Before She Met Me (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes

Author:Julian Barnes [Barnes, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307797780
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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 Well, not all the South: only those flash bits where the curving cliffs have been replaced by curving terraces of flats, the Nice and Cannes bits where Ann, he imagined, had behaved as … as any other girl would.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 haycart; 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

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