Before She Met Me

by Julian Barnes

  So I don’t have to say anything. What’s more, it’s important that I don’t. Jack might drag me off into camaraderie, and then where would I be? Probably nowhere different, but compromised, halfway towards being explained, towards being sodding understood.

  ‘Anything up, matey?’

  Jack was gazing across at him with benign irritation. Since he seemed to be running this counselling service now, he wished the buggers would stick to a few normal rules. Didn’t they realize he had a job? Did they think all those books of his just turned up one morning at the foot of the chimney, and that all he had to do was dust the soot off them and send them round to the publishers? Is that what they thought? And now, they not only turned up without any warning, they just sat there like blocks of stone. Othello was turning into what’s his name—Ozymandias.

  ‘Cough, cough,’ said Jack. Then, with a more hesitating jokiness, he repeated into Graham’s silence, ‘Cough, cough?’

  Graham looked across and smiled distantly. He gripped his mug more fiercely than he needed to, and took a sip.

  ‘Coffee to your satisfaction, sah?’ enquired Jack.

  Still nothing.

  ‘I mean, I don’t mind earning my thirty guineas this way; it’s no skin off my fore. I should imagine every shrink would envy me you. It’s just that it’s a bit boring. I mean, if I am to put you in my next novel, I’ve got to feel more what’s going on inside you, haven’t I?’

  Put you in my next novel … Oh yes, and will you give me a mole on the end of my nose so that I won’t recognize myself? Make me thirty-nine instead of forty-two? Some sophisticated little touch like that? But Graham resisted the temptation to ironic reply. Instead, he worried about his hands getting damp.

  Suddenly, Jack picked up his coffee and walked to the other end of his long room. He sat down on his piano stool, shifted some of the garbage round, lit a cigarette and switched on his typewriter. Graham listened to the low electric hum, then the rapid clatter of the keys. It didn’t sound like a proper typewriter to him, more like one of those things which announced sports results on television—what was it, a teleprinter? Well, that wasn’t inappropriate: nowadays Jack’s fiction was produced more or less automatically. Maybe there was a special switch on his machine, like the autopilot on an aeroplane: Jack only had to press it and his teleprinter would churn out auto junk.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ Jack called out over the hum. ‘Stay as long as you like.’

  Graham looked down the sitting-room. The novelist was sitting with his back to him; Graham could just see the right side of his face and a bit of fuzzy brown beard. He could almost make out the spot where Jack lodged his cigarettes in that reckless but oh-so-charming way of his. ‘Anyone smell burning?’ he’d say with such a straight face, and the object of that particular night’s pursuit would whinny with delight at this strange, absent-minded, self-destructive but obviously creative person. Graham wished he’d been able to tell some of them about the autojunk switch on the typewriter.

  ‘Get yourself some more coffee whenever you like,’ Jack called out. ‘Lots of stuff in the deep freeze if you’re counting on staying a few days. Spare bed’s made up.’

  Well it would be. You never knew when it would come in useful. Not that Jack would have any scruples about dousing the marital bed.

  In a funny way Graham was just as fond of Jack as he’d always been. But that had absolutely nothing to do with the case. He set his coffee down on the floor and quietly stood up. Then he walked slowly across towards the desk. The hum and the occasional burst of key-clatter covered his steps. He wondered what sort of sentence Jack was in the process of tapping out; he hoped, in a sentimental way, that he wasn’t striking in mid-cliché.

  It was his favourite: the one with the black bone handle, and a six-inch blade tapering from a breadth of an inch to a sharp point. As he withdrew it from his pocket, he turned it sideways, so that it would slide in between the ribs more easily. He walked the last few feet and then, instead of stabbing, seemed merely to walk into Jack with the knife held out ahead of him. He aimed about halfway up the back on the right-hand side. The knife struck something hard, then slipped downwards a little, then went in suddenly to about half its length.

  Jack gave a curious falsetto wheeze, and one of his hands fell on the keyboard. There was a spurt of typing, then a dozen keys got tangled up and the noise stopped. Graham looked down and saw that the jarring entry of the blade had cut the top of his index finger. He pulled out the knife, quickly lifting his eyes away as it emerged.

