Dirty Tricks Page 6

  Karen looked sullenly down at the crazy paving, where a small ant was wending its way homeward with part of a dead butterfly on its back.

  ‘You never talk to me.’

  ‘I understood that it was forbidden unless Dennis was within earshot.’

  ‘You never talk like that to me!’ she repeated shrilly.

  I have never liked shrillness, particularly when allied to Liverpudlian vowels and a cock-teaser’s soul.

  ‘Karen,’ I replied coldly, ‘you and I have absolutely nothing to talk about.’

  But I mustn’t let you run away with the impression that I spent all my time lounging around the pool. In fact such moments of leisure were relatively rare. Although the subject was never directly mentioned, it was subtly intimated in various ways that I was beholden to the Parsons for what was after all a free holiday, and was therefore expected to do rather more than my bit when it came to chauffeuring, chaperoning, shopping and suchlike chores. What made this all the more piquant was that so far from being free, the holiday was in fact bankrupting me. ‘It won’t cost you anything except for booze and eats,’ Dennis had told me. What he hadn’t mentioned was that we would be dining out in restaurants which had attracted a nod from Michelin, a faint damn from Gault-Millau or a paragraph of wet-dream prose in a British Sunday. My share of the bill rarely came to less than?30. What with contributions to the housekeeping, the holiday was going to end up costing me the best part of?500.

  There was no point in protesting, of course. The Parsons and the Carters were incapable of conceiving that anyone could be financially embarrassed by a lunch bill, particularly one which, as Dennis kept pointing out, was ‘bloody reasonable’. At least I had the money, painfully scraped together with a view to eventually taking a PGCE-TEFL course to upgrade my qualifications and enable me to escape from Clive’s power. Every penny of that meagre capital represented a pleasure foregone, a temptation denied, yet now I found myself wasting it on meals I didn’t want with people who regarded me as a poor relative. I was thus in the interesting position of paying to be patronized, asset-stripping my future and still cutting a despicable figure. Dennis would never let me forget what he had done for me, and come September I had nothing to look forward to except another year of slavery on Clive’s treadmill.

  One day towards the middle of our second week there Thomas Carter returned from a trip to the local market town with the news that he had bumped into a friend of his who was staying not far away. She had invited us all to lunch the following day, he said. It cannot be simply the distortions of hindsight that cast Alison Kraemer in the role of spoiler, for the effect was to throw us all into a foul temper, heightening the existing tensions until they exploded a few days later with devastating results. The very first view of the house put a dampener on our mood. Set a short distance off a minor road, approached by a winding drive flanked by poplars, it was everyone’s image of the ‘little place in France’, rustic but well-proportioned, manageably spacious, restrained but not austere, a Cotswold farmhouse with a French accent. That much was real estate, available to anyone with the right money, although it didn’t help to discover that Alison and her late husband, a philosophy don at Balliol, had bought it back in the early sixties for less than?2,000. What no one could have bought, what wasn’t for sale at any price, was Alison’s way with the place. Every geranium, every chicken, every snoozing cat was in its place, like so many movie extras. But that gives the wrong impression, for there was nothing whatever contrived about the effect. If only! What a relief it would have been to be able to dismiss it all as a Homes and Gardens photo-call, carefully stage-managed to make visitors drop dead.

  If I am to do better than merely throw up my hands and assert that Alison Kraemer was in some indefinable way ‘the real, right thing’, then I would suggest that the distinguishing characteristic of her ascendancy was the way she denied you any possibility of mitigating it. Most people go just that little bit too far, opening up a blessed margin of excess along which our wounded egos can scuttle to safety. With the upstart Parsons that margin was as wide as a motorway, of course, but even Thomas Carter, Nature’s gentleman, couldn’t help getting it ever so slightly wrong, in his case by bending over backwards to minimize his achievements and rubbish his accomplishments in order to spare you the painful comparison with your own lacklustre status. Both, in their different ways, were measuring the distance between themselves and others. Alison Kraemer simply didn’t seem conscious of it.

