Before She Met Me

by Julian Barnes

  ‘Don’t care.’

  ‘Don’t Care was made to care,’ she answered instinctively. It was what her grandmother had always replied when, as a child, Ann expressed pert indifference. And if her ‘Don’t care’ had implied genuine recalcitrance, her grandmother used to give the full reply:

  Don’t Care was made to care;

  Don’t Care was hung;

  Don’t Care was put in a pot

  And boiled till she was done.

  There were still three weeks of Graham’s summer holiday left (Ann could never get used to calling it ‘vacation’). Normally, this was one of the best times of the year, when Graham was at his most helpful and jolly. She would go to work happy at the thought of him messing about at home, reading a bit, sometimes making the dinner. Occasionally, in the last year or two, she had sneaked off work in the middle of the afternoon, getting back sweaty and sexy from the heat and the light clothes she wore and the thump and rattle of the Underground; without speaking they’d agree on why she’d come home early, and they would go to bed with her still damp at all the hinges of her body.

  Afternoon sex was the best sex of all, Ann thought. Morning sex she’d had enough of in her time: usually it meant, ‘Sorry about last night but here it is anyway’; and sometimes it meant, ‘This’ll make sure you don’t forget me today’; but neither attitude charmed her. Evening sex was, well, your basic sex, wasn’t it? It was the sex which could vary from enveloping happiness via sleepily given consent to an edgy, ‘Look, this is what we came to bed early for, so why don’t we just get on with it.’ Evening sex was as good or as indifferent, and certainly as unpredictable, as sex could be. But afternoon sex—that was never just a courteous way to round things off; it was keen, intended sex. And sometimes it whispered to you, in a curious way (and even though you were married), ‘This is what we’re doing now, and I still want to spend the evening with you afterwards.’ Afternoon sex gave you unexpected comforts like that.

  Once Ann had tried for it since they got back from France. But when she got home, Graham wasn’t there, even though he’d said he’d be in all day. She felt parched and disappointed, and walked round petulantly checking the rooms. She made herself a cup of coffee. As she sipped it, she freewheeled slowly down to disappointment and beyond. They couldn’t make love; he’d just buggered off; whereas if he had any instinct, any nous … She grumbled to herself at men’s structural inability to catch moods, to seize the day. Then she paused: perhaps he had gone out intending to come back in time. What if something had happened? How long does it take you to find out? Who rings you? Within fifteen seconds she had arrived at the predictive pleasure of widowhood. Go on, then, die, don’t come back, see if I care. In quick succession she saw a bus stalled across the road, a pair of crushed spectacles, an ambulance man’s shroud.

  Then she remembered Margie, a schoolfriend who’d fallen, in her mid-twenties, for a married man. He’d left his family, set up house with her, moved in all his things, and got a divorce. They talked about having children. Two months later he was dead of a perfectly normal, extremely rare blood disease. Years afterwards Margie had confessed to Ann her feelings. ‘I loved him very much. I planned to spend the rest of my life with him. I’d messed up his family so even if I hadn’t wanted to see it through I would have. Then he got thin and white and drained away from me, and I watched him die. And the day after he died, I found something inside me saying, “You’re free.” Over and over again, “You’re free.” Even though I didn’t want to be.’

  Ann hadn’t understood, not until this moment. She wanted Graham home now, safe; she also wanted him under a bus, stretched and burned across a tube line, impaled on the driving shaft of the car. The two wishes coexisted; they didn’t even begin to war.

  By the time Graham got home, at about seven, her feelings had subsided. He claimed he’d suddenly remembered something he wanted to look up in the library. She didn’t think about whether or not she believed him, never asked any more if he’d seen any good films lately. He didn’t seem to think there was anything to apologize for. He was a little subdued, and went off to take a bath.

  Graham was more or less telling the truth. In the morning, after Ann had left, he’d finished the paper and done the washing up. Then he wandered round the house like a burglar, finding each room a surprise. He had ended up, as always, in his study. He could start that new biography of Balfour, which he’d even gone as far as buying. He quite wanted to, because nowadays biographies, or so it seemed to him, were more and more about sex. Historians, lethargic buggers at the best of times, had finally arrived at a filtered awareness of Freud. Suddenly, it all boiled down to sex. Did Balfour deliver the goods? Was Hitler monorchid? Was Stalin a Great Terror in bed? As a research method, it had as much chance, Graham judged, of turning up the truth as did wading through boxes of state papers.

