Before She Met Me (20 page)

He carried the five novels up to his study. He hadn’t skimmed books in the way he was doing now since adolescence. In those days, too, he’d been skimming for sex: after all, fiction was where you went when parents and encyclopaedias failed. A practised eye could make words like ‘brassière’, ‘bosom’ and ‘loins’ stand out from the text as if
printed in bold type. This time, there were no obvious key words to look for.

Thank God he didn’t have to wade through Jack’s first five books. The first three—’my Lincolnshire poacher days’ as Jack would mock-modestly categorize them—were taken up with what the novelist called ‘the task of putting my family on the fictive shelf’. Next came three ‘novels of sexual and political conflict’, the last of which Graham would have to flip through. Finally there were the latest four, where the social, political and sexual ambitions and guilts which animated the first six had died away, where all the characters took on a cynical wash, where it didn’t really matter who did what to whom, and whether things ended well or ill: they were moving towards stylized comedies of manners in high-bohemian settings. Soon, Graham hoped, Jack would turn into a latter-day Firbank, which would not only amount to a neat revenge on the reputedly earthy writer, but also ensure that nobody would ever want to read or publish Lupton ever again. And by that time he would be so pickled in his own manner that he’d be unable to change.

The last of the politico-sexual novels,
Out of the Dark
, had been published in 1971. In it, Graham remembered, Jack was lightly disguised as a bearded junior minister who, shortly before election time, engages in a liaison with Sarah, an attractive lobby correspondent; his ten-year marriage to a competent home-maker has begun to stale. Soon, the wife finds out and starts blackmailing the Jack-figure: either give up the girl, or I’ll expose you to the papers and make sure you lose both your marginal seat and custody of the children. ‘Jack’ prepares to defy convention and put his case before the electorate and the divorce courts, when Sarah selflessly argues the case for the Party (even though, ironically, it is not
her
party) and the children (another irony, since she is pregnant by ‘Jack’ but hasn’t told him, and intends having a secret abortion). ‘Jack’ is finally persuaded that there are times when principles must hold sway over the call of the
heart; when Sarah heroically leaks to him the social security cuts her party plans for after the election, he reflects on the plight of working families and their need for his presence in the next parliament, and finally accepts the correctness of her decision. Before they part, however, they make love one last time:

Pages 367 and 368: Graham ripped them out. The clues were unmissable: the tear in the eye—that had happened a few times; the lifting of the bottom—yes; the clincher, though, was the mole—even if he had moved it from her right shoulder to the left side of her neck (this would be what Jack called imagination). And even if the mole wasn’t a clincher, there was the cigarette. Ann often put cigarettes into her mouth the wrong way round. Graham hadn’t ever noticed her doing it after they made love, but she’d done it several times when socially flustered. Hadn’t Jack been there on one such occasion? And hadn’t there been some shared joke he didn’t understand? He couldn’t quite remember.

He flipped through
Out of the Dark
for a hundred pages or so on either side of the passage he’d just discovered, and tore out all the other references to Ann’s affair with Jack. He could read them through later. Then he turned his attention to the last four Lupton novels. Novellas, really: the start of the neo-Firbank period, Graham repeated gleefully to himself. Jack’s explanation was different.

‘Used to belong to the Tesco school of fiction,’ he had once explained. ‘You know: pile it high, sell it cheap. Thought that if people had a choice between some 200-page
bit of smart wankery at four quid, or 400 pages of my gutsy stuff at five quid, they’d see which was the better bargain. And I was right of course; they did prefer my stuff. But after half a dozen bleedings of my life’s blood, I thought, hey, aren’t I screwing myself a bit? It’s twice as long, but do I get twice the royalties? Then I saw all these chick novelists turning out monographs, and I thought, Jack boy, you can do that and leave a hand free for what-you-will at the same time. So I did, and you know, I’m beginning to see the point of all this minimalism. It’s easy on the bum, that’s what.’

In the neo-Firbank period, Jack’s toasts and teases continued. A phrase of Ann’s; a description of her breasts; a mannerism while making love; a dress. The more evidence Graham found, the easier it became to find yet more; and in the exhilaration of his critical pursuit he seemed to forget the precise significance of what he was finding out.

Only later, when he assembled the torn-out evidence—which added up to half the length of a late-period Lupton—did he stop for thought. Then, as he read through the collected evidence of the Jack-Ann affair, as he watched Ann’s body arch up towards Jack, and Jack stick his smelly beard into Ann’s face in the mistaken belief that stale nicotine was an aphrodisiac (it
couldn’t
be, Graham insisted, it couldn’t be), the anaesthetic wore off and the pains returned. He held his stomach with one hand, his chest with the other, and rocked forwards as he sat on the floor by the torn-out pages. Then he began slipping sideways and he keeled over into a foetal position; his hands slipped between his thighs, and he lay on the floor like a sick child. He shut his eyes and tried, as he used to when he was a boy, to think of something different, external, exciting. He thought of a game of village cricket, until the spectators turned into a football crowd chanting ‘Carwash, carwash’. He thought of abroad, until Benny drove by in his silver Porsche on the way to Arezzo, and casually flung a pair of knickers out of the window. He thought of giving a class on Bonar Law, until all his students
put their hands up at the same time and demanded to go into the film industry. Finally, he thought of his childhood, back before Ann and Jack and Barbara, back to the time when there had only been his parents to pacify; the years before betrayal existed, when there was only tyranny and subservience. He worked hard at holding in place the memory of that circumscribed time; gradually he retreated into it and pulled its certainties up around his ears; and then he fell asleep.

