ann her feelings. ‘I loved him very much. I planned to spend the rest of my life with him. I’d messed up his family so even if I hadn’t wanted to see it through I would have. Then he got thin and white and drained away from me, and I watched him die. And the day after he died, I found something inside me saying, “You’re free.” Over and over again, “You’re free.” Even though I didn’t want to be.’

Ann hadn’t understood, not until this moment. She wanted Graham home
now
, safe; she also wanted him under a bus, stretched and burned across a tube line, impaled on the driving shaft of the car. The two wishes coexisted; they didn’t even begin to war.

By the time Graham got home, at about seven, her feelings had subsided. He claimed he’d suddenly remembered something he wanted to look up in the library. She didn’t think about whether or not she believed him, never asked any more if he’d seen any good films lately. He didn’t seem to think there was anything to apologize for. He was a little subdued, and went off to take a bath.

Graham was more or less telling the truth. In the morning, after Ann had left, he’d finished the paper and done the washing up. Then he wandered round the house like a burglar, finding each room a surprise. He had ended up, as always, in his study. He
could
start that new biography of Balfour, which he’d even gone as far as buying. He quite wanted to, because nowadays biographies, or so it seemed to him, were more and more about sex. Historians, lethargic buggers at the best of times, had finally arrived at a filtered
awareness of Freud. Suddenly, it all boiled down to sex. Did Balfour deliver the goods? Was Hitler monorchid? Was Stalin a Great Terror in bed? As a research method, it had as much chance, Graham judged, of turning up the truth as did wading through boxes of state papers.

He quite wanted to learn about Balfour’s frigidity; and in a sense he needed to, as a few of his more assiduous students might be speed-reading the book at this very moment. But in a larger sense he didn’t. After all, he wasn’t going to switch his approach to the study of history from intuitive-pragmatic (as he currently thought of it) to psycho-sexual; it would stir up the department too much for a start. And besides, even if every single student next term had read this biography (which seemed to get fatter and fatter in his mind the longer he left it unread), he, Graham, would still know far more about everything than all of them put together. Most of them didn’t know much when they started, got bored early on, read just enough to get by, borrowed each other’s notes for the exams, and were happy to get any sort of degree. You only had to toss the name of an authority at them for them all to look scared. Is it long, their expressions asked, and, Can I get by without it? Graham tended to throw in a number of discouraging names during the first few weeks; but mainly he relied on a system of boring them.
Pas trop d’enthousiasme
. Don’t over-excite them, he’d say to himself as he faced his first-year classes; you never know what you might be letting yourself in for.