Dirty Tricks Read online

  I was terrifically embarrassed, but Karen did not once so much as glance in my direction, and after a while I began to suspect that she had made a mistake too. The ad-man opposite had been casting meaningful glances at her all evening, and the likeliest explanation seemed to be that she and Roger were doing a number together and I’d inadvertently got caught in the crossfire. The state Karen was in, it was a wonder she knew who her own feet belonged to, never mind anyone else’s. I threw myself with apparent enthusiasm into a conversation Marietta and the solicitor were having about the difficulty of finding and keeping reliable cleaning ladies.

  Some time later I got up to go to the loo. Karen also rose, muttering something about checking to see how the meringue was coming along. I stopped to hold the door open for her. As it swung shut behind her, she jumped me.

  I mean that quite literally. Karen taught physical education, so she was in good shape. As I turned, she sprang forward like a cat, leaping up to straddle my hips with her thighs. Instinctively, to prevent her falling, I grabbed her buttocks. By then her mouth was all over mine, her tongue darting in and out. I just stood there like a punch-drunk boxer, taking the punishment she was handing out. I had no idea who she was or who I was or where we were. What was happening clearly had no connection with what had been happening before or would, presumably, happen afterwards.

  It wasn’t until I heard Dennis say, ‘I’ll just fetch up another bottle of the Hunter Valley’ that it was borne in on me that the woman who was frenching me and bringing herself off on my belt buckle was none other than Karen Parsons, the wife of Dennis Parsons, who was currently six feet away on the other side of the dining-room door and closing rapidly.

  Karen reacted before I did. Obeying some primitive burrowing instinct, she pulled me into the loo and locked the door behind us. We held hands in the dark while someone tried the handle.

  ‘Won’t be a mo,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, are you still in there?’

  It was Dennis, stopping off for a pee on his way to replenish the supply of social oxygen, already anxious about what the others were saying about him behind his back. Meanwhile, on the other side of the door he was impatiently eyeing, Karen and I were locked in a windowless room about five feet by three, with no possibility of escape short of flushing ourselves down the lavatory.

  I’ve often speculated since on what would have happened if we’d just given ourselves up at this point. There would, I imagine, have been an ugly scene. I certainly wouldn’t have been invited back to the Parsons’, but I could have lived with that. At the very worst, their marriage might not have survived. They would have, on the other hand.

  Instead, I flushed the toilet and opened the door just wide enough to slip through the gap. Dennis gave me the vague smile of complicity that men exchange in lavatorial situations. I grasped his arm firmly and led him away.

  ‘Could I have a word with you?’

  He frowned.

  ‘In private,’ I added, leading him into the kitchen. I slammed the door behind us to let Karen know the coast was clear.

  ‘That bloke across the table from me, is he gay, do you happen to know?’

  Dennis’s brow puckered more intensely.

  ‘Roger? You must be joking.’

  ‘In that case I think he just made a pass at your wife.’

  You could tell right away he didn’t want to know. Things were going all right, the evening was a success. Dennis didn’t want anything to change that.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he started playing footsie-footsie with me,’ I explained. ‘But if he’s not that way inclined, he must have mistaken my foot for Karen’s.’

  I glanced down at the limb I was illustratively wiggling, only to find an involuntary erection making my trousers stick out like an accusing finger.

  ‘Not Roger,’ Dennis replied dismissively. ‘Too busy giving it to his secretary, by all accounts.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘I suppose he might have had cramp or something. Still, I thought I ought to let you know.’

  ‘Oh yes, right, fair enough. Seen Kay, by the way?’

  ‘She went upstairs, I think.’

  I’d heard the door spring open and the stairs groan as she made good her escape. She’d be sluicing her face down with cold water, I assumed, vowing never again to drink so much that she lost control of herself in such an embarrassing, such an appallingly dangerous and potentially disastrous way.

