Dirty Tricks Page 5

  I thought he’d sussed what was going on, of course.

  ‘Didn’t you notice?’ he smiled archly. ‘As soon as he left, all the air went out of her.’

  At the far end of the room, Karen appeared in the kitchen doorway, a glass in her hand.

  ‘You mean there’s something going on between her and Thomas?’ I asked.

  Dennis shook his head, then tapped it with two fingers.

  ‘All up here. Takes some of them that way. It would all have been different if we’d been able to have children.’

  I frowned.

  ‘You mean Karen …?’

  Dennis nodded.

  ‘Poor kid. Tough on her.’

  I glanced down at the kitchen. Karen had disappeared again.

  ‘Shame to dump this on the dregs,’ said Dennis, surveying his glass moodily.

  ‘I’ll get fresh ones.’

  As soon as I rounded the line of fitted units screening off the kitchen I saw her slumped on the floor in the corner, huddled up as though against the cold. For a moment I thought she had passed out. Then her eyes registered my presence, and started to water. She looked so utterly pathetic that I bent down and comforted her silently, stroking her hair, kissing her face. She kissed me back, and then she wasn’t pathetic any more.

  ‘To the left of the sink,’ Dennis called loudly.

  I straightened up, opened a cupboard at random and took out two tumblers. As I did so, Karen unzipped my fly.

  My first reaction was of embarrassment. I hadn’t even had a chance to wash it! My mother always told me to put on clean underwear in case I got knocked over and taken to hospital, but the possibility that someone’s drunken wife might decide to revenge herself on her husband by going down on me was not a scenario we had ever discussed. The other source of embarrassment was the very real possibility that Dennis would stroll over at any moment and catch us at it. Already I could see myself standing there, tongue-tied and grinning sheepishly, the star of a bedroom farce which had gone badly off the rails. So while it would clearly be an exaggeration to say that I didn’t enjoy the experience at all, my main preoccupation was to get it over. Only I couldn’t. And while there are situations in which it is possible for the male to simulate orgasm, fellatio is not one of them.

  ‘No, no!’ Dennis shouted. ‘The snifters, man! The snifters.’

  He had swivelled round in the armchair and was staring at me irritably. Dennis hated being kept waiting for his drink. Feeling like a character in a split-screen movie, I opened another cupboard and took out two brandy glasses. But I still couldn’t come, and to withdraw without doing so would, I felt, be the height of bad manners. I pretended to find a smudge on the glasses, rinsed them, dried them and held them up to the light.

  ‘You going to be there all night?’ Dennis demanded.

  ‘Just coming.’

  It wasn’t much of a joke, but then it didn’t take much to make Karen laugh. Laugh she did, at any rate, and those convulsive movements succeeded where her more calculated efforts had failed. I grasped her hair with both hands, binding her head against my loins while I came in her mouth, loudly and at some length.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’

  He was on his feet now, and walking towards us. I waved him away as Karen thoughtfully tucked me in and zipped me up.

  ‘Cramp. It’s OK, it’s passed.’

  A few moments later, balloon of armagnac in hand, I was listening to Dennis recount with great self-satisfaction how he’d come by the priceless spirit, when our attention was drawn by the sound of running water from the kitchen. Karen stood there filling a glass of water.

  ‘I thought you were in bed,’ said her husband.

  Karen rinsed her mouth out and spat in the sink.

  ‘Just been clearing up a bit.’

  ‘You mean eating up! Never happy unless she has something in her mouth,’ he confided to me. ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at her, would you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  Karen giggled hysterically, spluttering water all over the counter.

  I knew then that we were bound to go all the way, wherever it might lead, whether we wanted to or not. As for Dennis, well, after that killing him would have been a kindness, wouldn’t it?

  There are times, frankly, when one longs for a video camera. All these words! It’s absurd, these days, like submitting a portrait in oils with your passport application. Oh yes, very tasteful, sir, a very speaking likeness I’m sure, and such tactility in the brushwork, but what we really wanted was a while-you-wait snapshot, a quid the strip of four down the machine. The kids these days don’t bother with language. Even life doesn’t do much for them. It’s just not state-of-the-art any more, life. How can you be sure what really happened unless you can rerun it in slo-mo? To say nothing of mashing the boring bits down to a slurry of images, hosing them away with a touch of your finger.

