Before She Met Me (3 page)

‘Alice, go to your room while your mother and I sort this out.’

‘Why should she? Why shouldn’t she hear about where your
musts
come from? Is that where you’ve been all night—out gathering
musts
? Come back with a nice set of orders for us, have you? Come on, tell me what my
musts for
the day are.’

Oh God, out of hand already.

‘Is there something wrong with you, Alice?’ he asked quietly. His daughter put her head down.

‘No, Daddy.’

‘She’s had a nosebleed. I’m not sending a child to school with a nosebleed. Not at her age.’

There she went again. ‘At her age’—what did that mean? Were there ages at which you could send daughters with nosebleeds to school? Or was Barbara merely pretending to draw on that Swiss bank account of ‘feminine’ reasons for doing or not doing things? Was it all related to that private mother-daughter domain from which Graham had been ritually excluded a couple of years earlier? Was ‘nose-bleed’ a euphemism?

‘It’s all right now.’ Alice had lifted her face until her nostrils were pointing up towards her father. Even so, their insides were still in shadow; he didn’t know whether he ought to bend down and examine them. He didn’t know what to do.

‘Alice, that’s a disgusting habit,’ Barbara announced, and roughly tapped her daughter’s head down again. ‘Go to your room and lie down, and if you feel better in an hour I’ll let you go to school with a note.’

Graham realized his ineptness at this sort of squabbling. In one move, Barbara had reasserted her authority over their daughter, ensured that she would remain in the house as a distant witness to her delinquent father’s trial, and established herself as Alice’s future liberator, thus securing the continued alliance against Graham. How did she do it?

‘Well,’ Barbara stated rather than asked, before (though only just before) Alice closed the kitchen door. Graham didn’t reply; he was listening for Alice’s footsteps on the stairs. But all he heard was,

‘WEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLL.’

‘ … ’

The only technique Graham had taught himself in fifteen years was to allow the first few dozen accusations to declare themselves before he joined in.

‘Graham, what do you mean by staying out all night and not letting me know and coming home at this hour and trying to run my house for me?’

That was four to start with. Graham already felt he was beginning to detach himself from the house, from Barbara, even from Alice. And if Barbara needed to play complicated games to secure Alice’s sympathy, then clearly she needed the girl more than he did.

‘I’m having an affair. I’m leaving you.’

Barbara looked at him as if she didn’t recognize him. He had stopped being even the newsreader; he had become almost a burglar. She didn’t say a word. He felt it was his turn to speak, but there wasn’t much to add.

‘I’m having an affair. I don’t love you any more. I’m leaving you.’

‘You’re not. I’ll see to it. If you try, I’ll get on to … to the university authorities.’

Of course, she would think that. She would think that the only person he could possibly be having an affair with was a student. That was how limited she thought he was. This realization gave him more confidence.

‘It’s not a student. I’m leaving you.’

Barbara screamed, very loudly, and Graham didn’t believe her. When she stopped, he merely said,

‘I think you’ve probably got Alice on your side anyway, without all that.’

Barbara screamed again, just as loud, and for just as long. Graham felt unmoved, almost cocky. He wanted to leave; he was going to leave; he was going to love Ann. No, he did love Ann already. He was going to go on loving Ann.

‘Careful—it might get counterproductive. I’m going to work now.’

That day he taught three classes on Baldwin without feeling any tedium at either his own repetitions or his students’ well-meant banalities. He phoned Ann to tell her to expect him that evening. At lunchtime he bought a large suitcase, a fresh tube of toothpaste, some dental floss, and a flannel as furry as a bearskin rug. He felt as if he were going on holiday. Yes, it would be a holiday, a long, unending holiday
—what’s more, with holidays within the holiday. The thought made him feel silly. He went back to the chemist’s and bought a roll of film.

He got home at five o’clock and went straight upstairs without looking for his wife or daughter. From the telephone extension by the bed he made a call to the local taxi service. As he was putting down the phone, Barbara walked into the bedroom. He didn’t speak to her, but merely opened his new suitcase flat on the bed. They both looked inside it; the Kodak film carton glared back at them, raucously orange.

