Dirty Tricks

PART TWO

‘Love’s dart, being barbed,’ to quote a couplet familiar to every schoolchild here, ‘cannot retract, only plunge more deeply i’ the panting breast.’ Or as they put it in the locker-room, once you’re in, you’re in. What happened that afternoon was the product of countless details, all of which had to be just right. If it hadn’t been so hot, if there had been no row the night before, if Dennis hadn’t passed out, if I’d fallen asleep, if any of the others had been there, if Karen had come back later, if she’d gone straight to the pool rather than taken a shower, if any or all of these had been the case, then intercourse would not have occurred.

Once it had, though, it was relatively simple to convince Karen that the whole thing had been inevitable. No one likes to be made to look like a mere creature of chance. It was simply too demeaning to believe that the experience we had shared had been dependent on such things as the amount of booze Dennis put away that lunchtime. We had to repossess what fate had handed us on a plate, and the only way to do this was to claim that we had willed it all along. When I broke the matter to Karen on the deck of the ferry going home, however, I sugared the locker-room logic in language more akin to the elegant formulas of your illustrious bard.

‘We can’t put the clock back, Karen. What’s happened has happened. Now we know how it feels to be together fully, how can we be content with anything less?’

Thick Britannic cloud massed overhead. The Channel swill chopped and slapped all around. Dennis and the others were propping up the bar, Karen was supposedly selecting duty-free perfume. No one cared what I was doing.

‘I know,’ she sighed.

Karen Parsons never ceased to astonish me. I’d been expecting her to put up a stiff rearguard action, protesting that holidays were one thing and everyday life another, that she had only surrendered to me in a moment of weakness which she would regret for the rest of her life, and so on and so forth. I was confident I could wear her down eventually, but I certainly never expected her to come across at the first time of asking. But instead of prevaricating and procrastinating she came over all gooey, stroking my hand and squeezing my arm and saying she didn’t want to lose me but she was frightened, frightened and confused, she didn’t know what to do.

This was a Karen I hadn’t seen before, and one I didn’t have much time for, to be frank. After my belated conversion from the outworn pieties of my youth what I wanted from Karen was a crash course in greed, voracity, cheap thrills and superficial emotion. What attracted me to her was her animality. The last thing I needed was her going all human on me. Karen was a magnificent bitch, but when she tried to be human she turned into a Disney puppy: trashy, vulgar and sentimental.

When I kissed her, she twisted against me urgently, and then I understood. Actions, not words, were the way to Karen’s heart. On the level of language she was frightened, confused and unsure what to do, but her body spoke loud and clear. I looked round. There was no one about apart from a couple of youths stoning the seagulls with empty beer bottles. I led Karen up a narrow companion-way marked ‘Crew Only’ to a constricted quarterdeck partially screened by the lifeboats hanging from their cradles. We did it on the sloping lid of a locker, our jeans and knickers round our ankles. It was what you might call a duty fuck. A pallid sun appeared like a nosy neighbour spying from behind lace curtains. The wind ricochetted about the deck, raising goose-bumps on our bare flesh. A seagull on one of the lifeboats regarded us with a voyeur’s eye. It wasn’t much fun, but we did it, and that was the main thing. Until we had made love again, that first occasion at the villa was in danger of becoming the exception which proved the rule. As a unique event, Karen could file it away in her snapshot album as one of the interesting things that had happened during her holiday in France. But as soon as it was repeated, its individuality merged into a series extending indefinitely into the future. By the time we returned to the bar Karen’s extramarital virginity had been lost beyond recall.

Back in Oxford, I discovered that I was not only broke but unemployed. Clive Phillips, the council estate dodger who had got on his bike and into the fast lane, had fired me. Well he didn’t need to fire me. Like all the teachers, I had a one-year contract renewable at Clive’s discretion, which in my case he found himself unable to exercise.

‘I don’t think I can do it,’ is how he put it when I phoned him. ‘I just don’t think it’s on, quite frankly, at this particular point in time.’

The technical term for the speech-like noise that babies produce before they learn to talk is ‘jargoning’. That’s what I did now.

‘The fact of the matter is, several of the teachers on the course you missed because of skiving off on holiday, a number of them have asked me if they can stay on for the autumn term. Comparisons are insidious, I know, but I have to say they’re good. Sharp, hungry, keen as mustard. Thatcher’s kids. Make me feel my age, tell you the truth! Anyway, what with you not being around and that, I felt constricted to give them a crack of the whip. Only fair, really.’

You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? ‘Watch out!’ you yelled as I set off on holiday. ‘Look behind you!’ You saw it coming a mile off. I didn’t. I really didn’t. When I put that phone down, I was in tears. I couldn’t believe the universe could do this to me. Deep down inside, you see, I still believed that life was basically benevolent. I wasn’t naive enough to expect the goodies to win every time, but over the long-haul, and certainly in the last reel, I sort of weakly, vaguely, wetly assumed that things would come right. I should have realized that Clive would dump me at the first opportunity, that he had in fact been looking for an excuse to do so. Clive didn’t want quality or experience in his teachers. Quality expects rewards, experience makes comparisons. What Clive wanted was callow youth.

At such moments of crisis, some people resort to drink. I couldn’t afford drink, so I resorted to Karen instead. The only advantage of being dumped by Clive was that it made this a lot simpler. Dennis’s mornings were fully taken up meeting clients, delegating responsibilities, processing figures and accessing data. His afternoons were much less predictable, and that was also when the bulk of Karen’s contact hours were timetabled. So if I’d still been giving Clive the best part of my days, occasions for dalliance would have been rare and risky. As a gentleman of leisure it was a breeze. Dennis Parsons was blessed with behavioural patterns which were etched into his brain like circuits in a microchip. When it comes to the detail of everyday life most of us just muddle through somehow, but Dennis was a Platonist. When he went to the toilet, for example, his aim wasn’t just any old crap but the closest possible approximation in this imperfect world to the Eternal Idea of Dennis-Going-to-the-Toilet. This had been of something more than philosophical interest to Karen and I in our pre-coital phase, since it meant that we could count on at least a minute thirty seconds before he reappeared, or as much as three minutes forty-five seconds if we heard the seat go down for a big jobby.

Now we had moved on to bigger and better things, this predictability still stood us in good stead. At 8.57 every weekday, Dennis went out to fetch the BMW from the garage. Exactly one minute later, he backed it out on to the drive and turned round. Leaving the engine running, he then returned to the house to collect his executive briefcase and other relevant impedimenta. At 9 o’clock precisely, just as the pips ended and the news began, he got back into the car and drove off. I observed this routine the day after I learned that my services were no longer required at the Oxford International Language College, and I knew that barring an Act of God I could set my watch by it thereafter. As soon as Dennis had roared off towards the offices of Osiris Management Services I strolled down Ramillies Drive to the Parsonage and rang the bell.

