Before She Met Me

Graham Hendrick is a 38-year-old history lecturer at London University, 15 years into a loveless marriage to Barbara. At a party hosted by his friend Jack Lupton, a successful novelist, Graham meets Ann, a clothing buyer whose directness and spontaneity captivate him. They begin an affair, and Graham leaves Barbara, agreeing to generous divorce terms. He and Ann marry, honeymoon on the Greek island of Naxos, and settle in a small terraced house in Clapham. Over two years, Graham's feelings for Ann intensify rather than fade. He catalogs her clothing each morning in his diary, eats the scraps left on her plate to feel closer to her, and weeps when her houseplants die. He tells himself that with Ann he will at last "be properly mourned" (28).

The trouble begins when Barbara fabricates a pretext to take Graham and their daughter Alice to see a re-run of a British comedy called Over the Moon. The real purpose is to make Graham watch Ann in an old role as a woman in bed with a villain. At home, Ann admits she once slept with her co-star Dick Devlin. Graham responds lightly, but the film plants something he cannot control. He returns to the cinema three more times that week, each viewing provoking stronger reactions: trembling, nausea, unfocused aggression directed at the fact of Ann's sexual past.

Graham confides in Jack, who frames the problem as every marriage's inevitable flaw, its "cross-eyed bear": a design fault that must be identified and met with a coping response. Jack suggests practical remedies, then proposes that Graham simply love Ann less. Graham rejects this idea with an impassioned catalog of his devotion so intense that Jack is nearly embarrassed.

Graham's jealousy spreads rapidly. While planning a holiday, he mentally excises from the map of Italy every place Ann visited with past lovers. Alone in the house, he searches her possessions: foreign coins linked to different ex-lovers, book matches from restaurants, inscriptions in books from former boyfriends. He tries Jack's suggestion of masturbation, hiding pornographic magazines in his filing cabinet, but the practice does not diminish his obsession.

Meanwhile, Ann visits Jack secretly. She tells him she has decided their past affair never happened; when Graham drunkenly listed her former lovers and included Jack's name, she denied it. Jack agrees to support the lie. Ann reveals that Graham's evenings have become a drunken litany of names, each recitation punctuated by wine and tears. At home, Graham escalates further, mailing packages containing animal organs to actors from Ann's old films.

Graham's obsession produces violent dreams that bleed into waking life. After watching Ann's brief scene with the American actor Buck Skelton, he dreams that Buck taunts him with fabricated exploits involving Ann and mocks Graham's inadequacy. A second recurring dream, featuring Larry Pitter from the gang film The Rumpus, haunts Graham most persistently: Pitter calls him "Mister Carwash," claiming Ann enjoyed group sex. The image infiltrates his waking hours; every garage sign reading CARWASH triggers it.

One evening Graham realizes he has forgotten whether Ann actually slept with Pitter. The gap excites rather than relieves him. He proposes a quiz game in which Ann tests his recall of her sexual history. Ann refuses. Graham insists. She snaps and lies, saying she slept with Pitter and enjoyed it. Graham's eyes go dull. They go to bed in silence, both crying. Eventually Ann whispers that it was not true.

They take a holiday in the south of France, since Italy is contaminated by Ann's travels with previous lovers. For a few days Graham achieves something close to peace, and they make love without intrusion from the past. But at Gatwick, passing a garage with a CARWASH sign, he knows the respite is over.

Back in England, domestic life deteriorates. Alice asks Graham one afternoon why he left her mother, pressing until he admits it was romantic love. Graham sleeps badly, stops wanting sex, and grows withdrawn. He spends afternoons obsessively replaying a 15-second television commercial featuring Dick Devlin in disguise. Ann watches him with the vigilance one might give someone in crisis, discovering that her wish for his safety and her wish for his death coexist without conflict.

Ann organizes a party as a display of normality. Graham, drunk, retreats to the garden, where he sees Jack put his arm around Ann. When Ann locks the back door, Graham attacks the French window with a garden fork, smashes the glass, and climbs back inside in front of the remaining guests. After they leave, Ann delivers a controlled monologue about brothel practices, building to a devastating offer: She could be his virgin. Graham flinches, retreats to his study, and sits up all night.

During this period Graham searches Jack's novels for evidence of the affair with Ann. In Out of the Dark he finds a sex scene whose details unmistakably match Ann's mannerisms. Later novels yield further evidence spanning the length of Graham and Ann's marriage. He tears out the incriminating pages and collapses in anguish. To confirm what he believes, Graham arranges a lunch with Sue, Jack's wife, and fabricates a story that Jack and Ann never stopped their affair. Sue, who did not know about it, is inwardly furious but feigns confirmation, giving Graham the corroboration he sought.

On a day when Ann is at work, Graham drives to Jack's flat. Jack lets him in, but Graham sits in silence. He reflects that the struggle between reason and instinct is always lost and resolves not to explain himself. He crosses the room, draws his favorite knife, and stabs Jack in the back. When Jack twists around, Graham stabs him repeatedly "between the heart and the genitals" (174). He stops only when resistance ceases, wipes the knife, places it on Jack's chest, and sits back down to finish his coffee.

That evening Ann arrives home to an empty house. Unable to sleep, she searches Graham's study and finds the pornographic magazines, a scrapbook documenting her pre-marriage life, the torn-out novel pages, and a videocassette containing eight recordings of the same commercial featuring Dick Devlin in disguise. The next morning she goes to Jack's flat. Graham answers the door and walks her inside, where she sees Jack's body beside the piano stool. Graham leads her to the kitchen, positions her facing the window, and ties her wrists behind her back.

Graham picks up the knife, sits in the armchair, and cuts deeply into both sides of his own throat. Ann hears his grunt, turns, and with her hands still tied, runs past him, past Jack's body, and butts her head through the window to scream for help. Three neighbors call the police. By the time the first officer reaches inside the broken window, Graham has bled to death in the armchair.