Dirty Tricks (15 page)

I had naively imagined that marriage would magically obliterate the origins of the wealth we shared, melting Dennis’s laboriously acquired treasures down into a common heap of anonymous gold. But there is notoriously no such thing as a free meal. Karen never let me forget that everything we owned was originally hers and hers alone, and that I had not only contributed nothing to our joint capital but wasn’t bringing in any income either. For appearances’ sake I maintained the fiction that I was setting up an independent enterprise in the EFL field. Under cross-examination I added a few more details about my supposed activities. The idea, I claimed, was to exploit my extensive network of influential contacts with a view to offering special courses for foreign businessmen involving saturation experience in an authentic English-speaking work environment. At the moment this innovatory scheme was still at the planning stage, but once it got off the ground I couldn’t fail to gross a minimum of fifty thou in the first year of operation, after which the sky was the limit. Every morning I climbed into the BMW and swept off, just as Dennis had once done, except that once I reached the Banbury Road I had nowhere to go. I told Karen that I was visiting factories and offices in the Oxford area and sounding out the management with a view to future co-operation, but in fact my mornings were spent driving aimlessly around the highways and byways of rural Oxfordshire. Then one day, just for old times’ sake, I paid a visit to Winston Street.

Someone here once told me a story about the most notorious of the dictators who ruled this country at the turn of the century. It was some time after the construction of the capital’s tramway system, and it may well be that the true origins of the tale lay in a superstitious dread of this foreign technology. On certain days, it was said, a tramcar of unusual design was seen circulating slowly along the lines which passed through the poorest and most deprived slums in the city. Its windows were silvered and the doors locked, and it never stopped to let passengers on or off. The official explanation was that the car contained instruments for monitoring the condition of the track. Some people, however, claimed that at the end of its run the mysterious tram disappeared on to a private spur line leading into the grounds of the presidential palace. Eventually the story spread that the dictator himself was aboard, observing his subjects through the mirror windows.

At first this was merely the usual paranoid rumour inevitable under a ruthless regime where informers abounded, but after a time a more imaginative version emerged. The dictator was indeed inside the tramcar. The purpose of his trip, however, was not spying but something more extreme, more perverse, more savagely contemptuous. The tyrant was bored. For years he had starved and destroyed, tortured and killed. What more could he inflict on his subjects? They had nothing left but their suffering, the pain and misery of their daily lives. So he determined to take that too. While they fought to draw water from a broken tap, he looked on from the safety of his armoured tram, sipping iced champagne. While they scavenged rotten vegetables from the rubbish tip, he gorged himself on imported delicacies. The poverty of their lives played across the silvered windows like a back-projection in a film, lending perspective and contrast to the satiated self-indulgence of his.

It doesn’t matter whether or not this story is true. What is significant is that it was universally believed, because, like a fairy tale, it embodies a profound truth. Only contrast can create value. At first the contrast is between what you have and what you want, but what do you do once you have what you want? That trip back to Winston Street taught me the answer. After a month or two at the wheel, the BMW had become completely transparent to me. It was just a car, a way of getting about. Daily visits to East Oxford soon restored it to its former glory. I would put on a tape of Tudor madrigals – a new interest – and lie back in the contoured leather seats, letting myself melt into the crevices of Morley’s sinuous six-part harmony and observing the surrounding misery with mounting satisfaction. To think that not so long ago I had been one of these creatures, peddling off through the drizzle to a dead-end job! From time to time a harassed mother might rap angrily on the window to complain that she couldn’t get her push-chair past the car, which I had parked blocking the pavement. I didn’t reply. There was no need. The car spoke for me. I simply stared into her eyes through the layer of toughened glass which divided her world from mine. Not only was I indulging a harmless pleasure, I was also doing her kids a favour. It was too late to save the mother, but by flaunting my privileges under her nose, taunting her with the contrast between my power and her weakness, my wealth and her poverty, I was helping to ensure that her children’s chances in life would never be blighted by the well-wishing do-goodism which had crippled me. What makes the world go round is not love or kindness, they’d learn, but greed and envy. The more those kids were deprived and maltreated, the more motivated they would be to get aboard the enterprise culture and start creating wealth.

