Before She Met Me (2 page)

Throughout the fifteen years of his marriage, he’d never been unfaithful to Barbara: because he thought it was wrong, but also, he supposed, because he’d never really been tempted (when gusset-flashing girl students crossed their legs at him, he responded by giving them the more difficult essay options; they passed on the news that he was a cold fish). In the same way, he’d never thought of shifting his job, and doubted if he could find one elsewhere which he could do as easily. He read a great deal, he gardened, he did the crossword; he protected his property. At thirty-eight, it felt a bit like being retired already.

But when he met Ann—not that first moment at Repton Gardens, but later, after he’d conned himself into asking her out—he began to feel as if some long-broken line of communication to a self of twenty years ago had suddenly been restored. He felt once more capable of folly and idealism. He also felt as if his body had begun to exist again. By this he didn’t just mean that he was seriously enjoying sex (though of course he did mean this too), but that he had stopped picturing himself as merely a brain lodged within a container. For at least ten years he had found a diminishing use for his body; the location of all pleasure and emotion, which had once seemed to extend right to the edge of his
skin, had retreated to the small space in the middle of his head. Everything he valued went on between his ears. Of course, he looked after his body, but with the same sort of muted, impassive interest he showed towards his car. Both objects had to be fuelled and washed at varying intervals; both went wrong occasionally, but could usually be repaired.

893–8013: how had he found the nerve to make that call? He knew how: by fooling himself. He’d sat at his desk one morning with a list of phone calls and had slipped ‘her’ number into the middle of them. Halfway through rancorous haggling about timetables and resigned expressions of interest from editors of learned journals he found himself confronted by ‘her’ ringing tone. He hadn’t asked anyone (any woman, that was) out to lunch (well, a non-professional lunch) for years. It had never seemed … relevant. But all he had to do was identify himself, check that she remembered him, and ask away. She accepted; what’s more, she said yes to the first day he suggested. He’d liked that; it had given him the confidence to leave his wedding ring on for the lunch. He had, for a moment, considered removing it.

And things had carried on as straightforwardly as that. He, or she, would say, ‘Why don’t we … ’; she, or he, would reply, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; and the decision was made. None of that speculation about motives which marriage to Barbara constantly involved. You didn’t really mean that, Graham, did you? When you said
x
you really meant
y
, didn’t you, Graham? Living with you is like playing chess against someone with two ranks of knights, Graham. One evening in the seventh year of their marriage, after a dinner almost without tension, when Alice had gone to bed and he felt as soothed and happy as had seemed then to be possible, he had said to Barbara, exaggerating only a little,

‘I feel very happy.’

And Barbara, who was scouring the final crumbs from the dinner-table, had wheeled round, pink rubber gloves wetly aloft, as if she were a poised surgeon, and answered,

‘What are you trying to get out of?’

There had been similar exchanges, before and after, but this one stuck in his mind. Maybe because he really hadn’t been trying to get out of anything. And afterwards, he found himself pausing before he told her he loved her, or was happy, or that things were going well, weren’t they, and he’d first ponder the question: is there anything Barbara might think I’m trying to evade or diminish if I go ahead and tell her what I’m feeling? And if there wasn’t, he’d go ahead and tell her. But it did take the spontaneity out of things.

Spontaneity, directness, the mending of communication lines to his body: Ann had introduced him not just to Pleasure (many might have done that) but to its intricate approaches, its mazy enjoyment; she even managed to freshen for him the memories of pleasure. The pattern of this introduction never varied: first, a thrust of recognition as he saw how Ann did something (ate, made love, talked, even just stood or walked); then, a period of mimetic catching-up, until he felt at ease in the presence of that particular pleasure; finally, a state of thankfulness edged (he didn’t understand how it could be, at first, but it was) with queasy resentment. Grateful as he was to her for teaching him, approving as he did of her having found out first (without that, how could he ever have learnt?), he sometimes ran up against a residual, nervous vexation that Ann had got there before him. After all, he was seven years older than her. In bed, for instance, her confident easiness often seemed to him to be showing up (criticizing, mocking almost) his own cautious, stiff-jointed awkwardness. ‘Hey, stop, wait for me,’ he thought; and at other times, with more resentment, ‘Why didn’t you learn this with
me
?’