  Which is what I’d like to do now, ideally. What would you see? Karen and I on the sofa, Karen and I in the back seat of the BMW, Karen and I at the river, up the alley, down the garden, round the corner, in the pub. Our movements are furtive, frantic and compulsive. Our pleasures are brief and incomplete. Our frustrations are enormous. Because if you look closely at the background of every scene, you’ll see Dennis.

  Do you believe this? I didn’t, and I was there. Even while it was happening to me, I couldn’t believe it. Here was a woman who would go down on me in her husband’s presence, but wouldn’t touch me, wouldn’t speak to me, wouldn’t see me, unless he was there. And when I asked her why …

  ‘He’s my husband, isn’t he?’

  ‘Karen, you blew me. Remember? You stroked yourself off in front of me. It’s a bit late to be coming on like the Angel in the House now.’

  ‘I won’t cheat on him, I don’t care what you say. I just won’t. I like you ever such a lot, I really do, but the bottom line is I’m still married to Denny.’

  The wonder of it is I didn’t kill her then, never mind later. It was bad enough being mercilessly teased and tantalized, without having to listen to this sort of humbug. Because what all the fine talk came down to was hard cash. If Dennis dumped her, Karen and I would be another Trish and Brian. I could quite appreciate that she didn’t want that. I didn’t want it either. I just wished she’d cut out the bullshit about cheating on Dennis. We could have saved ourselves so much time and grief.

  My relationship with Karen may have been stormy, but her husband and I got on perfectly. I had finally worked out why Dennis was so keen on me. Although a barrow boy at heart, he had a yen for the finer things in life. The condition was that the transaction be conducted in whorehouse terms: he paid the trick, he called the shots. There was nothing very remarkable about him in this respect. You only have to walk into any art gallery these days to see that the real action is in the shop. Most people want to like art — they know it’s good for you, or at any rate looks good on you — but face to face with a great painting they feel like gate-crashers at a Mayfair reception. Back in the gallery supermarket they can happily check out the product like so many pin-ups, wallet in hand, the big spender, in control again.

  That’s how Dennis felt about me. I was everything he would never be: Oxford educated, widely travelled, still more widely read, a man of the world at ease in several languages. My saving grace was poverty. With the cash to match my pretensions I’d have been a menace for our Dennis. As it was, I was cheap at the price. An extra bottle of wine and some spare grub and he had himself a harmless court jester whose sallies were guaranteed to shock or amuse. Roll up, roll up! See the Eternal Student! Watch him go through his repertoire of quotes and quips. Listen to him sing for his supper. Didn’t he do well? Now watch him cycle home in the rain. He’s nearly forty-two, you know, and still living in digs!

  I couldn’t have cared less what Dennis Parsons thought of me, of course. If his judgement rankled, it was only because it accorded perfectly with my own. It was that inner voice that made me cringe as I lay sleepless on my lumpy mattress listening to the pogoing of the bedstead against the wall next door, where my co-tenants were pursuing their nightly quest for the elusive grail of Trish’s orgasm. I was merciless with myself, but the only thing I envied Dennis was his money. We thus had a perfect relationship: each of us felt that he could patronize the other.

  OK, let’s roll it. The hands of the clock spin round, the pages drop off the calendar, shots of punting and cricket replace those of rowing and rugby. It’s summer, and the English middle class prepare for their annual pilgrimage to the land of their putative forebears. Actually Dennis and Karen’s ancestors most likely dwelt among the cattle and kine in a wattle-and-daub barrio beneath the castle jakes, but their descendants cultivated a taste for wine and continental cooking, went riding and spent the obligatory two weeks a year in a rented villa in the Dordogne. They and the Carters were to have shared it that year with the computer analyst and his wife, but one of this couple’s children was involved in an accident and they had to cancel at the last minute. Very much to my surprise, Dennis asked me if I wanted to go instead.