Karen came to the door in her dressing-gown. I pushed past her into the hall and closed the door behind us.

‘What are you doing?’

I untied the belt of her dressing-gown and got my hands inside.

‘Don’t!’

To my surprise, she was wearing panties underneath her nightdress.

‘Stop it! Don’t! I can’t!’

‘You already have.’

‘No, I mean I really can’t.’

I stared at her.

‘I’ve got my period,’ she said.

‘So what?’

She frowned.

‘Don’t you mind?’

‘Not if you don’t.’

To prove it, I gave her head. The effect was electric. Overwhelmed by this proof of my devotion, Karen abandoned herself as never before. The fact that we were making love in the Parsons’ matrimonial bed, the sheets still warm and smelly from their previous occupant, may have had something to do with it as well. Unavoidably detained in a traffic snarl-up in Park End Street, Dennis couldn’t be with us in person, but he was present in spirit, and the result was quite literally indescribable.

That morning set the pattern for our love-making. Outwardly, my habits hardly changed at all. I still left Winston Street every morning for the long cycle ride through town and up the Banbury Road. At about ten to nine I tethered the bike to a lamp-post and proceeded at a leisurely pace on foot to the Parsons’. I had to wait at most a couple of minutes before Dennis opened the back door, walked across to the garage, unlocked it, swung the door up and stepped inside. While he was out of sight of the gate I walked up the drive, opened the front door with the key Karen had given me, and ran upstairs. After that it was a race. I reduced the odds by wearing a pullover, slip-off shoes and no underwear, but it was still touch and go. The idea was to be in Karen’s bed, in Karen’s arms and, ideally, in Karen, by the time Dennis paused to call ‘Goodbye, darling’ from the foot of the stairs.

Dennis’s unwitting participation in our mating was so exciting that we soon overcame any lingering doubts about the risks involved. So far from abandoning our folly, we started pushing it as far as it would go. This was made perfectly clear by our spontaneous reaction one morning when it seemed that the game was finally up. Dennis had shouted goodbye and gone out as usual, closing the front door loudly behind him. In the bedroom upstairs his wife and I were making love slowly. But instead of the genteel growl as the BMW drove off, Dennis’s footsteps crunched back across the gravel to the house and the front door opened.

‘Kay!’

He started to climb the stairs. Karen thrust her pelvis against me and raked my buttocks with her fingernails.

‘Did you call Roger about Saturday?’

‘Forgot.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, Karen. Have you got any idea of the number of things I have to keep track of every day? Calls to make, people to see, papers to consign? All I ask of you is to make one phone call to firm up a social event, and you can’t even get that together!’

While Dennis maundered on, Karen filled her mouth with my shoulder and neck, then broke away to shout her brief replies in as normal a voice as possible. I was working her hard by now, trying to make her lose control. With Dennis just a few feet away on the stairs, it was the sexual equivalent of Russian roulette.

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s no use being bloody sorry, just get it done. Today, all right? This morning. Phone him at work. Have you got the number?’

‘Nah!’

‘Well it’s in the book. Acme Media Consultants. Just don’t forget again, understand?’

‘Wanna!’

‘What?’

There was a pause. Dennis squeaked up another couple of steps.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Flubbadub.’

‘You sound a bit funny.’

‘Gawn,’ Karen squawked. ‘Slate!’

This was an appeal Dennis couldn’t ignore. After a moment we heard his footsteps descending the stairs again.

‘Just don’t forget to make that call!’ he shouted from the hallway.

By now Karen’s neck was a tree trunk of muscles that branched out across her face, slitting her eyes, tauting her lips, draw-stringing her throat. As the BMW finally drove away they all let go at once, releasing an answering roar that seemed to come all the way from her sex and anus, rippling up her spine and out of her gaping mouth.

‘That was the best ever,’ she gasped as we lay side by side, our arms and hips touching lightly. ‘Whatever would we do without him?’

I had my ideas about that.

Like the brick she was, Trish had kindly offered to subsidize my share of the rent until I found another job. Thanks to her I still had a roof over my head, but this economic patronage subtly altered relations between us in a way that did nothing to improve my self-respect. I had finally hit rock-bottom, down there with the bums and dossers, unable even to pay my own way in Winston Street. The only work I could find was with Clive’s main sharp-end competitor, a school offering short courses to businessmen on company accounts. They paid through the nose for ‘one-to-one intensive tuition from qualified experts supported by sophisticated resources incorporating the latest technology’. The fees worked out at?25 an hour. I got?6.50, or rather less than a fiver after deductions. The director of studies, an obnoxious little shit who knew exactly where we both stood, received me in audience after I had waited for three-quarters of an hour. With an air of great condescension he told me that he was ‘prepared to give me a try-out’ for a few hours a week. If this was satisfactory, he might ‘exploit me more extensively’ in the new year.

This wasn’t quite what I told Dennis when he brought the matter up.

‘Clive tells me he’s had to let you go.’

I assumed a sphinx-like smile, as though my present situation were part of a long-term career strategy which would yield staggering results when it finally matured.

‘Let’s say we agreed to go our separate ways.’

‘So what are you up to now?’

‘On a day-to-day basis? I’ve gone freelance. A little angle I’ve worked out. Can’t say more at the moment. You know how it is.’

Dennis laughed knowingly.

‘Too right. Half my clients don’t even want to let me know what they’re up to. Think of me as your psychiatrist, I say. If you don’t tell me your dirty little secrets, how can I help you?’

He topped up our glasses.

‘Got a pension plan, have you?’

I admitted that I hadn’t quite got around to organizing that aspect of my life yet.

‘When you’re ready, just let me know. I know someone, doesn’t work for us, quite independent, nothing in it for me, don’t worry about that. Absolutely brilliant though. Put together a beauty for me, tailored exactly to my needs. Most plans are like off-the-peg suits, they fit everyone more or less and no one perfectly. With this bloke, it’s all bespoke. Costs a shade more now, but when it’s time to cash in you’ll be glad you did, believe you me.’

His fingers jabbed and sketched as he explained the details. Dennis was a genuine enthusiast for financial matters. A well-made pension plan inspired in him the same emotions as an estate-bottled single-vineyard wine of a good year, and about the same amount of waffle. I had to listen for a good hour while he burbled on about variably apertured annuity options and the like. But in his eagerness to demonstrate how wonderful the scheme was, he let drop the fact that in the event of his death Karen would inherit not only the house, fully paid-off under the terms of their endowment mortgage, but also a lump sum amounting to almost half a million pounds. He was unwilling to disclose the still more impressive amount accruing on his retirement at age fifty-five, but this was of purely theoretical interest to me. I didn’t really rate his chances of living that long. The fact is that I had already begun to give serious consideration to the possibility of doing away with Dennis Parsons.