  Lunch was an omelette and a salad and cheese and bread, and it was the best meal we’d eaten all holiday. The eggs were from Alison’s hens, the leaves from her garden and hedgerow, the cheese from a neighbour’s goats, the bread chewy and wood-scented. Alison presided in a relaxed way, finding things for people to do, drawing them out, drawing them in. She did not offer us a tour of the house. She did not put on a tape of Vivaldi. She did not press drink on us. It was all most agreeable.

  I can imagine what’s going through your minds at this point. This answer is no, I didn’t fancy her. Not remotely. Not then, not later, not at any time. Alison was resolutely unerotic. This had nothing to do with her looks, which were traditional English upper-middle class, soft and rounded, sweet yet sturdy. If the daemon that fired Karen had invaded Alison’s body, locking its carapace to her face and swarming down her throat like some nifty parasitic alien, it would have had her coming on like Mae West in no time at all. The material was there, but Alison simply didn’t project, physically. Nevertheless, she had a strong effect on me, and an odd one. In her presence, after almost a year, and in a foreign country at that, I felt I had finally come home.

  When we returned to our gentrified cow-flop that afternoon everything seemed tawdry, vulgar and second-rate. More significantly, so did everybody. All the nagging discontents that had accumulated after ten days together burst out in a series of rows that increased in intensity and duration as the evening wore on. Broken corks and ineffective tin-openers sparked off major incidents. Unforgiveable things were said, and then repeated with morbid satisfaction by the aggrieved party in the manner of beggars displaying their sores. As darkness fell and the booze took its toll, people began to drop out. First Floss and Tibbs retired to their tent to dispel this foretaste of the middle-aged grossness that awaited them in the exercise of their healthy young bodies. Lynn sat slumped for a while in catatonic gloom, scratching bubo-like mosquito bites and reading about foreign horrors in an Amnesty International magazine, and then she too turned in. Only the Parsons stuck gamely to their gory sport, circling each other like bull terriers in a pit, with Thomas and I as spectators and referees.

  The nominal subject of such quarrels is of course secondary to the couple’s need to hurt each other, but in this case it appeared to centre on the Parsons’ childlessness. From Dennis’s drunken hints that memorable evening in Ramillies Drive I had gathered that the reason for this was Karen’s sterility, so I was somewhat surprised to find her going on the offensive.

  ‘God knows why you ever married me! It certainly wasn’t for sex.’

  Dennis grinned.

  ‘You reminded me of my mother, darling.’

  ‘Too bad you couldn’t make me a mother.’

  I held my breath, waiting for the knock-out punch. If what Dennis had told me was true, Karen was wide open. But he said nothing.

  ‘Time we got some sleep,’ said Thomas.

  Dennis drained his glass.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Not with me you bloody don’t,’ Karen told him, striding into the house. The bedroom door slammed shut behind her.

  ‘You can have my room, if you like,’ I said.

  I made it easier for him by saying I wasn’t tired, I wanted to stay up and star-gaze, and anyway the sofa in the living area was very comfortable. All of these were lies. What I was really counting on was finding my way to the bed which Dennis had been denied. I needn’t have worried about him being too delicate to accept my offer. In fact he didn’t even seem to feel that it required any show of gratitude. Why shouldn’t he take my bed? I wasn’t paying for it, after all.

  I sat outside beneath the upturned colander of the night sky until Dennis’s snores had settled into a consistent rhythm, then made my way inside the house and across the living area to the door behind which Karen lay naked. I was sure she would be waiting for me, but the door was locked. I tried calling softly, but there was no reply, and I did not dare make more noise for fear of disturbing the others. In the end I retreated to the sofa, where I spent a cold, uncomfortable and furiously sleepless night.

  I was awakened shortly after dawn by Floss and Tibbs. They were finally off to Italy and wanted to make an early start. When Dennis emerged I reclaimed my room, flopped out on the sheets impregnated with his distinctive odour and slept fitfully until just after ten, when a hot slice of sunlight which had been working its way across the bed reached my face.

