Michael Dibdin: Dirty Tricks

‘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 Ch a rwell 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 .