I foresee that this statement will excite a certain amount of comment. Indeed, my legal representative has strongly advised me against making it. All I can say to that is that I have a higher opinion of your judgement than he has. A hundred years ago, most people would have violently and indignantly denied that they ever felt the desire to make love with anyone other than their marital partner. To do otherwise would have been tantamount to branding yourself an obscene, inhuman monster, an outcast from civilized society. Yet we now know that everyone has promiscuous sexual fantasies all the time. The people we worry about these days — the monsters, the ogres, the threats to society — are the ones who refuse to admit it.

The same applies, I believe, to the question under discussion, except that while our sexual desires are now the subject of free and frank discussion, our homicidal ones still dare not speak their name. It is striking that at a time when just about every other human value has been called in question, the value of life is still universally accepted as an absolute. Despite this, I have no qualms about admitting to men of your culture and experience that the demise of Dennis Parsons seemed to me to be jolly desirable. I just couldn’t work out how to bring it about. What it comes down to is that most people, myself included, are just not up to murder. We make a big show of our moral objections, but what really puts us off are the technical ones. Most of us couldn’t stick a pig either, but that doesn’t stop us eating pork. If we didn’t have butchers to do the necessary, we’d be vegetarians out of sheer ineptitude.

Perhaps it helps if you hate the intended victim, but I had no reason to hate Dennis. I rather liked him, in fact. My objections to his existence were purely utilitarian. I wanted to make large-scale improvements and extensions to my life, and to do so Dennis would have to be demolished. But how? It would have been easier if I could have discussed it with Karen. After all, it was in her interests as much as mine. If Dennis discovered that we were committing adultery, as he was bound to eventually, we would both end up in poverty. If he died before finding out, on the other hand, Karen got everything and I got Karen. So when she asked me where we’d be without him, my urge was to reply, ‘Rich.’ But despite her impeccable bed-cred, Karen was in most respects a very conventional person compared to someone like Manuela.

It’s really about time we tackled Manuela, who seems to have become a recurring reference point in this story. I met her on a colectivo here in the capital, standing face to face in the rush-hour crowds. What sort of face did she have? She must have had one. I’m sure of that. I’d have noticed if it had been missing. No question about it, she had a face, but I’m buggered if I can remember what it looked like. I recall her bum, though, in vivid detail. It was one of those long drawn-out Latin bums, the ones that start just above the knees and peter out somewhere round about the coccyx. Apart from that she was unremarkable, short and stocky, solid-breasted, round-shouldered, with sturdy hips and ankles, not yet fat but genetically programmed for early obesity. The foreknowledge of that fate gave her flesh a deliciously transient ripeness, a brief doomed perfection on which I loved to gorge myself. Her lips were satisfyingly full, tensed to one side as though expecting a blow at any moment. I expected her to limp slightly. She didn’t, but something about the way she moved confirmed my suspicion that she saw herself as damaged goods.

Even before we’d exchanged a word, I knew that she would let me do anything I wanted to her. Not that she would like it. She would hate it, and me, and herself most of all. But she wouldn’t say no. Manuela was the product of a relationship between the sexes firmly grounded in the realities of the marketplace. In the last resort, anything is preferable to spinsterhood. If you can’t get loved, get laid. If even that fails, get raped. That’s the bottom line. There were no doubt tribes whose females thought differently, but they died out. We’re the survivors. We may not be very nice, but we’re here.

Manuela no doubt had her personal preferences and tastes, like everyone else, but she didn’t make the mistake of thinking that they were of any importance in the matter. She knew that men were total shits, that there were no limits to their depravity, selfishness or filthy desires. But she wanted a man, so she knew she’d have to pay a price, any price. That was why I had to break off our relationship in the end. I had to live with myself for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to know what I was capable of, given the opportunity she was offering me.

But while Manuela was a mirror in which I glimpsed troubling facets of my own personality, hers presented no problems. Her licentiousness was entirely passive, reflecting not her own desires but those of the man she was with. What did she want? I never asked her, but I don’t imagine oral penetration figured as high on her list of priorities as it did on mine, and she could probably have done without the anal variety altogether. In fact at the risk of sounding patronizingly sexist, I would be prepared to bet that what Manuela really wanted was to get married, settle down and have lots of children. But she knew that no man was going to suggest that, not to her. The best she could hope for was that someone would come along and abuse her in various disgusting and incomprehensible ways. Then just possibly — there were no guarantees with this sort of investment — he might let her have a child in return, if only to give him someone to abuse when they both got older.

A wish for children was about the only thing Karen and Manuela had in common, apart from their interest in me. Even where the sexual acts were identical, there was an essential difference. I did them to Manuela, but with Karen. Objectively, Karen was prepared to go almost as far as her predecessor, and her eager greed more than made up for the thrill I used to get from subjecting dogged, cow-like Manuela to the same routines. But Karen’s sexual behaviour was in marked contrast to her rigid conventionality in all else. For people of my generation, children of the sixties, sex and freedom are so inextricably connected that it is difficult for us to accept that someone can be totally uninhibited in bed and still have a Reader’s Digest mentality. For Karen, though, good sex was just one of the amenities to which everyone aspired. Like videos, satellite TV, whirlpool baths and microwaved paella, it was a form of in-home entertainment, an affordable luxury to enhance your lifestyle. Karen kept The Joy of Sex by the bed and The Joy of Cooking by the stove, and approached both activities with the same brash, cheerful, unsubtle gusto. If I’d suggested to Manuela that we murder someone, she would no doubt have gone along with it as she went along with everything else I suggested. She might have drawn the line if I’d suggested murdering her, but even then I wouldn’t have counted on her being able to break the habit of a lifetime. But with Karen such frankness was out of the question, and without her co-operation, getting rid of Dennis looked like just another of the many pipe-dreams I had indulged in over the years. But this one was to come true almost immediately, without my even lifting a finger.

The first thing to say about what happened is that it was Dennis’s idea from the start. So much for the jerk-off theories put forward by the police, in which I figure as an adulterous version of George Joseph Smith — not the brides in the bath but the wittol in the water. I would be tempted to suggest that the Thames Valley CID read too many detective stories, except that I doubt whether they read at all. Late-night TV is more their speed. Wee-hours brain-numbers, junk videos from the 8-till-late take-out, that’s what’s formed their model of reality. The trouble with that stuff is not that it’s bad, but that it’s not bad enough. Life makes the worst video you’ve ever seen look like a masterpiece, and the episode I’m about to relate was well down to par in this respect.