  Ah Karen, how I misjudged you! But I’d never met anyone quite like her before, you see. Even little Manuela, of whom more anon, wasn’t in the Karen Parsons league. Knowing what I know now, I imagined she was stretched out on the marital bed finishing the job. She would have left the door open and the landing light on so that she was clearly visible from the stairs. If Dennis came looking for her, she might hear him in time, or she might not. That would have done it for her, the uncertainty.

  Something had, at any rate, when she returned to the dining room a few minutes later. The frantic animation, the barely-suppressed hysteria, had been replaced by a languid, dopey calm. At the time I thought that the drink had finally taken its toll. The stuff circulating in her veins by then must have been a cocktail in which blood was a fairly minor ingredient. It didn’t seem at all surprising that she’d slowed down a little. It was a wonder she wasn’t in a coma. She paid me no particular attention. For my part, I had other preoccupations. Thanks to Karen’s attack I hadn’t been able to pee, and when my organ switched from reproductive to urinary mode I realized that my bladder was bursting. In the end I pretended to be worried that I had left my bicycle lamp on and dashed outside to relieve myself in a flower-bed.

  Through the dining-room window I heard someone inside say, ‘… on a bicycle!’

  ‘The eternal student,’ Dennis remarked. They all laughed.

  I stood there trembling with humiliation and anger. For a moment I thought of getting on my joke transport and heading back to the East Oxford slums where I belonged. Only I didn’t belong there, that was the whole trouble. If I belonged anywhere, it was with these people, the lumpenbourgeoisie, in whose eyes I’d lost caste, fatally and irrevocably. Besides, it had come on to rain, and the prospect of arriving home soaking wet to find my housemates Trisha and Brian curled up in a post-coital stupor in front of the TV was more than I could bear, so I swallowed my pride and went back inside.

  Nevertheless, Dennis’s comment still rankled, and looking back on what had happened earlier I pondered the possibility of evening the score by seducing his wife. She fancied me, that was clear. The problem was my end. To drag Karen’s personality into it would be an unfair handicap, but even from a purely physical point of view she wasn’t my type. I like my women big and round and female. Karen Parsons wasn’t like that at all. She was anorexically skinny, her bosom almost imperceptible, her rump flat and hard. As for her face, it was one I had seen countless times in buses and supermarkets, dole queues and pubs, waiting outside schools or factories, at all ages from fifteen to fifty. Its only striking feature was a large, predatory mouth, like the front-end grille on a cheap flash motor. Definitely not my type, I decided, even if it did mean getting even with Dennis. I just didn’t fancy her and that was all there was to it.

  How simple life would be, if it was as simple as we think!

  The rain was falling harder than ever as I cycled home down the Banbury Road, through the science ghetto on Parks Road and into a time-warp. It was 1964, and I was on my way back from seeing Jenny, a very lovely, very sweet and gentle first-year history major at Somerville. I had rooms in college that year, so instead of turning east along the High I carried on down Magpie Lane and round the corner into Merton Street, taking care over the cobbles, treacherous when wet. The half-hour was just ringing from the massive bell tower, there was a muffled sound of organ practice from the chapel, the light was burning in the porter’s lodge and the gate lay open — but not to me.

  I pedalled back to the High Street, past Magdalen and across the bridge to the Plain. It was now a year later. Jenny had digs on the Iffley Road and I was going there to see her, to tell her, to break it to her, to break her fragile, trusting heart. I had conceived a passion for another, you see. Liza wasn’t at university. That was one of her main attractions, quite frankly. Universities weren’t where it was happening, and particularly not Oxford. It was happening in Liverpool, where giggly Karen had just started at the local secondary mod, and in London, where Dennis Parsons was fast learning that the prime number is number one, and where Liza was studying art at the Slade. The things that were going down were urban things, street things, classless things. Oxford felt like a transatlantic liner in the age of bucket shops and cut-price charters.