Over the next few days Graham read and re-read the passages from
Out of the Dark
and the later works. There could be no doubt at all. Jack’s affair with Ann had started in 1971, had continued during the time he was first getting to know Ann, and then through all their marriage.
Hot Certainties, The Doused Fire
and
Rage, Rage
contained the necessary evidence. If he allowed six months—a year at maximum—for the publishers to produce the book, this meant that the passages in
The Doused Fire
where ‘Jack’, lightly disguised as an exbomber pilot whose face has been refashioned by plastic surgery, has a healing relationship with ‘Ann’, a Scottish nurse with a mole in the right place for once, were written during the first year of their marriage. The infidelity didn’t even lapse then, Graham thought; not even then.

A week or so later, Graham telephoned Sue in the country, having first prepared himself to wrong-number Jack if by any chance he answered.

‘Sue, it’s Graham.’

‘Graham … oh, Graham.’ She sounded relieved at having guessed the right Graham, rather than actually pleased. ‘Jack’s in London.’

‘Yes, I know. I wanted to talk to you.’

‘Go ahead. I’m not all that busy.’ She still didn’t sound welcoming.

‘Could we meet, Sue? In London one day?’

‘Graham … well … what’s it about?’

‘I don’t want to tell you now.’

‘Just as long as it isn’t something you think I ought to know. As long as you don’t think you know what’s good for me.’

‘It’s not like that. It’s sort of, well, about you and me …’ He did sound serious.

‘Graham, I didn’t know you cared. Better late than never, anyway.’ She gave a skittish giggle. ‘Let me look at my diary. Yes, just as I thought. I can offer you any day between now and the end of the decade.’

They fixed on a date a week ahead.

‘Oh and Sue … ’

‘Yes?’

‘Would you think it odd if I said … if I said I hope you don’t tell Jack we’re having lunch together.’

‘He has his own life,’ she replied sharply. ‘I have mine.’

‘Of course.’

Could her implication have been clearer, Graham wondered as he put down the phone. Yes, he supposed it could, but even so … Especially as he’d rung her completely out of the blue. He hadn’t seen her for over a year and, well, after all, he didn’t really like her much, did he? That natural vivacity which friends praised was a bit close, in Graham’s view, to unfocused aggression.

The following week he sat in Tardelli’s over a Campari and soda, at a table tucked away round a corner. He pondered the best way to get the final corroboration he sought. He couldn’t just ask for it, that was certain.

‘Graham, darling, the adulterers’ table—you
were
serious.’

‘ …?’

‘You mean you didn’t know?’ She was still holding her face out towards him. He half-rose, kicking a table leg as he did so, and touched his lips to her cheek. Had they been on kissing terms before? He wasn’t sure.

‘I asked for a quiet table,’ he replied, ‘I said we wanted an undisturbed lunch.’

‘So you didn’t know that this is the official adulterers’ table?’

‘No, really.’

‘How disappointing.’

‘But no one can see you here.’

‘That’s just the point. You’re out of sight, but in order to get to the table or go for a pee or anything, you have to declare yourself to the whole restaurant. It’s famous, darling—maybe not in your circles, but certainly in ours.’

‘You mean people deliberately sit here?’

‘Of course. It’s much pleasanter than putting an announcement in
The Times
. It’s a brilliant form of discreet publicity, I always think. You announce a liaison while pretending to yourself to be hiding it. Eases the guilt, but gets the news around. Ideal solution. I’m surprised more restaurants don’t have tables like this.’

‘Is there likely to be anyone here you know?’ Graham wasn’t sure whether to act pleased or apprehensive.

‘Who can tell? Don’t worry, love, I’ll take care of you when they pop their heads round the corner and pretend to be looking for someone else.’ She patted his arm reassuringly.

After that, Graham decided there was only one way to let the lunch run. He acted the shy flirt, risking an occasional light touch, and gauchely getting caught stealing glances at her. Distantly, genially, he went along with the received opinion that she was a pretty woman; but he didn’t confront the question very seriously.

Since Graham had not, it seemed, come to discuss her husband’s infidelities, that was precisely what Sue talked to him about. Since he had not come to press his cause with a today-or-forget-it urgency, she talked, as an analogue, about her own occasional affairs; about the difficulties of conducting any liaison in the country without being found out; and about her townee’s fears of bucolic revenge, of pitchforks, and balers, and feed silos. For a moment, as the second carafe was emptied and they were waiting for their coffee, Sue’s tone hardened.

‘You know what I call the way Jack goes on? I call it the Stanley Spencer syndrome. Know about that?’

Graham indicated that he didn’t.

‘And the fact that I was Jack’s second wife makes it even more appropriate.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘When Stanley Spencer got married for the second time, do you know what happened on the wedding night?’

‘No.’

‘He sent his new wife ahead on the honeymoon, like an advance crate of luggage, went home, and fucked his first wife.’

‘But … ’

‘No, no, wait for it. Not that. Then he went off to join his second wife and sat her down on the beach and explained to her that an artist had exceptional sexual needs, and that he now proposed to keep two wives. His art required it, and his art came first. Cold-blooded little dwarf,’ she added, as if Spencer were a drinking companion of her husband’s. ‘And that’s what Jack’s got, to a certain extent. He’s smart enough not to put it like that, but deep down it’s what he believes. Sometimes when I’m at home I stand in front of the row of books he’s written and I find myself thinking, I wonder how many fucks went into that one?’