Dirty Tricks

PART ONE

First of all, let me just say that everything I am going to tell you is the complete and absolute truth. Well yes, I would say that, wouldn’t I? And since I’ve just sworn an oath to this effect, it might seem pointless to offer further assurances, particularly since I can’t back them up. I can’t call witnesses, I can’t produce evidence. All I can do is tell you my story. You’re either going to believe me or you’re not.

Nevertheless, I am going to tell you the truth. Not because I’m incapable of lying. On the contrary, my story is riddled with deceptions, evasions, slanders and falsifications of every kind, as you will see. Nor do I expect you to believe me because my bearing is sincere and my words plausible. Such things might influence the judges of my own country, where people still pretend to believe in the essential niceness of the human race — or at least pretend to pretend. But this country, in its short and violent history, has had no time to develop a taste for such decadent indulgences. Yours is the clear-sighted, undeceived vision of the ancients, who knew life for what it is and men for what they are, and did not flinch from that knowledge.

So I do not say, ‘Believe me, for I cannot tell a lie.’ I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to lie my teeth off if it was either useful or necessary. Only it isn’t. As it so happens, I am actually innocent of the murders detailed in the extradition request before you. It is therefore quite simply in my own best interests to tell you the truth.

It began, inevitably, at a dinner party. That’s where the social action is in my country, among people of my class. Half the English feed fast and early and then go down the pub to drink beer, the other half eat a slow meal late and drink wine before, during and after. (I am anxious that you should understand the customs and manners of the country where the events in question took place, so different from your own. Otherwise it may be difficult to appreciate how very natural it is that things should have turned out as they did.) When I say dinner parties, I mean drinking parties with a cooked meal thrown in. And with Karen Parsons in the state she was that evening, there seemed a very real possibility that it would be. Both she and Dennis were chain-drinking. This was perfectly normal. But even then, before I knew her at all, I sensed that normality was not really Karen’s thing. She could fake it, up to a point. She could put it on, like a posh accent, but it didn’t come naturally to her.

I’d met the Parsons a week earlier, at an end-of-term social at the language school where I was teaching. We rolled up at the same time, I on my bike, the Parsons in their BMW. I thought at first they must be students. No one else I knew could afford a car like that. But as soon as they got out I realized I was wrong. What is it that sets us Brits apart so unmistakably? The clothes? The posture? Whatever it was, the moment I saw the Parsons I knew them for British as surely as though they’d had the word stamped on their hides like bacon. The man was thickset and heavy, like a rugby player, the woman thin and bony. I didn’t give them a second glance.

Parties at the Oxford International Language College, like everything else, were designed with cost-effectiveness in mind. Clive had to have them, because the competition did, but since the benefits were at best indirect he had to come up with the idea of asking the students from each country to get together and prepare a ‘typical national dish’. These were then combined as a buffet and served back to the students together with one free soft drink of their choice. Subsequent or alternative drinks had to be paid for at saloon-bar prices, so Clive managed to turn a profit on the evening.

In previous years he had forbidden staff to bring their own booze ‘so as to avoid making an invidious distinction’. This had caused a ripple of protest. No more than that, for we were all on renewable annual contracts and Clive never tired of reminding us just how many eager applicants there had been the last time he’d had to ‘let someone go’. Nevertheless, he had relented to the extent of allowing the teachers to bring a bottle as long as it was kept out of sight of the paying customers. The result was that we all kept making surreptitious trips to the staff room to refill our plastic beakers. I was lingering near the assembled bottles, wondering who on earth could have brought the Bourgueil, when I was joined by the man I had seen stepping out of the BMW. He walked over, holding out his hand.

‘Dennis Parsons. I do Clive’s accounts.’

Close up, he looked softer and less fit than I had thought, not so much rugby as darts. Spotting my empty beaker, he grasped the bottle I had been admiring, carefully covering the label with his hand.

‘Have some of this.’

His voice was filled with self-congratulatory emphasis. I stuck my nose in the beaker and hoovered up the aroma in the approved fashion.

‘Like it?’

‘Very much.’

I got busy with my nose again, then took a sip and gargled it about my mouth for some time.

‘What do you make of it?’

I frowned like someone who has just been put on the spot and is afraid of making a fool of himself.

‘Cabernet?’ I suggested tentatively.

Dennis grinned impishly. He was enjoying this.

‘Well, yes and no. Yes, and then again no.’

I nodded.

‘I see what you mean. Cabernet franc, not sauvignon.’

That shook him.

‘But is it Bergerac or Saumur?’ I mused as though to myself. ‘I think I’d go for the Loire, on the whole. But something with a bit of class. There’s breeding there. Chinon?’

Dennis Parsons breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Not bad,’ he nodded patronizingly. ‘Not bad at all.’

He showed me the label.

‘Ah, Bourgueil! I can never tell them apart.’

‘Very few people can,’ Dennis remarked in a tone which suggested that he was one of them.

After that I couldn’t get rid of him. The man turned out to be a wine bore of stupendous proportions. I must have kept my end up successfully, though, for just before he left Dennis sought me out and invited me to dinner the following Friday.

‘Can’t speak for the food, that’s Kay’s department, but I think I can promise that the tipple will be up to par.’

As for Karen, she left not the slightest impression on me. Apart from that initial glimpse of them both getting out of the car, I literally have no image of her at all. I emphasize this to make clear that what happened the following weekend was as unforeseeable as a plane falling on your house.

Dennis told me that he lived in North Oxford, but that was geographical hyperbole. True, the street he lived in was north of the city centre, but that didn’t mean it was in North Oxford. My country is full of distinctions of this kind, and in the congenial climate of Oxford they flourish to form a semantic jungle through which only the natives can make their way. Thus it’s the Isis not the Thames, the Charwell not the Cherwell, the Parks not the park, and Carfax is not the latest executive toy but a crossroads. There’s a street called South Parade and, half a mile south of it, one called North Parade. The area where the Parsons lived lay not in the desirable temperate zone called North Oxford but further north, too far by half, in the boreal tundra of pre-war suburbia out towards the ring road, beyond which lie the arctic wastes of Kidlington, where first-time buyers huddle in their brick igloos and watch the mortgage rate rising.

Nevertheless, even though it wasn’t quite the real thing, Dennis had done all right for himself. When I was young, accountants used to be figures of fun. Not the least of the many surprises I got on returning home was to find that all that had changed. For the kids today, the people we used to snigger at are role models, swashbuckling marauders sailing the seas of high finance, corporate raiders whose motto is ‘Get in, get out, get rich’. Dennis Parsons was an accountant of the new ‘creative’ variety, for whom the firm’s actual turnover represents only the original idea on which the completed tax return is based. When it came to cooking the books, Dennis was in the Raymond Blanc class. Socially, though, he and Karen, who taught part-time at a girls’ school in Headington, were both from a lower-middle-class, comp/tech background, and it may not have been only the fearsome price of property in the North Oxford heartlands which had put them off moving there. Even after five years they were finding it a bit difficult in Oxford, you see, a bit sticky.

Still, it wasn’t these fine distinctions that were uppermost in my mind that Friday evening in April when I turned off the Banbury Road into the quiet, tree-lined avenue where the Parsons lived, but the rather more obvious contrast, the gaping abyss between these genteel surroundings and the ones in which I myself was then living. For if property values and social status north of St Giles shaded imperceptibly from one microclimate to another, the other side of the Cherwell they just dropped out of sight. We didn’t have much time for subtle distinctions down in East Oxford. They weren’t our style. We went in for agitprop caricature and grotesque exaggeration. Derelict vagrants hacking their lungs up while a group of students in evening dress pass by waving bottles of champagne, that sort of thing. I was always surprised that you could cross Magdalen Bridge without having to show your papers, that you could just walk across. It felt like Checkpoint Charlie, but in fact no one tried to stop you except the alkies lurching up off their piss-stained benches with some story about needing the bus fare back home to Sheffield.