  ‘It won’t cost you anything except for booze and eats. Their holiday insurance will cover the rent, and since Thomas and I are both taking cars there’ll be plenty of room. It’s just to make up the numbers, really. It gets a bit dull with just the four of you, and of course everyone else has already made plans.’

  The only problem was my work. June to September is open season for EFL students. During the winter Clive scraped by as best he could, bagging a rich brat here, a group of businessmen there, but come summer he cleaned up, netting the poor startled witless kids in droves. To pack and process them he needed staff, so our terms stipulated a minimum of two months’ summer work, the understanding
being that when contracts came up for renewal, priority would be given to those who had put in most time on the slime-line.

  But I was no longer in awe of Clive. Had we not dined together? And had I not wiped the floor with the little squirt, conversationally speaking? Judging by his expression, Clive had not been best pleased to find me ensconced in the Parsons’ sitting room that night. He didn’t mind socializing with his staff as long as it was on his terms and at their expense, but to meet them as equals on neutral ground was another matter. None are so ruthlessly exclusive as those who have worked their way up from the ranks. That evening Clive could only grin and bear it, but when I told him I wouldn’t be able to do the second summer course he was distinctly cool. I explained that I’d found someone to substitute for me — one of the Carter boys was looking for holiday work — but he kept making objections about unqualified staff, mentioning a notorious case a few years earlier when one malcontent teacher wreaked his revenge by teaching a group of teenage Italians that the English greet each other in the street with the phrase ‘Piss off, wanker.’ Half the class had to be invalided home, and Clive’s name was still mud in Emilia-Romagna. I assured him that Nigel Carter wouldn’t dream of playing tricks like that, but the discovery that my replacement was the son of the friend of a friend, one of his own kind, was a further blow. Nor was he at all happy with the idea of me swanning off to France with the Parsons.

  ‘Do I detect a wick-dipping situation?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Contrary to what the course books say, we do distinguish between familiar and formal modes of address in English, between tu and usted. It’s just that we don’t do it grammatically.

  ‘SAS training, isn’t it? Who dares wins. Faint fart never won hairy lady.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Clive ran a hand through his hair and gave me his wide-boy grin.

  ‘Our K.P. Sauce. Nice lips, shame about the teeth. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Asbestos sheath time.’

  He kept up this sort of thing a while longer, but I refused to be provoked and in the end he had to let me go. I rushed out to a payphone to break the good news to Karen. Her reaction was less than ecstatic.

  ‘Aren’t you glad?’

  ‘I suppose so. It’s just …’

  ‘What?’

  She sighed.

  ‘It isn’t going to be easy, that’s all.’

  By contrast, her husband sounded genuinely pleased that I was coming. But of course he didn’t have anything to lose, as far as he knew. Karen did, and I could quite understand her apprehension at the prospect of trying to maintain her rigid code of etiquette beneath the hot southern sun, in a festive holiday atmosphere, with both of us under the same roof twenty-four hours a day.

  Personally, I didn’t think she had a chance.

  In anticipation and retrospect, holidays come into their own. We’re all salesmen then, armed with brochures, videos and amusing anecdotes. Real time is more problematic. Looking back, that holiday in France formed a point of no return in my relationship with Karen. On the ground it felt very different: confusing, stressful, messy, tiring, incomplete, frustrating.

  The villa had turned out to be a converted barn featuring renovated stone walls, distressed oak furniture, and a large resident population of rats, bats, wasps, flies, spiders and cockroaches, all of which strongly resented our intrusion into their habitat. A farm on the other side of the lane provided fresh eggs, the stench of cow shit, and a rabid mongrel roped to a tree who barked for twenty minutes whenever a car went by. The main selling point was a heavily-chlorinated pool in which we swam (except for Dennis, who didn’t know how) and a variety of insects drowned. The tiled terrace, complete with metal table, coloured parasol and Ricard ashtray, commanded an extensive view of a valley studded with similar villas, similar holidays.

