Dirty Tricks (3 page)

As I wheeled my tenth-hand push-bike through the gates of the Parsons’ large detached house and made my way across the gravel forecourt past the guests’ Volvos and Audis, I began to feel uncomfortably out of my depth. These people were armed and dangerous. They had houses, wives, cars, careers, pensions. They bought and sold, consumed and produced, hired and fired. They ski’d and sailed and rode and shot. Once I could have seen them off by asserting that I had no interest in such things, preferring to live from one day to the next, unfettered by possessions and responsibilities. But that wouldn’t wash any more, not at my age. It would be like the denizens of Magdalen Bridge claiming they drank VP sherry rather than Tio Pepe because they preferred the taste.

Once I got inside the house I began to cheer up. The Parsons had tried, you could see that. They had tried and they had failed. The furnishings were an indiscriminate mess: a bit of Habitat here, a dash of Laura Ashley there, a few near-antiques, some Scandinavian minimalism, an MFI recliner-rocker, and let’s bung a tank of Japanese fighting-fish in the corner. They knew their own taste wouldn’t do, poor dears, but they weren’t quite sure what
would
. Well not those fish, for a start-off. Or the block-mounted Manet print in the downstairs loo. There there was the collection of Demi Roussos and Richard Clayderbuck albums, and the Skivertex-clad set of ‘Great Classics of World Literature’ ranging from
Ulysses
at one end to
HMS Ulysses
at the other. None of those would do. To say nothing of Karen’s Merseyside vowels and over-eager laugh. To say nothing of
Karen
.

As I said earlier, the drink was flowing freely. Dennis was an assiduous host, constantly on the move, opening bottles, disposing of empties, topping up everyone’s glasses and handing round salty snacks in case anyone’s thirst began to flag. But one look at Karen was enough to confirm that her present state wasn’t simply the result of fast-lane drinking since the guests arrived. She’d been at it since tea-time, since lunch, since she got up. In fact the prospect of hosting a dinner party was so fraught with terrors that she’d probably started to get drunk for it the night before. The initial elation the rest of us were experiencing was as far away as her childhood. She’d been there and come back, and been again. It’s not quite so good the second time around, never mind the fourth or fifth. By now she had the look of a refugee, a displaced person. She was
elsewhere
.

The people who had put her in such a tizzy were a solicitor, a computer analyst and someone in advertising. The Parsons wanted to know people like that. They didn’t know why. They didn’t know what they were going to do with them. They were on heat socially. They needed to couple with the big dogs.

When Dennis summoned us to table, I ended up with Karen on one side of me and the computer analyst’s wife on the other. Marisa? Marika? The British authorities will no doubt have the name, if you’re interested. As far as that sort of thing goes they can’t be faulted.

‘What do you do?’ she fluted.

I told her I taught English to foreign students.

‘Oh, that must be interesting,’ she said. Meaning, that must be boring
and
badly paid.

‘And you?’ I inquired politely.

She made a little throw-away gesture.

‘Oh, I’m just a housewife!’

Meaning, my husband’s weekly lunch bills exceed your monthly income.

I took very little part in the conversation. There are certain topics about which I have nothing to say, and they covered almost every one of them that night. The guests’ children, recent ailments, accomplishments, acquisitions and priceless sayings of. Preparatory schools in Oxford, their relative value for money. The public education system, its declining educational and social standards. A good start in life, the importance of providing one’s children with, particularly these days. You would never have guessed from the way the Parsons talked that they were childless. The subject was
de rigueur
and they knew it. We then moved on to the spiralling property prices in Oxford, the purchase price of the Parsons’ house compared to its current estimated value, the solicitor’s recent attic conversion, and so on and so forth.

It was towards the end of the main course, some sort of
en croûte
affair which Karen must have bought oven-ready at Marks and Spencer’s, that the muscles in the arch of my right foot suddenly seized up. The Parsons’ slimline dining table was too low for me to get a proper purchase to relieve the cramp. The pain was agonizing. I groped around with my foot for the table-leg and pressed down hard until the spasm gradually subsided. A moment later, to my astonishment, I felt an answering pressure on my own foot.

It took me a moment to work out what was going on. There are fashions in these things. When I grew up, young people had various ways of intimating to each other a desire to become better acquainted, but playing footsie-footsie was not generally one of them. That was what was happening though, and the foot in question belonged to none other than mine hostess.