One of the many alienating features of unemployment is that weekends lose their magic. On the contrary, I was coming to dread them. Not only was there no chance of seeing Karen, but Trish and Brian took over the house with heavy hints about housework that needed doing or how if only the back garden was cleared we could plant organic vegetables. To avoid this aggravation, I used to spend my weekends going for long walks by the river. I joined it at Donnington Bridge and walked downstream, past Iffley Lock and under the by-pass to Radley, or up to Folly Bridge and through the back-streets of Osney to Port Meadow and Godstow. In summer the water is home to huge plastic bathtubs in which unhappy families sit self-consciously picking at their dog’s dinners, or pudgy louts grow raucous on tinned beer. By October, though, these wally wagons had given way to splinter-thin rowing shells in which muscular lads sweated and gasped over their oars while a weedy wimp goaded them on to still greater suffering. I always relished this sight, which closely resembled the fantasies I had harboured at school, a gang of jocks and bullies tormented by a puny swot. A different pleasure was afforded when the cox was female. Not seldom were my solitary walks enlivened by the spectacle of some plain Jane on her back in the stern of the boat, imploring the team of half-naked, sweat-drenched males to keep it coming, watch their finishing, keep it firm, keep it hard.

On exceptionally fine days I used to prefer Oxford’s other river. The Cherwell is quite different from the Thames, a toy stream winding through stately parks and bucolic meadows miraculously unencroached upon by the dreary outskirts of the city. Shy and secretive, not quite real and very safe, it is an apt setting for the young enthusiasts who flock thither on summer afternoons to recreate scenes from Brideshead Revisited. Striking is the contrast between their artfully-poled craft, laden with wind-up gramophones, teddy bears and pints of Pimms, and the aquatic dodgems of your average punter, bearing ghetto-blasters, squealing skirt and six-packs of Australian lager. Numerous collisions result, yet — such is the nature of class conflict in Britain — no damage is done, and the respective crews pass on their way as though oblivious of each other, hiding in silence and averted eyes the embarrassment of foreigners with no common language.

Despite the sunshine, there were more ducks than punts on the river that Saturday. It was brilliantly sunny, but with an autumnal edge, perfect walking weather. I strolled along the narrow path with the anticipatory exhilaration a fine morning bestows, that quids-in glow of youth, confident that there is more and better to come. But the wisdom of age told me that this parabola of promise would not be maintained indefinitely, but would peak and then decline. A psychological astronomer, I calculated its apogee at approximately 2 to 3 o’clock, unless of course I stopped for a drink. In that case I would peak earlier and higher and then feel like hell for the rest of the day. If I wanted to be happy I should have avoided the pub altogether, or at least had nothing stronger than mineral water. I knew that. So I ordered a pint of bitter, and then another. What it comes down to is that I can’t handle happiness. I don’t know what to do with it.

As I walked back from the bar with my second pint I caught sight of Karen and Dennis at a table in the corner. We all made much of the coincidence, though not as much as the police, for whom it amounts to damning evidence of collusion, malice aforethought, cold-blooded premeditation and goodness knows what else. Is it likely, they argue, that both the Parsons and I should have decided, quite independently, to visit that particular pub on that particular day at that particular time? If they had bothered to get off their bums and ask some questions, they would have discovered that the pub in question was a regular haunt of the Parsons, who went there for lunch every Saturday on their way back from the supermarket. As it also happens to be the only drinker on the Cherwell until you get to Islip, the murderous conspiracies and dark plots which so excite the Kidlington Kops amount to nothing more than the fact that when I opened my curtains that morning I saw the sun shining in a cloudless blue sky and decided to go for the longest and most pleasant of the river walks open to me.

The same fact was responsible for Dennis’s insistence that we should take to the water. Here the police’s version of events is not merely contentious but downright absurd. To believe them, Karen and I shanghaied the shrinking Dennis on to a punt by some underhand ruse worthy of a ‘once-aboard-the-lugger-and-the-maid-is-mine’ melodrama. It seems almost a pity to subject these lively fancies to the stern test of verisimilitude, but I feel constrained to point out three facts. The first is that the?20 deposit required on hiring the punt was secured by means of a personal cheque drawn on Dennis’s account and duly signed by him. The second is that from the Cherwell boathouse to the point where the tragedy occurred is a distance of over two and a half miles, including a strenuous portage, and took us nearly an hour. And lastly, when we reached Magdalen Bridge, Dennis insisted on coming alongside so that he could visit an off-licence at the Plain and buy a bottle of champagne, the sale being recorded in his credit card records. If you combine these three facts with another, namely that Dennis’s fortieth birthday had fallen on the previous Thursday, an alternative explanation presents itself.

As soon as I joined the Parsons, I sensed something odd about Dennis. There was a manic air to the way he ate his steak and kidney pie. He stabbed his chips like a killer and poured beer down his throat as though his guts were on fire. Christ, he’s sussed, I thought. Had I left some clue behind, a stray sock not his, an unfamiliar scent on the pillow? Or had Karen fessed up? She avoided my eye. Yes, that must be it. How much had she told him? Did he know that she’d revealed his habit of farting as he came, or that I had once worn his pyjamas while she blew me? The knife in Dennis’s paw was sharp and serrated, with a sturdy wooden handle. I calculated angles and distances and located the nearest exit.

My fears were groundless. Dennis wasn’t jealous, he was desperate. Time’s winged chariot was sitting on his rear bumper, flashing its headlights. Where was the fun? Where was the glitter? What had happened to his youth? His mood was an explosive mixture of maudlin self-pity and forced gaiety, the latter predominating as he got drunker. He was out to reveal a spunky, sparky, spontaneous self which had in fact never existed. No idea was too off-the-wall, no scheme too madcap. He was going to have fun if it killed him, to coin a phrase. It was a shame to waste such a lovely day sitting indoors, he announced. Nothing would do but we must go out on the river. Our attempts to talk him out of this merely provoked his scorn. What was the matter with us? Had we forgotten what it was like to be young? Did everything need to be planned months ahead? Couldn’t we just throw away our Filofaxes for one afternoon and live a little? There were plenty of people in the pub, and some of them must have overheard Dennis’s vicious mockery of our suggested alternatives, a walk on Shotover or Otmoor, for example. But the police made no attempt to contact any of them, for the obvious reason that such evidence would have been a severe embarrassment to their preconceived ideas. After all, what sort of conspiracy is it when the victim has to browbeat his supposed aggressors into taking part?

In the end we gave in. The only thing on our minds was getting it over with. Dennis had an early-evening business appointment at a client’s house. He wouldn’t be gone long, he assured us, but the look Karen and I exchanged confirmed that it would be long enough. First, however, we had to let the birthday boy have his fling. There had been heavy rain the previous week, and the river was high and running quite swiftly. As soon as we cast off from the boathouse Dennis started poling downstream like a maniac. We nipped along past college grounds, through glades of poplars, to the point where the river divides in two. Instead of turning back or taking the upper channel, a long cul-de-sac ending at a floodgate, Dennis beached the punt on the rollers forming a portage over the weir.