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do you do?’ she fluted.

I told her I taught English to foreign students.

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

‘And you?’ I inquired politely.

She made a little throw-away gesture.

‘Oh, I’m just a housewife!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Won’t be a mo,’ I said.

‘Oh, are you still in there?’

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

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

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

‘Could I have a word with you?’

He frowned.

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

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

Dennis’s brow puckered more intensely.

‘Roger? You must be joking.’

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

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

‘How do you mean?’

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

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

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

I shrugged.

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

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

‘She went upstairs, I think.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clive was twenty-nine years old.

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

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

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

Except, perhaps, for Karen Parsons.

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

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

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

‘Hang on, I’ll ask Kay.’

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

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

‘Sorry?’

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

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

‘You’ve got it?’

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

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

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

‘It’s no bother.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why did you do that?’

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

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

‘I haven’t got your wallet.’

‘I know you haven’t.’

We measured each other with our eyes.

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

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

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

She shrugged pettishly.

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

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

‘Speak of the devil,’ said Karen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Good green fruit on the nose. Young and vibrant. Soft round buttery fruit in the mouth, trailing off a little on the finish. Very chardonnay. Lovely concentrated body. Surprisingly firm grip.’

He bought his wine from a mail-order firm, I later discovered. Each case came with tasting notes, from which Dennis was given to quoting extensively. The point of the whole performance was only partly the usual snobbery and one-upmanship. The essential purpose was to disguise the fact that Dennis was an alcoholic. He wasn’t out to get drunk — perish the thought! — but to savour the unique individuality of each wine to the full. Dennis didn’t drink, he degusted. Well fair enough, whatever it takes. But if he couldn’t even get pissed in his own living room without all this blather it was hard to imagine him asking casually if I’d care to step upstairs for some kinky sex.

Still, I wasn’t complaining. I didn’t know what was going on, but I was happy to be there, sipping Dennis’s eight-quid-a-bottle plonk, trading glances with his vibrant young — well, youngish — wife and openly admiring the charms of her lovely concentrated body. Since I wasn’t in a position to return the Parsons’ hospitality, I felt an obligation to provide conversational value for money, so I embarked on a series of anecdotes about my time abroad, some true, all exaggerated, a few plain invention. You may have the house and the car and the job and the security, I was saying, but I’ve lived. That’s what I was saying to Dennis, at any rate. The messages passing between Karen and I were more complex. As the wine took hold I glanced in her direction with increasing frequency, often to find her already looking at me. Or else she would turn round, as though sensing my gaze on her skin, and for a moment as brief and yet momentous as a pause in music our eyes talked dirty. Then she slumped back in her chair, mouthing the nicotine-dosed chewing gum she used instead of cigarettes, and I thought I must have imagined an intensity of which she was surely incapable.

That evening the Parsons were meeting friends for an early meal before going on to the opera. How times had changed, to be sure! When I grew up, opera had all the allure of a the dansant on Bournemouth pier. Now it was like Wimbledon. People who couldn’t tell Weber from Webern went along to cheer their favourite tenor and be seen with their bums on a fifty-quid seat. Dennis thoughtfully offered to drop me off in town.

‘Save you 30p, it all adds up,’ he said, reducing my glamorous cosmopolitan personality to its due place in the Oxford scheme of things.

He paid for that, though. Just before we left, while Dennis was in the loo, I grabbed his wife and kissed her on the mouth. Karen made no attempt to break away or to respond. She just stood there, trembling all over. Then the toilet flushed and we wrenched violently apart, as though each of us had been struggling to get free all along.

Dennis appeared in the doorway, grinning cheerfully.

‘All set?’

When I worked abroad, I lived like a gentleman of leisure. Unless I was awakened by the departure of a bed-fellow who had to work or study, poor girl, my day began at about nine or thereabouts, with a leisurely shower and a small black coffee. The rest of the morning I might spend at the beach, in season, or in the park or a cafe, reading or catching up on my correspondence, or chatting to friends and acquaintances, as the whim took me. Then came the delicious moment of the aperitivo, that sense of the whole city beginning to wind down towards lunch, which I took at any one of a dozen excellent and welcoming restaurants where I was sure to be hailed and called over to one table or another. After a leisurely meal it was out into the sun-drenched streets again, replete and relaxed, in boisterous good-natured company, for an excellent coffee and a cigar.

Sated with a whole morning of freedom and indulgence, work seemed almost a pleasure, the more so in that my students were in the same post-prandial daze as myself. All serious business was dispatched in the morning. No one expected to achieve anything much after lunch, so the mood was languid and light-hearted, as though we were just pretending. The hours slipped past almost unnoticed. Outside the window dusk had fallen, the sky glowed in exuberant shades of green and pink. Soon my working day was over, but the night had only just begun, the streets and piazzas just beginning to hum with life. Where would I spend those precious, unforgettable hours tonight, and with whom?

Since his return home, the prodigal’s life had been rather different. Classes were no longer in the afternoon and evening, after work. They were work, and the students, who were paying through the nose for them, were grim, resentful and bloody-minded. My day began at seven with unwanted glimpses of Trish and Brian’s intimacies, followed by slurped tea and munched toast in the communal kitchen. Then it was on to my bike and off to spend the rest of my day banged up with a bunch of sullen, spoilt brats in order to make Clive Phillips even richer than he already was. ‘The eternal student,’ Dennis had joked. The joke, of course, was that the real students were currently being head-hunted for posts with starting salaries in excess of 20K.

That term, the second half of each morning consisted of a two-hour mental sauna with my ‘Fake’ Early Intermediates. There were seven of them, and it was a source of perpetual wonder to me that they’d ever learned to speak their own languages, never mind anyone else’s. The exception was Helga, a Euro-slut from Cologne who should have been several grades higher but kept deliberately failing the aptitude tests so as to be with Massimo. A Latin looker whose stock response to any correction was an impatient ‘Izza same!’, Massimo combined staggering conceit, total ineptitude and a winsome, self-ingratiating charm which would have been hard to take in a toddler, never mind a beefy twenty-year-old. He and Helga sat at the back of the class, groping each other up in a flurry of smirks and giggles. In front of them sat Tweedledum and Tweedledee, a pair of Turkish twins whose soft, pale, shapeless, perfumed flesh irresistibly suggested the cloying sweetmeats of their native land. Then there was Kayoko, the Girl Who Couldn’t Say No. Asked, for example, if she was from New York, the Tokyo-born lass would blushingly reply, ‘Yes, I’m not.’ Yolanda and Garcia rounded out this select group. Yolanda was a spotty, bespectacled girl from Barcelona who spent her time translating every word I said into Spanish for the benefit of Garcia, a missing-link anthropoid from one of your immediate neighbours. For reasons which will become clear in due course, I prefer not to specify which one. Nor is Garcia his real name. In fact, given his track record, even his real name probably wasn’t his real name.

It wasn’t like working here, where I could slip into Spanish when things got ropey, and afterwards we’d all go to the bar and tone up the group dynamics over a few drinks. The only lingua franca this lot shared was English, and they didn’t speak English. Not only that, but they were never going to speak it. I knew it and they knew it, but we couldn’t admit that we knew it. We wouldn’t have understood each other, for one thing. So all I could do was to prance about waving flashcards and realia like a second-rate conjuror at a children’s party, and try not to glance at my watch more than once a minute.

