Before She Met Me

by Julian Barnes

  There was a silence. He hoped the conversation was over. He fiddled with the ignition key, but didn’t turn it.

  ‘Daddy, was it …’ Out of the corner of her eye he could see her frown. ‘Was it romantic love?’ She pronounced it tentatively, as if this was the first time she’d used this foreign phrase.

  You couldn’t say you didn’t know what that meant. You couldn’t say, That isn’t a real question. There were only two boxes available for answers, and you had to tick one of them quickly.

  ‘Yes, I think you could say it was.’

  Saying it—without knowing what it meant, or how the answer would affect Alice—made him feel sadder than if he’d taken her to the zoo.

  One, Graham thought. Why was there jealousy—not just for him, but for lots of people? Why did it start up? It was related to love in some way, but that way wasn’t quantifiable or comprehensible. Why did it suddenly start wailing in his head, like the ground warning system in an aircraft: six and a half seconds, evasive action, now. That was what it felt like sometimes, inside Graham’s skull. And why did it pick on him? Was it some bit of fluky chemistry? Was it all dished out at birth? Did you get given jealousy the way you got given a big bottom or poor eyesight, both of which Graham suffered from. If so, maybe it wore off after a while; maybe there was only enough jealousy chemical in that soft box up there for a certain number of years. Perhaps; but Graham rather doubted it: he’d had a big bottom for years, and that showed no signs of easing up.

  Two. Given that for some reason there had to be jealousy, why should it operate retrospectively? Why was it the only major emotion that seemed to? The others didn’t. When he looked at photos of Ann as a girl and a young woman, he felt a natural wish-I’d-been-there wistfulness; and when she told him about some childhood punishment unjustly inflicted on her, he felt protectiveness gurgle up inside him. But these were distanced emotions, felt through gauze; they were easily stirred and easily calmed—calmed by the simple continuance of the present, which wasn’t the past. This jealousy, however, came in rushes, in sudden, intimate bursts that winded you; its source was trivial, its cure unknown. Why should the past make you crazy with emotion?

  He could think of only one parallel. Some of his students—not many, not even most, but one a year, say—did get incensed about the past. He had a case at present, that ginger-haired boy, MacSomething (God, nowadays it took a whole year to learn their names, and then you never saw them again; you might as well not bother), who became quite enraged by the failure of good (as he saw it) to triumph over evil in History. Why hadn’t x prevailed? Why did z beat y? He could see MacSomething’s puzzled, angry face staring back at him in classes, wanting to be told that History—or at any rate historians—had got it wrong; that x had in fact gone into hiding and turned up years later at w; and so on. Normally, Graham would have ascribed such reactions to—what?—immaturity; or, more specifically, to some local cause like a churchy upbringing. Now he wasn’t so sure. MacSomething’s rage against the past involved complex emotions about a medley of characters and events. Perhaps he was suffering from a retrospective sense of justice.

  Three. Why did retrospective jealousy exist now, in the last quarter of the twentieth century? Graham wasn’t a historian for nothing. Things died out; rages between nations and continents settled down; civilization was becoming more civil: you couldn’t deny it, to Graham’s eye. Gradually, he didn’t doubt, the world would calm down into a gigantic welfare state devoted to sporting, cultural and sexual exchange, with the accepted international currency being items of hifi equipment. There would be the occasional earthquake and volcanic eruption, but even Nature’s revenges would be sorted out in time.

  So why should this jealousy linger on, unwanted, resented, only there to bugger you around? Like a middle ear, only there to make you lose your sense of balance; or like an appendix, only there to flare up insolently and have to be taken out. How did you take out jealousy?

  Four. Why should it happen to him, him of all people? He was, he knew, a very sensible person. Barbara had naturally tried to make him believe that he was a grotesque egomaniac, a monstrous lecher, a heartless emotional dwarf; but that was only understandable. Indeed, the fact that Graham understood it proved to him yet again how sensible he was. Everyone had always called him sensible—his mother comfortingly, his first wife sneeringly, his colleagues applaudingly, his second wife with that fond, mocking, half-askance look in her eye. That’s what he was, and he liked being it.

  Moreover, it wasn’t as if he was one of the world’s great lovers. There’d been Barbara, then Ann, and that was more or less all. What he had felt for Barbara had probably been exaggerated by the jaunty novelty of first emotion; while what he felt for Ann, complete as he knew it to be, had arisen warily. And in between? Well, in between, there had been occasions when he’d tried to spur himself into feeling something approaching love; but all he’d ever come up with was a sort of urgent sentimentality.