  He quite wanted to learn about Balfour’s frigidity; and in a sense he needed to, as a few of his more assiduous students might be speed-reading the book at this very moment. But in a larger sense he didn’t. After all, he wasn’t going to switch his approach to the study of history from intuitive-pragmatic (as he currently thought of it) to psycho-sexual; it would stir up the department too much for a start. And besides, even if every single student next term had read this biography (which seemed to get fatter and fatter in his mind the longer he left it unread), he, Graham, would still know far more about everything than all of them put together. Most of them didn’t know much when they started, got bored early on, read just enough to get by, borrowed each other’s notes for the exams, and were happy to get any sort of degree. You only had to toss the name of an authority at them for them all to look scared. Is it long, their expressions asked, and, Can I get by without it? Graham tended to throw in a number of discouraging names during the first few weeks; but mainly he relied on a system of boring them. Pas trop d’enthousiasme. Don’t over-excite them, he’d say to himself as he faced his first-year classes; you never know what you might be letting yourself in for.

  So instead of Balfour he fished in the 1915–19 drawer of his filing cabinet. There was one girl in the new magazine he was really looking forward to wanking with. Most of the girls in most of the magazines, of course, were good for a heavy flirtation, even—if your fingers misled you at a vital juncture—for a consummation. But somehow every magazine always yielded up a favourite, someone to come back to, someone to think of with fondness, to half look out for in the street.

  ‘Brandy’ was his current favourite; a soft-faced, almost bookish girl. Indeed, in one shot she was pictured reading a hardback; probably something from a book club, he thought disapprovingly, but even so, better than nothing. And the contrast between this gentle face and the vigorous, almost aggressive way she turned out her trouser pocket struck Graham with piercing force, time after time. ‘Brandy makes you randy’ announced the corny letterpress; but it was quite true.

  In the bathroom, Graham re-read the whole magazine except for the pages devoted to Brandy (why wasn’t she the centre-fold, he demanded angrily: much better than whatser-name in that Tom Jones sequence, all embroidered cami-knickers and soft focus for Christ’s sake). Whereas Brandy, revealed in fearsome detail towards the back of the magazine … Just a couple more pages of readers’ letters and the massage parlour ads, and you can turn to her, he promised himself. Okay, right, now. His left hand found Brandy while his right hand became more serious. Check again how many pages there are of her, yes eight, that’s three double spreads and one at the start and one at the end, best double spread on pages six and seven, okay, start at the end, Christ yes, she is, isn’t she, then back to the beginning, and one, yes, then over and mmmmm, then yes that shot, and now, over, and time to look at each of the three pictures slowly, lovingly, before that one, that one. Perfect.

  After lunch he settled down in front of the television and tuned in to I.T.V.; he switched on the V.C.R., pressed the Record button, and then immediately the Pause. That way he wouldn’t los
e two or three vital seconds. He sat there for over an hour watching genre serials before seeing what he wanted and flipping up the Pause. Fifteen seconds later he pressed the Stop button. Then he replayed the whole tape. It didn’t bother him at first; but later he began to brood. Maybe he should drive up to Colindale; that might keep sadness at bay. It was strange how violent sadness could be. It was strange, too, how it was possible to be both entirely happy and entirely sad. Perhaps you were compelled to be this sad if you had been this happy. Perhaps the two were linked, like the weathermen on a cuckoo clock. Cuckoo, he thought, cuckoo. Which one of you is coming out next?

  Jack had an insincere way of smiling as well as a sincere one. This was a discovery it took Sue some years to make; but the distinction, once spotted, was an unfailing indicator of behaviour. The insincere smile involved showing rather more of the upper teeth, and was held for slightly longer than necessary; there were doubdess other subtleties, but these were lost beneath the beard.