The main item on the agenda the following Monday was a listening comprehension exercise based around a tape-recorded ‘authentic’ conversation. In fact I’d carefully scripted the whole thing, grading the language to keep it within the students’ capabilities. ‘Fake’ Intermediates were students who had done the Beginners’ course but learned nothing from it. Indeed most of them had made a kind of negative progress. Not only were they still ignorant of the language, but they now had a sense of personal inadequacy — totally justified, I might add — which manifested itself in a stubborn refusal to learn anything. The aim of the gist-listening session was to try and break down this hostility by showing the group that they could understand two native speakers talking ‘naturally’, in this case about a shopping expedition. Ideally they were supposed to pick up that the woman (Trish) was asking the man (me) for money — an all-too-authentic situation, this. The first run-through was a complete failure. Even my most basic pre-set question (‘How many people are talking?’) proved to be over their heads, so I rewound the tape and tried again. If all else failed I could usually rely on Massimo getting an ego-boosting tip from Helga, who wasn’t allowed to take part herself. We were about half-way through the second audition when the door opened and Karen Parsons walked in.

I wasn’t best pleased to see her. It was bad enough to have to spend my days acting as occupational therapist to a bunch of linguistic basket-cases without having my social acquaintances dropping in to witness my degradation. Moreover one of Clive’s many draconian rules was an absolute ban on personal visitors during school hours. There was even a story, not necessarily apocryphal, that when a message arrived to tell one of the teachers that his father had died, Clive had insisted on waiting until the lunch break before passing it on. I already had reason to suspect that I was by no means flavour-of-the-month at the Oxford International Language College. If Clive caught me entertaining a lady friend in the classroom, I would be out on my ear in no time at all.

So when I asked Karen what she thought she was up to, I was merely expressing my irritation and anxiety at this interruption. As usual, we were at cross-purposes from the start.

‘I won’t go behind his back,’ she said. ‘It may seem stupid, but that’s the way it is. What happened the other day was wrong. I was drunk and I …’

She fell silent, looking uncertainly at the students.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘They won’t understand as long as you speak quickly.’

I was being tactful. Given Karen’s broken-nosed vowels and head-banger intonation, they wouldn’t have understood if she’d spelt it for them.

‘You mean I could say anything at all?’ she asked with a mischievous smile.

I glanced at Helga, but she was busy sticking her tongue in Massimo’s ear. Karen took something from her handbag and slipped it into her mouth like a communicant self-administering the host.

‘Just my knickers,’ she murmured, catching my eye.

‘Sorry?’

‘Nicorette. Denny won’t let me smoke. Kills the taste of the wine, he says.’

She fell silent. Then an internal bulkhead gave way somewhere and she blurted out, ‘We don’t do it any more, not really. Not enough. And I need it, and sometimes …’

She broke off.

‘Ooh, this is fun, isn’t it?’

As she eagerly scanned the blank faces turned like sunflowers towards us, I felt almost faint for a moment, overwhelmed by her excitement and my own desire. I no longer cared about Clive finding us together. I no longer cared about anything but the sexual charge passing between us.

‘I want you, Karen,’ I murmured. ‘I want you properly.’

She squirrelled away at the nicotine-laden gum.

‘I know. But I can’t. At the end of the day, he’s still my husband.’

‘What, so you’d be sick as a parrot if we went over the moon together?’

This was the tone to take with Karen, I decided. Coming on all awed and respectful would just put the wind up her. Most women don’t really have a very high opinion of themselves, so if you start treating them as something special they think, ‘Oh God, sooner or later he’ll find out the truth, and then he’ll despise me.’ Much better to make it clear from the start that you’ve seen through them, and you still fancy them rotten.

She shrugged stubbornly.

‘That’s the way it is.’

‘You interrupted my class just to tell me this?’

‘What? No, I just dropped by to invite you to dinner on Saturday. We haven’t got your number, you see. I was going to leave a note, but there was no one at Reception and then I heard your voice in here. Thomas and Lynn will be there. He’s Denny’s partner, you’ll like him. Half past seven for eight.’

I nodded curtly.

‘Fair enough.’

At the door she looked back.

‘And I am sorry. About the other. I just can’t. I do like you, but I can’t.’

The door closed behind her. I looked round at the class, my finger hovering above the tape-recorder.

‘All right, let’s try again. How many people are there and what are they talking about?’

Helga put her hand up.

‘There is a man and a woman,’ she enunciated fastidiously. ‘He wants to — how do you say? — “fuck” her? And she, I think, also wants to fuck him. Yes, I’m sure she does. But her husband is a problem.’

I nodded coolly.

‘I see. And why is her husband a problem?’

To my astonishment a forest of hands shot up around the class.

‘Izza money,’ said Massimo. ‘Always same ting widda womans.’

‘She is want more,’ ventured Yolanda.

‘Yes,’ Kayoko chimed in. ‘Can’t get enough.’

Like the kraken stirring in its primaeval sleep, one of the Turkish twins rumbled into speech.

‘Chopping,’ it said.

I stood staring at them in utter bewilderment. I was the only one who hadn’t understood.

You know those days when you’ve got it? When everyone looks at you expectantly and everything you do is significant, when men defer and women give you cool, appraising glances? What is that stuff? Maybe the clothes, you think, but the next time you wear that outfit you’re The Invisible Man. No, it wasn’t the clothes. So what was it? Certainly not the radiant glow of confidence and success, or it sure as hell wouldn’t have worked for me that Saturday round at Ramillies Drive. Which it did.

I was irresistible. I could have levitated, spoken in tongues and changed the Perrier into Dom Perignon. I disdained such vulgar exhibitionism, however. I made no attempt to impress or ingratiate. When Thomas Carter asked me how I liked Oxford, I made a wry face and said, ‘Mmmm …’ Normally I would have sounded like a tongue-tied half-wit, but that evening my response appeared to hint at the inexpressible depths and nuances of my infinitely complex relationship with the city, together with a gentle rebuke to a question which was either fatuous or unanswerable. The Oxford manner, in short, the knack of which consists wholly in getting away with it.

I could have got away with murder that Saturday night, although under the present circumstances I had better add that I made no attempt to do so. What I did get away with was arguably worse than murder, and revealed for the first time something of what I was letting myself in for by getting involved with Karen Parsons. One might even argue that if that elusive mantle of desirability hadn’t happened to fall on my shoulders on that of all evenings …

But the past conditional is a notoriously tricky area, even for mother-tongue speakers, and there’s no point in speculating on which way the final result might have gone if we wouldn’t’ve scored that first goal, Ron. The fact is that before the evening was over I had not only penetrated Karen sexually, but perhaps even more important we had shared a good laugh together at Dennis’s expense. If you can make her laugh, they say, you’re half-way there. If you can make her laugh while you’re coming in her mouth, then you might be said to have arrived. And if you can do all that with her husband just a few feet away, blissfully unaware that he’s the butt of the joke, then yours is his house and everything that’s in it, old son.

The other guests that night were Dennis’s partner in Osiris Management Services, Thomas Carter, his Welsh wife Lynn, and a menopausal colleague of Karen’s called Vicky. Compared with the Parsons’ previous dinner party, this was a relaxed affair. As an American, Carter was a non-combatant in the class warfare which terrified the Parsons. This was just as well, because as a native he would have been a bit hard to take. Thomas Carter came right out and told you that he thought England was the only truly civilized country in the world and that as the most English of English cities, Oxford was its heart and soul, the core of everything that had formed us, the repository of our values and the guarantor of our standards, an expression in stone of our whole Western civilization, a cultural Stonehenge which, etc, etc.

