Dirty Tricks (9 page)

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 rosé. 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 aroused 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.

At such moments of crisis, some people resort to drink. I couldn’t afford drink, so I resorted to Karen instead. The only advantage of being dumped by Clive was that it made this a lot simpler. Dennis’s mornings were fully taken up meeting clients, delegating responsibilities, processing figures and accessing data. His afternoons were much less predictable, and that was also when the bulk of Karen’s contact hours were timetabled. So if I’d still been giving Clive the best part of my days, occasions for dalliance would have been rare and risky. As a gentleman of leisure it was a breeze. Dennis Parsons was blessed with behavioural patterns which were etched into his brain like circuits in a microchip. When it comes to the detail of everyday life most of us just muddle through somehow, but Dennis was a Platonist. When he went to the toilet, for example, his aim wasn’t just any old crap but the closest possible approximation in this imperfect world to the Eternal Idea of Dennis-Going-to-the-Toilet. This had been of something more than philosophical interest to Karen and I in our pre-coital phase, since it meant that we could count on at least a minute thirty seconds before he reappeared, or as much as three minutes forty-five seconds if we heard the seat go down for a big jobby.

Now we had moved on to bigger and better things, this predictability still stood us in good stead. At 8.57 every weekday, Dennis went out to fetch the BMW from the garage. Exactly one minute later, he backed it out on to the drive and turned round. Leaving the engine running, he then returned to the house to collect his executive briefcase and other relevant impedimenta. At 9 o’clock precisely, just as the pips ended and the news began, he got back into the car and drove off. I observed this routine the day after I learned that my services were no longer required at the Oxford International Language College, and I knew that barring an Act of God I could set my watch by it thereafter. As soon as Dennis had roared off towards the offices of Osiris Management Services I strolled down Ramillies Drive to the Parsonage and rang the bell.

Karen came to the door in her dressing-gown. I pushed past her into the hall and closed the door behind us.

‘What are you doing?’