  I almost didn’t bother to take a degree, it seemed so pointless. Liza agreed. Francis Bacon never went to art college, she pointed out. In the end I went along and scraped a pass, largely to avoid the horrendous scenes with my parents that would ensue if I came away from the temple of learning empty-handed. They’d been considerably bucked when I got a place at Merton, you see. We were respectable Home Counties middle class, but nothing special, nothing to brag about. Not that our sort is given to bragging in any case, but it had given my dad — a branch manager for one of the High Street banks — a certain quiet satisfaction to be able to let his staff know that his son was ‘going up’ to Oxford. In fact he got more out of it than I did, I think. He’d missed out on all that because of the war, and he never tired of dropping references to ‘noughth week’ and ‘encaenia’ and ‘schools’ and May Balls. But it wasn’t those balls that were important to me, and timid undemanding Jenny couldn’t compete with Liza’s inspired experimentation, nor a damp drab flop on the Iffley Road with the joss-stick-scented nest lined with Li
za’s fauvist daubs where she and I lay after our bouts of dirty love, toking and talking, turning the world inside out.

  That was where I had made my bed, back in the mid-sixties. Now, a quarter of a century later, I was still lying in it. I’d chosen London over Oxford, and that’s what I’d got. The Cowley Road isn’t Oxford, it’s South London without the glamour. But even that was too chic for me, so I turned off into Winston Street. Winston Street made the Cowley Road seem pacey and sharp. Winston Street was where I lived. I chained my bicycle to the railings and climbed the north-facing steps, slimy with moss, where the puddles never dried. Trish and Brian had gone to bed. I made a mug of decaf and sat looking round at the crumbling plaster ceiling, the curdled paintwork, the tatty carpet and the flophouse furnishings.

  The place belonged to Clive Phillips, who also owned the school where the three of us taught. Indeed for all practical purposes he owned us. Our rent was?120 a month each, exclusive of gas, electricity and water. Clive had bought the house five years earlier, before prices soared. Even if he was still paying off a mortgage, he had to be making at least?2,500 a year out of us, not counting the fact that the property had quadrupled in value. He was rumoured to own upwards of a dozen such houses in various parts of East Oxford, all let on short leases to students or teachers, in addition to his own home in Divinity Road. What with all those houses, plus the school, he must have been worth close to a million pounds, give or take the odd thousand.

  Clive was twenty-nine years old.

  Still, money’s not important, is it? That’s what I was brought up to believe. Niceness was what counted in life, not money. I was brought up to believe in niceness the way other people believe in God. I lost my faith when my parents died. They’d taken pride in planning for every eventuality, but there was nothing much they could do when an oncoming driver had a heart attack at the wheel and steered straight into the path of their Rover saloon. The estate turned out to be worth considerably less than I had hoped. My principal inheritance was a justification for any irresponsibility I cared to indulge in thereafter. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as my parents, forever denying themselves what they wanted now so that they could look forward to their retirement with complete peace of mind. Since every day could evidently be my last, I was going to make it count. Experience was all, and I set out to grab it with both hands, drifting from country to country, from one relationship to another, a heedless, hedonistic round with never a thought for tomorrow. But though I refused to age, the students and the other teachers grew younger year by year. Eventually I decided that I’d had enough. It was time to retire, to return to England-land, to the genteel sheltered accommodation I’d fled more than a decade earlier.

  The moment I got back I realized that things had changed. The demolition crew had been in, the wreckers and blasters, the strippers and refitters. The attitudes and assumptions I’d grown up with had been razed to the ground, and a bold new society had risen in their place, a free-enterprise, demand-driven, flaunt-it-and-fuck-you society, dedicated to excellence and achievement. Something new, unheard-of! Created by this one woman! She had spurned the hypocritical cant beloved of politicians and addressed herself directly to the people, showing how well she knew them, telling them what they whispered in their hearts but dared not speak, calling their bluff! ‘You don’t want a caring society,’ she had told them, in effect. ‘You say you do, but you don’t, not really. You couldn’t care less about education and health and all the rest of it. And don’t for Christ’s sake talk to me about culture. You don’t give a toss about culture. All you want to do is sit at home and watch TV. No, it’s no use protesting! I know you. You’re selfish, greedy, ignorant and complacent. So vote for me.’

