Dirty Tricks Page 9

  Afterwards we trooped outside and stood awkwardly saying our good-byes. I sniffed deeply. There seemed to be a new aroma in the air. A sweaty, gamey, meaty nose, I thought, drying out a touch at the finish, not much body to it.

  It was probably my imagination.

  The media were later to make much of the discovery that a few weeks after Dennis Parsons’s death, Karen and I had spent a weekend at the same hotel in mid-Wales. ‘Nights of Passion in Rhayader’ remains my favourite headline, although ‘Drowning Duo’s Dirty Welsh Weekend’ runs it close. When journalists resort to this sort of thing you can be sure that the facts are drab in the extreme, and believe me, they don’t come much drabber than our Bargain Weekend Break at the Elan Valley Lodge. The only interesting thing about it is that it happened at all.

  When I say that I saw Karen at the funeral, I mean that quite literally. I saw her. She saw me too, no doubt, but that was it. We didn’t exchange a word, or even a glance. With Dennis’s demise our intercourse, as they say in the classics, had become problematic. Not that it seriously occurred to either of us that anyone might think we had murdered Dennis. It’s difficult to get across to those who didn’t know him just how outlandish this idea seemed. Dennis Parsons was so deeply and intrinsically boring that it was almost impossible to imagine anything as exciting as being murdered ever happening to him. Nevertheless, it clearly wouldn’t do for Karen and I to be seen together immediately afterwards. If I’d been seen popping in and out of Ramillies Drive, tongues would inevitably have begun to wag. Legally, though, we were in the clear. Even the insurance adjusters, who proved infinitely more assiduous than the police, finally agreed that Dennis’s death fell into one of the approved categories listed in the small print.

  It never occurred to me that Karen might be grieving for her late husband. I don’t want to sound unduly negative, but I simply couldn’t see what there was to mourn. There was a photograph of Dennis on one of the wreaths at the funeral, and I didn’t even recognize it. I don’t think I’d ever really looked at him, to be honest. I didn’t need to. I knew he was there, and that if I tried to move in a certain direction I’d bump into him. Now that he was gone I supposed that the crooked would be made straight and the rough places plain. But in death, every wally shall be exalted. Dennis’s absence proved much more potent an obstacle than his presence had ever been.

  My first inkling of this came when I phoned Karen shortly after the funeral.

  ‘I want to see you.’

  Silence.

  ‘When can I come round?’

  Silence.

  ‘Karen?’

  Blubbery sobbing, followed by a loud sniff.

  ‘Never.’

  ‘What?’

  A longer silence, and more damp hankie noises.

  ‘We killed him.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’

  Years abroad had made me wary of what I said on the telephone. While I was in the Gulf, one of our teachers vanished temporarily after a call to a colleague in which he had made disparaging remarks about members of the local royal family.

  ‘We did!’ she insisted dully.

  ‘Karen, it was an accident.’

  ‘If only we could have had a child. Then at least something of him would be left.’

  ‘I know it’s difficult to accept what has happened,’ I said in an unctuously compassionate tone. ‘In a way it would be easier if someone had killed him. At least then there would be a reason. That’s why people invent gods, even vicious, vengeful ones, to account for all the awful things that happen.’

  ‘There is a God, and He’s punishing me for our sin, punishing me through Denny.’

  ‘Look Karen, no one is sorrier than I am about what happened. It was a horrible tragedy, a cruel waste, absurd and unnecessary. But having said that, what about us? It’s been nothing but Dennis, Dennis, Dennis for days now. What do I have to do to get some attention, jump in after him?’

