Dirty Tricks (4 page)

That was where I had made my bed, back in the mid-sixties. Now, a quarter of a century later, I was still lying in it. I’d chosen London over Oxford, and that’s what I’d got. The Cowley Road isn’t Oxford, it’s South London without the glamour. But even that was too chic for me, so I turned off into Winston Street. Winston Street made the Cowley Road seem pacey and sharp. Winston Street was where I lived. I chained my bicycle to the railings and climbed the north-facing steps, slimy with moss, where the puddles never dried. Trish and Brian had gone to bed. I made a mug of decaf and sat looking round at the crumbling plaster ceiling, the curdled paintwork, the tatty carpet and the flophouse furnishings.

The place belonged to Clive Phillips, who also owned the school where the three of us taught. Indeed for all practical purposes he owned
us
. Our rent was £120 a month each, exclusive of gas, electricity and water. Clive had bought the house five years earlier, before prices soared. Even if he was still paying off a mortgage, he had to be making at least £2,500 a year out of us, not counting the fact that the property had quadrupled in value. He was rumoured to own upwards of a dozen such houses in various parts of East Oxford, all let on short leases to students or teachers, in addition to his own home in Divinity Road. What with all those houses, plus the school, he must have been worth close to a million pounds, give or take the odd thousand.

Clive was twenty-nine years old.

Still, money’s not important, is it? That’s what I was brought up to believe. Niceness was what counted in life, not money. I was brought up to believe in niceness the way other people believe in God. I lost my faith when my parents died. They’d taken pride in planning for every eventuality, but there was nothing much they could do when an oncoming driver had a heart attack at the wheel and steered straight into the path of their Rover saloon. The estate turned out to be worth considerably less than I had hoped. My principal inheritance was a justification for any irresponsibility I cared to indulge in thereafter. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as my parents, forever denying themselves what they wanted now so that they could look forward to their retirement with complete peace of mind. Since every day could evidently be my last, I was going to make it count. Experience was all, and I set out to grab it with both hands, drifting from country to country, from one relationship to another, a heedless, hedonistic round with never a thought for tomorrow. But though I refused to age, the students and the other teachers grew younger year by year. Eventually I decided that I’d had enough. It was time to retire, to return to England-land, to the genteel sheltered accommodation I’d fled more than a decade earlier.

The moment I got back I realized that things had changed. The demolition crew had been in, the wreckers and blasters, the strippers and refitters. The attitudes and assumptions I’d grown up with had been razed to the ground, and a bold new society had risen in their place, a free-enterprise, demand-driven, flaunt-it-and-fuck-you society, dedicated to excellence and achievement. Something new, unheard-of! Created by this one woman! She had spurned the hypocritical cant beloved of politicians and addressed herself directly to the people, showing how well she knew them, telling them what they whispered in their hearts but dared not speak, calling their bluff! ‘You don’t want a caring society,’ she had told them, in effect. ‘You
say
you do, but you don’t, not really. You couldn’t care less about education and health and all the rest of it. And don’t for Christ’s sake talk to me about culture. You don’t give a toss about culture. All you want to do is sit at home and watch TV. No, it’s no use protesting! I
know
you. You’re selfish, greedy, ignorant and complacent. So vote for me.’

And they had, over and over again, so many times that no one except me seemed to remember that things had ever been different. I felt like Rip Van Winkle, an anachronistic laughing-stock, a freak. Failure was no longer acceptable, particularly in someone with my advantages. I had thrown away my chances in life, pawned them off for a few cheap thrills. And it was too late to do anything about it. In the new Britain you were over the hill at twenty-five, never mind forty. The key to success, an article in the local paper informed me, was to sell yourself hard, but I had nothing to offer that anyone wanted.

Except, perhaps, for Karen Parsons.

So my phone call to the Parsons’ household the next day was in the best traditions of the society in which I found myself living. Indeed without any wish to evade my responsibility for subsequent events, I think I may fairly claim that in everything I did
in re
Karen and her husband I was market-led. There was a hole waiting to be plugged. I had identified a need and was aiming to satisfy it.