  And they had, over and over again, so many times that no one except me seemed to remember that things had ever been different. I felt like Rip Van Winkle, an anachronistic laughing-stock, a freak. Failure was no longer acceptable, particularly in someone with my advantages. I had thrown away my chances in life, pawned them off for a few cheap thrills. And it was too late to do anything about it. In the new Britain you were over the hill at twenty-five, never mind forty. The key to success, an article in the local paper informed me, was to sell yourself hard, but I had nothing to offer that anyone wanted.

  Except, perhaps, for Karen Parsons.

  So my phone call to the Parsons’ household the next day was in the best traditions of the society in which I found myself living. Indeed without any wish to evade my responsibility for subsequent events, I think I may fairly claim that in everything I did in re Karen and her husband I was market-led. There was a hole waiting to be plugged. I had identified a need and was aiming to satisfy it.

  Dennis answered the phone. I thanked him for dinner and said how much I’d enjoyed myself.

  The reason I’m calling, actually, is that my wallet seems to have disappeared and I wondered whether I could possibly have left it there.’

  ‘Hang on, I’ll ask Kay.’

  I stood looking down at the pavement below the payphone while Dennis padded across the wall-to-wall carpeting and called distantly to his wife. Half-eaten turds of Spud U Like nestled on a bed of throw-up curry. I looked up at the concrete-grey sky, still surprisingly free of graffiti. I tried not to look at anything in between.

  ‘It’s OK, we’ve got it,’ Dennis said in my ear.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘When do you want to come and pick it up?’

  I got my wallet out of my pocket and held it up in front of my eyes.

  ‘You’ve got it?’

  ‘Kay found it when she was clearing up. She was going to ring you but we don’t have your number. Look, we’re going shopping this morning, we could drop it off if you like. Where do you live?’

  This brought me to my senses. I would rather have died than let the Parsons see where I lived.

  ‘No, I don’t want to put you to any bother.’

  ‘It’s no bother.’

  ‘Well actually I’m going out this morning too.’

  But I was talking to myself. There was another muffled exchange at the other end.

  ‘Why don’t you pop in this afternoon and get it? I’ll be going out briefly at some stage, but Kay’ll be here.’

  Fair enough, I thought as I walked home. I was beginning to appreciate Karen Parsons. I’ve always been good at thinking on my feet. It’s the other kind of thinking I’ve never been able to muster, the long-term stuff. ‘Never confuse strategy with tactics,’ one of my tutors advised me, but I can’t even remember what the words mean. Over the short distance, though, I’m pretty impressive, and I admire the same quality in others. I liked the way Karen had picked up that my story about the wallet was in fact a message, and I liked the message she was sending back even more. It was risky. If I marched round there and demanded my wallet in front of Dennis, she would be in deep doo-doo. She was trusting me not to do that, putting that power in my hands. I liked that, too. It’s good to go dutch on power. I’ve always made a point of borrowing money from women early in the relationship so as to give them a hold over me. It also helps when the time comes to break off the affair, because you can talk about the money instead of feelings and love and messy, painful stuff like that.

  At a quarter to three I was in position behind the grime-sprayed glass of a bus shelter on the Banbury Road. The entrance to Ramillies Drive was about thirty yards away on the other side of the road. There I stood, waiting for Dennis’s car to emerge. It was mizzling steadily, so I had lashed out on a minibus ticket, which cost more than a taxi would here. The afternoon was cold and raw, and I soon regretted my choice of clothing, a light linen suit dating from my time in this country. But I wanted to present an exotic image, a man of the world blown in from foreign parts to bring some much-needed glamour to Karen’s drab suburban existence.

  I had hoped she would be able to get rid of Dennis quickly, but it was almost 4 o’clock before the red BMW finally appeared and roared away in the direction of the ring road. By that time I was chilled to the bone, exhausted from the relentless battering of the traffic, sullen and depressed. This had better be good, I thought grimly as I crossed the road and walked up the cul-de-sac to the Parsonage. This had better be bloody good.