Before She Met Me Read Online Free PDF

envelope into his pocket withoutcomment. Normally he replied with another silently-accepted envelope the following Sunday. Queries were dealt with on Thursday evenings, when he rang up and was allowed to talk to Alice for between five and ten minutes, depending on her mother’s mood.
    ‘Enjoy the film?’ Barbara enquired levelly. She was looking neat and pretty, her tight dark curls newly washed. It was her going-out-and-having-a-good-time-and-stuff-you look; as opposed to her martyred-by-housework-and-being-a-single-parent-and-stuff-you look. Graham felt roughly the same indifference towards both guises. He felt a complacent lack of curiosity about why he had ever loved her in the first place. That black hair, inhumanly flawless in colour; that round, forgettable face; those guilt-inducing eyes.
    ‘Couldn’t get in,’ he replied, just as levelly. ‘It’s one of those cinemas they’ve split up into three, and I suppose all her schoolfriends had got there before us.’
    ‘So what did you do?’
    ‘Oh, well, we thought, once we were there, we might as well see something, so we went to the new James Bond instead.’
    ‘What EVER for?’ Her tone was sharper, more rebuking than he could have predicted. ‘You’ll give the child nightmares.
Really
, Graham.’
    ‘I think she’s too sensible for that.’
    ‘Well, all I can say is, on your head be it. On
your head
.’
    ‘Yes. Yes, okay then. See you … talk to you on Thursday.’ He backed off the doorstep like a rebuffed brush salesman.
    Even the jokes turned sour with Barbara nowadays. She’d find out in due course that they hadn’t been to the Bond film—Alice would keep it up for a bit and then crack, in that rather solemn way of hers—but by then Barbara would be past seeing it as a simple revenge joke. Why did she always do this to him? Why did he always feel like this when driving away? Oh, stuff it, he thought. Stuff it.
    ‘Good visit?’
    ‘Not bad.’
    ‘Cost much?’ Ann wasn’t referring to the direct price of taking Alice out, but to the indirect one, the one in the sealed envelope. And perhaps to other indirect costs as well.
    ‘Haven’t looked.’ He tossed the monthly reckoning on to the coffee table unopened. He always felt depressed returning from the failed part of his life to the active one; that was inevitable, he supposed. And he always underestimated Barbara’s talent for making him feel like a bob-a-job boy: the envelope, he suspected, might as well contain his signed cub’s card, while even now his ex-wife would be putting up the ‘Job Done’ sticker with its big red tick.
    He went through to the kitchen, where Ann was already pouring him a half-and-half gin-and-tonic, her usual prescription for him at this time of the week.
    ‘Nearly caught you
in flagrante
,’ he said smilingly.
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘Nearly caught you, today,
in flagrante
with the other fellow,’ he expatiated.
    ‘Ah. Which of them?’ She hadn’t located the joke yet.
    ‘That Eyetie fellow. Thin moustache, velvet smoking jacket, cheroot, glass of champagne in the hand—that one.’
    ‘Ah. That one.’ She was still puzzled. ‘Enrico or Antonio? They both have thin moustaches and swill champagne all the time.’
    ‘Riccardo.’
    ‘Oh, Riccardo.’ Come on, Graham, get to the point, she thought. Stop making me feel nervous.
    ‘Riccardo Devlin.’
    ‘Devlin … Christ, Dick Devlin. Oh, you don’t mean you saw
Over the Moon
? … God, wasn’t it awful? Wasn’t
I
awful?’
    ‘Just bad casting. And they didn’t have Faulkner on the script, did they?’
    ‘I sat there in bed, wearing ridiculous dark glasses, and said, “I don’t want any of this to come out”—or something like that. Star part.’
    ‘That might have been an improvement. No, it was, “I don’t want any publicity”.’
    ‘Well, I certainly didn’t get any; quite right too.
And I
got punished for being a loose woman.’
    ‘Mmmm.’
    ‘What did you see
that
for? I thought