Dirty Tricks (14 page)

But it’s a funny old business, sex. In order to keep an erection long enough to fake orgasm, I had to imagine that I was making love to Karen. I
was
, of course, but that wasn’t enough. I needed the fantasy angle. I needed to call up the heroic days when Dennis was still around, and we were young and carefree, bonking our brains out while he shouted banalities from the foot of the stairs. In Dennis’s presence I became an outlaw once again, and Karen my moll. When he was there we were Bonnie and Clyde, now he was gone we were Blondie and Dagwood. Or rather, now he was gone,
I
was Dennis.

If I’d been smarter, or less vain, I might have realized that this meant that my former role was now vacant.

The news that Karen and I were married was made public at a buffet brunch given by Thomas and Lynn Carter to which we had been invited – or rather Karen had been invited, and had asked if it would be all right to bring me along. Thomas and Lynn owned a spread on Boars Hill, an annexe of Oxford closely resembling the WASP’s nest suburbs of Tom’s native Philadelphia. It spelt money, but in a style which brought the denizens of North Oxford out in flushes of embarrassed superiority. It was a further proof of Thomas Carter’s blissful innocence that he evidently had no idea that his swimming-pool, tennis court, fitted kitchen and high-tech appliances were as contemptible to the class whose values he so admired as the Parsons’ van Gogh prints and Dacron three-piece suite. He blithely led his guests to the picture-window framing the classic ‘dreaming spires’ view of the city, pointing out the various features, distinguishing the cathedral from St Mary’s, Merton from Magdalen, the fantastic lacework of All Souls from the monastic sobriety of New College. ‘He really knows his Oxford!’ he thought we thought, while every enthusiastic word and expansive gesture in fact revealed that the poor bugger hadn’t a clue about the place.

The gathering was a complex affair, socially. A representative sampling of Osiris Management Services’ clientele was there, beefy ballocky blokes who prized the rugby scrum of life as much as an opportunity for putting the boot in as for winning the ball. To them, the occasion was just another hospitality tent, an opportunity to claw back some of Thomas’s fees by consuming as much of his food and drink as possible. They ganged together round the buffet, whingeing about business and interest-rate hikes, doing gamesmanship numbers on each other, exchanging racy stories and tall tales and laughing fit to bust their considerable guts. These hearties certainly weren’t aware that Thomas was wrong-footing himself. If they had any reservations about the amenities he was so tastelessly flaunting, it was only to ask themselves what his profit margin must be if he could afford this stuff.

After some time one became aware that members of a quite different clan were also to be found scattered in little clusters throughout the open-plan living area. Both sexes were clad in essentially masculine garments which looked as though they had been in the family for generations: waxed jackets, sensible shoes, chunky pullovers, indestructible tweeds and cords. They came complete with miniature versions of themselves, flawlessly self-assured offspring called Ben, Simon, Emma and Kate, who had been breast-fed dry sherry and even drier wit. Their demeanour was one of fastidiously ruffled
pudeur
. Identifying one another like fellow nationals grounded amid alien hordes in a foreign airport, they exchanged glances dense with judgement. Poor Thomas! He had installed the obligatory Aga cooker, but also a microwave, an indoor barbecue, and a 24-inch remote-control colour television. He drove the statutory Volvo estate, but left it parked outside the two-car garage beside his wife’s Honda hatchback and his son’s Kawasaki motorcycle. Wince! Cringe!

I was busily listening to these subliminal hisses of disapproval when Alison Kraemer appeared at my elbow. Within minutes we were discussing a recent television series adapted from a classic novel and disagreeing about why it had been so unsatisfying. I suggested that the subtlety and depth which characterize good fiction must inevitably be lost in any version acceptable to the
box populi
. Alison signalled her appreciation of this pun, but took a neo-McLuhanite line herself, arguing that since actuality was the essence of the medium, watching a classic novel on television was as odd as reading it in a newspaper. I’m quite sure she didn’t believe a word of this, but in Oxford it is considered good manners to take an adversarial position so as to generate an interesting conversation and allow both parties to display their intelligence, knowledge and eloquence. Once this had been achieved, and we had given each other that little nod of recognition with which one acknowledges an intellectual equal, I moved on to the question that really interested me, which was how Alison came to know Thomas Carter in the first place.