Dennis answered the phone. I thanked him for dinner and said how much I’d enjoyed myself.

The reason I’m calling, actually, is that my wallet seems to have disappeared and I wondered whether I could possibly have left it there.’

‘Hang on, I’ll ask Kay.’

I stood looking down at the pavement below the payphone while Dennis padded across the wall-to-wall carpeting and called distantly to his wife. Half-eaten turds of Spud U Like nestled on a bed of throw-up curry. I looked up at the concrete-grey sky, still surprisingly free of graffiti. I tried not to look at anything in between.

‘It’s OK, we’ve got it,’ Dennis said in my ear.

‘Sorry?’

‘When do you want to come and pick it up?’

I got my wallet out of my pocket and held it up in front of my eyes.

‘You’ve got it?’

‘Kay found it when she was clearing up. She was going to ring you but we don’t have your number. Look, we’re going shopping this morning, we could drop it off if you like. Where do you live?’

This brought me to my senses. I would rather have died than let the Parsons see where I lived.

‘No, I don’t want to put you to any bother.’

‘It’s no bother.’

‘Well actually I’m going out this morning too.’

But I was talking to myself. There was another muffled exchange at the other end.

‘Why don’t you pop in this afternoon and get it? I’ll be going out briefly at some stage, but Kay’ll be here.’

Fair enough, I thought as I walked home. I was beginning to appreciate Karen Parsons. I’ve always been good at thinking on my feet. It’s the other kind of thinking I’ve never been able to muster, the long-term stuff. ‘Never confuse strategy with tactics,’ one of my tutors advised me, but I can’t even remember what the words mean. Over the short distance, though, I’m pretty impressive, and I admire the same quality in others. I liked the way Karen had picked up that my story about the wallet was in fact a message, and I liked the message she was sending back even more. It was risky. If I marched round there and demanded my wallet in front of Dennis, she would be in deep doo-doo. She was trusting me not to do that, putting that power in my hands. I liked that, too. It’s good to go dutch on power. I’ve always made a point of borrowing money from women early in the relationship so as to give them a hold over me. It also helps when the time comes to break off the affair, because you can talk about the money instead of feelings and love and messy, painful stuff like that.

At a quarter to three I was in position behind the grime-sprayed glass of a bus shelter on the Banbury Road. The entrance to Ramillies Drive was about thirty yards away on the other side of the road. There I stood, waiting for Dennis’s car to emerge. It was mizzling steadily, so I had lashed out on a minibus ticket, which cost more than a taxi would here. The afternoon was cold and raw, and I soon regretted my choice of clothing, a light linen suit dating from my time in this country. But I wanted to present an exotic image, a man of the world blown in from foreign parts to bring some much-needed glamour to Karen’s drab suburban existence.

I had hoped she would be able to get rid of Dennis quickly, but it was almost 4 o’clock before the red BMW finally appeared and roared away in the direction of the ring road. By that time I was chilled to the bone, exhausted from the relentless battering of the traffic, sullen and depressed. This had better be good, I thought grimly as I crossed the road and walked up the cul-de-sac to the Parsonage. This had better be
bloody
good.

I had to ring the bell several times before Karen finally appeared. I knew at once that something was wrong.

‘Oh, it’s you.’ She sounded surprised and displeased. ‘Dennis isn’t here.’

She was wearing clingy jeans and a ribbed woollen sweater which emphasized the lines of her body. It still wasn’t my kind of body, but dressed like that it looked quite different, a gym teacher’s body, supple, firm and fit.

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I’ve just spent an hour and a quarter waiting for him not to be here.’

‘Why did you do that?’

Ah, I thought. Right. Fine, if that’s the way you want to play it.

‘Sorry if I misunderstood. Just give me my wallet and I’ll be off.’

‘I haven’t got your wallet.’

‘I know you haven’t.’

We measured each other with our eyes.

‘Then what are you doing here?’ she asked.