‘All hands to the ropes!’ he shouted merrily. ‘Look lively, ye lubbers!’

He started to haul the punt up the rollers.

‘What are you doing?’ I called.

He glowered at me.

‘Have you seen Fitzcarraldo?’

‘What’s this, the TV remake?’

He single-handedly dragged the punt to the top of the portage, where it balanced precariously.

‘To the Thames!’

‘Oh Denny!’ Karen unwisely interjected.

Her husband swung round on her.

‘Don’t you “Oh Denny” me! We’re going to the Thames. At least, I am.’

The punt tipped over and started to clatter down the rollers the other side. Dennis ran down the concrete slope and leapt in as the craft relaunched itself with a loud splash, taking on quite a lot of water. He started poling furiously away. Karen and I looked at each other, half-amused, half-disturbed. We both knew he couldn’t swim.

‘How much has he had?’ I asked.

‘Lots. Champagne for breakfast, and he’s been at it ever since. He says today’s the first day of the rest of his life.’

‘It could be the last, the rate he’s going.’

Pausing only for a brief tongue-twister — she did that very well, Karen, where your tongues circle each other tantalizingly, barely touching — we gave chase along the footpath which runs through the meadows bordering the river. We hadn’t gone far before we spied the punt entangled in the branches of a willow which had collapsed into the stream. By the time we worked it loose and got aboard again, Dennis’s initial fit had passed, but he was still adamant that he wanted to get as far as the Thames.

‘We’ll just poke our nose out into the river and then turn back. I just want to be able to say I’ve done it, that’s all.’

I took over the poling. We drifted down past Magdalen Fellows’ Garden, borne along on the current with just the odd stroke to correct our course. I was saving my energies for the return journey. At Magdalen Bridge, Dennis went ashore for more champagne, which passed from hand to hand as we negotiated the lower reaches of the river. This stretch is attractive at first, with Christ Church Meadow on one side and a cricket pitch on the other, but as it approaches the larger river the Cherwell divides into two channels separated by a flat overgrown island, deserted except for a row of college boat-houses. The sun was low by now, obscured behind the wattle of leafless branches, and the air had a chilly edge. We took the left-hand cut, which runs into the Thames at an angle. The water was quite deep, and I was having difficulty finding the river-bed with the pole. I twice suggested that we turn back, but Dennis wouldn’t hear of it.

When we finally emerged from the mouth of the tributary it was evident that the Thames was in flood. The surface was grooved with the tumult of adversarial currents, the turbid water lapping high at the trunks of willows and alders on the banks. I thrust the pole into the water until my arms were submerged, but in vain. The only hope was to try and paddle to the bank, then work our way back into the safe waters of the Cherwell by pulling on the branches of the shrubs and trees that overhung the river. I accordingly shipped the pole and went forward to get the paddle. Then Dennis got up.

‘Why aren’t you poling?’

‘It’s too deep.’

‘Let me have a go.’

The current had already sucked us out into the centre of the river, and we were gathering speed downstream. I elbowed Karen unceremoniously aside and grabbed the paddle. Behind me, Dennis had erected the punt-pole and was now drunkenly trying to lower it into the water. As I turned, my shoulder struck the pole, pushing it sharply to one side and knocking him off-balance. Karen instinctively got up to try and help, which made the punt wobble even more wildly. Clasping the pole to his chest, Dennis teetered back and forth, then slowly fell over backwards into the water.

At least, that’s our story. If you believe the Thames Valley CID — not the account they gave at the inquest, when the events were still fresh in everyone’s minds, but the one they came up with in the months following my return to this country — then having lured Dennis on to the river and dosed him with draughts of spiked bubbly, Karen and I went ‘One, two, three’ and heaved him overboard. We then hit him over the head with the punt-pole and paddled off out of range of his piteously outstretched hands, cackling demonically as he went down for the third time.

I have made it a point of honour to spare you moral blackmail of the ‘Do you honestly suppose for a single moment that I would be capable of stooping to such beastliness?’ variety, and I shall not waver even at this supreme moment. Nor shall I again urge the objections cited above to the ‘murderous conspiracy’ theory. I simply wish to point out that if it is supposed that Karen Parsons and I embarked that afternoon with the intention of drowning her husband, why did we wait till we had reached a point where our criminal acts were overlooked by at least fifteen witnesses? We had already negotiated long stretches of the Cherwell where we were completely hidden from view. Why didn’t we do the foul deed there, rather than risk facing a rugby team of accusing fingers at the inquest? Which in turn brings us to the most remarkable fact of all, namely that so far from corroborating the police’s recent claims, the witnesses they located and interviewed at the time signally failed to mention any suspicious behaviour whatsoever. Five of them, consisting of a family and friends out for a walk along the towpath, described only a scene of ‘noisy confusion’ which they ascribed to high-spirited students horsing about. An elderly man bird-watching in Iffley Fields recognized that we were all drunk, and that when Dennis fell overboard Karen and I panicked with tragic results. Despite being equipped with an excellent pair of binoculars, however, he made no reference to any signs of murderous intent on our part.

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 grace’. 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?

Once this sunk in, my manner changed abruptly. No longer did I bother to appear gracious, sympathetic or understanding. On the contrary, I told Karen that she was quite right. We had no future together. The weekend had been a failure — or rather a success. Having settled our separate bills, we walked out to the car park together. For the first time that weekend the rain had stopped, and although it was still overcast we could make out something of the beauties of the landscape. Suddenly it came home to me with tremendous force that this was my last chance, the very last of all the countless chances I had thrown away just like this, because I had been too lazy or too proud to exploit them properly. If I squandered this one there would be no more. The door to a BMW would never beckon again. I would be on my bike for the rest of my life, stuck on the stopping train to nowhere. This wasn’t just another tiff we were having. We wouldn’t kiss and make up later. There wouldn’t be any later, unless somehow, at the eleventh hour, I freed Karen from her sterile remorse. But how could I achieve in a few minutes what I had failed to accomplish after hours of trying?

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I said.

She shrugged listlessly.

‘What for?’

‘I’ve got something to say to you.’

‘You can say it here.’

I felt as though I were seducing her all over again. She wanted to, she really did, but she needed to be made to feel she could, or rather that she couldn’t not, that it was out of her hands, that she couldn’t help herself.

‘Come up to the lake with me. It’s not far.’

In view of the significance of the Elan Valley in later developments, it would perhaps be as well to sketch the local topography briefly at this point. Set on the fringes of the Cambrian Mountain chain, the valley was flooded to satisfy the thirst of Victorian Birmingham and incidentally create a picturesque ‘feature’, a series of artificial lakes connected by dramatic waterfalls. A century later, to eyes hardened by exposure to the brutalities of reinforced concrete, the dams and weirs seem part of the landscape from which their stone was taken. Only the water itself, its wildly fluctuating level carving a swathe of devastation along the shore, betrays the deception.

