Before She Met Me (7 page)

‘I cry when the houseplants die.’

‘Come again, squire?’

‘She had these African violets. I mean, I don’t like African violets much, and neither does Ann. I think she was given them. She’s got lots of other plants she likes a lot more. And they got sort of plant chicken pox or something, and they died. Ann didn’t mind at all. I went up to my study and cried. Not about
them
—I just found myself thinking about her watering them, and putting that fertilizer stuff on them, and, you know, not her feelings about the sodding plants—she didn’t really have any, as I said—but her
time
, her
being there
, her
life …

I’ll tell you another thing. After she’s gone to work, the first thing I do is take out my diary and write down everything she’s got on. Shoes, tights, dress, bra, knickers, raincoat, hair-grip, rings. What colour. Everything. Often it’s the same, of course, but I still write it down. And then occasionally, throughout the day, I take out my diary and look it up. I don’t try and memorize what she’s looking like—that’d be cheating. I get out my diary—sometimes when I’m teaching and pretend to be thinking about essay titles or something—and I sit there, sort of dressing her. It’s very … nice.

‘I’ll tell you another thing. I always clear the table after dinner. I go through to the kitchen, and I scrape my plate off into the kitchen bin, and then I suddenly find myself eating whatever she’s left on hers. Often, you know, it isn’t anything particularly nice—bits of fat and discoloured vegetables and sausage gristle—but I just scoff it. And then I go back and sit down opposite her, and I find myself thinking about our stomachs, about how whatever I’ve just eaten might easily have been inside her, but’s inside me instead. I think, what an odd moment it must have been for that food,
when the knife came down and the fork pushed it this way rather than that, and instead of lying inside you it’s lying inside me. And that sort of makes me feel closer to Ann.

‘And I’ll tell you another thing. Sometimes, she gets up in the night and has a pee, and it’s dark and she’s half asleep and she somehow—God knows how she does it, but she does—she misses the bowl with the piece of paper she dries herself with. And I’ll go in there in the morning and find it lying on the floor. And—it’s not knicker-sniffing or anything like that—I sort of look at it and I feel … soft. It’s like one of those paper flowers that bad comedians wear in their buttonholes. It seems pretty, and colourful, and decorative. I could almost wear it in
my
buttonhole. I pick it up and shove it back in the bowl, but I feel sentimental afterwards.’

There was a silence. The two friends looked across at each other. Jack sensed a belligerence in Graham; the confession somehow managed to be aggressive. Perhaps too there was a touch of self-satisfaction about the recital. Jack felt almost embarrassed—so rare an occurrence that he began reflecting on his own internal condition rather than Graham’s. Suddenly he became aware that his friend had stood up.

‘Well, thanks, Jack.’

‘Glad to be of any. If I was. Next time you need to give the old psychocouch a pounding just give me a buzz.’

‘Yes I will. Thanks again.’

The front door was shut. Each had gone about five yards, in opposite directions, when they both paused. Jack paused while he gave a little pivot, a sort of fly-half’s side-step in the middle of the hall. He farted, not very noisily, and commented to himself,

‘Gone With the Wind.’

Outside, Graham paused, sniffed the dusty privet and the overflowing dustbins, and made a decision. If he cut out going to the good butcher, and did all his shopping at the supermarket, he could slip into
The Good Times
on his way home and catch Ann committing adultery again.

And then it began to spread.

One evening in late March they were sitting over a map of Italy and discussing their holiday. Side by side on the bench at the kitchen table: Graham had an arm loosely dangled round Ann’s shoulder. It was a comforting, marital arm, a tranquil parody of Jack’s urgent, front-row forward’s limb. Just looking at a map despatched Graham’s mind on suave imaginings; he remembered how holidays made each old, familiar pleasure come up smelling like clean laundry. Vallombrosa, Camaldoli, Montevarchi, Sansepolcro, Poggibonsi, he read off to himself, and already he was in a cicada-crackling dusk, a glass of Chianti in his left hand, and his right hand floating up the inside of Ann’s bare leg … Bucine, Montepulciano, and he was being woken by the raucous flutter of a pheasant landing heavily outside their bedroom window to gorge with impunity on the bursting figs … Then his eye tripped on

‘Arezzo.’