‘You’re not taking the car.’

‘I’m not taking the car.’

‘You’re not taking anything.’

‘I’m not taking anything.’

‘You take everything,
everything
, do you hear?’ Graham carried on filling the suitcase with clothes.

‘I want the front door keys.’

‘You can have them.’

‘I’m changing the locks.’ (Then why ask for the keys, Graham wondered half-heartedly.)

Barbara went away. Graham finished packing his clothes, his razor, a photograph of his parents, one of his daughter, then started to close the case. It was only half-full. All that he wanted was less than a caseload. He felt exhilarated at the discovery, lightened by it. He had once read a biography of Aldous Huxley, and remembered being puzzled by the writer’s behaviour when his house in Hollywood was burnt down. Huxley had meekly watched it happen: his manuscripts, his notebooks, his entire library were destroyed without interference from their owner. There was lots of time, but all he chose to save were three suits and a violin. Graham now felt he understood. Three suits and a violin. He looked down at his case and was slightly ashamed of its size.

As he picked it up he heard the clothes fall softly towards the hinges; they would be crumpled by the time he arrived.
He put the case in the hall and went into the kitchen; Barbara was sitting at the table. He placed in front of her his car keys and his house keys. In reply she pushed towards him a large plastic laundry bag.

‘Don’t imagine I’m doing
this
for you.’

He nodded and picked up the bag.

‘I’d better say goodbye to Alice.’

‘She’s staying with a friend. She’s staying the night. I said she could.
Like you did
,’ Barbara added, though it sounded weary rather than venomous.

‘Which friend?’

Barbara didn’t reply. Graham nodded again and left. With his case in his right hand and his washing in his left, he walked down the front path, along Wayton Drive, and turned into Highfield Grove. That was where he’d asked the taxi to wait. He didn’t want to embarrass Barbara (maybe he even thought to gain a squirt of sympathy by leaving on foot); but he was damned if he was going to arrive at Ann’s, arrive for Part Two of his life, by public transport.

The taxi-driver inspected Graham and his luggage without comment. Graham thought it must look like some botched midnight flit, which had either gone off too soon or fallen pathetically behind schedule. But he felt confident enough not to explain, and hummed to himself in the back of the taxi. After a mile or so he spotted on the verge a slatted wooden rubbish bin, told the driver to stop, and dumped his laundry. You didn’t arrive for the honey time with a bag of dirty washing.

And so the unending holiday began. Graham and Ann spent six months in her flat before finding a small terraced house with a garden in Clapham. Barbara proved yet again her capacity to wrong-foot Graham by insisting on a divorce at once. None of that blame-free two-year-separation stuff either: she wanted a proper, old-fashioned fault divorce. In the face of her demands Graham remained as passive as Huxley. He would continue to pay the mortgage; he would
pay an allowance for Alice; Barbara could keep the car and the entire contents of the house. She would accept no money specifically for her own support; she would only accept it indirectly. She intended taking a job. Graham, and later the court, found these proposals fair.

The decree nisi came through in the late summer of 1978; Graham was granted weekly access to Alice. Shortly afterwards, he and Ann were married. They spent their honeymoon on Naxos, in a small whitewashed house owned by one of Graham’s colleagues. They did everything normal to those in their position—made love frequently, drank quantities of Samian wine, gazed longer than necessary at the octopuses drying on the harbour wall—yet Graham felt curiously unmarried. He felt happy, but he didn’t feel married.

After a fortnight they took a boat full of livestock and widows back to Piraeus, then another full of pensioners and academics up the Adriatic coast to Venice; five days later they flew home. As the plane crossed the Alps, Graham held the hand of his neat, kind, unimprovable wife, and repeated softly to himself that he was a happy man. This had been the holiday within the holiday; now the outer holiday would resume. There seemed no reason for any of it ever to end.

And as the next two years unfolded, Graham duly began to feel married. Perhaps subconsciously he’d been expecting it to be the same as the first time round. Marrying Barbara had involved an urgent if sometimes unco-ordinated erotic spree, a hurtling thrill at the novelty of love, and a distant sense of duty fulfilled towards parents and society. This time, the emphases were different: he and Ann had already been sleeping together for over a year; love the second time round made him wary rather than drunk; and certain friends were grumpy and distant with him over his abandonment of Barbara. Others expressed caution: once bitten, twice bitten, they warned.