Even with rows of parked vehicles on either side, North Oxford streets are still wide enough for cars to pass abreast, but east of Magdalen Bridge driving becomes a continual game of ‘chicken’. Success depends to some extent on your class of motor. Delivery vans are the kings of the jungle, but I didn’t do too badly in the BMW. The only people who drive luxury saloons in East Oxford are drug dealers who do karate with their rottweilers to relax. I’d therefore grown used to getting a certain amount of respect from other drivers, so when I found one of the clapped-out Toyotas favoured by Asian families in my path one morning I expected a free passage. In fact the car turned out to be a souped-up grease-wagon piloted by an ageing rocker eager to prove he still had it in the nuts. By the time I realized this we were less than twenty yards apart. I stood on my anchors and the BMW’s much-vaunted braking system came good. A moment later there was a loud crash aft as someone rear-ended me. Getting out to inspect the damage, I found myself confronting a shocked Alison Kraemer.

‘I’m most dreadfully sorry,’ she burbled. ‘I was miles away, I’m afraid. I had no idea …’

She broke off, staring at me.

‘Oh,’ she said shortly, ‘it’s you.’

‘I’m afraid so. You should have stayed up your own end of town. You get to run into a better class of person there.’

She coloured.

‘I’m sorry if I sounded rude. I’m a bit shocked.’

The damage to the BMW turned out to be negligible, but Alison’s elderly Saab had suffered a broken headlight and badly buckled fender.

‘Doesn’t look too good,’ I told her. ‘You’d better have a mechanic check it over before you try and drive it.’

‘I’ve got some camera-ready proofs in the back. I can’t leave them here.’

‘I’ll run you home.’

I visualized Alison as living in a classic North Oxford mansion set on a bosky avenue amid the murmuring of innumerable dons, so I was surprised to find myself directed up the hill to Headington. We turned down a flagrantly suburban side-street near the football ground. A few hundred yards further on, though, venerable stone walls sprang up on either side and we were suddenly in a picture-book Cotswold village tucked away out of sight in the ignoble fringes of the city. We passed a rural church, a country pub, and then turned down an unpaved cul-de-sac running through a dense cluster of beeches and pines to a four-square Edwardian villa with overhanging eaves and low-pitched roof.

‘Thank you very much for the lift.’

‘Why don’t we ring a garage and have them meet me at your car with the keys? It’ll save them a trip out here, with all the time and expense that’ll involve.’

If the location of Alison’s house was a surprise, the interior was everything I had expected. Antiphonal choirs of rosewood and mahogany gleamed darkly in rooms dominated by the rich pedal-tones of velvet curtains and hand-printed wallpaper. The furnishings were genially promiscuous, a jetsam of objects of every style eloquently evoking the varied and wide-ranging currents which had washed them up together here. Alison led me through the hall into the kitchen, a sprawling space with a flagstone floor dominated by a huge table, a Welsh dresser and rows of large cupboards. A set of battle-scarred Le Creuset pans nestled on the Aga where a Persian cat was profoundly asleep. On the wall nearby was a notice-board to which were pinned various notes and lists, telephone numbers, business cards and two concert tickets. While I looked around, Alison set about phoning one of the ‘little men’ who supply her class with everything from free-range pork to spare parts for obsolete typewriters.

‘That’s all arranged then,’ she told me, putting down the phone. ‘I said you’d meet him at the car in ten minutes.’

I had fancied myself a connoisseur of contrast, a gourmet savouring the sweet-and-sour clash between my present lifestyle and the one I had left behind me in East Oxford. But it was quite a different contrast that struck me there in Alison’s kitchen: the aching disparity between the woman who stood there, impatient for me to be gone, and the one I was going home to. I had gained much by marrying Karen, but now the thought of all I had lost rose up to overwhelm me. I found myself wondering who that second concert ticket was intended for. For some reason, Thomas ‘we make music together’ Carter crossed my mind, so after delivering the keys to the mechanic I stopped at the ticket agency. The concert was the following Wednesday. That was Karen’s yoga night, so there would be no difficulty there.