‘Yes, it’s nice there. I haven’t been for years.’

‘No. Yes, I mean, I know. Arezzo.’ Suddenly Graham’s lolling fantasies were over.

‘You haven’t been, have you, love?’ Ann asked him.

‘Don’t know. Don’t remember. Doesn’t matter.’ He stared back at the map, but it blurred as a tear eased itself into his left eye. ‘No, I was just remembering that you once told me you went to Arezzo with Benny.’

‘Did I? So I did. God, that feels years ago. It was, too. It must have been ten years at least. Probably in the Sixties. Think of that:
in the Sixties
.’ She was briefly jarred by pleasure at the thought that she had been doing interesting, grown-up things for such a length of time; for at least fifteen years, and she was still only thirty-five. A fuller, happier person now; and one still young enough not to flag at pleasure. She pressed closer to Graham on the bench.

‘You went to Arezzo with Benny,’ he repeated.

‘Yes. Do you know, I can’t remember anything about it. Is that where that great, sort of bowl-shaped square is? Or is that Siena?’

‘That’s Siena.’

‘Then Arezzo … that must be the place where … ’ She frowned, in disapproval of her bad memory as much as in an attempt to search it. ‘I can only remember going to the cinema in Arezzo.’

‘You went to the cinema in Arezzo,’ said Graham slowly, in the tone of one prompting a child, ‘and you saw a bad sentimental comedy about a whore who tries to disgrace the village priest, and then you came out and sat over an iced Strega in the only café you could find that was open, and you wondered as you drank how you could ever again live in a climate that was damp and cold, and then you went back to your hotel and you … screwed Benny as if you would never know greater pleasure, and you held nothing back from him, absolutely nothing, you didn’t even save a small corner of your heart and leave it untouched for when you met me.’

It was all uttered in a sad, hurt way, almost too precise to be self-indulgent. Was he putting it on? Was any of it a joke? As Ann looked across to check up, he went on,

‘I made up the last part of course.’

‘Of course. I never said anything like that to you, did I?’

‘No, you told me as far as the café, and I guessed the other things. Something about your expression told me the rest.’

‘Well, I don’t know if it’s true; I don’t remember. And anyway, Graham, I was twenty, twenty-one, I’d never been to Italy before. I’d never been on holiday with anyone who was as nice to me as Benny.’

‘Or had as much money.’

‘Or had as much money. Is that wrong?’

‘No. I can’t explain it. I certainly can’t justify it. I’m glad you went to Italy. I’m glad you didn’t go alone; it might have been dangerous. I’m glad you went with someone who was nice to you. I’m glad—I suppose I have to be—that you went to bed with him there. I know it all in steps, I know the logic. All of it makes me glad. It just makes me want to cry as well.’

Ann said gently,

‘I didn’t know you then.’ She kissed him on the temple, and stroked the far side of his head, as if to calm the sudden turbulence inside. ‘And if I
had
known you then, I’d have wanted to go with you. But I didn’t know you. So I couldn’t. It’s as simple as that.’

‘Yes.’ It was simple. He gazed at the map, following the route he knew Ann had taken with Benny a decade before he had met her. Down the coast, through Genoa to Pisa, across to Florence, Rimini, Urbino, Perugia, Arezzo, Siena, back to Pisa and up again. Benny had just removed a great slice out of Italy for him. He might as well take a pair of scissors to the map, shear straight across it-from Pisa to Rimini, cut a parallel line through Assisi, and then stick the bottom bit of Italy back on to what was now left of the top bit. Make it into a mere bootee—the sort with little buttons down the side. As worn by posh whores; or so he imagined.

They could go to Ravenna, he supposed. He hated mosaics. He really hated mosaics. Benny had left him with the mosaics. Thanks very much, Benny.

‘We could go to Bologna,’ he said finally.

‘You’ve been to Bologna before.’

‘Yes.’

‘You went to Bologna with Barbara.’

‘Yes.’

‘You almost certainly slept in the same bed as Barbara in Bologna.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, Bologna’s fine with me. Is it a nice place to go?’

‘I’ve forgotten.’

Graham stared at the map again. Ann stroked the side of his head, trying not to feel guilty about what she knew it would be foolish to begin feeling guilty about. After a few minutes’ contemplation Graham said quietly,

‘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.