This was not the first time I had dabbled in adultery. I’ve always had a yen for married women – it’s something to do with being an only son, I suspect, some sort of Oedipal urge to play Daddy’s part with Mummy – and I knew by experience how much care and tact is needed. However tenuous it may have become, once a marriage is under threat it can suddenly turn into a territory which has to be defended at all costs, like the Falklands. Neither partner has given it a thought for years, but let some outsider come barging in as though he owned the place and it’s war. Perhaps I had been too forward, I thought, taken too much for granted. After what had happened the previous evening exquisite delicacy had seemed uncalled for.

‘I assumed you wanted me to come. Why did you say you had my wallet otherwise?’

She shrugged pettishly.

‘You’re late. I thought Dennis would still be here.’

I tried this on from various directions, but it still didn’t make sense.

‘Speak of the devil,’ said Karen.

There was a swish of gravel as the BMW drew in. Dennis clambered out looking disgruntled.

‘Bloody thing’s on the blink. There’s another up your end of town somewhere, but I can’t be bothered.’

Registering my look of bewilderment, but mistaking the cause, he added, ‘Car wash. I go every Saturday. Prevents grime build-up.’

He grasped my elbow and led me through the hallway and into a long room knocked through the whole length of the house. A three-piece suite and coffee table occupied the front half, a fitted kitchen and dinette the rear. These were the real living quarters, as opposed to the receiving rooms on the other side of the house, where guests were entertained. Dennis apparently saw me as ‘family’, or at any rate as someone he didn’t have to impress. What I still couldn’t understand was why he wanted to see me at all.

Almost the biggest shock of the many I had sustained on my return home was the loss of the social cachet I had enjoyed for so many years. In Spain, in Italy, in Saudi – well, no, forget Saudi – and above all here, among your warm-hearted and hospitable people, I had been sought-after, even lionized. As a foreigner and a teacher, I was the object of general interest and respect. At the end of the EFL training course I did in London, a British Council type gave us all a pep talk before we were packed off to Ankara or Kuala Lumpur. ‘Never forget, you’re not just teachers,’ he told us, ‘you’re cultural ambassadors.’

The funny thing was that in a way the old fart was right. Socially, we benefited from a sort of diplomatic immunity. We were extraterritorial. The rules of the local game didn’t apply to us. I didn’t appreciate this freedom until I lost it. I took it for granted that I could associate with people from all walks of life, from every background. It seemed perfectly natural that I should spend one evening being waited on by uniformed retainers at the home of an important industrialist whose son I taught, and the next in a seedy bar drinking beer with a group of workers from the factory where I gave private courses in technical English. Someone rightly said that language exists to prevent us communicating, and of no country is that more true than my own. I never made more friends as easily as when I was among people whose language I spoke badly and who barely spoke mine at all. In a land where trendy cafés display neon signs reading SMACK BAR and SNATCH BAR, no one’s going to pick up the linguistic and social markers that pin the native Brit down like so many Lilliputian bonds. Subtle but damning variations of idiolect are unlikely to count for much in a country where people go around wearing tee-shirts inscribed with things like ‘The essence of brave’s aerial adventure: the flight’s academy of the American east club with the traditional gallery of Great Britain diesel’. Do you know what that means? I don’t. But it must have meant something to someone. You couldn’t just
invent
something like that.

But things were very different back in the land of dinge and drab, of sleaze and drear and grot. Teachers are not figures of respect in my country. They’re the bottom of the professional heap, somewhere between nurses and prison warders. And I wasn’t even a real teacher. The only remarkable thing about me was the fact that I was still doing a holiday job at the age of forty. I was just damaged goods, another misfit, another over-educated, under-motivated loser who had missed his chance and drifted into the Sargasso Sea of EFL work.

Yet here I was, in sedate and semi-exclusive Ramillies Drive, being urged to spend the rest of the afternoon with a successful chartered accountant and his wife, being plied with expensive wine and prawn-flavoured corn snacks, being
courted
. What was going on? Were the Parsons into troilism? ‘Suburban couple seek uninhibited partner, m or f, for three-way sex fun.’ That was the sort of thing I could imagine Denny and Kay going in for, at least in theory. It would go with the decor. But in practice Dennis was too repressed to actually go through with it. Even his drinking had to be packaged as an aesthetic experience.