In England, that kind of patriotism is something you do with other consenting adults under the covers with the lights out, and usually comes with various unpleasant side-effects such as xenophobia, anti-Semitism, Anglo-Catholicism and so on. But Thomas Carter was from Philadelphia, and his love for Oxford and for England was a pure boyish enthusiasm as innocent as a passion for preserved railways or real ale. He was also very charming, an easy smiler, witty, relaxed and vivacious. With the British, any relationship begins heavily in debt. You have to spend years and years working off the initial residue of suspicion and diffidence before you’re even out of the red, let alone seeing any positive return for your efforts. Meeting Thomas reminded me that human relations don’t have to be like this, that in other countries you open your account in credit, and unless you squander that goodwill by behaving like a complete arsehole, the mutual warmth continues to grow with every subsequent encounter, as though it were natural for human beings to get on together.

Lynn Carter presented a striking contrast to her extrovert mate. Her personality was drab, earnest and humourless and her appearance calculatedly unattractive. To be honest, it looked as though she had given up on being a woman. Not that I’d blame anyone for that. Let’s face it, would you want the job? Lynn Carter had put in her time down there on the sexual shop floor — there were two teenage sons to prove it — but now she’d taken early retirement. Fair enough, but where did that leave her husband, so full of vim and vigour? Where did Thomas go to get retooled these days? Who was mucking him out and hosing him down? It had to be Karen, I reckoned. I wasn’t vain enough to think that the way she had come on to me that first night was solely down to my resistless charms. Like the Carters’, the Parsons’ marriage was in turn-around, only there it was Dennis who was the sleeping partner. Karen had admitted as much the day she came to the school. Which left her as Thomas’s vis-a-vis.

On another occasion, this suspicion might have been calculated to cripple me with a sense of my own worthlessness. Who was I to be taking on a contender like Thomas Carter, a management consultant and the owner-occupier of a?500,000 property set in the accessible Arcadia of Boars Hill? My Early Intermediates had unwittingly pointed out the parallels between Karen’s refusal to ‘go behind Dennis’s back’ and the recorded conversation about money and shopping I had played them. In other words, the reason for my coy mistress’s quaint sense of honour was nothing more nor less than financial prudence. Whatever Dennis’s other shortcomings, he footed the bill. My salary was barely enough to keep me in sliced white and undies, never mind maintain Mrs Dennis Parsons in the style to which she had become accustomed.

As if to make this quite clear, the other charity guest that night was Vicky, a career spinster with beefy-jerky skin and a mouth as tensely muscled as an anus. During one of her absences from the room everyone shook their heads and agreed that Vicky was ‘a very sad case’. The implied judgement on me, Vicky’s notional partner, should have been enough to send me into a screaming spiral of paranoid depression. But that evening nothing could touch me. The only effect of these humiliations and challenges was to make me even more determined to overcome Karen’s scruples.

Dinner itself was a relatively painless affair. Karen wasn’t trying to impress anyone, so we ate promptly and quite well. She seated me on her right, and I made my first direct pass as soon as we sat down. The first course was avocado with prawn cocktail dressing. No problem there. While my right hand spooned up the sweet pulp and hefted my glass of Alsace riesling, my left explored the contours of my neighbour’s inner calf and the hollow behind her knee. I’d expected some token reluctance, a bit of chair-shuffling and so on. There wasn’t much else she could do without attracting attention, but I definitely expected a bit of the old argy-bargy before she let me get down to business. I mean, it’s traditional, isn’t it?

But Karen didn’t have much use for tradition. She stiffened when I touched her, just for an instant, the way you do when you feel something on your leg and aren’t sure what it is. After that the only clue was her heightened responses to everything else that happened, a too-eager agreement, an over-emphatic laugh. Like she was high, not on booze or pills but some of that good mellow shit that used to go the rounds at the first dinner parties I ever went to, at Liza’s place, when the world was young and lovable.

I’d like to comment briefly on two aspects of Karen’s response to my attentions, both of which are fundamental to a correct understanding of later events. The first was what I might call her physical candour. To an amazing — even an alarming — extent, Karen Parsons was totally straightforward about what she wanted to do with her body and what she liked having done to it. The quality I’m referring to was something common enough here in Latin America, but very rare in the land of booze and animal fats, where the women seem to have taken to heart mad Hamlet’s advice to let their honesty admit no discourse to their beauty. Even in bed, they’re hypocrites. Karen wasn’t. If you put your finger up her bum while she was coming, she didn’t pretend to object just to stop you running away with the idea that she was the kind of woman who wouldn’t object if you put your finger up her bum while she was coming. On the other hand, she wasn’t a Manuela either. There were limits to what Karen would let you do. It was just that she didn’t lie, to herself or others, about what they were.

My second observation demonstrates the absurdity of the idea that our relationship was, to borrow the elegant formula adopted by one news comic, ‘the perverted passion of two sex junkies who would do anything — even kill — for their fix’. In fact what the same tabloid, in a characteristic retreat into prudery, terms ‘the sexual act’ was never more than a terminus ad quem for us. This is evident from Karen’s ecstatic reaction to my attentions that evening. It may be mildly titillating to feel a hand on your knee during dinner, but in itself it’s not going to bring you off, is it? ‘The hurricane of their all-consuming lust for each other,’ continues our over-titillated hack, ‘swept away every obstacle that stood in its path.’ The author of these words clearly had his pen in one hand and his dick in the other, and had forgotten which was which.

The truth is exactly the opposite. Karen and I went out of our way to place obstacles in our path. We became connoisseurs of obstacles. We collected them like rare orchids, gleefully sharing our latest acquisitions and discoveries. That was the secret of Karen’s empressement. It wasn’t what I was doing that was turning her on but the fact that I was doing it there, doing it then, in front of her husband and her husband’s partner and her husband’s partner’s wife and one of her own colleagues. Karen wouldn’t commit adultery behind Dennis’s back, but there was nothing that excited her more than doing it under his nose. Feeling my hand on her leg, the fingers fanning out, stroking to give pleasure, squeezing to show need, a little dumbshow of love being played out on her skin. And meanwhile, above-board …

‘Jane Grigson says to sweat them lightly in butter.’

‘Perspire, surely?’

‘I still swear by Delia.’

‘Did you know you can chambrer wine in the microwave?’

While Lynn and Thomas and Vicky and Dennis chattered, I sat back and let my fingers do the talking. Nevertheless, after ten minutes or so my hand on Karen’s knee was starting to feel like one lump of meat resting on another. It was time to sign off before familiarity bred contempt, and just in case it already had I decided to hurt her.

A gentleman may be defined as someone who never inflicts pain unintentionally, and where women are concerned I’ve always prided myself on being a perfect gent. Apart from Manuela — we really must find time for a word or two about Manuela soon — I’ve never got any mileage out of hurting women. This is a cultural difference, I think. Here in Latin America there’s traditionally been a lot of pain involved in relations of all kinds, from the family to the state that is modelled on it. There are complex historical reasons for this, just as there are for differences in the amount of seasoning used in cooking. People here are used to a fairly high level of pain, just as they’re used to a lot of chilli in their food. Life would be bland without it. I was astonished by the amount of pain that Manuela seemed to thrive on. It was only when I stopped hurting her that she got worried. She thought I was cheating on her, you see, hurting another woman behind her back.

Anyway, before taking my hand away I reached over and pinched the tender flesh on the inside of Karen’s leg until she moaned. Conversation stopped and everyone became frightfully solicitous. Karen brushed them off with talk of a ‘little twinge’ that she got from time to time and rose briskly to clear the table. I muttered something about helping and followed her out. I found her standing by the sink, which she was filling with hot water.

‘Have you seen the furry liquid?’ she asked without looking round.

The last thing I had expected from Karen was an imaginative feel for language, but this was almost poetic: the soap foam as fur on the skin of the water. With a sudden rush of tender emotion I hugged her.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, and kneed me in the groin.

‘Anything I can do?’ ventured Vicky, appearing in the doorway. ‘What are you doing down there?’

