Before She Met Me by Julian Barnes

Author:Julian Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780099540076
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-04-14T15:17:45+00:00

FOUR STAR

THREE STAR

TWO STAR

DERV

CARDS

TOILETS

CARWASH

and the day was gone, destroyed. Larry Pitter had sidled out of his alley and slyly removed a manhole cover; Graham, head up, whistling, feeling the sun on his face, had walked straight into it.

The Rossini continued but Graham thought only of Ann lying on her back encouraging the four men. They were lined up side by side at right angles to her body, each licking a swath, like four motor mowers moving over her. Graham shook his head to expel the image, and concentrated on driving; but the picture, though rebuked and diminished, continued mockingly at the edge of his vision, up in the rear-view mirror.

He found himself watching the road for garages. At each he instinctively flicked an eye down the rows of signs, looking for the one that said CARWASH. Mostly, they didn’t; and each one that didn’t made Graham feel elated, as if all his suspicions of adultery had been proved false. Then he would pass the eighth or ninth garage, with its contemptuously informative sign, and the image in the rear-view mirror would sharpen. Now, he could see his wife urging the four men to make their different uses of her. Three took the obvious channels; the fourth squatted in the corner of the mirror like a distempered satyr and pulled on his cock. Graham forced his attention back to the road. The rain had slackened off, and with every sweep the wipers were now depositing some of their own dirt back on the screen. Automatically, Graham reached out and pressed the windscreen washer. A burst of bubbly opaque liquid hit the glass in front of his face. He should have known better. Up in the mirror the satyr was coming.

Graham spent twenty minutes of his first class looking at his male students and wondering if any of them wanted to go into films and commit adultery with his wife. Then this struck even him as comical, and he went back to expounding a tentatively revisionist view of Balfour. After a couple of hours he emerged, walked to his car, and gazed at the windscreen washer nozzles on the bonnet as if they were instruments of adultery. An enervating sadness began to creep through him. He bought a racing edition of the Evening Standard and checked through the films. Maybe he should see something that didn’t have his wife in for a change. What about the new Jancso not starring his wife, the new inter-galactic battleorama not starring his wife, or the new British road movie about hitch-hiking to Wrexham, definitely not starring his wife?

Not a single one of his wife’s films was showing. Not one. Graham felt as if a branch of the social services which particularly affected him had suddenly been withdrawn. Did they realize the effects of their cuts? He couldn’t, today, go to any cinema in London or its immediate suburbs and see a film in which his wife committed adultery; nor could he see any film in

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