  She hung up on me. This was all to the good. The more my words hurt, the sooner she would acknowledge their truth. But I wasn’t prepared to sit patiently on the sidelines while this process took place. More importantly, I couldn’t afford to. As an attractive young heiress Karen might quickly become the target of unscrupulous bounty hunters. It was no use trying to resolve anything over the phone, though. My hold over Karen was physical, not verbal. If the magic was to start working again, I had to get her alone and in person for a few days. The trip to Wales was simply my first idea. I sent her a brochure I had picked up at a travel agent, together with a bouquet of roses and a letter. I was worried about the strain and stress she must be under, I said. What we both needed was to get away for a couple of days, to go somewhere peaceful, relaxing and free of any association with the past, where we could work out where we stood.

  Much to my surprise she agreed, on condition that we had separate rooms and made our own travel arrangements. This meant I faced a five-hour train journey, with two changes, and then — having retrieved my bicycle from the guard’s van — a fifteen-mile uphill ride. It would no doubt have been quite attractive in fine weather, and the same applied to the countryside around the hotel, an imposing pile by Nightmare Abbey out of a Scotch baronial shooting lodge. As it is, my memories of the weekend are dominated by the image of two diminutive figures crouching in the nether reaches of a vast vaulted interior, their sporadic and tentative remarks amplified by the vacant acoustics into portentous gobbledegook. The other guests are all asleep, or possibly dead and stuffed. The staff are under a spell. Time has come to a standstill. Outside, a soft rain falls ceaselessly.

  In my letter I had told Karen that the purpose of the trip was to discuss the future of our relationship. I quickly discovered that in her view it didn’t have one, and that the only reason she had agreed to see me was to get this across once and for all. As far as she was concerned, she told me over and over again, we were responsible for Dennis’s death. If she hadn’t yielded to a guilty passion then she would have been a better wife to Denny. The implication was that with a bit more happening in the sack, hubby wouldn’t have felt he was getting past it and tried to prove his virility by punting up the north face of the Thames.

  ‘If I’d been more, you know, responsive and that, then Denny’d still be here today. And the only reason I wasn’t is, well, because of us.’

  I assaulted this position from every angle, ranging from thoughtful analyses of the male mid-life crisis, its nature and origins, to sweeping ad absurdum dismissals in which I demonstrated that by the same token Trish and Brian were equally culpable, because if they’d gone out for the day I would have stayed at home and we would never have met in the first place. But all my wit and wisdom were wasted on Karen’s one-track mind. Just as the inhabitants of the barrios here defend their pathetic shanties to the last, defying the well-meaning efforts of the authorities to relocate them, so the poor in intellect cling to whatever feeble idea they have been able to fashion out of the odds and ends they have foraged. Be it never so humble, there’s no place like home.

  ‘That’s the way I see it,’ was Karen’s doggedly repeated bottom line, ‘and nothing you say is going to make me change.’

  Fair enough. I’d never set much store by rational argument where Karen was concerned. It was body language I’d been counting on to win her round. Given our record, I’d imagined that it would be impossible for us to spend a night under the same roof without spending it together. Not only didn’t this happen, however, but it never seemed remotely likely to happen. To my dismay, the sexual charge between us had disappeared as though a switch had been thrown. When Karen and I used to feast on each other’s bodies, Dennis was the unseen guest at the table. Even when he wasn’t there, we conjured him up, putting on his rank, night-sweated pyjamas, recounting his doings and sayings. Dennis was our ribbed condom, our french tickler. He made sex safe and savoury at the same time. Now he was dead, it would be too dangerous and too dull.

  So far from convincing Karen she was wrong, by the Sunday afternoon I had come round to her point of view. Most couples, however fossilized their relationship, have some interest in common, if it’s only cooking or travel or pets. We had nothing. We were like creatures so different that their scales of vision are incompatible. To myopic Karen my world was a featureless, threatening blur, while for me hers was a chaos of microscopic inanity. To seduce Dennis’s swinging wife had been a welcome compensation for my social and financial humiliations, but to lay siege to his frigid, guilt-stricken widow was a very different matter. What on earth was I doing pursuing this common gym mistress instead of a woman like, say, Alison Kraemer?

