Before She Met Me (21 page)

‘Well, you know what Balzac used to say—“There goes another novel.” ’ Graham felt uneasy, not sure whether this remark was reassuring or the opposite.

‘And then I have another look at the books, and I think about Jack screwing around all these years, and I think, I don’t really mind
that
much, not after the first hurt of it, and after all I’ve had some fun myself, but what I really resent when I look at his ten novels lined up on the shelf, what I really can’t forgive him for, is that they aren’t bloody better than they are. I sometimes feel like saying to him, “Look, Jack, you can forget the books, just forget them. They aren’t that good. Give them up and concentrate on the screwing. You’re better at that.” ’

Graham thought of the torn-out sections of
Rage, Rage, The Domed Fire
and
Out of the Dark
. Then he began what he had very carefully prepared.

‘Sue, I hope you won’t misunderstand me. I thought it would be nice to … to …’ he stumbled a bit, deliberately, ‘to have lunch with you, to see you, because we’ve been out of touch for a while, and I’ve always thought we, I, don’t see enough of you. I don’t want you to think I’ve got some motive of neatness, or revenge or anything.’ She looked puzzled, and he hurried on. ‘I mean, we all knew about Jack and Ann in the old days, and that’s not at all surprising, and anyway, if they hadn’t been, um, lovers then I might not have met her, so I suppose in a way I’m even sort of a bit grateful.’ Graham felt his show of timid honesty was going quite well; now came the tricky part.

‘But I
did
get a shock, I have to admit it, when I found out they’d never really stopped having an affair. It gave me quite a stab. I only discovered about six months ago. Apart from anything to do with Ann, I felt a sense of friendship betrayed, and all those emotions people tell us are old-fashioned. I was quite bitter about Jack for a while, but I suppose in a way it’s helped me understand Ann’s … needs a bit more. I suppose if I’d rung you then you’d have had reason to doubt my purpose. But, well, that hiccup is over, and I’m quite resigned to it, and then when I found myself thinking how nice it would be to see you again, I examined my motives and once I could give them a clean bill of health I got on the phone. And … and here we are now, I suppose you could say.’

Graham looked down at his empty coffee cup. He was pleased with the cautious, limp ending. Pushing two separate lines at the same time was a good idea. Just when he was wondering if he dared look up, Sue leaned across and placed a hand on his forearm. He raised his head and met a bright smile.

‘I suppose you could.’ She liked his shyness. She smiled,
encouragingly, once more, and all the time she was thinking, The bastard, the bastard, the fucking Stanley Spencer Jack Lupton bastard. Why hadn’t she guessed? Jack never really gave up his old girlfriends. Maybe he thought they’d stop buying his books if he stopped fucking them. But she clamped down on these feelings. Mustn’t let Graham see that she was upset, that she hadn’t known, that it would need a hell of a lot more than a few fake smiles on a Friday night to pacify her this time. Don’t spoil your chances, girl, don’t splash the water; this one will have to be reeled in gently.

‘Maybe I should have told you,’ she went on, ‘but I’m afraid I always work on the cancer rule. If they don’t ask, you don’t tell them; and if they do ask but really want to be told No, then you still say No. I’m sorry you had to find out from a third party, Graham.’

He smiled wanly, thinking of his deception. She smiled sympathetically, thinking of hers. Sue thought that revenge-fucking Graham might prove quite salutary.

‘I hope you won’t think me old-fashioned,’ he said, continuing his act, ‘but I’ve actually got to take a class in about an hour. Can we, can we meet again next week perhaps?’

Sue found his lack of presumption charming. None of those terrible lines chaps sometimes used, like ‘Keep the afternoon free’ and ‘I’m a bachelor at the moment’. She leaned across and kissed him on the lips. He looked surprised.

‘
That’s
the advantage of the adulterers’ table,’ she said cheerfully. She was pleased he hadn’t tried to grope her or anything during lunch. She hoped this passiveness didn’t go too far. Still, it made a nice change. Jack, for instance, by this stage would be under the table, his beard bringing a rash like razor-burn to some gullible tart’s inner thighs. Would Graham take his glasses off in bed?

They kissed goodbye outside the restaurant, Sue already with her mind on the same time, same place, the next week, and whatever might follow. Graham was also looking ahead, but in quite a different direction.