We walked along a path which wound attractively through a pine forest and round a spur of the hillside to a viewpoint overlooking the lower lake, which is spanned by a narrow bridge across which a minor road leads up into the mountains. After we had admired the panorama for some time in silence, I said, ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’

‘Mmmm,’ Karen agreed vaguely.

‘Really makes you feel life’s worth living.’

She was silent.

‘Believe me, Karen, I understand how you feel. This is an appalling tragedy which will haunt us for the rest of our lives. We shall never be again as we were. Dennis is gone, and we are the poorer.’

She looked away, biting her lip.

‘But in the midst of death, we are also in life. If it was wrong for us to acknowledge our love while Dennis was alive, it would be even more wrong to deny it now. If we have been indirectly responsible for a death, there is only one way we can make amends.’

She frowned.

‘What do you mean?’

‘First of all, let me ask you something. On the phone the other day you said that if only you and Dennis had had children then something of him would have survived. Now he told me, that night we got so drunk, that it was because of you that it hadn’t happened. Is that true?’

Her head shook minimally.

‘We had tests done. They said it was some illness he had when he was young. Denny never accepted that, though. He always claimed it was me.’

‘Did you consider using a donor?’

‘You mean like they do with cows? Some bloke you never meet jacks off with a copy of Penthouse and then they pump his come up you with a syringe? No thanks, I’m not that desperate. It’s not just the baby, you know. It’s whose baby.’

‘So what were you going to do?’

‘I tried not to think about it. I suppose I hoped Dennis might, you know, get better. It happens, sometimes. We still had plenty of time, or so I …’

She broke off, wiping her eyes.

‘That was one reason why I tried to stop us, you know, going all the way,’ she went on. ‘You thought I was on the pill, of course, that’s why you never used a sheath or anything. But I wasn’t. There was no need, you see. Not with Dennis. And with you …’

Tears started to roll down her cheeks.

‘That was the worst thing I did. I mean trying, well not trying, but I wasn’t … I mean, if I’d got pregnant he might have thought it was his, that he’d got better somehow. He’d have been ever so proud! And I still would have known the real father, known him and loved him. But it was wrong, terribly wrong. That’s why I’ve been punished through his death. And the worse thing is that now there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s too late!’

I put my arm around her in a chaste, consoling embrace.

‘It’s never too late, Karen.’

‘What do you mean?’ she sobbed softly.

‘You can still have that child. With me. If it’s a boy we’ll call him Dennis, and if it’s a girl, Denise. Let us return life for death, Karen, good for evil. We have caused enough harm by our thoughtless, irresponsible, selfish behaviour. Now let’s strive to live for others. This is a turning-point in my life. It may have come too late to save your husband, but I beg of you, Karen, spare the life of our unborn baby!’

This seems to you exaggerated, melodramatic, in poor taste? I quite agree. But it was a question of horses for courses. My speech was directed at Karen Parsons, and whatever reservations you or I may have about it, I can assure you it went down a treat with its target audience.

‘Do you really mean that?’

There were still tears in her eyes, but for the first time that weekend there was colour in her cheeks as well. I’ll spare you my reply. If you found the opening pitch a bit over the top, the follow-up would gross you out completely. But Karen lapped it up and came back for more.

‘I never thought … I mean, it was great in bed and everything, but I thought that was all it was. I thought all I was to you was just a good lay.’

I smiled ruefully.

‘You were certainly that. The best I’ve ever had. But that was never all you were, Karen. It wasn’t just the sex. There was always something else as well.’

Overcome by emotion, she turned away, gazing out over the black waters of the reservoir. Then a violent shiver convulsed her. At the time I assumed she was thinking of Dennis, but I now wonder if she had a premonition of her own fate. At all events, it only lasted a moment. Then she looked back at me and smiled a brave, convalescent smile, not yet well, but on the mend, cured in spirit.

‘Let’s go home,’ she said.

And home we went, in the BMW, my bike tucked away in the capacious boot. While she drove, Karen talked non-stop about her childhood, her parents, her hopes, her dreams, her problems. In turn I told her a little about my own background, as though we were out on a first date.

I didn’t tell her about my vasectomy.

The vasectomy dated from 1980, when a girl I’d been sleeping with told me she was embarazada. So was I. The expectant mother was sixteen years old and one of my students at the school in Barcelona where I was five months into my first teaching job. My contract was promptly terminated with extreme prejudice. The girl’s family paid for her to fly to London to get an abortion. I went by train.

After that I was blacked by the quality schools, but I soon landed a job for the rest of the year with a cowboy outfit in Italy who needed a replacement teacher in a hurry. Before going, though, I had it out with my dick. This wasn’t the first time it had got me into trouble, but I intended to make damn sure it was the last. Let’s face it, those who can, have fun. The others, too poor in pocket or spirit, have children. Any parent who says he enjoys it is a liar. You might as well say you enjoy being crippled. Karen saw things very differently, of course. She just couldn’t wait to go through with the whole messy, life-destroying business. The absurd excitement she displayed at the prospect of becoming a mother confirmed my worst opinions of her. Feminism has been wasted on women like that.

The most amusing thing about the period of my engagement to Karen was the degree of role reversal involved. Not only were we going through the timid rituals of conventional courtship after a six-month diet of take-away sex, but I was the one who insisted that it stay that way until we were legally united. It’s incredible what an aphrodisiac the prospect of motherhood can be for some women. Once the magic word ‘baby’ had been spoken, Karen was in a permanent state of arousal. Sex with me was no longer a sin but the way to salvation. Magna Peccatrix was about to be beatified as Mater Gloriosa. All she needed was a touch from my magic wand. That was all very well, but I had my own position to consider. You know what women are like. They’ll promise you the earth to get you to come across, then treat you like dirt once they’ve satisfied their maternal cravings. I couldn’t afford to risk being left on the shelf once Karen had had her way with me. Her desires were my only hold over her, so despite her frantic pleas I refused to go any further than finger-fucking until she had signed on the dotted line.

When the formalities finally took place, it was a very brief ceremony. Our solicitors had prepared the necessary ‘instruments’, and all Karen and I had to do was ‘execute’ them, but when we emerged into the mild sunshine of Beaumont Street twenty minutes later, my life had been changed out of all recognition. I entered the premises an unemployed teacher living on charity in a rented two-up, two-down off the Cowley Road. Now I was a man of property, the joint owner of a large house in North Oxford, with investments so extensive I had no detailed idea of their scope and access to current and deposit accounts totalling well into six figures. I felt all weepy and emotional as Karen and I drove home together. Happy endings always make me cry.

