Before She Met Me

  Ann strained a smile through her face and waited.

  ‘So what this may mean is that I’m beginning to forget.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it may.’ But Graham looked excited rather than relieved, she thought.

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘Go on what?’

  ‘Test me.’

  ‘Test you?’

  ‘Yes. See how much I remember. “Have I fucked so-and-so?”, that sort of thing. “Who played the second male lead in what film whom I fucked onscreen but not off?” Go on, it sounds like a good game.’

  ‘Are you drunk?’ Maybe he’d had a few before she got home.

  ‘Not at all. Not in the least.’ He certainly didn’t look it: he looked bright, cheerful, happy.

  ‘Then all I can say is I think it’s the sickest suggestion I’ve ever heard.’

  ‘Oh, come on. Be a sport. Homo ludens, etcetera.’

  ‘You are serious, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m serious about playing games, yes.’

  Ann said quietly, ‘I think you’re mad.’

  Graham didn’t seem at all put out.

  ‘No, I’m not mad. I just find it all very interesting. I mean, I was so surprised today, when I couldn’t remember, that I went off to see The Sleeping Tiger?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What do you mean? It’s Larry Pitter’s last film but one.’

  ‘Why should I be interested in Larry Pitter’s films?’

  ‘Because he didn’t, or as the case may be, did, fuck you; definitely onscreen in The Rumpus, and offscreen, well, that’s what this is all about.’

  ‘You went to see some film with Pitter in it?’ Ann was amazed; appalled. ‘Why?’

  ‘The Sleeping Tiger. To see if it would jog my memory.’

  ‘Ah. On locally, was it?’

  ‘Swiss Cottage.’

  ‘Graham, that’s miles out of anyone’s way. All for some crappy film with Pitter in it. You must be crazy.’

  Graham wasn’t in the least deterred. He looked across at his wife with unequivocal tenderness.

  ‘Wait, wait. The point was, I sat all the way through The Sleeping Tiger and at the end I was still no nearer remembering. I looked at Larry Pitter’s face every time it came on the screen and I simply couldn’t remember whether or not I wanted to kill him. It was very odd.’

  ‘Well, I suppose if it makes you feel better in some way, that’s a start.’

  Graham paused, then said slowly,

  ‘I don’t know about better.’ Ann was getting more and more lost. ‘No, I wouldn’t say better. I’d say different. It’s a new twist, you see. And I’m wondering why, if my brain chose to forget one of them, it should pick on Larry Pitter. What’s Pitter got, or not got, that the others haven’t?’

  ‘Graham, I think this is worrying. I’ve always been able to understand you before. Now I can’t. It used to upset you when we talked about my old boyfriends. It always upsets me. Now it just … it just seems to excite you in some way.’

  ‘Only this Pitter business. It’s as if I hadn’t ever known in the first place. It’s really as if I’m about to discover for the first time whether or not you’ve fucked Larry Pitter.’

  ‘You’re serious. You’re bloody serious, aren’t you?’

  Graham leaned across the dinner table and gently took Ann’s wrist.

  ‘Did you?’ he said quietly, as if a louder voice would disturb the answer. ‘Did you?’

  Ann pulled away her arm. She had never imagined that Graham would provoke in her the disgusted pity she now felt.

  ‘You don’t think I’m going to tell you, do you; now?’ she replied, equally softly.

  ‘Why not? I need to know. I’ve got to know.’ His eyes had the brightness of fever in them.

  ‘No, Graham.’

  ‘Come on, love. You’ve told me before. Just tell me again.’

  ‘No:’

  ‘You’ve told me before.’ The soft voice, the excited eyes, the hand back again on her wrist, only this time more firmly.

  ‘Graham, I’ve told you before and you’ve forgotten so it can’t bother you that much whether I did or didn’t.’

  ‘I need to know.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I need to know?’

  Ann tried a last appeal to reason, and a last attempt to suppress her own anger.

  ‘Look, either I didn’t or I did. If I didn’t then it doesn’t matter; if I did and you’ve forgotten, then that’s the same as me not having done so in the first place, isn’t it? If you don’t remember, it doesn’t matter, so let’s say I didn’t.’

  Graham merely repeated, more insistently,

  ‘I need to know.’