‘A management consultant? It doesn’t seem quite your …’

I left the phrase hanging.

‘Oh, it’s got nothing to do with
business
,’ Alison replied with a laugh that ever so gently reprimanded me for my mercantile preoccupations. ‘We make music together.’

There was, as they say, no answer to that – or at least none that I was prepared to touch with a barge-pole.

‘He’s easily the best of us, technically,’ Alison went on. ‘He can sight-read almost anything we do.’

‘And what
do
you do?’

‘Sixteenth century, mostly. Byrd, Tomkins, Morley, Wilbye, Weelkes, some Palestrina and Victoria.’

The North Oxford brigade had by now formed a coherent clique at one end of the room, separated by a buffer zone of bare carpet from the jolly tradesmen.

‘And these people …?’

This time Alison refused the bait, merely gazing at me with her large, bovine eyes. I felt an enormous sense of peace and security in her presence. It was like going for a walk in a Constable painting.

‘What brings
them
here?’

‘I really can’t speak for all of them. Some will be friends they’ve made through Ralph and Jonathan, I expect. Dragon School mafia, you know. Quite a few are from the madrigal group, or people Tom’s got to know through it.’

I nodded.

‘And what about you?’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘What brings
you
here?’

Before I could answer, a shrill peal of laughter cut through the air like fingernails dragged down a blackboard. I looked round to find Karen standing in the centre of a group of businessmen who were eyeing her up and down in a blatantly sexual way. One leaned forward, his face almost touching hers, and made some comment to which she responded with another shriek of mirth.

Instantly my position became hideously clear. In my analysis of the social and intellectual divisions at the party, it had never occurred to me to question where I stood myself. I had included myself in the North Oxford set as of right, a right seemingly confirmed by the way Alison had approached me and the ease with which we had conversed. Just like Thomas, I could sight-read anything she threw at me. I had completely forgotten Karen until her squeal of laughter reminded me of the answer to Alison’s question. Why was I there? I was there because Karen had brought me.

Alison stood waiting for me to reply, but I couldn’t. I was completely paralysed by the realization of what I had done. I had delivered myself over, bound head and foot, to the yahoos. Soon Alison would know, the Carters would know, everyone would know, and once they knew they would cut me dead. My clever chat would avail me nothing in the face of the fact that I had chosen to ally myself with a woman who practically peed her pants at some salesman’s blue jokes. I just hoped Karen wouldn’t go any further, that she wouldn’t get so drunk that she tried to mount some leering admirer who happened to step on her toe by mistake.

My speculations were cut short by the appearance of Karen herself at my elbow.

‘You’ve been talking a lot,’ she said aggressively.

‘And saying very little, I’m afraid,’ replied Alison, effortlessly defusing the situation.

Karen glared at her.

‘Has he told you we’re married?’

She was perceptibly drunk, and for a moment Alison hesitated, as though she might be joking. But the steely ‘So fuck you, smarty-pants, ‘cos he’s mine’ look in Karen’s eye soon put paid to that idea. Alison stood looking us both up and down, the gold-digger and the whore. Then she stage-coughed and muttered gracelessly, ‘Indeed?’

This was the black cap. If even Alison Kraemer’s perfect manners could not cope with the news, then our marriage must be an intolerable scandal. Within moments, Alison had found a pretext to excuse herself. All I wanted to do was to get away, but Karen refused point-blank. When I insisted, she flew into a rage, and the newly-weds had a very public row in the course of which I was termed a wet-rag and a killjoy who was too old to have fun any more. One of the businessmen sniggered and whispered a comment to his neighbour, who burst into raucous laughter. ‘Are they the hired entertainers, Mummy?’ a North Oxford brat inquired in piercing tones. I had achieved the remarkable feat of uniting the two factions at the party in mockery of me. Gown despised me for selling my soul to a shrill shallow shrew, town for being an old fart who couldn’t satisfy his frisky young mate. I hadn’t a friend in the room. What Karen didn’t realize, in her moment of cheap triumph, was that she didn’t either.

As the months passed, the fact of our social isolation gradually began to sink in. One by one the Parsons’ former friends and acquaintances found reasons not to accept our invitations, and although they claimed to be anxious that we should ‘get together some time’, that time never came. I ran into Trish in the Covered Market one day, and I felt so lonely I asked her to have a coffee. It was fun hearing all the gossip from the school. Clive’s latest wheeze was to have the students – now referred to as ‘customers’ – grade the teachers on a scale of one to ten. These points were then totalled and posted up in the staff room, and at the end of the year those at the bottom of the list were dismissed.

