Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

It never occurred to me that Karen might be grieving for her late husband. I don’t want to sound unduly negative, but I simply couldn’t see what there was to mourn. There was a photograph of Dennis on one of the wreaths at the funeral, and I didn’t even recognize it. I don’t think I’d ever really looked at him, to be honest. I didn’t need to. I knew he was there, and that if I tried to move in a certain direction I’d bump into him. Now that he was gone I supposed that the crooked would be made straight and the rough places plain. But in death, every wally shall be exalted. Dennis’s absence proved much more potent an obstacle than his presence had ever been.

My first inkling of this came when I phoned Karen shortly after the funeral.

‘I want to see you.’

Silence.

‘When can I come round?’

Silence.

‘Karen?’

Blubbery sobbing, followed by a loud sniff.

‘Never.’

‘What?’

A longer silence, and more damp hankie noises.

‘We killed him.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’

Years abroad had made me wary of what I said on the telephone. While I was in the Gulf, one of our teachers vanished temporarily after a call to a colleague in which he had made disparaging remarks about members of the local royal family.

‘We did!’ she insisted dully.

‘Karen, it was an accident.’

‘If only we could have had a child. Then at least something of him would be left.’

‘I know it’s difficult to accept what has happened,’ I said in an unctuously compassionate tone. ‘In a way it would be easier if someone had killed him. At least then there would be a reason. That’s why people invent gods, even vicious, vengeful ones, to account for all the awful things that happen.’

‘There is a God, and He’s punishing me for our sin, punishing me through Denny.’

‘Look Karen, no one is sorrier than I am about what happened. It was a horrible tragedy, a cruel waste, absurd and unnecessary. But having said that, what about us ? It’s been nothing but Dennis, Dennis, Dennis for days now. What do I have to do to get some attention, jump in after him?’

She hung up on me. This was all to the good. The more my words hurt, the sooner she would acknowledge their truth. But I wasn’t prepared to sit patiently on the sidelines while this process took place. More importantly, I couldn’t afford to. As an attractive young heiress Karen might quickly become the target of unscrupulous bounty hunters. It was no use trying to resolve anything over the phone, though. My hold over Karen was physical, not verbal. If the magic was to start working again, I had to get her alone and in person for a few days. The trip to Wales was simply my first idea. I sent her a brochure I had picked up at a travel agent, together with a bouquet of roses and a letter. I was worried about the strain and stress she must be under, I said. What we both needed was to get away for a couple of days, to go somewhere peaceful, relaxing and free of any association with the past, where we could work out where we stood.

Much to my surprise she agreed, on condition that we had separate rooms and made our own travel arrangements. This meant I faced a five-hour train journey, with two changes, and then — having retrieved my bicycle from the guard’s van — a fifteen-mile uphill ride. It would no doubt have been quite attractive in fine weather, and the same applied to the countryside around the hotel, an imposing pile by Nightmare Abbey out of a Scotch baronial shooting lodge. As it is, my memories of the weekend are dominated by the image of two diminutive figures crouching in the nether reaches of a vast vaulted interior, their sporadic and tentative remarks amplified by the vacant acoustics into portentous gobbledegook. The other guests are all asleep, or possibly dead and stuffed. The staff are under a spell. Time has come to a standstill. Outside, a soft rain falls ceaselessly.

In my letter I had told Karen that the purpose of the trip was to discuss the future of our relationship. I quickly discovered that in her view it didn’t have one, and that the only reason she had agreed to see me was to get this across once and for all. As far as she was concerned, she told me over and over again, we were responsible for Dennis’s death. If she hadn’t yielded to a guilty passion then she would have been a better wife to Denny. The implication was that with a bit more happening in the sack, hubby wouldn’t have felt he was getting past it and tried to prove his virility by punting up the north face of the Thames.

‘If I’d been more, you know, responsive and that, then Denny’d still be here today. And the only reason I wasn’t is, well, because of us.’

I assaulted this position from every angle, ranging from thoughtful analyses of the male mid-life crisis, its nature and origins, to sweeping ad absurdum dismissals in which I demonstrated that by the same token Trish and Brian were equally culpable, because if they’d gone out for the day I would have stayed at home and we would never have met in the first place. But all my wit and wisdom were wasted on Karen’s one-track mind. Just as the inhabitants of the barrios here defend their pathetic shanties to the last, defying the well-meaning efforts of the authorities to relocate them, so the poor in intellect cling to whatever feeble idea they have been able to fashion out of the odds and ends they have foraged. Be it never so humble, there’s no place like home.

‘That’s the way I see it,’ was Karen’s doggedly repeated bottom line, ‘and nothing you say is going to make me change.’

Fair enough. I’d never set much store by rational argument where Karen was concerned. It was body language I’d been counting on to win her round. Given our record, I’d imagined that it would be impossible for us to spend a night under the same roof without spending it together. Not only didn’t this happen, however, but it never seemed remotely likely to happen. To my dismay, the sexual charge between us had disappeared as though a switch had been thrown. When Karen and I used to feast on each other’s bodies, Dennis was the unseen guest at the table. Even when he wasn’t there, we conjured him up, putting on his rank, night-sweated pyjamas, recounting his doings and sayings. Dennis was our ribbed condom, our french tickler. He made sex safe and savoury at the same time. Now he was dead, it would be too dangerous and too dull.

So far from convincing Karen she was wrong, by the Sunday afternoon I had come round to her point of view. Most couples, however fossilized their relationship, have some interest in common, if it’s only cooking or travel or pets. We had nothing. We were like creatures so different that their scales of vision are incompatible. To myopic Karen my world was a featureless, threatening blur, while for me hers was a chaos of microscopic inanity. To seduce Dennis’s swinging wife had been a welcome compensation for my social and financial humiliations, but to lay siege to his frigid, guilt-stricken widow was a very different matter. What on earth was I doing pursuing this common gym mistress instead of a woman like, say, Alison Kraemer?

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