Two days later I drove the BMW back to Winston Street and cleared my room. Trish and Brian were out at work. I left a cheque for the amount Trish had loaned me, plus a month’s rent in advance and a brief note saying that I was going to stay with an unspecified friend in North Oxford. I didn’t mention my marriage. At my suggestion, Karen didn’t tell any of her friends either. Although we both knew that we were acting from the best possible motives, I argued, other people were always ready to place a malicious interpretation on their neighbours’ doings and it might therefore be better to wait before breaking the news.

Karen welcomed this as further evidence of my tact and seriousness, which she ascribed to a sense of responsibility at the prospect of becoming the pater of a tiny foetus. I was amazed and terrified at the change I had so casually brought about in her. I felt like Frankenstein, quailing before the monster I had created. The Karen I had known a few months earlier, a simple, straightforward creature with healthy appetites, had been metamorphosed by my spells into a raving obsessive who regarded the spawning of offspring not as a lowest-common-denominator activity like excretion but as a moral and creative achievement on a par with, say, painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. All we had to do was bump our uglies.

No problem, you might think, given our track record in that particular event. And as far as Karen was concerned you’d be right. There were changes of style and technique, of course. Oral sex was definitely not in favour any more. This and all the other alternative orifices fell into disuse. Henceforth all traffic was routed down the main line. Even once we were acceptably coupled, though, the differences were obvious. Before, Karen had made love with hysterical urgency, a compulsive satisfying her greed. Our sex was anarchic, sufficient to itself, without perspectives. But that was in the past. Now the expression on Karen’s face as she lay beneath me, knees pulled up to her chin to facilitate maximum penetration, was of a recent convert taking communion. Rapt, ecstatic, she willed me on to ever-greater feats of ardour. It wasn’t just impregnation she was after, it was quality impregnation. She might have been wearing a sign like those you see in car windows: GIVE MY CHILD A CHANCE — DON’T PULL BACK.

In principle I was quite prepared to oblige. I may have my faults, but ungratefulness is not one of them. Karen had done her bit for me and I would have been more than happy to reciprocate. But though the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak. It wasn’t a question of impotence. I just couldn’t come.

In the old days this would have been all to the good. There was nothing Karen had liked better than being taken on a guided tour of three or four climaxes. But the new Karen had become sickeningly selfless in bed. It was no longer her orgasms that excited her, but mine. Her own afforded her nothing but a transient thrill, but mine supplied another dose of semen to chuck at the uterine wall where, sooner or later, she reckoned, some of it must stick. Marathon bonking was therefore frowned upon. What the market demanded was frequent and copious ejaculation. And since the supplied response was lacking, I had to fake it.

The simulated male orgasm has attracted very little attention by comparison with its female equivalent, not because it isn’t as common, but because it’s in no one’s interest to publicize the fact. Both sexes like the idea that women pretend, men because it confirms their suspicion that their partners are basically frigid and devious manipulators, women because it gives them a delicious sense of power to think that the delirium which men fondly ascribe to their virile prowess is no more than a hollow civility, like laughing at Grandpa’s jokes. By contrast, neither party has any desire to suggest that men might do the same thing. We males naturally reject the idea that we’re not at all times ready to cream anything that moves as a monstrous slander on our virility, while women certainly don’t want to think that creatures whose sexual urges are so undiscriminating that they have been known to rape grannies and animals and even corpses, for God’s sake, could possibly find them so unattractive that they need to simulate orgasm.

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.

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.

‘Faure,’ 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.

‘I don’t.’

‘You do! You must. You couldn’t be all that you are without despising me. But it’s not what you think, you see. It’s not what you think at all.’

Rebecca bounded back like a retriever with a stick.

‘Squish broke his ankle in Klosters and is being invalided home and Trouncy wants to know if she can bring Jean-Pierre, their French exchange. She says he has amazing hands, whatever that might mean.’

‘All right, but what about transport?’

Rebecca hared away again.

‘Anyway, I really can’t see that it matters one way or the other what I think,’ Alison said.

‘It matters very much to me.’

‘Well I’m not sure it should.’

‘I’d just like you to know what really happened, that’s all. The situation is very different from what you suppose, from what anyone supposes.’

Rebecca was already on her way back.

‘Will you meet me for tea one day this week?’ I said urgently. ‘How about that place in Holywell Street?’

Tea has always seemed to me a childish and pointless affair, but it has the advantage of being morally blameless and socially safe. Nothing naughty has ever happened over tea.

‘Fiona says we can all fit in the Volvo,’ Rebecca announced, ‘but Rupert says he doesn’t see why they should act as bloody chauffeurs for their friends all the bloody time.’

‘Rebecca!’

‘I’m just quoting, Mummy. Anyway, Fiona told him not to be so bolshie, they’ll come about twoish and don’t forget you promised to give her your recipe for clafoutis.’

Alison waved largely at the Barringtons, who semaphored back.

‘I’m particularly fond of the slow movement of his second piano sonata,’ Rebecca confided to me.

The kid was coming round, I thought. My charm wins them all over in the end. Conscious that it would be very much to my advantage to have an ally within Alison’s gates, I replied warmly, ‘Me too.’

Rebecca gave a squeal of delight.

‘Really? It’s an unfashionable point of view.’

‘Is it?’

‘Definitely. A downright faux pas in fact.’

Alison regarded me as though I were a dosser who’d just importuned her for some spare change.

‘Will Friday do?’ she said.

‘What, Mummy?’ asked Rebecca, suddenly anxious.

‘Nothing, darling.’

Oh but it was, I thought. It was really quite a lot.

When I got home I looked up Faure in the Oxford Companion. He didn’t write any piano sonatas, of course.

‘First of all, let me just say that everything I am going to tell you is the complete and absolute truth.’

The little tea-shop was pleasantly uncrowded. Full Term had ended a fortnight earlier. The Easter tourists hadn’t yet arrived. For a few weeks Oxford seemed like a normal city instead of a theme park.

‘You sound so serious.’

‘It’s no joking matter, at least to me. But I suppose I also intend a warning.’

Alison raised her eyebrows.

‘As in “this programme contains scenes which some viewers may find distressing or objectionable”.’

She nodded.

‘Go on.’

‘When Karen broke the news of our marriage so crudely at Thomas’s party, and I saw the look on your face, I understood for the first time the force of that old cliche about wishing the floor would open up and swallow one. I could tell what you were thinking. You were thinking that I had married her for her money, and that she’d married me for … all the wrong reasons. You were wondering how long we’d been lovers. Perhaps you were even wondering about Dennis’s death. Did he fall or was he pushed?’

‘No!’

Alison’s denial was so forceful it attracted the attention of a couple at a neighbouring table. Like a batsman rehearsing a shot after playing and missing, she repeated quietly, ‘No. That’s not true.’

