Read Before She Met Me for Free Online

didn’t need us. Bowling!’
    ‘And …’ Graham, who had been drying, turned away and started folding napkins, so that when Ann answered she wouldn’t be able to catch his eye. ‘ … did you?’
    ‘Oh yes.’ From the direction of her voice he knew she was looking at him. ‘Just once, I think.’
    ‘No more than a sneeze.’
    ‘Not much.’
    Graham patted the napkins flat, picked up a teaspoon that didn’t need washing, carried it over to the sink and slipped it into the water. As he did so, he kissed Ann on the side of the neck and made a little sneezing noise. Then he kissed her again, in the same place.
    He liked the way she answered him directly. She was never coy, or sly, or evasive. She never took the line, which she justifiably might, of ‘You haven’t earned the knowledge’. She just told him, and that was that. He liked it this way: if he asked, he got told; if he didn’t ask, he didn’t get told. Simple. He picked up the coffee tray and wandered off to the sitting-room.
    Ann was glad she’d got out of acting when she had—which was a few months before she met Graham. Eight years was quite enough for her to realize the random correlation that existed between talent and employment. A variety of stage, television and, latterly, film work, had convinced her that at her best she was really quite good; which was precisely not good enough for her.
    She had wrangled with herself for some months and finallygot out. Not out into resting, but out into something full-time and different, by cleverly using Nick Slater’s friendship to ease her into Redman and Gilks. (It had been clever not only not to sleep with him before he made the offer, but to make it clear that even if he did give her the job she still wouldn’t. He had seemed relieved, almost respectful, when faced with such intransigence. Perhaps that was the best way, she thought later, the modern way: nowadays you get jobs by not sleeping with people.) And it had worked out. Within three years she was deputy chief buyer, with a six-figure budget, as much travel as she wanted, and hours which, though sometimes long, were determined by her own efficiency. She had sensed an unfamiliar stability entering her life even before she met Graham; now, things felt solider than ever.
    On the Thursday Graham rang Barbara and haggled briefly about the bills.
    ‘But why does she need so many clothes?’
    ‘Because she needs them.’ (The classic Barbara answer: take a chunk of your sentence and simply repeat it. Less work for her, plus time saved for preparing the next answer but one.)
    ‘Why does she need three bras?’
    ‘She needs them.’
    ‘Why Does she wear them all at once—one on top of the other?’
    ‘One on, one clean, and one in the wash.’
    ‘But I paid for three only a few months ago.’
    ‘You may not have noticed, Graham, and I doubt if you care, but your daughter’s growing. She’s changing … size.’
    He wanted to say, ‘Oh, you mean she’s busting out all over’; but he no longer had confidence in jokes with Barbara. Instead he quibbled mildly.
    ‘She’s growing that fast?’
    ‘Graham, if you constrict a growing girl, there is untold damage that can be done. Bind up the body and you affectthe mind; it’s well known. I really didn’t know your meanness went as far as that.’
    He hated these conversations; not least because he suspected that Barbara half-invited Alice to listen in and then rouged her side of the argument accordingly.
    ‘Fine. Okay. Fine. Oh, and by the way, thanks for the delayed wedding present, if that’s what it was.’
    ‘The what?’
    ‘The wedding present. I take it that’s what Sunday afternoon was.’
    ‘Ah. Yes; glad you liked it.’ For once, she sounded a bit defensive, so he instinctively pushed again.
    ‘Though I really can’t imagine why you did it.’
    ‘Can’t you? Can’t you imagine?’
    ‘No, I mean, why you should be interested … ’
    ‘Oh, I just think you ought to