I smiled at her over gritted teeth.

‘Banged my funny bone.’

‘Ah, there it is!’ cried Karen, seizing a plastic bottle with green lettering. ‘Furry liquid’, I realized belatedly, was simply her Merseyside pronunciation of the well-known brand of washing-up liquid which the Parsons favoured.

‘God it’s big.’

‘Enormous.’

‘Impressive feel in the mouth. Tremendous length.’

Dennis glanced at his tasting notes.

‘ “The aroma leaps out of the glass and assaults you while your senses wallow in big good fruit and a long, long finish.” ’

He inhaled deeply.

‘Big, hard, hot, juicy, fruit attack on the nose.’

‘Generous but well-structured body.’

‘Soft but beautifully tight. Very firm.’

‘Relaxed tannic grip.’

‘Lingering finish.’

‘Long final note.’

The scene was the Parsons’ living room. Not the sitting room across the hall, to which we’d retired after dinner. That was for guests, and the guests had gone, Vicky by half past ten, the Carters an hour later. By now it was almost one, but Dennis still wanted to party. Karen was lying stretched out on the sofa facing me, staring up at the ceiling. Since the departure of Thomas and Lynn she had drunk much and said little. Dennis lay sprawled in the armchair between us, his feet propped on the glass-topped coffee table amid an array of empty bottles. In the course of the evening we had sampled a wide variety of wines, and were now experiencing a woozy sense of disassociation that was like being drunk and hung-over at the same time. It was nevertheless quite a shock, when I next glanced in Karen’s direction, to realize that she was masturbating.

I instinctively looked away, the way children do when they see something naughty, as though witnessing it might incriminate them. Then I looked back. There was no doubt about it. Her left hand was curled down under the hem of her skirt, which she’d pulled up on that side. She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse that left her arms bare to the elbow. The muscles rippled lightly as she worked. Her right knee was raised to form a screen that prevented Dennis from seeing what was going on, but she made no attempt to conceal it from me. On the contrary, she was staring at me with an almost manic intensity.

I thought I had just about run the gamut of sexual experiences, but nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I found it incredibly erotic, and the more Dennis maundered on about boiled sweets on the nose, the more erotic it became. His wife’s head gradually fell back, her mouth open and her eyes still pinned to my face, the whites showing like a frightened horse. Her legs were slightly parted and her toes curled convulsively, as though trying to find some support to relieve her vertiginous predicament.

‘Your glass is empty,’ yawned Dennis. ‘Kay asleep?’

‘I don’t think so.’

She was staring at me imploringly, unable to move the way she wanted, the way she needed to. She couldn’t quite get there on her own, not with having to lie so still and make no noise. Neither, of course, could she stop. I raised my hand to my mouth, as though politely concealing a yawn. My eyes clamped to Karen’s, I extended my tongue and flicked the tip rapidly up and down, flutter-tonguing the air. She came almost at once, in a series of tense repressed tremors that forced a dulled gasp from her.

‘Oh, you still with us?’ Dennis murmured.

‘Till death do us part.’

Her husband squinted at her blearily.

‘Thought you were going to start doing your imitation of a sleeping sow any moment.’

The tone of voice revealed the intensity of his disgust, not just with his wife’s snores, but with her physicality as such. ‘We don’t do it any more,’ Karen had said. I could believe it.

She rose unsteadily to her feet.

‘Good night,’ she said.

‘Don’t bother waiting up,’ Dennis told her. ‘It’ll only be me, I’m afraid.’

He fetched a bottle from the sideboard.

‘Now then, this’ll see us right. Thirty-year-old armagnac. Landed and bottled. Over a grand’s worth you’re looking at here, and you know how much it cost me? Not one penny. Friend of a friend. You scratch mine and vice versa. Payment in kind. Lot of it goes on.’

Bloody typical, I thought. It’s not enough for the rich to be rich, they have to boast about their perks and fiddles and scams as well. That way they screw you twice over. They’re rich enough to pay for it and smart enough to get it for free. As for you, you’re not only poor, you’re stupid. Which is why you’re poor, stupid.

‘What was that about not waiting up?’

‘What?’

‘You told Karen not to wait up, it would only be you. I mean who else would it be?’

I thought he’d sussed what was going on, of course.

‘Didn’t you notice?’ he smiled archly. ‘As soon as he left, all the air went out of her.’

At the far end of the room, Karen appeared in the kitchen doorway, a glass in her hand.

‘You mean there’s something going on between her and Thomas?’ I asked.

Dennis shook his head, then tapped it with two fingers.

‘All up here. Takes some of them that way. It would all have been different if we’d been able to have children.’

I frowned.

‘You mean Karen …?’

Dennis nodded.

‘Poor kid. Tough on her.’

I glanced down at the kitchen. Karen had disappeared again.

‘Shame to dump this on the dregs,’ said Dennis, surveying his glass moodily.

‘I’ll get fresh ones.’

As soon as I rounded the line of fitted units screening off the kitchen I saw her slumped on the floor in the corner, huddled up as though against the cold. For a moment I thought she had passed out. Then her eyes registered my presence, and started to water. She looked so utterly pathetic that I bent down and comforted her silently, stroking her hair, kissing her face. She kissed me back, and then she wasn’t pathetic any more.

‘To the left of the sink,’ Dennis called loudly.

I straightened up, opened a cupboard at random and took out two tumblers. As I did so, Karen unzipped my fly.

My first reaction was of embarrassment. I hadn’t even had a chance to wash it! My mother always told me to put on clean underwear in case I got knocked over and taken to hospital, but the possibility that someone’s drunken wife might decide to revenge herself on her husband by going down on me was not a scenario we had ever discussed. The other source of embarrassment was the very real possibility that Dennis would stroll over at any moment and catch us at it. Already I could see myself standing there, tongue-tied and grinning sheepishly, the star of a bedroom farce which had gone badly off the rails. So while it would clearly be an exaggeration to say that I didn’t enjoy the experience at all, my main preoccupation was to get it over. Only I couldn’t. And while there are situations in which it is possible for the male to simulate orgasm, fellatio is not one of them.

‘No, no!’ Dennis shouted. ‘The snifters, man! The snifters.’

He had swivelled round in the armchair and was staring at me irritably. Dennis hated being kept waiting for his drink. Feeling like a character in a split-screen movie, I opened another cupboard and took out two brandy glasses. But I still couldn’t come, and to withdraw without doing so would, I felt, be the height of bad manners. I pretended to find a smudge on the glasses, rinsed them, dried them and held them up to the light.

‘You going to be there all night?’ Dennis demanded.

‘Just coming.’

It wasn’t much of a joke, but then it didn’t take much to make Karen laugh. Laugh she did, at any rate, and those convulsive movements succeeded where her more calculated efforts had failed. I grasped her hair with both hands, binding her head against my loins while I came in her mouth, loudly and at some length.

‘What on earth’s the matter?’

He was on his feet now, and walking towards us. I waved him away as Karen thoughtfully tucked me in and zipped me up.

‘Cramp. It’s OK, it’s passed.’

A few moments later, balloon of armagnac in hand, I was listening to Dennis recount with great self-satisfaction how he’d come by the priceless spirit, when our attention was drawn by the sound of running water from the kitchen. Karen stood there filling a glass of water.

‘I thought you were in bed,’ said her husband.

Karen rinsed her mouth out and spat in the sink.

‘Just been clearing up a bit.’

‘You mean eating up! Never happy unless she has something in her mouth,’ he confided to me. ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at her, would you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

Karen giggled hysterically, spluttering water all over the counter.

I knew then that we were bound to go all the way, wherever it might lead, whether we wanted to or not. As for Dennis, well, after that killing him would have been a kindness, wouldn’t it?