I was terrifically embarrassed, but Karen did not once so much as glance in my direction, and after a while I began to suspect that she had made a mistake too. The ad-man opposite had been casting meaningful glances at her all evening, and the likeliest explanation seemed to be that she and Roger were doing a number together and I’d inadvertently got caught in the crossfire. The state Karen was in, it was a wonder she knew who her own feet belonged to, never mind anyone else’s. I threw myself with apparent enthusiasm into a conversation Marietta and the solicitor were having about the difficulty of finding and keeping reliable cleaning ladies.

Some time later I got up to go to the loo. Karen also rose, muttering something about checking to see how the meringue was coming along. I stopped to hold the door open for her. As it swung shut behind her, she jumped me.

I mean that quite literally. Karen taught physical education, so she was in good shape. As I turned, she sprang forward like a cat, leaping up to straddle my hips with her thighs. Instinctively, to prevent her falling, I grabbed her buttocks. By then her mouth was all over mine, her tongue darting in and out. I just stood there like a punch-drunk boxer, taking the punishment she was handing out. I had no idea who she was or who I was or where we were. What was happening clearly had no connection with what had been happening before or would, presumably, happen afterwards.

It wasn’t until I heard Dennis say, ‘I’ll just fetch up another bottle of the Hunter Valley’ that it was borne in on me that the woman who was frenching me and bringing herself off on my belt buckle was none other than Karen Parsons, the wife of Dennis Parsons, who was currently six feet away on the other side of the dining-room door and closing rapidly.

Karen reacted before I did. Obeying some primitive burrowing instinct, she pulled me into the loo and locked the door behind us. We held hands in the dark while someone tried the handle.

‘Won’t be a mo,’ I said.

‘Oh, are you still in there?’

It was Dennis, stopping off for a pee on his way to replenish the supply of social oxygen, already anxious about what the others were saying about him behind his back. Meanwhile, on the other side of the door he was impatiently eyeing, Karen and I were locked in a windowless room about five feet by three, with no possibility of escape short of flushing ourselves down the lavatory.

I’ve often speculated since on what would have happened if we’d just given ourselves up at this point. There would, I imagine, have been an ugly scene. I certainly wouldn’t have been invited back to the Parsons’, but I could have lived with that. At the very worst, their marriage might not have survived. They would have, on the other hand.

Instead, I flushed the toilet and opened the door just wide enough to slip through the gap. Dennis gave me the vague smile of complicity that men exchange in lavatorial situations. I grasped his arm firmly and led him away.

‘Could I have a word with you?’

He frowned.

‘In private,’ I added, leading him into the kitchen. I slammed the door behind us to let Karen know the coast was clear.

‘That bloke across the table from me, is he gay, do you happen to know?’

Dennis’s brow puckered more intensely.

‘Roger? You must be joking.’

‘In that case I think he just made a pass at your wife.’

You could tell right away he didn’t want to know. Things were going all right, the evening was a success. Dennis didn’t want anything to change that.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, he started playing footsie-footsie with me,’ I explained. ‘But if he’s not that way inclined, he must have mistaken my foot for Karen’s.’

I glanced down at the limb I was illustratively wiggling, only to find an involuntary erection making my trousers stick out like an accusing finger.

‘Not Roger,’ Dennis replied dismissively. ‘Too busy giving it to his secretary, by all accounts.’

I shrugged.

‘I suppose he might have had cramp or something. Still, I thought I ought to let you know.’

‘Oh yes, right, fair enough. Seen Kay, by the way?’

‘She went upstairs, I think.’

I’d heard the door spring open and the stairs groan as she made good her escape. She’d be sluicing her face down with cold water, I assumed, vowing never again to drink so much that she lost control of herself in such an embarrassing, such an appallingly dangerous and potentially disastrous way.

Ah Karen, how I misjudged you! But I’d never met anyone quite like her before, you see. Even little Manuela, of whom more anon, wasn’t in the Karen Parsons league. Knowing what I know now, I imagined she was stretched out on the marital bed finishing the job. She would have left the door open and the landing light on so that she was clearly visible from the stairs. If Dennis came looking for her, she might hear him in time, or she might not. That would have done it for her, the uncertainty.