  Once this sunk in, my manner changed abruptly. No longer did I bother to appear gracious, sympathetic or understanding. On the contrary, I told Karen that she was quite right. We had no future together. The weekend had been a failure — or rather a success. Having settled our separate bills, we walked out to the car park together. For the first time that weekend the rain had stopped, and although it was still overcast we could make out something of the beauties of the landscape. Suddenly it came home to me with tremendous force that this was my last chance, the very last of all the countless chances I had thrown away just like this, because I had been too lazy or too proud to exploit them properly. If I squandered this one there would be no more. The door to a BMW would never beckon again. I would be on my bike for the rest of my life, stuck on the stopping train to nowhere. This wasn’t just another tiff we were having. We wouldn’t kiss and make up later. There wouldn’t be any later, unless somehow, at the eleventh hour, I freed Karen from her sterile remorse. But how could I achieve in a few minutes what I had failed to accomplish after hours of trying?

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I said.

  She shrugged listlessly.
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  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’ve got something to say to you.’

  ‘You can say it here.’

  I felt as though I were seducing her all over again. She wanted to, she really did, but she needed to be made to feel she could, or rather that she couldn’t not, that it was out of her hands, that she couldn’t help herself.

  ‘Come up to the lake with me. It’s not far.’

  In view of the significance of the Elan Valley in later developments, it would perhaps be as well to sketch the local topography briefly at this point. Set on the fringes of the Cambrian Mountain chain, the valley was flooded to satisfy the thirst of Victorian Birmingham and incidentally create a picturesque ‘feature’, a series of artificial lakes connected by dramatic waterfalls. A century later, to eyes hardened by exposure to the brutalities of reinforced concrete, the dams and weirs seem part of the landscape from which their stone was taken. Only the water itself, its wildly fluctuating level carving a swathe of devastation along the shore, betrays the deception.

  We walked along a path which wound attractively through a pine forest and round a spur of the hillside to a viewpoint overlooking the lower lake, which is spanned by a narrow bridge across which a minor road leads up into the mountains. After we had admired the panorama for some time in silence, I said, ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mmmm,’ Karen agreed vaguely.

  ‘Really makes you feel life’s worth living.’

  She was silent.

  ‘Believe me, Karen, I understand how you feel. This is an appalling tragedy which will haunt us for the rest of our lives. We shall never be again as we were. Dennis is gone, and we are the poorer.’

  She looked away, biting her lip.

  ‘But in the midst of death, we are also in life. If it was wrong for us to acknowledge our love while Dennis was alive, it would be even more wrong to deny it now. If we have been indirectly responsible for a death, there is only one way we can make amends.’

  She frowned.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘First of all, let me ask you something. On the phone the other day you said that if only you and Dennis had had children then something of him would have survived. Now he told me, that night we got so drunk, that it was because of you that it hadn’t happened. Is that true?’

  Her head shook minimally.

  ‘We had tests done. They said it was some illness he had when he was young. Denny never accepted that, though. He always claimed it was me.’

  ‘Did you consider using a donor?’

  ‘You mean like they do with cows? Some bloke you never meet jacks off with a copy of Penthouse and then they pump his come up you with a syringe? No thanks, I’m not that desperate. It’s not just the baby, you know. It’s whose baby.’

  ‘So what were you going to do?’

  ‘I tried not to think about it. I suppose I hoped Dennis might, you know, get better. It happens, sometimes. We still had plenty of time, or so I …’

  She broke off, wiping her eyes.

  ‘That was one reason why I tried to stop us, you know, going all the way,’ she went on. ‘You thought I was on the pill, of course, that’s why you never used a sheath or anything. But I wasn’t. There was no need, you see. Not with Dennis. And with you …’

  Tears started to roll down her cheeks.

  ‘That was the worst thing I did. I mean trying, well not trying, but I wasn’t … I mean, if I’d got pregnant he might have thought it was his, that he’d got better somehow. He’d have been ever so proud! And I still would have known the real father, known him and loved him. But it was wrong, terribly wrong. That’s why I’ve been punished through his death. And the worse thing is that now there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s too late!’