‘I don’t mean to impute mean or vulgar opinions to you, Alison. But I saw judgement in your face, and it shattered me, precisely because I knew I must seem to deserve the very worst that anyone could imagine. And it wasn’t just anyone, it was you. That made it almost unbearable. Right from that very first day in France you made the most tremendous impression on me, Alison. When we met again at the funeral, I knew that I had to see you again soon. I said so at the time, if you remember. I looked up your number in the phone book. I was going to call you and …’

I broke off. Alison refilled our cups and for a moment we took refuge in the polite rituals of milk and sugar.

‘A few days after the funeral,’ I said, ‘Karen phoned to ask if I’d come over and help her dispose of some of Dennis’s effects. She said she couldn’t face tackling the job on her own. The Parsons had been good to me. It was the least I could do to help Karen out now. We spent two or three hours bagging up clothes to take to the charity shops. Then Karen went downstairs to make some tea. When she came back … she didn’t have any clothes on.’

Alison herself was wearing a rather shapeless dress made of some fabric suitable for curtains, which covered her body like a dustsheet draped over furniture. Her fingers twitched nervously at the buttons of the high collar.

‘The ridiculous thing is that I wasn’t remotely attracted to Karen. Those scrawny, neurotic women are not my type.’

I allowed myself a brief glance at Alison’s ample contours.

‘That’s no excuse, of course. I knew perfectly well when I allowed Karen Parsons to seduce me that I was not acting rightly. I was simply too stunned to protest. I thought she must be unhinged by grief. It never occurred to me for a moment that she had planned it all in cold blood.’

‘I don’t find it particularly surprising that you allowed yourself to be seduced by her. What I do find surprising …’

‘Is that I married her.’

She sketched a shrug.

‘It’s no earthly business of mine, of course …’

I leant forward.

‘After what had happened I couldn’t face trying to contact you. I felt polluted, tainted, defiled, unworthy of anyone except Karen, who repelled me. I told her I didn’t want to see her again. She pleaded and begged me to change my mind, but I was adamant. Finally she dropped the bombshell. She was pregnant, she said, and I was the father.’

Alison looked away out of the window at the facade of New College opposite. I sighed deeply.

‘I couldn’t see any other honourable way out. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned. Perhaps I should have been frank with her, admitted honestly that I didn’t love her and that if she insisted on marrying me she would be condemning both of us to a joyless union. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I honestly thought she loved me so much that she’d been prepared to get herself pregnant to trick me into marriage. However badly she’d behaved, it was my duty to stand by her and the child. Telling her the truth about my feelings, or rather the lack of them, would just have made our life together even more intolerable.’

To harmonize my body language with Alison’s, I turned to look out of the window. As our eyes met in the glass, I realized that she was not admiring the flaking stone blocks opposite but using the window as a mirror. It was me she had been looking at all that time, but secretively, like a girl.

‘It was Karen’s idea to keep the wedding quiet,’ I went on. ‘She claimed people might be shocked at her remarrying so soon after Dennis’s death. The real reason was that she was afraid of what I might find out. She couldn’t know who Dennis might have told, man to man, after a few drinks. If I had learned her secret before the marriage was legal, all her devious schemes would have come to nothing.’

‘What secret?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Know what?’

‘In my worst moments I thought everyone knew, except me.’

‘Knew what, for heaven’s sake?’

I fixed her eyes.

‘That Karen has had a hysterectomy.’

Alison looked suitably appalled.

‘Two weeks after we were married, I asked how her pregnancy was going. She turned red and started stammering. Then she burst into tears. I tried to comfort her. She said she’d lost the foetus. It sounded as though she’d left it on a bus or something. Then she started laughing at the top of her voice. I thought it was just hysteria. Living with her, day in day out, I was beginning to realize how unstable she is. Her mood swings quite frighten me sometimes. Anyway, to calm her I said not to take it so hard, we could always try again. It was then that she told me about the hysterectomy.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Like a fool, I told her that the only reason I’d married her was because she’d told me she was pregnant. You can imagine the reaction that got.’

‘But she had deliberately deceived you!’

‘Exactly! She tricked me, Alison. That little bitch tricked me! Forgive my language, but I think I have every right to feel bitter. Not only am I forced to share bed and board with a woman for whom I feel nothing but disgust, but for my pains I have been branded a disreputable opportunist by all and sundry. And worst of all, I have lost the respect of the person I hold most dear in all the world.’

I fell silent, my head bowed in exhaustion and despair.

‘I’ll divorce her, of course. But it will take time. She’ll fight every inch of the way. She’s crazy about me, for some reason. And what will everyone think? They’ll say I took advantage of a widow’s grief to marry her for her money, then cold-bloodedly ditched her as soon as I had a chance. It’s all so hopeless! Why on earth did this have to happen to me? What have I done to deserve it?’

This sort of feeble whining goes down a treat with women like Alison. They like their men to be useless. It gives them a purpose in life.

‘Well it’s not for me to advise you, of course …’

‘On the contrary! If I thought that I might be able to count on your friendship, despite all that’s happened, then … Well, that would make an enormous difference. It would make all the difference.

‘Then I think you should separate as soon as possible. The sooner the situation is clarified, the better for everyone concerned.’

She gathered her shopping together.

‘And now I must be going. I have to collect my youngest from Phil and Jim.’

Outside in the street I took her hand for the first time.

‘It’s been such a comfort talking to you, Alison. You don’t know how it’s helped. Will you …?’

‘I’ll do everything I can,’ she said, freeing herself.

I nodded meekly.

‘Don’t look so glum!’ she added. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’

And off she went to collect her son from St Philip and James Primary School.

Strange the tricks that life plays, I mused as I drove home, popping the tape of madrigals into the player. A few days earlier I had been thinking of calling my doctor to assess the chances of having my vasectomy reversed in order to save my marriage to Karen. Now I would be calling a solicitor to see how I could get it dissolved on the best possible terms. The last thing I wanted was to make some hasty move which might invalidate my claims to a large share of our joint estate. But these were mere details. The main thing was that my intuitions about Alison had been confirmed. She was far from indifferent to me, I felt sure of that, but neither would she contemplate carrying on an affair with a married man. That was fine. I didn’t want to have an affair with Alison. My intentions were entirely honourable. Whoever would have guessed it, though? What a tease life was, to be sure! What a little caution. With a fol-rol-rol and a hey-nonny-no.

Much to my surprise, Karen greeted me at the front door with a glass of champagne in her hand and, still more unusual, a smile on her face.

‘Guess what?’ she said archly.

Not best pleased at being awakened from my reveries, I shrugged impatiently. Karen threw her arms round my neck, spilling champagne everywhere.

‘I’m pregnant!’ she shrieked.