There are times, frankly, when one longs for a video camera. All these words! It’s absurd, these days, like submitting a portrait in oils with your passport application. Oh yes, very tasteful, sir, a very speaking likeness I’m sure, and such tactility in the brushwork, but what we really wanted was a while-you-wait snapshot, a quid the strip of four down the machine. The kids these days don’t bother with language. Even life doesn’t do much for them. It’s just not state-of-the-art any more, life. How can you be sure what really happened unless you can rerun it in slo-mo? To say nothing of mashing the boring bits down to a slurry of images, hosing them away with a touch of your finger.

Which is what I’d like to do now, ideally. What would you see? Karen and I on the sofa, Karen and I in the back seat of the BMW, Karen and I at the river, up the alley, down the garden, round the corner, in the pub. Our movements are furtive, frantic and compulsive. Our pleasures are brief and incomplete. Our frustrations are enormous. Because if you look closely at the background of every scene, you’ll see Dennis.

Do you believe this? I didn’t, and I was there. Even while it was happening to me, I couldn’t believe it. Here was a woman who would go down on me in her husband’s presence, but wouldn’t touch me, wouldn’t speak to me, wouldn’t see me, unless he was there. And when I asked her why …

‘He’s my husband, isn’t he?’

‘Karen, you blew me. Remember? You stroked yourself off in front of me. It’s a bit late to be coming on like the Angel in the House now.’

‘I won’t cheat on him, I don’t care what you say. I just won’t. I like you ever such a lot, I really do, but the bottom line is I’m still married to Denny.’

The wonder of it is I didn’t kill her then, never mind later. It was bad enough being mercilessly teased and tantalized, without having to listen to this sort of humbug. Because what all the fine talk came down to was hard cash. If Dennis dumped her, Karen and I would be another Trish and Brian. I could quite appreciate that she didn’t want that. I didn’t want it either. I just wished she’d cut out the bullshit about cheating on Dennis. We could have saved ourselves so much time and grief.

My relationship with Karen may have been stormy, but her husband and I got on perfectly. I had finally worked out why Dennis was so keen on me. Although a barrow boy at heart, he had a yen for the finer things in life. The condition was that the transaction be conducted in whorehouse terms: he paid the trick, he called the shots. There was nothing very remarkable about him in this respect. You only have to walk into any art gallery these days to see that the real action is in the shop. Most people want to like art — they know it’s good for you, or at any rate looks good on you — but face to face with a great painting they feel like gate-crashers at a Mayfair reception. Back in the gallery supermarket they can happily check out the product like so many pin-ups, wallet in hand, the big spender, in control again.

That’s how Dennis felt about me. I was everything he would never be: Oxford educated, widely travelled, still more widely read, a man of the world at ease in several languages. My saving grace was poverty. With the cash to match my pretensions I’d have been a menace for our Dennis. As it was, I was cheap at the price. An extra bottle of wine and some spare grub and he had himself a harmless court jester whose sallies were guaranteed to shock or amuse. Roll up, roll up! See the Eternal Student! Watch him go through his repertoire of quotes and quips. Listen to him sing for his supper. Didn’t he do well? Now watch him cycle home in the rain. He’s nearly forty-two, you know, and still living in digs!

I couldn’t have cared less what Dennis Parsons thought of me, of course. If his judgement rankled, it was only because it accorded perfectly with my own. It was that inner voice that made me cringe as I lay sleepless on my lumpy mattress listening to the pogoing of the bedstead against the wall next door, where my co-tenants were pursuing their nightly quest for the elusive grail of Trish’s orgasm. I was merciless with myself, but the only thing I envied Dennis was his money. We thus had a perfect relationship: each of us felt that he could patronize the other.

OK, let’s roll it. The hands of the clock spin round, the pages drop off the calendar, shots of punting and cricket replace those of rowing and rugby. It’s summer, and the English middle class prepare for their annual pilgrimage to the land of their putative forebears. Actually Dennis and Karen’s ancestors most likely dwelt among the cattle and kine in a wattle-and-daub barrio beneath the castle jakes, but their descendants cultivated a taste for wine and continental cooking, went riding and spent the obligatory two weeks a year in a rented villa in the Dordogne. They and the Carters were to have shared it that year with the computer analyst and his wife, but one of this couple’s children was involved in an accident and they had to cancel at the last minute. Very much to my surprise, Dennis asked me if I wanted to go instead.

‘It won’t cost you anything except for booze and eats. Their holiday insurance will cover the rent, and since Thomas and I are both taking cars there’ll be plenty of room. It’s just to make up the numbers, really. It gets a bit dull with just the four of you, and of course everyone else has already made plans.’

The only problem was my work. June to September is open season for EFL students. During the winter Clive scraped by as best he could, bagging a rich brat here, a group of businessmen there, but come summer he cleaned up, netting the poor startled witless kids in droves. To pack and process them he needed staff, so our terms stipulated a minimum of two months’ summer work, the understanding being that when contracts came up for renewal, priority would be given to those who had put in most time on the slime-line.

But I was no longer in awe of Clive. Had we not dined together? And had I not wiped the floor with the little squirt, conversationally speaking? Judging by his expression, Clive had not been best pleased to find me ensconced in the Parsons’ sitting room that night. He didn’t mind socializing with his staff as long as it was on his terms and at their expense, but to meet them as equals on neutral ground was another matter. None are so ruthlessly exclusive as those who have worked their way up from the ranks. That evening Clive could only grin and bear it, but when I told him I wouldn’t be able to do the second summer course he was distinctly cool. I explained that I’d found someone to substitute for me — one of the Carter boys was looking for holiday work — but he kept making objections about unqualified staff, mentioning a notorious case a few years earlier when one malcontent teacher wreaked his revenge by teaching a group of teenage Italians that the English greet each other in the street with the phrase ‘Piss off, wanker.’ Half the class had to be invalided home, and Clive’s name was still mud in Emilia-Romagna. I assured him that Nigel Carter wouldn’t dream of playing tricks like that, but the discovery that my replacement was the son of the friend of a friend, one of his own kind, was a further blow. Nor was he at all happy with the idea of me swanning off to France with the Parsons.

‘Do I detect a wick-dipping situation?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Contrary to what the course books say, we do distinguish between familiar and formal modes of address in English, between tu and usted. It’s just that we don’t do it grammatically.

‘SAS training, isn’t it? Who dares wins. Faint fart never won hairy lady.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Clive ran a hand through his hair and gave me his wide-boy grin.

‘Our K.P. Sauce. Nice lips, shame about the teeth. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Asbestos sheath time.’

He kept up this sort of thing a while longer, but I refused to be provoked and in the end he had to let me go. I rushed out to a payphone to break the good news to Karen. Her reaction was less than ecstatic.

‘Aren’t you glad?’

‘I suppose so. It’s just …’

‘What?’

She sighed.

‘It isn’t going to be easy, that’s all.’

By contrast, her husband sounded genuinely pleased that I was coming. But of course he didn’t have anything to lose, as far as he knew. Karen did, and I could quite understand her apprehension at the prospect of trying to maintain her rigid code of etiquette beneath the hot southern sun, in a festive holiday atmosphere, with both of us under the same roof twenty-four hours a day.

Personally, I didn’t think she had a chance.

In anticipation and retrospect, holidays come into their own. We’re all salesmen then, armed with brochures, videos and amusing anecdotes. Real time is more problematic. Looking back, that holiday in France formed a point of no return in my relationship with Karen. On the ground it felt very different: confusing, stressful, messy, tiring, incomplete, frustrating.