  The house was silent. The surface of the swimming pool was quite still, except for a set of small rings around a drowning fly. I jumped in and frothed about a bit, then went back inside and made some coffee. The silence, like the sunlight, was palpable, sensuous. I lay back on the hot canvas of a recliner and closed my eyes, soaking it in. I may have dozed off for a while.

  Some time later I heard a chink of glass and looked up to find Dennis sitting at a nearby table with a half-empty bottle of chilled rose. Lynn and Thomas had gone walking with Alison, he said. He didn’t say where Karen was. We sat drinking wine and nibbling olives. Dennis was knocking the stuff back like lager, not even bothering with his usual patter. After a lunch of Roquefort sandwiches and the remains of last night’s salad, he went inside to lie down. I curled up in the shade of the parasol and tuned in to the natural static.

  I was a
roused by a metallic clatter. To my unadapted eyes the scene looked as bleached-out as an over-exposed snapshot. I could just make out a figure wheeling a bicycle up the drive. It disappeared round the corner of the house. I sat up, rubbing a patch of raw skin where the sun had found out my shoulder. Inside the house doors opened and closed. Pipes hummed, drains slushed, the gas geyser whomped into action. I skipped across the baking flagstones, eyes clenched against the brutal light. In the living room, Dennis lay across the sofa on his stomach, face flabbed up at an angle on a cushion, mouth gaping. I padded past him, towards the bathroom. The door was ajar. In the shower cubicle, water hissed on ceramic tile or clattered on the green plastic curtain, according to the gyrations of the nude body within.

  No one of the post-Psycho generation likes being surprised in the shower, so I closed the bathroom door loudly behind me. The curtain twitched aside and Karen’s face appeared.

  ‘Be finished in a mo.’

  I stepped out of my swimming trunks. Her expression hardened.

  ‘I’ll scream!’ she warned.

  I pulled back the shower curtain, exposing her fully. We stood inches apart, divided by the spray of lukewarm water, not touching, our eyes locked together with almost coital intensity. Then, without the slightest warning, just like that first time so many months before, Karen jumped me. Her legs hooked around mine, her arms clasped my neck. I’d had a soft erection before, but as our mouths collided — we hadn’t even been able to kiss all week! — it hardened up painfully. Even now I half-suspected that she was just teasing, but in the end it was she who wriggled and twisted until we docked.

  After that I don’t remember very much, except that in our ecstasy the fatal word ‘love’ passed our lips for the first time. I don’t recall which of us spoke it first, but as the end approached we were both mouthing it imploringly, like a prayer, like a spell. By then our approaching orgasms had synchronized to form a freak wave of emotion which threatened to wipe our personalities clean. Then it peaked, and we were riding it, and now the words were exultant, incantatory. Whether it was that in that heightened state I had a premonition of what was to follow, or was simply recalling Dennis’s corpse-like stupor in the next room, I felt a perverted thrill, as though I were desecrating the most holy altar of all. For what we had just created was not a life but a death, and one that was to take far less than nine months to gestate.

  PART TWO

  ‘Love’s dart, being barbed,’ to quote a couplet familiar to every schoolchild here, ‘cannot retract, only plunge more deeply i’ the panting breast.’ Or as they put it in the locker-room, once you’re in, you’re in. What happened that afternoon was the product of countless details, all of which had to be just right. If it hadn’t been so hot, if there had been no row the night before, if Dennis hadn’t passed out, if I’d fallen asleep, if any of the others had been there, if Karen had come back later, if she’d gone straight to the pool rather than taken a shower, if any or all of these had been the case, then intercourse would not have occurred.

  Once it had, though, it was relatively simple to convince Karen that the whole thing had been inevitable. No one likes to be made to look like a mere creature of chance. It was simply too demeaning to believe that the experience we had shared had been dependent on such things as the amount of booze Dennis put away that lunchtime. We had to repossess what fate had handed us on a plate, and the only way to do this was to claim that we had willed it all along. When I broke the matter to Karen on the deck of the ferry going home, however, I sugared the locker-room logic in language more akin to the elegant formulas of your illustrious bard.

