Before She Met Me

by Julian Barnes

  Meanwhile Graham read on. It was strange that nowadays he had exactly the same reaction to every history book he read, regardless of length, quality, usefulness or price: he found it at the same time, and almost in the same sentence, intensely interesting and intensely boring.

  There were four days of their holiday left when, one morning, Ann felt the skin on her breasts begin to tauten; felt too the first distant ache at the hollow of her back. As they ate their picnic by a flat, wide stream, where the water, never reaching a depth of more than a foot, flowed listlessly over fat pebbles, she murmured to Graham, using the French slang she’d once taught him,

  ‘I think the redcoats are about to land.’

  Graham held a long slice of thickly pâtéed bread in his right hand, and in his left a tomato which he’d just bitten into; he knew the juice was currently deciding whether to fall on his trousers, or run up his forearm, or perhaps do both. So it was with only half a mind that he asked,

  ‘Have they just been spotted?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So they’re still some way out to sea?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Though of course they may have a following wind?’

  ‘That’s always possible.’

  He nodded to himself with a sort of private calculation, like a dealer at an auction preview deciding what he’ll bid up to. Ann was amused by his responses to the arrival of her periods. Sometimes there would be a long, multiple-choice catechism about precisely where the redcoats had been spotted, what their estimated strength was, how long their expeditionary force planned to stay, and so on. Sometimes, as now, the news seemed to take him quite seriously, as if she’d announced that she had to go into hospital. Occasionally it made him roguishly sexual, and while he wouldn’t exactly drag her off to bed—he’d never be that type—he would respond more keenly than usual to encouragement.

  To Graham the whole subject was of vivid interest, because for him it was only four years old, and had never before been allowed a sexual slant. He still remained invincibly fastidious about the idea of mid-menstrual sex; he’d even confessed, sheepishly and vaguely, that the thought of it made him feel he ought to be wearing galoshes. But he always agreed readily enough with Ann’s suggestion that the imminence of her period meant that it was, well, almost one’s duty to allow oneself some quick felicity before closedown. Ann had, once, gone further, and suggested that even if he didn’t care to contemplate galoshes, he could always try something a bit different. But Graham didn’t really fancy something a bit different; it made him feel awkward, both too bestial and too cerebral at the same time.

  During his first marriage it had never been like this. Barbara regarded the arrival of her periods as a time when women’s suffering should be exalted, when she should be allowed an extra degree of irrationality in decision-taking, when Graham should be made to feel as guilty as possible. Sometimes he found himself half-thinking that he actually caused Barbara’s periods; that it was his penis which had cut her and made her bleed. Certainly it was a time of uncertain temper and strange accusations. Charity suggested that the difference between Barbara’s attitude and Ann’s could be ascribed to generation, or pain thresholds; but Graham was less tempted by charity nowadays.

  When they got back to their hotel after lunch Graham seemed preoccupied; he scarcely spoke as they sipped at their small, chunky, square-handled cups of coffee. Ann didn’t ask what he was thinking, but gave him an option.

  ‘Would you like to go for a walk this afternoon?’

  ‘Oh, no, definitely not.’

  ‘Shall I fetch our books?’

  ‘Oh, no, definitely not.’

  He leaned across and peered into her cup, checking that it was empty; then stood up. For Graham, this was decisive, almost pushy. They walked upstairs side by side to their bedroom, where the sheets had been pulled so tight and smoothed down so thoroughly that it seemed as if they must be fresh. The room was in an easy darkness, with windows and shutters closed. Graham opened the windows, releasing into the room a faint hum of insects, distant kitchen clatter and the background rumble of a warm afternoon; he left the shutters closed. Perhaps he had been at the window for longer than he realized, for when he turned Ann was already in bed, one arm thrown up on the pillow beside her head, the other automatically holding the sheet half over her breasts. Graham walked round to his side of the bed and sat down, then undressed at moderate pace. The last thing he took off was his glasses, which he placed on the bedside table next to the glass of wilting and mostly unnamable flowers that Ann had collected one morning.

  She was unprepared for what followed. First, Graham burrowed down the bed and practically butted her legs apart. Then he began kissing her, with obvious tenderness but no very profitable sense of location. Which was hardly a surprise, since it was only the second time he’d done this. She had assumed she didn’t taste nice down there; or at any rate, not nice to him.

  Next he reared up, and squirmed his body aggressively sideways, expecting reciprocation. She consented, again with surprise, as she thought he only half-liked that. After about a minute, he scuttled down the bed and pushed inside her, holding his cock as he did so, which was unusual, since he normally liked her to do that for him. And even then he kept moving her about—on her side, on her front, finally, to her relief, on her back—in a diligent, programmed way that hinted at some deeper or more complicated motive than pleasure. It seemed like an act not directly of sex, but of sexual recapitulation. Do it all, do it now, do everything; you never know when you’ll do anything, even the simplest kiss, ever again. That was what it seemed to be saying.

  And he came differently, too. Whereas his head would usually be buried in the pillow as he rummaged his way breathily to orgasm, this time he reared away from the bed into a press-up, and stared at Ann’s face with a seriousness bordering on pain. His expression was both searching and anonymous—he might have been a customs officer to whom she had just offered her passport.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, as his head collapsed back into the pillow beside her. It was the first word he had spoken since they’d been in the bar. He meant, Sorry it didn’t work, Sorry for me, Sorry I tried everything and got very little. Sorry for me.

  ‘What for, silly?’ She laid a hand across his back and stroked his shoulder.

  ‘All for me. Not enough for you.’ But mainly, not enough for me.