The villa had turned out to be a converted barn featuring renovated stone walls, distressed oak furniture, and a large resident population of rats, bats, wasps, flies, spiders and cockroaches, all of which strongly resented our intrusion into their habitat. A farm on the other side of the lane provided fresh eggs, the stench of cow shit, and a rabid mongrel roped to a tree who barked for twenty minutes whenever a car went by. The main selling point was a heavily-chlorinated pool in which we swam (except for Dennis, who didn’t know how) and a variety of insects drowned. The tiled terrace, complete with metal table, coloured parasol and Ricard ashtray, commanded an extensive view of a valley studded with similar villas, similar holidays.

Thomas Carter had found the property ‘through a friend’, and there were some mutterings of discontent about his choice. From my point of view, though, it wasn’t the house that was the problem but the people. In Oxford, Karen’s insistence that our affair be conducted in public was just about feasible. At the villa it was out of the question. There were seven of us sharing the place, the Carters’ eldest son and his girlfriend having invited themselves along at the last moment, and their movements were completely unpredictable. I would have needed an air traffic control centre to keep track of where everyone was at any given moment. Moreover, as the joker in the pack, the only person without a partner, I was a subject of general interest, and to make matters still worse, Lynn Carter had conceived a pallid intellectual crush on me and was always hanging around trying to engage me in conversation. ‘It isn’t going to be easy,’ Karen had remarked when she heard I was coming. Not easy for her to deny me, I’d assumed she meant, not easy to continue denying herself. But Karen had been on these holidays before. She knew the score. Not easy for us, was what she’d been warning me, being so near and yet so far, so tantalizingly inaccessible to each other.

Meanwhile I saw her breasts for the first time. So did everybody else, for that matter. The rest of her was also naked to all intents and purposes. Karen didn’t dress well, trying unsuccessfully to disguise her wolfish sexuality with lambs-wool pullovers and flowery skirts. But once stripped of sheep’s clothing, her body made stunning sense. As I watched her turn and bend and lie back, oiled and tanned, her supple contours powered by a madness only I knew about, the idea that Karen ‘wasn’t my type’ seemed a quaint irrelevance. I felt like a kid again, skewered by desire, every passing girl a kick in the balls, humiliated and tormented by lust. Women never understand the way it hurts. They’ve never felt the pain that lies behind all the hatred we can feel for women, our need to hurt them in return.

It soon became clear that I was not the only moth cruising Karen’s flame. The Carter boy, Jonathan, known for some reason as Floss, took to spending long hours by the pool in a barely concealed state of voyeuristic arousal. He and his girlfriend Tibbs were supposedly en route to a camping holiday in Italy, but the lure of Karen’s nudity proved too powerful and this project was indefinitely postponed. The shameless bitch openly encouraged her young admirer’s attentions, summoning him to fetch her a drink, move the parasol, even to rub sun cream on her topless back. All quite harmless fun, no doubt — even Karen wasn’t going to seduce her husband’s partner’s teenage son — but I was not best pleased, especially since Tibbs showed no reciprocal interest in me. An energetic girl, she spent the day swimming, jogging, cycling and hiking before retiring to their tent, blissfully ignorant that the thrust of Floss’s nightly attentions was directed not at her but the succuba who also haunted my dreams.

The fact that I had an admirer in Thomas’s wife just made matters worse. Not only can’t you always get what you want, half the time you get what you don’t need either. I certainly neither wanted nor needed Lynn Carter, a woman of uninspiring appearance and a dreadful bore to boot. Since Karen Parsons was denied me, I resorted to polishing up my French with Therese Racquin, but the moment I settled down to read Lynn would flop down near me and solicit my views on waste recycling or food additives. The only interesting thing about our colloquia was that they excited Karen’s jealousy.

‘You two spend a lot of time talking,’ she remarked one day, materializing beside my chair as Lynn shambled off into the house in search of tea to counter the Dionysiac influence of the southern sun.

‘Lynn does a lot of talking. I do a lot of listening.’

‘You talk too! I saw you.’

Karen had been in the pool. Her breasts were covered now, but I could see the shape of the aureoles through the wet fabric. Water dripped from her crotch and streamed down her legs. I dared not touch her. Lynn might reappear at any moment, Thomas was rambling in the woods somewhere near by, Floss and Tibbs were playing badminton just round the corner. Ironically enough, only Dennis, sleeping off a heavy lunch, posed no threat to my desires.

‘What you talk about then?’ my tormentor demanded.

My eyes caressed her body languidly.

‘Mrs Carter’s taste runs to topics of fashionable concern. Her position is essentially uncontroversial, eschewing any extreme ideas which might conceivably add a flicker of interest to her otherwise predictable views. I sit there going “Mmm” and “Mmm?” at appropriate moments and greedily noting your every twitch and shudder down by the pool. In my mind’s eye, your body is liberally smeared with a mixture of walnut oil and Nutella spread. I am slowly removing it with my tongue.’

Karen looked sullenly down at the crazy paving, where a small ant was wending its way homeward with part of a dead butterfly on its back.

‘You never talk to me.’

‘I understood that it was forbidden unless Dennis was within earshot.’

‘You never talk like that to me!’ she repeated shrilly.

I have never liked shrillness, particularly when allied to Liverpudlian vowels and a cock-teaser’s soul.

‘Karen,’ I replied coldly, ‘you and I have absolutely nothing to talk about.’

But I mustn’t let you run away with the impression that I spent all my time lounging around the pool. In fact such moments of leisure were relatively rare. Although the subject was never directly mentioned, it was subtly intimated in various ways that I was beholden to the Parsons for what was after all a free holiday, and was therefore expected to do rather more than my bit when it came to chauffeuring, chaperoning, shopping and suchlike chores. What made this all the more piquant was that so far from being free, the holiday was in fact bankrupting me. ‘It won’t cost you anything except for booze and eats,’ Dennis had told me. What he hadn’t mentioned was that we would be dining out in restaurants which had attracted a nod from Michelin, a faint damn from Gault-Millau or a paragraph of wet-dream prose in a British Sunday. My share of the bill rarely came to less than?30. What with contributions to the housekeeping, the holiday was going to end up costing me the best part of?500.

There was no point in protesting, of course. The Parsons and the Carters were incapable of conceiving that anyone could be financially embarrassed by a lunch bill, particularly one which, as Dennis kept pointing out, was ‘bloody reasonable’. At least I had the money, painfully scraped together with a view to eventually taking a PGCE-TEFL course to upgrade my qualifications and enable me to escape from Clive’s power. Every penny of that meagre capital represented a pleasure foregone, a temptation denied, yet now I found myself wasting it on meals I didn’t want with people who regarded me as a poor relative. I was thus in the interesting position of paying to be patronized, asset-stripping my future and still cutting a despicable figure. Dennis would never let me forget what he had done for me, and come September I had nothing to look forward to except another year of slavery on Clive’s treadmill.

One day towards the middle of our second week there Thomas Carter returned from a trip to the local market town with the news that he had bumped into a friend of his who was staying not far away. She had invited us all to lunch the following day, he said. It cannot be simply the distortions of hindsight that cast Alison Kraemer in the role of spoiler, for the effect was to throw us all into a foul temper, heightening the existing tensions until they exploded a few days later with devastating results. The very first view of the house put a dampener on our mood. Set a short distance off a minor road, approached by a winding drive flanked by poplars, it was everyone’s image of the ‘little place in France’, rustic but well-proportioned, manageably spacious, restrained but not austere, a Cotswold farmhouse with a French accent. That much was real estate, available to anyone with the right money, although it didn’t help to discover that Alison and her late husband, a philosophy don at Balliol, had bought it back in the early sixties for less than?2,000. What no one could have bought, what wasn’t for sale at any price, was Alison’s way with the place. Every geranium, every chicken, every snoozing cat was in its place, like so many movie extras. But that gives the wrong impression, for there was nothing whatever contrived about the effect. If only! What a relief it would have been to be able to dismiss it all as a Homes and Gardens photo-call, carefully stage-managed to make visitors drop dead.