That night in bed I had a genuine orgasm. By now this was so unusual that Karen didn’t even realize I’d come until I told her. What I didn’t say was that I hadn’t been making love to her but to Alison, taking her from behind on the kitchen table, her rump high in the air and her toes squirming helplessly an inch or two off the floor. As I’ve already explained, I felt absolutely no lust whatsoever for Alison Kraemer. I’d made love to her class of Englishwoman before, and had no particular wish to renew the experience. They’re all gauche and giggly in bed, by turns prudish and gushing, fidgety and frenetic one minute, in rigor mortis the next. If by some miracle they manage to achieve an orgasm, they don’t know whether they’re coming or going. Indeed, most of their problems spring from the fact that for them the two functions are deeply connected. ‘Have you finished?’ they ask as you lie gasping, and when they switch on the light you expect to see a sign over the bed, NOW WASH YOUR HANDS.

Despite this, it was Alison Kraemer I made love to that night and every night thereafter. As engaged couples used to make conversation and play parlour games in lieu of the physical pleasures they were forbidden, so I imagined erotic scenes with Alison to console myself for what was denied me: walks and talks, games and jokes, company, solace, an end to my dreadful, soul-destroying loneliness.

It was for her daughter, of course, the second ticket. I never thought of that. I thought I’d exhausted every possibility, rivals of every pedigree from the Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies to a rough-trade gamekeeper out at Shotover, but I never thought of family. Lovers don’t. Family’s the other mob. Family’s legit, but we’re where the action is. They’re a safe investment, but in love you can make a killing overnight. Metaphorically speaking, I hasten to add.

Anyway, there she was, a pert little fourteen-year-old following the action in her score and pointing out all the wrong notes, mistaken entries and interpretative lapses to her doting mamma. They cost a hell of a lot, these Oxford prodigies, but it’s worth every penny. The effect is even more telling than the BMW, because while anyone with the necessary can buy one of those, these kiddies are not just paid for but born and bred as well. In short, they’re advertisements not just for your financial status, but for your impeccable intellectual and social credentials. When Rebecca Kraemer remarked, as the last murmurs of the slow movement died away, that it was such a pity the conductor was still following the now-discredited Haas edition, she was telling everyone within earshot – which included half the audience – everything that Alison could have wanted them to know but naturally wouldn’t have dreamt of mentioning herself.

I slipped away before the encores and hung around in the courtyard outside the Sheldonian until the Kraemers emerged. I then plotted a converging course through the crowd and greeted Alison with feigned surprise and genuine pleasure. She appeared disconcerted, even flustered. Hello, I thought, maybe there’s something in this for you after all. A woman as socially assured as Alison Kraemer doesn’t get her knickers in a twist just because an acquaintance, however unsuitably married, asks her how she enjoyed the concert.

‘Are we going soon, Mummy?’ demanded young Rebecca, who seemed to have taken an instant dislike to me.

‘Past your bedtime?’ I joked.

The child glared at me so fiercely that I tried to ingratiate myself by asking who was her favourite composer.

‘Fauré,’ she replied.

‘Mine too.’

She arched her eyebrows.

‘I’d have thought Brahms and Liszt would have been more to your taste.’

The two names she had mentioned are of course rhyming slang for ‘pissed’, but nothing in Rebecca Kraemer’s innocent little face betrayed whether or not she was aware of this. I turned to her mother.

‘Alison, there’s something I want to say to you.’

‘Is your wife here?’

This threw me, but only for a moment.

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘To
me
?’

Rebecca was looking pointedly from one of us to the other like a parody of a spectator watching a tennis rally.

‘Look darling, there are Rupert and Fiona Barrington,’ Alison said. ‘Do just pop over and ask them whether Squish and Trouncy can make it under their own steam on Saturday or whether they’ll need a lift.’

With a mutinous glance, Rebecca sped off. Her mother looked at me, her face as still and hard as a life mask.

‘I can’t bear you to think ill of me,’ I said.