  Jack twisted on the stool, his left elbow dragging on the typewriter and sending a few more keys to join the clogged bunch which were still straining to reach the paper. As the bearded face came slowly round, Graham finally lost control. He stabbed repeatedly at Jack’s lower body, at the area which lay between the heart and the genitals. After several blows, Jack rolled soundlessly off the piano stool on to the carpet; but this didn’t placate Graham. Shifting his grip so that he could stab downwards, he worked doggedly away at the same area. Between the heart and the genitals, that was what he wanted. Between the heart and the genitals.

  Graham didn’t have any idea how many times he stabbed Jack. He just stopped when the knife seemed to be going in more easily, when resistance, not from Jack, but from his body, appeared to have stopped. He took the knife out for the last time and wiped it on Jack’s sweater. Then he placed it flat on his friend’s chest, went to the kitchen and rinsed his hand. He found some Elastoplast and stretched it awkwardly over the top joint of his finger. After that he went back to his chair, sat down, leaned over the arm and picked up his coffee. There was half a mug left, and it was still warm. He settled down to drink it.

  At seven o’clock Ann arrived home, expecting cooking smells, a large drink in Graham’s wavering hand, and another evening of tears and recriminations. She had stopped thinking about things getting better, or how to make them do so. Instead, she took each day by itself and tried to hold on to the right memories as the evenings degenerated. She took faith from a couple of things. The first was a belief that no one could go on being fuelled by such negative emotions for ever. The second was the realization that only rarely did Graham seem to be directly reproaching her: her now, that is. He was hostile to a past her, to a present situation, but not to a present her. These sources of comfort, she found, worked best when Graham wasn’t there. When he was there, it seemed much more likely that the situation might continue for ever, and that Graham genuinely hated her.

  At eight o’clock Ann rang Graham’s head of department, to be told that, as far as he knew, Graham had worked his normal day and gone home in the mid-afternoon. Would she like the home number of the department’s secretary? Ann didn’t think that was necessary.

  At eight-ten she rang Jack, and got no reply.

  She hoped Graham hadn’t started another burst of going to films.

  At ten o’clock, against her will, she rang Barbara and got Alice. After two seconds she got Barbara.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to talk to my daughter, thank you very much, she’s all I’ve got now you’ve taken my husband away from me.’ It was doubtless intended to be overheard by Alice.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know she would answer the phone.’

  ‘I don’t want you ringing here in any case.’

  ‘No. I quite understand.’

  ‘You understand? Oh well, that must be nice for you. It gives me quite a thrill to know that at least the woman who stole my husband understands. Maybe you understand me better than I do myself, maybe you stole Graham from me for my own good.’

  Ann always felt sympathy for Barbara until she needed to have any dealing with her, however indirect. Then she felt exhausted almost straight away. Why did Barbara enjoy complication so much?

  ‘I just wondered—I just wondered if you’d heard from Graham.’

  ‘Heard? Why should I? It’s not Thursday.’

  ‘No, I mean, he hasn’t come ho
me. I wondered if he’d … he’d been round to take Alice out or something.’

  There was a laugh, then a stagy sigh from the other end of the phone.

  ‘Well, well, well. Since you ask, No I haven’t seen Graham, No I would never let him see Alice except when the court said he could, and No I can’t think where he might have got to because’ (the tone became crisper) ‘the only times he never came home to me was when he was shilly-shallying about with you. Have you checked his suitcase?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, let me tell you the pattern, just so you’ll recognize it, though I must say I don’t think it says much for you if he’s already playing up after, what is it, three years, four years? Yes it must be four, because Alice was twelve when he left, I remember telling him how he was running off at a crucial time in the child’s development, and as she’s sixteen you must have stolen him four years ago. You see, that’s how I date things nowadays. You might find yourself doing the same at some stage. The point about the suitcase is, he only ever takes one suitcase. Just a few clothes, not even his toothbrush. I suppose he feels less guilty that way. Only the one suitcase, so it’s not a bad deal for you in some ways; I got quite a good price for his clobber. Oh, and the other thing is, he makes the taxi wait round the corner. Goes off all long-faced and sighing with his suitcase, and jumps into a cab round the corner. Why not ring the local taxi firm and find out where he’s gone to? I mean, that’s what I did.’