Something had, at any rate, when she returned to the dining room a few minutes later. The frantic animation, the barely-suppressed hysteria, had been replaced by a languid, dopey calm. At the time I thought that the drink had finally taken its toll. The stuff circulating in her veins by then must have been a cocktail in which blood was a fairly minor ingredient. It didn’t seem at all surprising that she’d slowed down a little. It was a wonder she wasn’t in a coma. She paid me no particular attention. For my part, I had other preoccupations. Thanks to Karen’s attack I hadn’t been able to pee, and when my organ switched from reproductive to urinary mode I realized that my bladder was bursting. In the end I pretended to be worried that I had left my bicycle lamp on and dashed outside to relieve myself in a flower-bed.

Through the dining-room window I heard someone inside say, ‘… on a
bicycle
!’

‘The eternal student,’ Dennis remarked. They all laughed.

I stood there trembling with humiliation and anger. For a moment I thought of getting on my joke transport and heading back to the East Oxford slums where I belonged. Only I didn’t belong there, that was the whole trouble. If I belonged anywhere, it was with these people, the
lumpenbourgeoisie
, in whose eyes I’d lost caste, fatally and irrevocably. Besides, it had come on to rain, and the prospect of arriving home soaking wet to find my housemates Trisha and Brian curled up in a post-coital stupor in front of the TV was more than I could bear, so I swallowed my pride and went back inside.

Nevertheless, Dennis’s comment still rankled, and looking back on what had happened earlier I pondered the possibility of evening the score by seducing his wife. She fancied me, that was clear. The problem was my end. To drag Karen’s personality into it would be an unfair handicap, but even from a purely physical point of view she wasn’t my
type
. I like my women big and round and female. Karen Parsons wasn’t like that at all. She was anorexically skinny, her bosom almost imperceptible, her rump flat and hard. As for her face, it was one I had seen countless times in buses and supermarkets, dole queues and pubs, waiting outside schools or factories, at all ages from fifteen to fifty. Its only striking feature was a large, predatory mouth, like the front-end grille on a cheap flash motor. Definitely not my type, I decided, even if it did mean getting even with Dennis. I just didn’t fancy her and that was all there was to it.

How simple life would be, if it was as simple as we think!

The rain was falling harder than ever as I cycled home down the Banbury Road, through the science ghetto on Parks Road and into a time-warp. It was 1964, and I was on my way back from seeing Jenny, a very lovely, very sweet and gentle first-year history major at Somerville. I had rooms in college that year, so instead of turning east along the High I carried on down Magpie Lane and round the corner into Merton Street, taking care over the cobbles, treacherous when wet. The half-hour was just ringing from the massive bell tower, there was a muffled sound of organ practice from the chapel, the light was burning in the porter’s lodge and the gate lay open – but not to me.

I pedalled back to the High Street, past Magdalen and across the bridge to the Plain. It was now a year later. Jenny had digs on the Iffley Road and I was going there to see her, to tell her, to break it to her, to break her fragile, trusting heart. I had conceived a passion for another, you see. Liza wasn’t at university. That was one of her main attractions, quite frankly. Universities weren’t where it was happening, and particularly not Oxford. It was happening in Liverpool, where giggly Karen had just started at the local secondary mod, and in London, where Dennis Parsons was fast learning that the prime number is number one, and where Liza was studying art at the Slade. The things that were going down were urban things, street things, classless things. Oxford felt like a transatlantic liner in the age of bucket shops and cut-price charters.

I almost didn’t bother to take a degree, it seemed so pointless. Liza agreed. Francis Bacon never went to art college, she pointed out. In the end I went along and scraped a pass, largely to avoid the horrendous scenes with my parents that would ensue if I came away from the temple of learning empty-handed. They’d been considerably bucked when I got a place at Merton, you see. We were respectable Home Counties middle class, but nothing special, nothing to brag about. Not that our sort is given to bragging in any case, but it had given my dad – a branch manager for one of the High Street banks – a certain quiet satisfaction to be able to let his staff know that his son was ‘going up’ to Oxford. In fact he got more out of it than I did, I think. He’d missed out on all that because of the war, and he never tired of dropping references to ‘noughth week’ and ‘encaenia’ and ‘schools’ and May Balls. But it wasn’t those balls that were important to me, and timid undemanding Jenny couldn’t compete with Liza’s inspired experimentation, nor a damp drab flop on the Iffley Road with the joss-stick-scented nest lined with Liza’s fauvist daubs where she and I lay after our bouts of dirty love, toking and talking, turning the world inside out.