  Most weekends Jack had been voluble about the Hendricks, and keen to speculate even if there had been no new developments. Sue looked forward to the latest episode in their friends’ soap opera. She wasn’t fond enough of them to be apprehensive. But this Friday her enquiry received the grunted reply,

  ‘No couch work this week.’

  ‘What do you think they’re up to?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Come on. Guess.’ He obviously needed coaxing; perhaps she’d come back to it tomorrow. But she realized she wouldn’t when he looked across at her, showed more of his teeth than normal, and answered,

  ‘I think the subject’s run out of steam, my dovey.’

  Every time she saw that smile Sue felt she knew what it must be like to hate Jack. Not that she did—and besides, Jack always worked hard at making himself liked—but whenever he smiled like that she thought to herself, ‘Yes, of course; and what’s more, it would feel like that all the time.’ Because the first such smile had accompanied her first discovery that Jack had been unfaithful to her. It marked the end of what she termed her Tully River Blacks phase.

  At the time it happened Sue had recently read an article about the Tully River Blacks, a small tribe of Australian aboriginals, reputedly the only people in the world who had not yet grasped the link between sex and conception. They thought sex was something you did for fun, like daubing yourself with mud or whatever, and that conception was a gift from heaven which arrived mysteriously—though it might be affected by the way you threw the bones or gutted the wallaby. It was surprising, really, that there weren’t more tribes around like this.

  There was another theory about the Tully River Blacks, of course. This was that they knew very well which cause had which effect, and were seeing how long they could bamboozle the teams of patronizing anthropologists who got so excited about their wry fable. They’d only invented it in the first place because they were fed up with being asked about the Great Hunter in the sky; and anyway, like most people, they preferred to talk about fucking than about God. But their lie had a marvellous effect, and had kept the tribe in chocolate and transistor radios ever since.

  Sue guessed which of the two interpretations Jack would favour; but then men were more cynical than women. Women believed until there was overwhelming evidence not to. Which was what her Tully River Blacks phase was all about. It had ended ten months after they were married, though the dossier available to her by then ought to have proved more than sufficient. Over a period of five weeks there had been the Lost Shirt, the Sudden Interest in Buying Toothpaste, the Cancelled Last Train from Manchester, and the Playful Scuffle over her not being allowed to read one of Jack’s ‘fan’ letters. But none of it meant anything until Jack showed her his upper teeth and held on to that smile for a second too long; whereupon all the bits cascaded into place and she knew he’d been fucking someone else. Her only mild, distant consolation was that the Tully River Blacks, if they were naive, would probably feel a whole lot sicker than she did when the anthropologists finally decided to fill them in on The Connection.

  She taught herself early on not to pursue the false smile. Never ask. It hurt less, and then you forgot until the next time. So she didn’t bother to follow up Jack’s last dissuasive remark about the Hendricks; to ask, for instance, whether his couch had been used for more practical therapeutic purposes.

  The answer would have been No, though its circumstances probably wouldn’t have comforted her. Jack had made a bit of a pass at Ann that week. Well, she kept turning up, didn’t she, and often on what seemed to him little enough pretext. He knew their affair had been officially shredded. But as against that, she did keep turning up, and what with Graham wanking away like a cotton mill … It wasn’t really his fault, he thought; it was just the nature of the beast. If I wasn’t unfaithful, he quoted, I wouldn’t be true to myself.

  So he had tried. Well, sometimes it was the only courteous thing to do, wasn’t it? And Ann was an old friend: she wouldn’t take it the wrong way. What’s more, he hadn’t exactly frightened the horses. Just got hold of her as she was leaving, kissed her more accurately than mere friendship demanded, drawn her away from the front door and gently led her to the foot of the stairs. And the funny thing was, she’d allowed herself to be led that far. She’d walked half a dozen yards or so with his arm round her before breaking away in a silent flurry and heading for the door. She hadn’t yelped, or hit him, or even seemed hugely surprised. So really, he was thinking, as he looked across at Sue and gave her a winning smile, he’d been a perfectly faithful husband. What grounds had anyone for complaint?