  The phone was abruptly put down. Ann felt depressed. Barbara was certainly someone capable of sustaining negative emotions.

  At half-past ten she rang Jack again. He was obviously making a night of it.

  What were you meant to do? Ring the police? ‘Probably met up with an old friend, Ma’m. Drinking man, is he?’ She couldn’t very well say no to that. But Graham had never been anywhere near this late before.

  At a quarter to eleven she went upstairs and pushed open Graham’s study door. She hadn’t been in here since the night of the party. Automatically she crossed to the window and looked down the garden towards the rockery. In one way, it was a relief that he wasn’t there.

  Without bothering to close the curtains, she switched on the light. The room wasn’t exactly out of bounds to her, but she felt as if she were intruding. This was Graham’s private area in their marriage; and not just because he worked here.

  She looked around. The desk, the chair, the bookshelves, the filing cabinet. The only thing that had changed was the photograph of her above the desk. Graham used to have a picture of her taken at their wedding—the happiest photo of her ever taken, she thought. Now he had replaced it with one she had almost forgotten giving to him: she was fifteen, awash with puppy fat, an Alice band in her hair, and precariously maintaining on her face a smile which approved of the world and all its doings.

  She pushed at one or two of the papers on Graham’s desk, not even looking at them. Then she idly pulled open the top drawer of his filing cabinet. 1911–15: full of neatly ordered files. She pulled at the second drawer, 1915–19. It slid out at the lightest of touches, so that she felt barely responsible for having opened it.

  A box of Kleenex lay diagonally across a pile of magazines; the top tissue was half pulled out. She pushed the box to one side. The top magazine of a pile of about thirty displayed its back cover: a shiny advert for cigarettes. Ann flipped it over and discovered it was a girlie mag. She delved through the rest of the pile, all of which were face down: different titles, the same widely-stretched contents. So that was why Graham didn’t seem keen to fuck her any more.

  Or maybe … or maybe, it was the other way round: he did this precisely because he wasn’t keen. Chicken and egg, she thought. As she flicked through the top magazine again, she felt a stirring of unease; her belly contracted. It wasn’t that Graham was being unfaithful to her when he came up here, it was just that—just that, yes, in a way he was. It was better, she supposed, than finding a packet of love letters; but she still felt betrayed. Shocked, too: not at what she saw, but at Graham’s—at men’s—need for it. Why did men have to spell it out so much? Why did they have to bestride their magazines, pseudo-raping dozens of women in one session? Why did they need such coarse visual stimulus? What was wrong with their imagination?

  When she pulled out 1919–24 there was a faint smell of almonds, explained by an opened, and now drying, pot of Gripfix. The plastic spatula hadn’t been replaced on the spike inside the lid, but lay with a few hard grains of glue on top of a yellow scrapbook. Ann paused, needlessly checking the silence of the house, and then opened it in the middle. She saw two photos of herself—so that’s where they went—and some xeroxes of press-cuttings. They were reviews of one of her earliest, and worst, films: reviews which came out years before she met Graham, and none of which mentioned her name. She didn’t even have copies of them herself.

  She turned on, then back to the beginning and worked her way steadily through the book. It was Graham’s secret record of her life before they met: photos; reviews of her films (understandably few of which ever referred to her); xeroxes of a couple of sweater adverts she’d modelled for when she was hard up (how had he found out about them?); even copies of the few occasions—the very few, thankfully—when her name had appeared low down in gossip columns. One of these Graham had circled in red:

  … also spotted were Jack Lupton, son-of-the-soil author of steamy, between-the-sheets novels, squiring must-try-harder would-be starlet Ann Mears. Mr Lupton’s divorce we hear (there are two children) is imminent, but the bearded boyo declined to comment …

  She remembered how sick that had made her feel at the time; how she had suppressed the thought of it on the orders of her agent.