If I am to do better than merely throw up my hands and assert that Alison Kraemer was in some indefinable way ‘the real, right thing’, then I would suggest that the distinguishing characteristic of her ascendancy was the way she denied you any possibility of mitigating it. Most people go just that little bit too far, opening up a blessed margin of excess along which our wounded egos can scuttle to safety. With the upstart Parsons that margin was as wide as a motorway, of course, but even Thomas Carter, Nature’s gentleman, couldn’t help getting it ever so slightly wrong, in his case by bending over backwards to minimize his achievements and rubbish his accomplishments in order to spare you the painful comparison with your own lacklustre status. Both, in their different ways, were measuring the distance between themselves and others. Alison Kraemer simply didn’t seem conscious of it.

Lunch was an omelette and a salad and cheese and bread, and it was the best meal we’d eaten all holiday. The eggs were from Alison’s hens, the leaves from her garden and hedgerow, the cheese from a neighbour’s goats, the bread chewy and wood-scented. Alison presided in a relaxed way, finding things for people to do, drawing them out, drawing them in. She did not offer us a tour of the house. She did not put on a tape of Vivaldi. She did not press drink on us. It was all most agreeable.

I can imagine what’s going through your minds at this point. This answer is no, I didn’t fancy her. Not remotely. Not then, not later, not at any time. Alison was resolutely unerotic. This had nothing to do with her looks, which were traditional English upper-middle class, soft and rounded, sweet yet sturdy. If the daemon that fired Karen had invaded Alison’s body, locking its carapace to her face and swarming down her throat like some nifty parasitic alien, it would have had her coming on like Mae West in no time at all. The material was there, but Alison simply didn’t project, physically. Nevertheless, she had a strong effect on me, and an odd one. In her presence, after almost a year, and in a foreign country at that, I felt I had finally come home.

When we returned to our gentrified cow-flop that afternoon everything seemed tawdry, vulgar and second-rate. More significantly, so did everybody. All the nagging discontents that had accumulated after ten days together burst out in a series of rows that increased in intensity and duration as the evening wore on. Broken corks and ineffective tin-openers sparked off major incidents. Unforgiveable things were said, and then repeated with morbid satisfaction by the aggrieved party in the manner of beggars displaying their sores. As darkness fell and the booze took its toll, people began to drop out. First Floss and Tibbs retired to their tent to dispel this foretaste of the middle-aged grossness that awaited them in the exercise of their healthy young bodies. Lynn sat slumped for a while in catatonic gloom, scratching bubo-like mosquito bites and reading about foreign horrors in an Amnesty International magazine, and then she too turned in. Only the Parsons stuck gamely to their gory sport, circling each other like bull terriers in a pit, with Thomas and I as spectators and referees.

The nominal subject of such quarrels is of course secondary to the couple’s need to hurt each other, but in this case it appeared to centre on the Parsons’ childlessness. From Dennis’s drunken hints that memorable evening in Ramillies Drive I had gathered that the reason for this was Karen’s sterility, so I was somewhat surprised to find her going on the offensive.

‘God knows why you ever married me! It certainly wasn’t for sex.’

Dennis grinned.

‘You reminded me of my mother, darling.’

‘Too bad you couldn’t make me a mother.’

I held my breath, waiting for the knock-out punch. If what Dennis had told me was true, Karen was wide open. But he said nothing.

‘Time we got some sleep,’ said Thomas.

Dennis drained his glass.

‘Right.’

‘Not with me you bloody don’t,’ Karen told him, striding into the house. The bedroom door slammed shut behind her.

‘You can have my room, if you like,’ I said.

I made it easier for him by saying I wasn’t tired, I wanted to stay up and star-gaze, and anyway the sofa in the living area was very comfortable. All of these were lies. What I was really counting on was finding my way to the bed which Dennis had been denied. I needn’t have worried about him being too delicate to accept my offer. In fact he didn’t even seem to feel that it required any show of gratitude. Why shouldn’t he take my bed? I wasn’t paying for it, after all.

I sat outside beneath the upturned colander of the night sky until Dennis’s snores had settled into a consistent rhythm, then made my way inside the house and across the living area to the door behind which Karen lay naked. I was sure she would be waiting for me, but the door was locked. I tried calling softly, but there was no reply, and I did not dare make more noise for fear of disturbing the others. In the end I retreated to the sofa, where I spent a cold, uncomfortable and furiously sleepless night.

I was awakened shortly after dawn by Floss and Tibbs. They were finally off to Italy and wanted to make an early start. When Dennis emerged I reclaimed my room, flopped out on the sheets impregnated with his distinctive odour and slept fitfully until just after ten, when a hot slice of sunlight which had been working its way across the bed reached my face.

The house was silent. The surface of the swimming pool was quite still, except for a set of small rings around a drowning fly. I jumped in and frothed about a bit, then went back inside and made some coffee. The silence, like the sunlight, was palpable, sensuous. I lay back on the hot canvas of a recliner and closed my eyes, soaking it in. I may have dozed off for a while.

Some time later I heard a chink of glass and looked up to find Dennis sitting at a nearby table with a half-empty bottle of chilled rose. Lynn and Thomas had gone walking with Alison, he said. He didn’t say where Karen was. We sat drinking wine and nibbling olives. Dennis was knocking the stuff back like lager, not even bothering with his usual patter. After a lunch of Roquefort sandwiches and the remains of last night’s salad, he went inside to lie down. I curled up in the shade of the parasol and tuned in to the natural static.

I was aroused by a metallic clatter. To my unadapted eyes the scene looked as bleached-out as an over-exposed snapshot. I could just make out a figure wheeling a bicycle up the drive. It disappeared round the corner of the house. I sat up, rubbing a patch of raw skin where the sun had found out my shoulder. Inside the house doors opened and closed. Pipes hummed, drains slushed, the gas geyser whomped into action. I skipped across the baking flagstones, eyes clenched against the brutal light. In the living room, Dennis lay across the sofa on his stomach, face flabbed up at an angle on a cushion, mouth gaping. I padded past him, towards the bathroom. The door was ajar. In the shower cubicle, water hissed on ceramic tile or clattered on the green plastic curtain, according to the gyrations of the nude body within.

No one of the post-Psycho generation likes being surprised in the shower, so I closed the bathroom door loudly behind me. The curtain twitched aside and Karen’s face appeared.

‘Be finished in a mo.’

I stepped out of my swimming trunks. Her expression hardened.

‘I’ll scream!’ she warned.

I pulled back the shower curtain, exposing her fully. We stood inches apart, divided by the spray of lukewarm water, not touching, our eyes locked together with almost coital intensity. Then, without the slightest warning, just like that first time so many months before, Karen jumped me. Her legs hooked around mine, her arms clasped my neck. I’d had a soft erection before, but as our mouths collided — we hadn’t even been able to kiss all week! — it hardened up painfully. Even now I half-suspected that she was just teasing, but in the end it was she who wriggled and twisted until we docked.

After that I don’t remember very much, except that in our ecstasy the fatal word ‘love’ passed our lips for the first time. I don’t recall which of us spoke it first, but as the end approached we were both mouthing it imploringly, like a prayer, like a spell. By then our approaching orgasms had synchronized to form a freak wave of emotion which threatened to wipe our personalities clean. Then it peaked, and we were riding it, and now the words were exultant, incantatory. Whether it was that in that heightened state I had a premonition of what was to follow, or was simply recalling Dennis’s corpse-like stupor in the next room, I felt a perverted thrill, as though I were desecrating the most holy altar of all. For what we had just created was not a life but a death, and one that was to take far less than nine months to gestate.