What happened to make Graham feel married was that
nothing happened: nothing to stir fear or distrust at his condition, at life’s treatment of him. And so, gradually, his feelings billowed out like a parachute, and after that alarming initial descent, everything suddenly slowed down, and he hung there, the sun on his face, the ground scarcely moving towards him. He felt, not so much that Ann represented his last chance, but that she had always represented his first and only chance. This is what they meant, he thought; now I see.

As his easiness in the face of love grew, his fascination with it—and with Ann—intensified. Things felt, paradoxically, both more solid and more precarious. Whenever Ann was away on business, he found that he missed her not sexually, but morally. When she wasn’t there he shrank, he bored himself, he became stupider and a little frightened; he felt unworthy of her, and a suitable husband only for Barbara. And when Ann returned, he found himself watching her, studying her far more closely than he had done when they had first met. Sometimes this meticulous passion became desperate and driven. He envied the things she touched. He was contemptuous of the years he had spent without her. He felt frustrated at not being allowed to
be
her, not even for a day. Instead, he conducted interior duologues, one part of him acting Ann while another part acted himself. He confirmed from these conversations that they really did get on extraordinarily well. He didn’t tell Ann about this habit—didn’t want to burden her with too many specifics of his love, in case … well, in case the details embarrassed her; in case he seemed to be asking for reciprocation.

He often imagined himself explaining his life to passers-by—to anyone, really, who was interested enough to ask. No one ever did ask, but that was probably more out of politeness than lack of interest. Even so, Graham had his answers ready just in case, and he would recite them to himself every so often, telling his whispered rosary of surprised joy. Ann
had made the spectrum wider for him, had restored to him those lost colours everyone had the right to see. How long had he been managing on green and blue and indigo? Now he saw more, and he felt safe; existentially safe. One thought recurred like a bass figure in his new life, and brought him strange comfort. At least now, he would say to himself, now that I’ve got Ann, at least now I’ll be properly mourned.

He ought, of course, to have suspected something earlier. After all, Barbara knew that he hated the cinema. He hated it; she hated it: this had been one of their first courting bonds, twenty years ago. They had politely sat through
Spartacus
, occasionally rubbing elbows in a fashion denoting awkwardness rather than desire, and had afterwards separately confessed that not only hadn’t they enjoyed the film, but they hadn’t much valued the underlying concept either. Not going to the cinema had been one of their first observable characteristics as a couple.

And now, according to Barbara, their daughter wanted him to take her to a film. He suddenly realized that he hadn’t the slightest idea whether or not Alice had ever seen one before. She must have done, of course—unless her genetic inheritance in the area of aesthetics was abnormally domineering. But he didn’t actually know. This made him sad. Three years away and you didn’t know the simplest things. And then it made him sadder. Three years away and you didn’t even ask yourself whether or not you knew.

But why did Alice want to go with him—and why to a re-run of a five-year-old British-made comedy flop at the Holloway Odeon?

‘Apparently there’s a scene in it which was filmed at her school,’ came Barbara’s offhand reply down the phone; his daughter’s request, as usual, was not being communicated to him directly. ‘All her friends are going.’

‘Can’t she go with them?’

‘I think she’s still a bit frightened of cinemas. I think she’d be happier with a grown-up.’ Not with you as you; just with you as a grown-up.

Graham agreed; he usually did nowadays.

When he got to the Odeon with Alice the wisdom of his two decades’ abstention was confirmed. The foyer smelt of softly frying onions, which patrons were encouraged to smear on hot dogs to ward off the chill of a warm July afternoon. Their tickets, he noted, cost as much as a shoulder of lamb. Inside, despite the scarcity of customers, the auditorium was murky with cigarette smoke. No doubt because the few who were there kept on lighting two cigarettes for themselves at the same time, in craven imitation of whatever that American film was that Graham had resolutely not seen.