  Ann tried to pull her wrist away without success, then took a deep breath.

  ‘Of course I did. I enjoyed it. He was a great screw. I asked him to bugger me as well.’

  The grasp relaxed at once. Graham’s eyes went dull. He looked down in front of him.

  They didn’t speak again all evening. They sat in separate rooms and then went to bed without consulting one another. As Ann was coming out of the bathroom—she had locked the door for once—Graham was waiting to go in. He stood further aside than was needed to let her pass.

  In bed, they lay with their backs to one another, a yard of space between them. In the dark, Graham began to cry quietly. After a few minutes Ann began to cry too. Finally she said,

  ‘It wasn’t true.’

  Graham stopped crying for the moment, and she repeated,

  ‘It wasn’t true.’

  Then they both began crying again, still curled away on the edges of the bed.

  SEVEN

  On the Dunghill

  Italy was out for a start: it was criss-crossed with lovers’ footprints, like camel tracks in a desert where the wind never blew. Germany and Spain were sort of half-out. There were some countries—Portugal, Belgium, Scandinavia—which were completely safe; though one of the reasons for this, of course, was that Ann had never wanted to go there in the first place. So this ‘safeness’ was in its turn dangerous: craven though Graham was inclined to be, the idea of being bullied into a fortnight in Helsinki by the absent presences of Benny and Chris and Lyman and whoever didn’t appeal. He imagined himself in one of those fringe countries, anoraked against the cold and sipping a glass of goat’s-hoof liquor; all there would be to do was brood chippily on the easy, sun-tanned shits who had driven him there and who were even now lolling down the Via Veneto and mocking the thought of him.

  France was semi-dangerous. Paris was out; the Loire was out; the South was out. Well, not all the South: only those flash bits where the curving cliffs have been replaced by curving terraces of flats, the Nice and Cannes bits where Ann, he imagined, had behaved as … as any other girl would. But of course there was the ‘real’ South, where neither of them had been, nor had those posh studs who were always telephoning London to check the movement of their portfolios. The real South: that was safe.

  They flew to Toulouse, hired a car, and for no particular reason other than that it was one of the offered directions out of the city, followed the Canal du Midi south-east to Carcassonne. They had clambered halfway round the ramparts before some remark of Ann’s made Graham break the news to her that it was all Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration; but this didn’t diminish her enjoyment. She was determined, as far as determination would carry her, to enjoy the holiday. Graham disliked Carcassonne intensely—no doubt because of historian’s integrity, he explained half-jokingly to Ann—but this didn’t matter. On the first day of their drive he’d been nervous, anxiously keen to escape the paternal fascination with his responses of Benny, Chris, Lyman and the others; by now, though, he seemed to have left them behind.

  Narbonne offered a T-junction; they turned north, up through Béziers and into the Hérault. On the fourth morning, driving carefully through an alley of fat plane trees, each with a fading band of white around its midriff, Graham slowed to pass an overflowing hayc
art; and as the driver, apparently asleep, shifted his head half-sideways at them and tugged lethargically on the reins, he suddenly felt that everything inside him was almost as good as it had been at the beginning. That evening, he lay under a single sheet in the hotel bed and stared at the peeling whitewash on the ceiling; it reminded him of the peeling band of insect-deterrent round the plane trees, and he smiled again to himself. They couldn’t get him here; none of them had ever been here before, so they wouldn’t know where to look; and even if they could find him, now, tonight, he’d be strong enough to chase them away.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’

  Ann, naked, a pair of rinsed-out knickers in her hand, was hovering by the window, wondering whether to hang them over the wrought-iron railing outside. Eventually she decided against it: the next day was a Sunday, and you never could tell what people judged to be blasphemous.

  ‘Just smiling.’ He took off his glasses and laid them on the bedside table.

  She hung her knickers on the projecting snout of the radiator, and walked across towards the bed. Graham always looked so much more defenceless without his glasses. She looked at the indentations on his nose; then at his patchily greying hair; then at the whiteness of his flesh. One of the first things he’d said to her that had made her laugh was, ‘I’m afraid I’ve got an academic’s body.’ She remembered this as she slipped in under the sheet.

  ‘Just smiling?’