  ‘Silly. It’s just as nice for me even if I don’t.’

  Well, it was true often enough for it not to be too much of a lie on this occasion. Graham grunted, as if happy; Ann shifted slightly to reposition his hipbone; and they lay in that traditional posture until the pressure on her bladder became too much.

  The next day the redcoats landed, and the weather seemed to shift into greyness. They set off back towards Toulouse, this time following a northern curve. The naves of damp plane trees were planted closer together here, and went schwaa schwaa at them as they drove along. The peeling distemper of their barks now made them look run-down: poor-boy trees.

  Heading into the southern fringe of the Causses, they saw a sign to Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. Neither of them was much interested in cheese, but this seemed as good a direction as any. They visited a factory cut into a cliff face, where a small female bullfighter wearing three sweaters and a long woollen cape explained to them how the vertical fissures in the rock kept the whole factory at its constant chilly temperature. The breeze and humidity produced unrepeatably perfect conditions for blue cheese making; and also produced, no doubt, the streaming cold of the guide.

  There was nothing much for them to see, it transpired, because the cheese making was seasonal, and they had come a little late. There was not even a cheese for them to see: but to compensate, the guide took a large wooden block, carved to the exact size of a whole Roquefort, and demonstrated how to wrap it in tinfoil. The lack of anything to see put Graham in an unshakably good mood, which was increased by Ann’s running translation.

  ‘The history goes
that there was a berger once who was with his muttons and it was the lunch. He sat in a cavern with some bread and some cheese, when a bergère who was naturally very beautiful passed. The young berger forgot his lunch and made his court to the young bergère. It was a few weeks later when he went back to his cavern that he discovered his cheese all green and his bread all green. But, happily for us, he gusted his cheese and it pleased him much. Then the bergers maintained the secret of the cavern over many centuries. It is not known whether this account is the truth, but it is one the Roqueforties amuse themselves to narrate to one another.’

  They walked through several fissures, damp and gleaming with moss of an unnaturally bright green, and were shown, through a window, a distant assembly line of disconsolate packers. The guide announced that the visit was terminating itself, and pointed sternly at a notice which forbade tipping. At the sales counter they disregarded the cheese and resisted a set of twelve colour transparencies of the cheese-making process from mould-collecting to packing. Instead, Graham bought a Roquefort knife: broad-bladed and swerving to a sudden point; the handle surprisingly thin and serious-looking. It would always come in, he supposed.

  They drove west for half a day and reached Albi, where they found the strangest cathedral either of them had ever seen: it rose in orange-brown brick, squat yet soaring, church yet fortress, beautiful in spite of being in large parts either ugly or merely odd. The Church militant; also the Church defensive, and the Church symbolic: built as a brick warning to the lingering remnants of Catharism, and to all subsequently tempted by that heresy. As they gazed up at the bulbous, black-faced towers of the west end, at the arrow-slits and the occasional leaping gargoyle, Graham reflected that in a sense this was an oblique, intellectual response to those tumbling heretics of Montaillou: this told the dunghill-fornicators that where the strength lay, so did the truth.

  Was it her period, or had Graham been a bit edgy for the last couple of days? Even his cheerfulness seemed slightly false. Ann couldn’t tell. Maybe it didn’t matter; maybe it was just the end of the holiday. In Albi they bought Armagnac and glass jars of vegetables. Graham found some espadrilles and a woven straw hat, both of which he’d been looking for since the start of the trip. They had to use up some of this spare money, he thought; otherwise Ann’s walnut box would be overflowing.

  As they drove through the outskirts of Toulouse on the way to the airport, they passed a cinema and Ann laughed.

  ‘What’s on?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re showing Fermeture annuelle,’ she replied. ‘It’s all over the place.’ It was like being on a train in Italy and finding all the towns you went through were called Uscita. ‘Is that Godard or Truffaut?’

  Graham smiled, and made some appropriate throaty response; but didn’t she catch, at the edge of her vision, that instinctive flinch?

  At Gatwick they found a taxi without difficulty. It was raining, as it always seemed to be when you returned to England. Graham gazed through the speckled window. Why did everything green seem to have so much brown in it here? And how was it possible for things to be both damp and dusty at the same time? After about a mile, they passed a garage. Four star, three star … carwash. Graham knew that he was back. The fermeture annuelle of the cinema inside his head was over.

  EIGHT

  The Feminian Sandstones

  Graham felt bad about never taking Alice to the zoo; but there it was. Not that he hated animals: on the contrary, he delighted in their improbability, in the speculative, SF way so many of them had developed. Who played that joke on you, he kept wanting to ask them. Whoever thought it was a good idea for you to look like that, he whispered to the giraffe. I mean, I know about needing long necks to reach the highest leaves, but wouldn’t it have been better-judged to make the trees shorter? Or, for that matter, get used to eating stuff nearer the ground, beetles or scorpions or something? Why did it seem such a good idea to giraffes for them to carry on being giraffes?

  Moreover, in a way he would have liked taking Alice round the zoo; it was one place where even the gauchest parent couldn’t miss. However cloying, poverty-stricken or contemptible you were in the child’s eyes, however frequently you wore the wrong clothes to its school prize day, you could always recoup at the zoo. The animals were so reliably generous with reflected glory—as if they were no more than the momentous products of the parent’s imagination. Look, my dad invented all these; yes, and the crocodile; and the emu; and the zebra. The only tricky points were sexual: that rhino’s erection, hanging down like a flayed gorilla’s fist or some joint you don’t dare ask for at the butcher’s. But even these moments could be explained away in terms of aberrant evolution.

  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 p
layers 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?