Ann was aware of this—she made Graham make her aware of it, as soon as she sensed it—but it didn’t seem a threat. Talking would surely make it go away. Besides, there were many areas where Graham knew far more than she did.
History was a library of closed books to her. The news was uninteresting because it was inevitable, uninfluenceable. Politics bored her, except for the brief gambler’s thrill she felt at Budget time, and the slightly more protracted thrill during general elections. She could just about name the important members of the Cabinet; except that she was normally one Cabinet behind.

She liked travelling, which Graham had almost given up (it was another activity which took place mainly between his ears). She liked modern art and old music; she hated sport and shopping; she loved food and reading. Graham found most of these tastes congenial, and all understandable. She used to like the cinema—she had, after all, had small parts in a number of films—but didn’t want to go any more; which was fine by Graham.

When Ann met him she wasn’t on the lookout. ‘I’m thirty-one,’ she had recently replied to an overconcerned uncle who stared pryingly at the third finger of her left hand, ‘I’m not on the shelf, and I’m not on the lookout.’ She no longer expected each party, each dinner to disclose a perfect partner—or even an adequate one. Besides, she had already grasped the baffling, comic disparity between intentions and results. You wanted a brief, almost contactless affair, and you got fond of his mother; you thought he was good but not wet, and discovered an adamantine selfishness behind his modest, drink-fetching appearance. Ann didn’t consider herself disillusioned or (as some of her friends thought her) unlucky; she merely judged herself wiser than when she had started. So far, she thought, as she considered the uneasy
ménages à trois
, the tear-drenched abortions, and the niggling, low-grade relationships some of her friends let themselves in for, she’d got through pretty unscathed.

It was in Graham’s favour that he wasn’t particularly good-looking; Ann told herself it made him more authentic. Whether or not he was married was a neutral factor. Ann’s girlfriends decreed that once you reached thirty, the men you
met (unless you turned cradle-snatcher) tended to be either homosexual, married or psychotic, and that of the three, the married men were obviously the best. Sheila, Ann’s closest friend, maintained that in any case married men were preferable to single men because they smelt nicer: their wives were always having their clothes dry-cleaned. Whereas the bachelor’s jacket, she declared, was all cigarette smoke and armpits.

Ann’s first affair with a married man had troubled her; she felt, if not exactly a thief, at least a white-collar criminal. But this didn’t last long; and nowadays she argued that if marriages went stale, that was hardly her fault, was it? If men strayed, it was because they wanted to; if you took a principled stand, shoulder to shoulder with your fellow-woman, that wouldn’t change anything. You wouldn’t get any thanks for your negative virtue; the husband would soon move on to some tramp; and the wife would never know about your silent support. So, as she sat over lunch with Graham for the first time and noticed his wedding-ring, she only thought, Well, that gets me out of
that
question. It was always difficult when you had to ask. Sometimes they assumed you were wanting them to lie, and so they did, and then you were tempted into needlessly sarcastic comments like, ‘You’re terribly good at ironing.’

At the end of what was largely a dossier meal, Graham leaned towards her and in his nervousness failed to punctuate his two sentences:

‘Will you have lunch with me again I’m married by the way.’ She smiled and answered simply,

‘Yes I will. Thank you for telling me.’

After the second lunch, with a little more to drink, he helped her into her coat more zealously, smoothing the material down over one shoulder blade as if the cloth had suddenly thrown up a ruckle. When Ann reported this to Sheila as being the full extent of their physical contact after three whole meetings, her friend commented,

‘Maybe he’s queer as well as married.’ Whereupon Ann surprised herself by replying,

‘It doesn’t matter.’