It was only offal, Graham found himself repeating under his breath as he drove to Repton Gardens. It was all offal. Well, not quite all, but it was the offal that came out on top. He’d spent forty years fighting it, and could now perceive the irony of his life: that the years when he’d thought of himself as a failure—when the whole mechanism seemed to be quietly and painlessly running down—were in fact the time of success.

It was clever stuff, offal, he reflected as he passed the Staunton Road carwash for the hundredth time since it all began. Clever stuff. And of course he hadn’t been a pushover: that’s why he had lasted forty years in the first place. It got to other people much more quickly. But it got to everyone in the end. With him it had taken the long, slow, circuitous route, and finally chosen someone quite unexpected as its instrument. Ann, who loved him; whom he loved.

It hadn’t changed much since the Middle Ages, since Montaillou, since the time they believed literally in offal: in blood, liver, bile, and so on. What was the latest theory which Jack—Jack of all people—had explained to him? That there were two or three different layers of the brain constantly at war with one another. This was only a different way of saying that your guts fucked you up, wasn’t it? All it meant was that the battle-plan and the metaphor had shifted about two feet six up your body.

And the battle was always lost, that was what Graham had been taught to recognize. The offal came out on top. You could delay it for a while, by desiccating your life as much as possible; though this only made you more of a prize later. The real division in the world wasn’t between those who had lost the battle and those who hadn’t yet fought it; but between those who, when they lost the battle, could accept defeat, and those who couldn’t. Maybe there was some little broom-cupboard of the brain where
that
was decided too, he reflected with glum irritation. But people did divide that way. Jack, for instance, accepted his defeat, didn’t seem to notice really, even turned it to his advantage. Whereas Graham couldn’t accept it now, and knew he would never be able to. Which was also ironic, because Jack was altogether a more pugnacious and truculent character; Graham saw himself as something very close to the mild, amiable, slightly put-upon figure that others perceived.

‘Ah, mmm, telephone,’ Jack muttered, answering the door after some considerable time. Then he hurried off down the hall.

‘No, my little coronary,’ Graham could hear as he took off his mac and hung it on the peg. ‘No, look, not now, I’ll ring you back …’ Graham patted his jacket pockets ‘… don’t know. Not too long … arriveheari.’

Graham reflected that even a few days ago he might have been interested in whoever Jack was talking to; might it be Ann? Now, it simply didn’t matter. There could have been a trail of familiar underclothes smirking at him from the stairs and still Graham wouldn’t have been bothered.

Jack seemed a bit flustered. ‘Just a little birdie whispering in my ear,’ he said jovially by way of explanation. ‘Come in, corky.’ He grinned uneasily. Turning into the sitting-room, he farted, for once without commentary.

‘Coffee?’ Graham nodded.

It had only been a few months since he’d been sitting in the same chair, tremulously offering to Jack his fretful
ignorances. Now he sat, listening to Jack tinkling at the coffee mugs with a spoon, and felt he knew it all. Not knew it all in the straightforward factual sense—about Jack and Ann, for instance—but knew it all in the wider sense. In the old stories, people grew up, struggled, had misfortunes, and eventually came to ripeness, to a sense of being at ease with the world. Graham, after forty years of not struggling very much, felt he had come to ripeness in a few months, and irrevocably grasped that terminal unease was the natural condition. This sudden wisdom had disconcerted him at first; now he felt calm about it. As he pushed his hand into his jacket pocket, he admitted that he might be misunderstood; he might be thought of as merely jealous, merely crackers. Well, that was up to them.

And the advantage of probably being misunderstood in any case, he said to himself as Jack handed him a mug, was that you didn’t have to explain. You really didn’t. One of the more contemptible features of the flicks he’d been going to see in recent months was the smug convention under which characters were called upon to explain their motives. ‘I killed you because I loved you too much,’ blubbed the lumberjack with the dripping chainsaw. ‘I felt this great like ocean of hate man welling up inside of me, and I had to ex
-plode,’
puzzled the violent but likable black teenage arsonist. ‘I guess I never could get Daddy out of my system, that’s why I fell for you,’ frankly admitted the now dissatisfied bride. Graham had winced at such moments, at the haughty gap between life and dramatic convention. In life you didn’t have to explain if you didn’t want to. Not because there was no audience: there was, and one habitually thirsty for motive at that. It was just that they didn’t have any rights; they hadn’t paid any box-office money to your life.

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.