  ‘We can’t put the clock back, Karen. What’s happened has happened. Now we know how it feels to be together fully, how can we be content with anything less?’

  Thick Britannic cloud massed overhead. The Channel swill chopped and slapped all around. Dennis and the others were propping up the bar, Karen was supposedly selecting duty-free perfume. No one cared what I was doing.

  ‘I know,’ she sighed.

  Karen Parsons never ceased to astonish me. I’d been expecting her to put up a stiff rearguard action, protesting that holidays were one thing and everyday life another, that she had only surrendered to me in a moment of weakness which she would regret for the rest of her life, and so on and so forth. I was confident I could wear her down eventually, but I certainly never expected her to come across at the first time of asking. But instead of prevaricating and procrastinating she came over all gooey, stroking my hand and squeezing my arm and saying she didn’t want to lose me but she was frightened, frightened and confused, she didn’t know what to do.

  This was a Karen I hadn’t seen before, and one I didn’t have much time for, to be frank. After my belated conversion from the outworn pieties of my youth what I wanted from Karen was a crash course in greed, voracity, cheap thrills and superficial emotion. What attracted me to her was her animality. The last thing I needed was her going all human on me. Karen was a magnificent bitch, but when she tried to be human she turned into a Disney puppy: trashy, vulgar and sentimental.

  When I kissed her, she twisted against me urgently, and then I understood. Actions, not words, were the way to Karen’s heart. On the level of language she was frightened, confused and unsure what to do, but her body spoke loud and clear. I looked round. There was no one about apart from a couple of youths stoning the seagulls with empty beer bottles. I led Karen up a narrow companion-way marked ‘Crew Only’ to a constricted quarterdeck partially screened by the lifeboats hanging from their cradles. We did it on the sloping lid of a locker, our jeans and knickers round our ankles. It was what you might call a duty fuck. A pallid sun appeared like a nosy neighbour spying from behind lace curtains. The wind ricochetted about the deck, raising goose-bumps on our bare flesh. A seagull on one of the lifeboats regarded us with a voyeur’s eye. It wasn’t much fun, but we did it, and that was the main thing. Until we had made love again, that first occasion at the villa was in danger of becoming the exception which proved the rule. As a unique event, Karen could file it away in her snapshot album as one of the interesting things that had happened during her holiday in France. But as soon as it was repeated, its individuality merged into a series extending indefinitely into the future. By the time we returned to the bar Karen’s extramarital virginity had been lost beyond recall.

  Back in Oxford, I discovered that I was not only broke but unemployed. Clive Phillips, the council estate dodger who had got on his bike and into the fast lane, had fired me. Well he didn’t need to fire me. Like all the teachers, I had a one-year contract renewable at Clive’s discretion, which in my case he found himself unable to exercise.

  ‘I don’t think I can do it,’ is how he put it when I phoned him. ‘I just don’t think it’s on, quite frankly, at this particular point in time.’

  The technical term for the speech-like noise that babies produce before they learn to talk is ‘jargoning’. That’s what I did now.

  ‘The fact of the matter is, several of the teachers on the course you missed because of skiving off on holiday, a number of them have asked me if they can stay on for the autumn term. Comparisons are insidious, I know, but I have to say they’re good. Sharp, hungry, keen as mustard. Thatcher’s kids. Make me feel my age, tell you the truth! Anyway, what with you not being around and that, I felt constricted to give them a crack of the whip. Only fair, really.’

  You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? ‘Watch out!’ you yelled as I set off on holiday. ‘Look behind you!’ You saw it coming a mile off. I didn’t. I really didn’t. When I put that phone down, I was in tears. I couldn’t believe the universe could do this to me. Deep down inside, you see, I still believed that life was basically benevolent. I wasn’t naive enough to expect the goodies to win every time, but over the long-haul, and certainly in the last reel, I sort of weakly, vaguely, wetly assumed that things would come right. I should have realized that Clive would dump me at the first opportunity, that he had in fact been looking for an excuse to do so. Clive didn’t want quality or experience in his teachers. Quality expects rewards, experience makes comparisons. What Clive wanted was callow youth.