  I put my arm around her in a chaste, consoling embrace.

  ‘It’s never too late, Karen.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she sobbed softly.

  ‘You can still have that child. With me. If it’s a boy we’ll call him Dennis, and if it’s a girl, Denise. Let us return life for death, Karen, good for evil. We have caused enough harm by our thoughtless, irresponsible, selfish behaviour. Now let’s strive to live for others. This is a turning-point in my life. It may have come too late to save your husband, but I beg of you, Karen, spare the life of our unborn baby!’

  This seems to you exaggerated, melodramatic, in poor taste? I quite agree. But it was a question of horses for courses. My speech was directed at Karen Parsons, and whatever reservations you or I may have about it, I can assure you it went down a treat with its target audience.

  ‘Do you really mean that?’

  There were still tears in her eyes, but for the first time that weekend there was colour in her cheeks as well. I’ll spare you my reply. If you found the opening pitch a bit over the top, the follow-up would gross you out completely. But Karen lapped it up and came back for more.

  ‘I never thought … I mean, it was great in bed and everything, but I thought that was all it was. I thought all I was to you was just a good lay.’

  I smiled ruefully.

  ‘You were certainly that. The best I’ve ever had. But that was never all you were, Karen. It wasn’t just the sex. There was always something else as well.’

  Overcome by emotion, she turned away, gazing out over the black waters of the reservoir. Then a violent shiver convulsed her. At the time I assumed she was thinking of Dennis, but I now wonder if she had a premonition of her own fate. At all events, it only lasted a moment. Then she looked back at me and smiled a brave, convalescent smile, not yet well, but on the mend, cured in spirit.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ she said.

  And home we went, in the BMW, my bike tucked away in the capacious boot. While she drove, Karen talked non-stop about her childhood, her parents, her hopes, her dreams, her problems. In turn I told her a little about my own background, as though we were out on a first date.

  I didn’t tell her about my vasectomy.

  The vasectomy dated from 1980, when a girl I’d been sleeping with told me she was embarazada. So was I. The expectant mother was sixteen years old and one of my students at the school in Barcelona where I was five months into my first teaching job. My contract was promptly terminated with extreme prejudice. The girl’s family paid for her to fly to London to get an abortion. I went by train.

  After that I was blacked by the quality schools, but I soon landed a job for the rest of the year with a cowboy outfit in Italy who needed a replacement teacher in a hurry. Before going, though, I had it out with my dick. This wasn’t the first time it had got me into trouble, but I intended to make damn sure it was the last. Let’s face it, those who can, have fun. The others, too poor in pocket or spirit, have children. Any parent who says he enjoys it is a liar. You might as well say you enjoy being crippled. Karen saw things very differently, of course. She just couldn’t wait to go through with the whole messy, life-destroying business. The absurd excitement she displayed at the prospect of becoming a mother confirmed my worst opinions of her. Feminism has been wasted on women like that.

  The most amusing thing about the period of my engagement to Karen was the degree of role reversal involved. Not only were we going through the timid rituals of conventional courtship after a six-month diet of take-away sex, but I was the one who insisted that it stay that way until we were legally united. It’s incredible what an aphrodisiac the prospect of motherhood can be for some women. Once the magic word ‘baby’ had been spoken, Karen was in a permanent state of arousal. Sex with me was no longer a sin but the way to salvation. Magna Peccatrix was about to be beatified as Mater Gloriosa. All she needed was a touch from my magic wand. That was all very well, but I had my own position to consider. You know what women are like. They’ll promise you the earth to get you to come across, then treat you like dirt once they’ve satisfied their maternal cravings. I couldn’t afford to risk being left on the shelf once Karen had had her way with me. Her desires were my only hold over her, so despite her frantic pleas I refused to go any further than finger-fucking until she had signed on the dotted line.