Dirty Tricks (12 page)

But the most striking evidence came from an Oriel Eight out training. As we drifted across the river, their cox first shouted a warning, then ordered the crew to angle their oars to avoid fouling the punt. As a result their practice run had to be aborted, and we thus had their full and indignant attention as we came alongside. This happened to be the very moment when I dropped the punt-pole into the water, the idea being that Dennis could grab hold of it and I would then pull him in. Unfortunately the pole was heavier than I had thought, I misjudged the angle and the thing came down on Dennis’s head. This incident has since been described, by the tabloid whose lurid prose I regaled you with earlier, as ‘a pitiless and cynical
coup de grâce’
. One hesitates to dispute this judgement, coming as it does from a source with such impeccable credentials in pitiless cynicism, but the fact remains that the young men of Oriel didn’t see it quite that way. Not that my character emerged unscathed from their testimony. ‘Frenzied and totally ineffective bumbling’, ‘drunken hysteria’ and ‘blind panic’ were some of the less offensive phrases mentioned in the coroner’s court. Out on the river, their language was less guarded, and we were treated to a variety of epithets which no Merton man, I hope, would have allowed past his lips in mixed company. But the vital point is what was
not
said. I may have been called a pillock and a dickhead, but no one asked why I had tried to brain my companion. It is also noteworthy that the Oriel crew – who may be presumed to have known a thing or two about rowing, given their record in recent years – also failed to remark on the fact that I or Karen were allegedly paddling
away
from the drowning man. What they saw, as one put it, were two people who weren’t up to boating in the bath, never mind on the Thames in spate.

A more substantial objection is why neither Karen nor I had dived in to try and save Dennis. At the time this criticism was directed at her rather than at me. Karen was not only Dennis’s wife but also a physical education instructor who could, as the coroner facetiously remarked, have swum to her husband’s rescue using either the crawl, breast-stroke, back-stroke or butterfly. This betrays a complete lack of understanding of the actual circumstances. The very newspapers which subsequently pilloried our ‘cowardice – or worse’ are constantly bemoaning the deaths of people who rashly attempt to rescue swimmers in distress, only to perish themselves as well. Dennis was thrashing about so vigorously that even a trained lifeguard would have had difficulty in retrieving him. To throw ourselves into those turbulent waters and then be unable to regain the punt would have put paid to any hope of rescuing Dennis. Of course it is easy to argue now, with the benefit of hindsight, that Dennis was doomed anyway, but it didn’t appear like that at the time. When he first fell in, I remember shouting at him impatiently to stop fooling about. It seemed inconceivable that a mere punt trip could end in death. Even after the pole struck Dennis on the head and he disappeared from sight, I remember thinking that he would pop up at any moment alongside the boat, like a coot. If either Karen or I had had any idea that it was possible for someone to drown so quickly, we would no doubt have thrown caution to the wind and dived in. Not that this would have made the slightest difference to the outcome. The simple fact of the matter is that we should never have been there in the first place.

The coroner concurred. In his verdict, he called for consideration to be given to regulations restricting punts to the relatively safe waters of the Cherwell and to review the conditions under which they could be hired. ‘It is striking,’ he concluded, ‘that while strict laws govern the use of motor vehicles, anyone may hire a marine craft and then, with no experience whatsoever, without a life-jacket, unable to swim and in a state of advanced inebriation, attempt to navigate a busy and treacherous public waterway. As long as this state of affairs continues, tragedies such as this will necessarily recur.’

No policemen leapt to their feet, protesting at this travesty of justice. Indeed, the police treated us both with the greatest sympathy and consideration from the moment I rang them from a callbox on the Abingdon Road. The river authorities contacted the lock-keeper at Iffley and it was there that Dennis’s body was eventually recovered later that evening. Karen was at home by then, under sedation.

The next time I saw her was at the crematorium. Thomas and Lynn were there too, to say nothing of Roger and Marina, if that’s her name, and the rest of them. Clive also attended, visibly gleeful that he had spared the school any undesirable publicity by unloading me in the nick of time. The only other person I recognized was Alison Kraemer. She expressed her condolences briefly and tactfully, in marked contrast to some of those present, who couldn’t quite bring themselves to approach the grieving widow but were quite prepared to quiz me at length about the details of Dennis’s last hours. To keep them at bay, I engaged Alison in close conversation. It turned out that she was a freelance editor for OUP, with a daughter in her early teens and a seven-year-old son for whom she had been caring single-handedly since her husband’s untimely death. I found it supremely restful to talk to her, and when we finally parted I told her I hoped we might see each other again some time. A lanky cleric oozing good intentions and bad faith then launched into an address that was squirmingly anxious to avoid giving offence to persons of any or no belief while still suggesting that, who knows, there might after all be, you know,
something
out there. While we all coughed and looked at our shoes in embarrassment, the gleaming casket containing Dennis’s mortal remains was spirited away to the nether regions of the crematorium.

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?