  Thomas Carter had found the property ‘through a friend’, and there were some mutterings of discontent about his choice. From my point of view, though, it wasn’t the house that was the problem but the people. In Oxford, Karen’s insistence that our affair be conducted in public was just about feasible. At the villa it was out of the question. There were seven of us sharing the place, the Carters’ eldest son and his girlfriend having invited themselves along at the last moment, and their movements were completely unpredictable. I would have needed an air traffic control centre to keep track of where everyone was at any given moment. Moreover, as the joker in the pack, the only person without a partner, I was a subject of general interest, and to make matters still worse, Lynn Carter had conceived a pallid intellectual crush on me and was always hanging around trying to engage me in conversation. ‘It isn’t going to be easy,’ Karen had remarked when she heard I was coming. Not easy for her to deny me, I’d assumed she meant, not easy to continue denying herself. But Karen had been on these holidays before. She knew the score. Not easy for us, was what she’d been warning me, being so near and yet so far, so tantalizingly inaccessible to each other.

  Meanwhile I saw her breasts for the first time. So did everybody else, for that matter. The rest of her was also naked to all intents and purposes. Karen didn’t dress well, trying unsuccessfully to disguise her wolfish sexuality with lambs-wool pullovers and flowery skirts. But once stripped of sheep’s clothing, her body made stunning sense. As I watched her turn and bend and lie back, oiled and tanned, her supple contours powered by a madness only I knew about, the idea that Karen ‘wasn’t my type’ seemed a quaint irrelevance. I felt like a kid again, skewered by desire, every passing girl a kick in the balls, humiliated and tormented by lust. Women never understand the way it hurts. They’ve never felt the pain that lies behind all the hatred we can feel for women, our need to hurt them in return.

  It soon became clear that I was not the only moth cruising Karen’s flame. The Carter boy, Jonathan, known for some reason as Floss, took to spending long hours by the pool in a barely concealed state of voyeuristic arousal. He and his girlfriend Tibbs were supposedly en route to a camping holiday in Italy, but the lure of Karen’s nudity proved too powerful and this project was indefinitely postponed. The shameless bitch openly encouraged her young admirer’s attentions, summoning him to fetch her a drink, move the parasol, even to rub sun cream on her topless back. All quite harmless fun, no doubt — even Karen wasn’t going to seduce her husband’s partner’s teenage son — but I was not best pleased, especially since Tibbs showed no reciprocal interest in me. An energetic girl, she spent the day swimming, jogging, cycling and hiking before retiring to their tent, blissfully ignorant that the thrust of Floss’s nightly attentions was directed not at her but the succuba who also haunted my dreams.

  The fact that I had an admirer in Thomas’s wife just made matters worse. Not only can’t you always get what you want, half the time you get what you don’t need either. I certainly neither wanted nor needed Lynn Carter, a woman of uninspiring appearance and a dreadful bore to boot. Since Karen Parsons was denied me, I resorted to polishing up my French with Therese Racquin, but the moment I settled down to read Lynn would flop down near me and solicit my views on waste recycling or food additives. The only interesting thing about our colloquia was that they excited Karen’s jealousy.

  ‘You two spend a lot of time talking,’ she remarked one day, materializing beside my chair as Lynn shambled off into the house in search of tea to counter the Dionysiac influence of the southern sun.

  ‘Lynn does a lot of talking. I do a lot of listening.’

  ‘You talk too! I saw you.’

  Karen had been in the pool. Her breasts were covered now, but I could see the shape of the aureoles through the wet fabric. Water dripped from her crotch and streamed down her legs. I dared not touch her. Lynn might reappear at any moment, Thomas was rambling in the woods somewhere near by, Floss and Tibbs were playing badminton just round the corner. Ironically enough, only Dennis, sleeping off a heavy lunch, posed no threat to my desires.

  ‘What you talk about then?’ my tormentor demanded.

  My eyes caressed her body languidly.

  ‘Mrs Carter’s taste runs to topics of fashionable concern. Her position is essentially uncontroversial, eschewing any extreme ideas which might conceivably add a flicker of interest to her otherwise predictable views. I sit there going “Mmm” and “Mmm?” at appropriate moments and greedily noting your every twitch and shudder down by the pool. In my mind’s eye, your body is liberally smeared with a mixture of walnut oil and Nutella spread. I am slowly removing it with my tongue.’