  Graham’s holiday photos didn’t come out, which only half-surprised him. Occasionally, when he had wound on, he’d felt the ridged knob transfer to his thumb suspicions of the camera’s inner turbulence; but as long as the knob still turned, he hoped for the best. The processors printed the first eight shots—Ann sitting on a farmhouse with a goat tethered to her leg; the other half of the farmhouse wittily nestling in the ramparts at Carcassonne—but then gave up.

  Despite Ann’s suggestions that they were all funny, and some of them even quite arty, Graham just grunted and threw them away. He also threw away the negatives. Later, he regretted this. He found it surprisingly hard to remember the holiday, even after five weeks. He remembered that he had been happy on it; but without the visual corroboration of where he had been happy, the memory of that emotion seemed valueless. Even a blurry double image would have been something.

  Why should this happen: this, on top of Ann’s films and his magazines? Up in his brain, had a set of points suddenly been switched to make him visually responsive? But could that happen after forty-odd years—forty-odd years of being a words man? At some stage, obviously, the whole soft box just began to wear out; bits fell off it; muscles—if they had such things there—got tired and stopped functioning properly. He could ask his friend Bailey, the gerontologist, about that. But at fortyish? What could account for such a shift in perceptions? You thought about your brain, when you did, as something you used—put things into and got out answers. Now, suddenly, you felt as if it were using you: sitting up there with a life of its own, and giving the rudder a tweak just at the point when you thought everything was going sweetly. What if your brain became your enemy?

  NINE

  Sometimes a Cigar …

  It was Ann who suggested they gave a party. For one thing, it might make the place feel less like a police station; and it would, however briefly, break the depressing routine of their evenings. At the moment, after a dinnertime of proxy complaints and defiant drinking, Graham would retreat silently to his study; Ann would sit reading, watching television, but mainly waiting for Graham to come downstairs. She felt as if she were sitting in a moulded plastic chair in front of a metal desk, breathing an atmosphere of stale cigarettes and waiting for the two of them to come through the door: the gentle one who only wanted to help you, and the anarchically brutal one who could freeze you by merely flicking your shoulder blade.
r />   After an hour or so Graham would come downstairs and go into the kitchen. She would hear the clatter of ice into a glass; or, sometimes, two glasses. If it was two glasses, he’d be in a benign mood: that’s to say, benignly depressed. He’d hand her a drink and murmur:

  ‘Between the study and the bed

  Liquor stands me in good stead.’

  Then he’d sit down beside her and either join in a bad television programme, or maunder on about how he loved her, or both. She hated being told like this that she was loved; it sounded like one extra thing to feel guilty about.

  More frequently, though, it was the other one who came downstairs: the one with a single drink in his hand. He knew precisely what your crime was, and didn’t wait to hear it from you, but went ahead and read the charges as if they were verdicts. And when Graham was in this mood—which was about two nights out of three—he would rail at her, repeating strings of names and recounting his horrible dreams: dreams of adultery, mutilation and revenge. At times she wondered if they had really happened, if they weren’t just inventions made up to appal her.

  And always, even on the most brutal evenings, he would crack: after an hour, an hour and a half, when she’d fetched herself a drink to keep going, when he’d fetched himself several more, when he’d interrogated her about the most improbable liaisons, he’d suddenly fall silent, and then begin to weep. His head would droop, and the tears which invaded his eyes would fill up his lenses, then suddenly burst out, down both sides of his nose as well as his cheeks. He cried in four streams instead of the usual two, and it looked twice as sad. Afterwards, Graham would tell her that all his incomprehensible anger was directed, not at her, but at himself; that he had nothing to reproach her for, and that he loved her.

  Ann knew he was telling the truth, and also knew she would never abandon him. Leaving him wouldn’t solve anything. Besides, they both believed he was quite sane. Jack’s casual suggestion to Ann that a shrink might help was scarcely discussed. You had to be either more arrogant or more insecure to do that, she thought. You had to be less ordinary, less English. This was just one of those hiccups all marriages go through. A severe hiccup, it was true—more like whooping-cough—but both Graham and Ann believed that he would come through in the end. Still, it was a lonely process; even Jack had seemed less keen on giving up his time lately—especially after she had turned away from the foot of his stairs.