It didn’t. Or rather, it wouldn’t have, she thought. But she duly found out, after an old-fashioned length of time (and after putting out enough signals to make a battle fleet alter course) that Graham wasn’t homosexual. At first, they seemed to make love a bit as if it were socially expected; but gradually, they began to do so with what felt like the normal frequency, and with what felt like the normal motives. After three months Graham faked a conference in Nottingham, and they spent the weekend driving through smoke-blackened spa towns and sudden moorlands edged with drystone walls. Separately, they worried what might happen if Barbara phoned the hotel and discovered that she, Mrs Graham Hendrick, had already booked in. Separately, they decided that next time it would have to be two rooms and their own names.

Ann found herself surprised by the creeping realization that she was in love with Graham. He hadn’t seemed at all an obvious candidate: he was eager and unco-ordinated, and kicked the legs of restaurant tables when he stood up to leave; whereas the men she had hitherto come closest to loving had been leisurely and relaxed. Graham was also what she supposed to be an intellectual; though she quickly discovered that he disliked talking about his work and seemed much more interested in hers. At first, the sight of him resettling his glasses on his nose as he bent over the special
prêt-à-porter
edition of French
Vogue
struck her as comical and vaguely threatening; but since, in reply, he showed no desire at all for her to accompany him to Colindale newspaper library and help collate the varying accounts of inter-war strikes and demonstrations, she began to stop worrying.

She felt, at the same time, both older and younger than him. Sometimes she pitied him for the narrowness of his previous life; at others she felt daunted by the thought that she
would never know as many things as Graham, would never be able to argue with the directness and logic which she perceived in him. On occasions, lying in bed, she found herself thinking about his brain. Beneath that covering of patchily grey hair, how were the contents distinguishable from what lay beneath her own trimmed and sculpted (and lightly dyed) covering of blonde? Could you cut his head open and immediately notice a different structure? If he really
had
been a brain surgeon, perhaps he might have been able to tell her.

After their affair had lasted six months, it became necessary to tell Barbara. Necessary not for her but for them: they were taking too many risks; it would be better if they told her when
they
wanted to, rather than be forced to confess after a period of suspicion which would be painful for her and guilt-inducing for them. It would also be cleaner, easier for Barbara. That’s what they told themselves. In addition, Graham hated having to go to the lavatory whenever he wanted to look at Ann’s photograph.

Twice he funked it. The first time because Barbara was in one of her nicer moods and he couldn’t bear to hurt her; the second because she was cheerfully hostile and he didn’t want her to think he was merely telling her about Ann in revenge. He wanted the announcement to be unequivocal.

In the end, he could only do it the cowardly way: he stayed a whole night with Ann. It wasn’t planned, but they fell asleep after making love, and when Ann roused him with a panicky slap he suddenly thought, Why should I? Why should I drive back through the cold just to lie next to a wife I don’t love? So instead, he turned over, and let morally neutral sleep force his declaration.

By the time he got home Alice would normally have left for school; but she was still there.

‘Daddy, I can go to school today, can’t I?’

Graham hated moments like this. He turned towards Barbara, conscious that he would never again look at her in quite the same way, unchanging and unchangeable though
she appeared: the short dark curls, the pouchily pretty face, the turquoise eyeliner. She was giving nothing away, and stared at him as expressionlessly as if he were a television newsreader.

‘Urn.’ He looked again at Barbara; still no help. ‘Um, I don’t see why not.’

‘We’ve got a history test today, Daddy.’

‘Then you must go.’

Alice’s answering smile never reached completion.

‘Must?
Must
? What right have you to go about issuing
musts
? Come on, you tell me what right.’ Barbara’s anger turned a round face long, and soft features angular.

Graham hated moments like this even more. He was incompetent at arguing with Barbara; she always operated on such fearlessly non-academic principles. With his students he could argue quite well: calmly, logically, on a basis of agreed facts. At home, there was no such basis; you never seemed to start the discussion (or rather, the system of one-way reprimands) at the beginning, but splashed in at the middle; while the accusations he had to counter were a home weave of hypothesis, assertion, fantasy and malice. Worse still was the relentless emotional overlay to the argument: the threatened price of victory might be clattering hatred, haughty silence, or a meat cleaver in the back of the head.