But the hottest item of news concerned my ex-student Garcia. ‘It turns out he’s got a human rights record as long as your arm,’ Trish told me. ‘Torture, murder, kidnapping, you name it. Terry got on to it through Amnesty International. Apparently when the military junta was overthrown Garcia managed to get sent over here through a contact in the embassy. Now the new regime want him back to stand trial, but to get extradition they have to establish a
prima facie
case under British law and their system is so different from ours that their evidence won’t stand up over here. His student visa is only valid as long as he’s enrolled at a school, so we went to Clive and tried to get him expelled. You can imagine the response.’

‘ “The Oxford International Language College is a non-ideological, non-denominational, profit-making organization dedicated to bring together people from many different cultures and walks of life. Nation shall speak peace unto nation, and I shall grab a piece of the action. Any member of staff who feels unable to live up to this high ideal is at perfect liberty to hand in his or her resignation. There were over forty applicants for the last post …” ’

For a moment, Trish’s laughter made me regret leaving the chummy, easy-going atmosphere of Winston Street. But only for a moment. Trish might have found my imitation of Clive’s cant amusing, but the fact remained that she was still in his power and I wasn’t. I had to keep reminding myself of that. All my life I had chosen the soft options: good times, good company, good fun. Now I was finally growing up. It might not be easy, but it was the only way forward.

Karen’s line on our ostracism was that everything would be all right once people heard she was pregnant. She may well have been right about this. It’s quite possible that people shunned us not so much as a mark of outrage at what we had done, but to avoid the frustration of not being able to satisfy their curiosity about what exactly it was. The questions our friends were dying to ask were those which the tabloids have trumpeted ever since the case came into the public domain. Since they couldn’t talk about that, they preferred not to talk at all. Having a baby would have taken us off the front pages, making us safe and dull again. Other people’s sexuality is always threatening, a hot dark secret from which we’re excluded. Birth brings it out in the open. Look, the proud parents exclaim, here’s our sexuality! Come and tickle its tiny toes and admire its baby-blue eyes! And everyone heaves a massive sigh of relief. There they were imagining satyrs and succubae and God knows what manner of obscene delights, and all the time it was just a
baby
!

The only problem with this pleasing scenario was that there wasn’t going to be any baby. This wasn’t for want of trying. If effort had counted for anything, we would have had a family of Catholic proportions. We were even using the papally approved contraceptive method, only in reverse. Karen carefully calculated the period when she was most fertile, and while that window of opportunity was open I was on standby twenty-four hours a day. Knowing it was all a pointless farce sapped my morale as much as the rigorous regime did my physique. I churned out orgasms to order, squawking and spluttering like Sylvester the Cat on acid. Karen was too desperate to notice. By now the soggy British spring was upon us. Purple and yellow crocuses were popping up all over the lawn, the hard winter outlines of shrubs and trees were blurred by new growth like the fuzz on an adolescent’s upper lip, even the rows of savagely pruned rosebushes at the front of the house, separated by concrete walkways like a cemetery of spider crabs buried upside-down, were shoving out shoots and buds. Nature was blooming and burgeoning, but poor Karen couldn’t get gravid for love or money. If fecundity continued to evade her, the question of responsibility was bound to come up sooner or later. Who was at fault? Was it Bill or was it Ben? Which of those two flowerpot men, her ovaries or my semen?

Up to now I’ve avoided mentioning our day-to-day domestic life, for much the same reason that ex-prisoners are reluctant to talk about their time inside. What brought Karen and I together was sex, but sex in Dennis’s shadow, agitprop sex, perilous, defiant and liberating. Now the tyrant was dead, sex was no longer a revolutionary gesture but establishment policy, with demanding productivity quotas and output targets. Our spare time was devoted to a vicious, unrelenting guerilla war inspired by Karen’s massive inferiority complex. Her tastes merely appalled me, but she felt threatened by mine. She couldn’t live and let live. She had to search and destroy, scorch and defoliate, and she made the most of her one point of advantage, namely that I was a kept man.