  Graham had already decided that for the next however many days he would avoid all references to what they had come on holiday partly to forget. So instead he told her something that had made him smile the night before.

  ‘I was thinking about an indicative thing.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’ She pushed towards him and laid her hand on his academic chest.

  ‘Towards the end of, of my time with Barbara, do you know what she used to do to me? It’s all right, it won’t make you cross. She used to plant bedclothes on me. She did, really. While I was asleep she used to pull out the sheets and blankets from her side of the bed and push them over to mine, and then give me all the eiderdown as well, and then pretend to wake up and bollock me for stealing all the bedclothes.’

  ‘That’s crazy. Why did she do it?’

  ‘Make me feel guilty, I suppose. It always worked, too. I mean, she used to make me feel that even when I was asleep I was subconsciously trying to give her a rotten deal. She used to do that about once a month for a whole year.’

  ‘Why did she stop?’

  ‘Oh, because I caught her. I was wide awake one night, just lying there, trying not to disturb her. After an hour or so she woke up, but I didn’t feel like saying anything to her, so I just stayed quiet. And then I realized what she was doing. So I waited for her to pile everything up on top of me, and then pretend to be asleep, and then pretend to wake up, and then pretend to be cold, and then shake me and start bollocking me, and I just said, “I’ve been awake for at least an hour.” She stopped in mid-sentence, and grabbed back the bedclothes she’d just given me, and turned over. I think it was the only time I can remember when she was at a loss for words.’

  Ann pressed her hand down on Graham’s chest. She liked the way he talked about his past. He never slanged Barbara just so that she, Ann, would feel better. His stories were always tinged with incredulity at the way he had behaved himself, or had allowed Barbara to behave towards him; and it seemed to imply that such ploys and deceptions didn’t, couldn’t take place between the two of them.

  ‘Do you want some more sheet?’ she asked, and crawled astride him. From the way he smiled up at her she guessed there would be no hesitancies, no rowdy past between them on this occasion. She was right.

  They found a small hotel near Clermont l’Hérault and stayed there for a week. At dinner a wide-shouldered litre of local red wine stood on their table, and the chips had a saffron colour and a softness which they thought of as importantly French. Perhaps the colour did come from using exhausted cooking oil; but no matter.

  In the mornings they would drive past scrubby vineyards to neighbouring villages, where they would look at churches which somehow made themselves more interesting than they really were, and then spend a lingering time buying picnic material and a copy of Midi-Libre. They’d drive a little, rather aimlessly, stopping occasionally for Ann to gather wild flowers and weeds, none of whose names she knew, and which were mostly left to curl and fade on the back shelf of the car. They’d find a bar, have an aperitif, then look for a sheltered slope or a clearing.

  Over lunch Graham would get Ann to read him page two of Midi-Libre. It was headed Faits Divers and specialized in stories of everyday violence. The odder crimes found their niche here, alongside case histories of ordinary people who had simply cracked. ‘Distrait mother drives into canal,’ Ann would translate, ‘five perish.’ One day it was a story about a peasant family who kept their octogenarian grandmother chained to her bed ‘for fear she might wander to the main route and occasion an accident’; the main route being eight miles away. The next day it was a story about two motorists arguing over a parking space; the loser had taken out a gun and shot his ‘enemy of five minutes’ three times in the chest. The victim had fallen to the ground; the assailant, for good measure, shot out two of his car tyres before driving off. ‘The police continue the pursuit,’ Ann translated, ‘the victim was gravely blessed and transported to hospital.’ Where, Graham thought, he might have to be gravely blessed one more, final time.

  ‘It’s all this Latin temperament about,’ he said.

  ‘This was in Lille.’

  ‘Ah.’

  After lunch they’d drive back to the hotel, have coffee at the bar and then go upstairs to bed. At five o’clock they came down and sat in lurching recliners made of plastic macaroni until it was time for the first drink of the evening. Ann was re-reading Rebecca; Graham was on several books at the same time. Occasionally, he would read bits out to her.