  Next to this cutting, which was on a right-hand page, was a drawing in red felt pen of the head of an arrow; the shaft disappeared over the page. She followed it, across a double spread, to where it started: at a review (which had appeared three months before the gossip-page clipping) of Too Late the Tears. That crummy film. The review was by Jack. Christ, by Jack. She’d forgotten that entirely. He’d done a brief stint for one of the Sundays as a film critic. And not long afterwards she’d met him at a party. A section of the review was circled in red:

  … Amid the general smoky nullity of this piece of unsellable celluloid, there are a few moments which redeem it from causing total bum-numbdom. These are mainly located round Ann Mears, who is well found in an otherwise insignificant part and whose grace arches across this cloudy movie like a bursting rainbow …

  Finally, Ann pulled out 1924–9, with little confidence that she would find there some hidden diary of praise, some sentimental signal of brief happiness. On the left was a cassette from their video-recorder; on the right was a large brown envelope. The cassette was unmarked. She opened the envelope and found bundles of pages which had been torn out of a book; or several books. There were red squiggles down the sides of some of the pages, underlinings and exclamation marks. She half-recognized one of the pages as being from some novel of Jack’s, then gradually perceived their communal source. She flipped through them, noticing that almost every page referred to sex in some way.

  It was three in the morning by the time she took the cassette downstairs. Cautious prying in Graham’s desk had revealed nothing; his bookshelves had disclosed only the five mutilated copies of Jack’s novels. Apprehensively she slotted the tape into the V.C.R. and rewound it to the beginning. It started with a commercial for a new brand of chocolate biscuit, in which a kilted servant came up to Queen Victoria and presented her with a packet of the biscuits on a silver tray. She unwrapped them, bit into one, and her plump, mournful face lifted into a smile. ‘We are not amazed,’ she commented, whereupon a file of kilted courtiers leaped into an eight-second song-and-dance number extolling the biscuit.

  Ann had never seen the commercial before. She was to see it again, though. The tape contained eight recordings of the same advert. On the third viewing, she found herself awkwardly aware of s
omething familiar; on the fifth she recognized him, beneath his drooping moustache and drooping tam-o’shanter. Dick Devlin. How had Graham discovered that? Even when she knew that it was Devlin, she could still only just recognize him in the final three recordings. And why the eight versions?

  Ann didn’t go to bed that night. She replayed the tape, baffled by the secrecy and obsessiveness it implied. Then she went back to the filing cabinet. The only thing she’d missed—because she’d initially taken it for lining paper—was sheet after sheet of the Evening Standard. Always the same page: the guide to cinemas. Each one was marked with blurry circlings of red felt pen. Frequently she found that she hadn’t even heard of the films marked; any supposed connection they might have with her was incomprehensible.

  She leafed once more through the pages torn from Jack’s novels, and saw a pattern emerge. But if he thinks all this is about me, he’s mad, she thought; then checked herself. Graham wasn’t mad. Graham was sad; upset; drunk sometimes; but he was not to be called mad. Just as he was not to be called jealous. That was a word she wouldn’t use of him. Again, he was sad; upset; he couldn’t handle her past; but he wasn’t jealous. When Jack had referred to him as ‘my little Othello’, she’d been annoyed: not just because it was patronizing, but because it disturbed her view of events.

  Finally, with some reluctance, she submitted to Barbara’s advice and looked in Graham’s wardrobe: all his clothes seemed to be there. His suitcase was still there. Of course it would be; of course he hadn’t run off.

  At ten o’clock the next morning she telephoned the hospitals and the police. Neither had seen him. The police advised her to ring round his friends. They didn’t ask if he was a drinking man, though they did say, ‘Had a spat by any chance, Ma’m?’ She rang work and told them she was feeling queasy. Then, after a final call to Jack’s, she walked to the Underground.