  And since he acknowledged all this about himself, it did seem particularly unfair that he was the one who was being punished. Others kicked the fire but he got burned. Or maybe this was the whole point of it. Maybe this was where Jack’s analysis of marriage, Jack’s Cross-Eyed Bear, came in. And maybe Jack’s theory, correct as far as it went, didn’t go far enough. What if it wasn’t something in the nature of marriage—in which case, being Jack, you could blame ‘society’ and then go off and be unfaithful until you felt better about it—but something in the nature of love? That was a much less pleasant thought: that the thing everyone pursued always went wrong, automatically, inevitably, chemically. Graham didn’t like the thought of it.

  ‘You could fuck one of your students.’

  ‘No I couldn’t.’

  ‘Course you could. Everyone does. That’s what they’re for. I know you’re not a looker, but they don’t really mind at that age. It’s probably more of a turn-on if you’re not a looker—if you’re a bit smelly or fucked-up or depressed. I call it Third World sex. There’s a lot of it about, but especially at that age.’

  Jack was only trying to be helpful; Graham was practically sure of that.

  ‘Well, I sort of think it’s wrong, you see. I can we are meant to be in loco parentis, and it would seem a bit like incest.’

  ‘The family that plays together, stays together.’

  Actually, Jack wasn’t particularly trying to be helpful. He was a bit fed up with Graham’s constant visits. He’d made lots of perfectly good suggestions—that Graham should lie, that he should wank, that he should have a foreign holiday —and he found that his therapist’s bag was more or less empty. In any case, he’d only felt half-sorry for Graham in the first place. Now, he felt almost more inclined to fool around with his friend than indulge him.

  ‘ … and in any case,’ Graham was continuing, ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Appetite comes with eating.’ Jack cocked an eyebrow, but Graham stolidly took the remark as no more than a platitude.

  ‘The funny thing is—I mean, the thing that’s most surprised me about it all—is that it’s so visual.’

  ‘ …?’

  ‘Well, I’ve always been a words man myself. I would be, wouldn’t I? It’s always been words that have most affected me. I don’t like pictures much; I’m not interested in colours or clothes; I don’t even like pictures in books; and I hate films. Well, I used to hate films. Well, I still do, though in a different way, of course.’

  ‘Yes.’ Jack waited for Graham to come to the point. This, he realized, was why he preferred sane people to crazy people: crazy people took so long to come to the point; they thought you wanted a Red Rover tour of their psyche before they showed you Buckingham Palace. They thought that everything was interesting, that everything was relevant. Jack tried to think up a new joke. Could he do anything with Edgar Wind? Or what about a wind quintet? No, that would be straining the old sphincter a bit. And they didn’t seem to have wind duos.

  ‘But it was a surprise
that the visual thing really triggered it off … ’

  Wasn’t there a River Windrush somewhere? Hmmm, might take a bit of planning.

  ‘ … I mean, obviously I knew when Ann and I married that it wasn’t like when Barbara and I married. And of course Ann was always completely straightforward with me about chaps … about her life … before she met me … ’

  Do it as you tripped up and you could have a windfall. Maybe an apple as prop? Down at the coast and you could have Come wind or high water; maybe use that with the washing-up?

  ‘… so I knew some of their names, and I might even have seen a photo or two, though of course I didn’t look hard; and I knew what jobs they’d done, and some were younger than me of course and some were better-looking and some were richer and some were probably better in bed, but it was all right. It was … ’

  Windhover. Windlass. Windjammer. Jack suppressed a half-chuckle, and politely turned it into a grunt.

  ‘ … it really was. And then I went to see Over the Moon and it all changed. Now why should I, who have been untouched by the visual for my whole life, suddenly go under like that? I mean, haven’t you thought about it yourself—it must affect you, professionally, I mean, if some people get more out of films than books.’

  ‘I always say you can take a book anywhere. Can’t see a film on the can, can you?’

  ‘No, that’s true. But seeing my wife there, up there on the screen, it was all quite different. I mean the visual—the visual is just a lot more powerful than the word, isn’t it?’

  ‘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.’

  ‘ …?’

  ‘On the first Feminian sandstones we were promised the

  Fuller Life

  (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving

  his wife).’

  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 ha
d 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,