  When Pierre Clergue wanted to know me carnally, he used to wear this herb wrapped up in a piece of linen, about an ounce long and wide, or about the size of the first joint of my little finger. And he had a long cord which he used to put round my neck when we made love; and this thing or herb at the end of the cord used to hang down between my breasts, as far as the opening of my stomach. When the priest wanted to get up and leave the bed, I would take the thing from around my neck and give it back to him. It might happen that he wanted to know me carnally twice or more in a single night; in that case the priest would ask me, before uniting his body with mine, ‘Where is the herb?’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘About 1300. Just down the road from here; well, fifty miles or so.’

  ‘Dirty old priest.’

  ‘The priests do seem to have been the randiest. I suppose they could give you absolution afterwards and save you the walk.’

  ‘Dirty old priest.’ Ann was shocked by the thought of ecclesiastical carnality. This intrigued Graham: normally it was he who was shocked when she casually told him about the ways of the world. He felt proprietorial, almost malicious, as he continued:

  ‘They didn’t all do it. Some of them preferred boys. Not that they were queer or anything—though I suppose they must have been a bit queer. There are lots of passages where men confess things like, “When I was a boy the priest took me into his bed and used me between his thighs as if I were a woman.” ’

  ‘That sounds pretty queer to me.’

  ‘No; the main reason they had boys was because they didn’t want to risk the diseases they might catch from prostitutes.’

  ‘The sods. The fucking sods. And I suppose they made that all right for themselves as well?’

  ‘Oh yes. They made everything all right for themselves. The rule about prostitutes was very interesting. I’ll read you it.’ He flicked back a few pages. ‘ “Vidal believed”—he wasn’t a priest, he was a muleteer, but this is the conclusion he came to after asking priests about the sins involved in going to prostitutes—“Vidal
believed the sexual act to be innocent when performed with a prostitute” … der der der … “on two conditions: first, it had to be a monetary transaction” (the man paying, of course); “secondly, the act in question had to ‘please’ both parties.” ’

  ‘What does “please” mean? Did the prostitute have to come or something?’

  ‘It doesn’t say. I didn’t know they knew about coming then.’

  Ann reached across from her lounger and poked Graham’s leg with her toe. ‘They’ve always known about coming.’

  ‘I thought they only found out about it this century. I thought the Bloomsbury Group discovered coming.’ He wasn’t entirely joking.

  ‘I think they’ve always known.’

  ‘Anyway, I shouldn’t think “please” necessarily means “come”. Probably just means that the client wasn’t allowed to hurt the prostitute or beat her up, just as he wasn’t allowed to run off without paying.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘Of course,’ Graham went on, enjoying himself more as he sensed Ann’s distaste growing, ‘it probably wasn’t much like it is today. I mean, they didn’t always do it in bed.’

  ‘Nor do we,’ Ann replied automatically, then remembered with alarm that with Graham they always had; it was with, well, some of the others that the location had been movable. Graham, happily, was beyond noticing.

  ‘Where they did it a lot,’ he said, delivering his saved-up detail, ‘was on dunghills.’

  ‘Dunghills? Errrrruuuukkk.’

  ‘Dunghills. Well, I suppose one can see the advantages.’ Graham affected his most academic tone. ‘They’re warm, they’re comfortable, they probably didn’t smell much worse than the couple on top of them … ’

  ‘Stop, stop. Enough,’ Ann interrupted firmly, ‘enough.’

  Graham chuckled, and turned back to his book. Ann did the same, though her mind continued with the conversation. She was surprised at how shocked she felt. Not at single things—the queer priests, the cynical absolutions, the V.D., the dunghills; but at their accumulation. When she’d said that women had always known about coming, she didn’t know on what authority she’d spoken; it just seemed that way to her. They must have known, mustn’t they: that was the sole force of her argument, she now realized. And in the same way she’d also always assumed, and on no stronger evidence, that sex had always been like it was now. Of course some things had changed—they’d invented the pill and the coil, thank God—but she’d imagined sex as a human constant, as something which was never not refreshing and enjoyed. She associated it in her mind with clean sheets and flowers by the bed. Whereas, not all that long ago, and just down the road, it was dunghills and dirty old priests, and instead of flowers beside you it was dried herbs up you. Why, she wondered, did anyone want to do it under such circumstances? Why did they bother? She wouldn’t have. Suddenly, she thought about toothpaste.