Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

Karen was in the shower when I got home. I took advantage of her acoustic isolation to phone Alison Kraemer. I hadn’t as yet told Alison about Karen’s pregnancy. Since that tea-time conversation in Holywell Street our relations had been friendly but correct. Now I felt the time had come to take her further into my confidence, and I therefore proposed meeting for lunch the next day. Quite apart from anything else, this would do me no harm at all in the event of Clive invoking the law. ‘Now let me just get this straight, officer. Your contention is that prior to meeting Ms Kraemer for lunch at Fifteen North Parade — I can really recommend their venison in madeira and celeriac sauce, and the Chateau Musar ’82 is drinking very nicely — I had spent the morning torturing someone in a quarry near Banbury. Is that correct?’

After some humming and hawing Alison agreed to see me, although she said she’d have to be home by four.

‘I’ve got the Barringtons and the Rissingtons to dinner and I’m making a rice timbale. It’s very good, but God, the preparation!’

The splashing and banging noises from the bathroom were still in full swing when I put the receiver down, so when Karen turned on me that evening and accused me of carrying on an affair with Alison behind her back, I was taken completely by surprise.

Karen and I shared the chores like the thoroughly modern couple we were. One night I loaded the microwave and Karen the dishwasher, the next we reversed roles. That day it was her turn to be creative. She’d selected something which looked like a slab of concrete wrapped in plastic foil when it went into the oven, and like a miniature hot-mud geyser when the timer pinged three minutes later. At no point did it resemble the illustration on the packet, but we ate it anyway, although as so often I felt that it would have made more sense to eat the packet and throw away the contents. We washed it down with one of the last surviving bottles from Dennis’s cache of wine, a ballsy Australian red weighing in at about fourteen degrees. This was of course on top of our two official G and Ts each, plus whatever Karen had been tippling on the side.

Dessert consisted of some slug-like tinned fruit in a slimy liquor, topped with a non-dairy aerosol mousse whose main selling point appeared to be the fact that the propellant was environmentally friendly. Once we’d scoffed this off, Karen launched her assault. On returning home, it seemed, she had phoned British Rail information to check the time of her train the next morning. The line was engaged, so she went to have a shower and tried again later, using the automatic re-dial facility. Since I had called Alison in the interim, her call was answered not by BR’s timetable touts but by a female voice which she identified as belonging to ‘that Crammer woman’.

Everything that happened subsequently was really down to my inability to react fast enough to this freak occurence. What I should have done, of course, is concoct a specious excuse for having phoned Alison. This would not have been so hard. I could have claimed to be returning a call from her I’d found recorded on the answering machine, for example. This would have given me time to work out a suitable cover-story, and also to brief Alison in case Karen phoned her to check.

Instead, I stupidly denied that I had ever made such a call. Alison was one of those people who recite their number when answering the telephone, so Karen had been able to confirm her suspicions by checking with the directory. Not only wasn’t I believed, but by lying about the call I had made it impossible to claim that it had been insignificant or innocent. There was no help for it, I realized reluctantly. I was going to have to go nuclear.

‘So did you manage to get through to station information in the end?’

‘Don’t try and change the subject!’

‘Oh I’m not, Karen. It’s very much the same subject, isn’t it?’

She looked hesitant, unsure as yet whether there was anything to be worried about.

‘What exactly did you want to know?’ I inquired archly.

‘About the trains, of course.’

‘The trains to Liverpool, or to Banbury?’

Something flared briefly in her eyes, like a dud firework.

‘How did you find out?’

In other circumstances I would have stood up and cheered. Her response had not only put mine to shame, she had also returned my volley with awkward bounce and heavy top-spin. If I admitted bugging the phone, she would want to know what had made me suspicious. The answer, of course, was her pregnancy, but I couldn’t tell her that without revealing the truth about my vasectomy, which was far more than I was prepared to admit at this stage of the game. So I said the first thing that came into my head.

‘Clive told me.’

He eyes opened wide in shock.

‘No!’

I held my tongue.

‘He wouldn’t do that!’ she cried.

‘I can’t help wondering just how well you know him, Karen. Other than in the biblical sense, of course.’

She scrabbled in her handbag and popped a couple of 4 mg slaps of nicotine-rich gum.

‘I dropped by the school this morning to sound Clive out about the EFL business idea. We chatted for a while about how much he’d want in return for letting me access his network of overseas contacts and so on. Then he suddenly turned to me and said, “Look here, I think you’d better know that I’ve been stuffing your wife.” ’

Karen flinched as though the child she was carrying had suddenly kicked her.

‘I told him I didn’t believe him. “You don’t need to take my word for it,” he said. “You see she’s carrying my child.” ’

‘But he doesn’t even know! I never told him.’

‘You don’t need to tell him, Karen. There are lots of little signs which a man as sexually active as our Clive has doubtless seen before. Anyway, that’s all a bit beside the point, which is that while you’ve supposedly been working on your yoga every Wednesday night, you’ve actually been practising positions of a rather different kind.’

‘That’s not true! I only saw him once or twice, when things were going so badly between us two. We had a thing together before, when I was with Dennis. The only reason anything happened this time was because you were being so horrible to me. I wanted to reassure myself that I was still desirable.’

I laughed savagely.

‘Oh I see, it was all my fault!’

‘It was both our faults. But it wasn’t important. It was just a bit of fun as far as I was concerned. It meant more than that to him, though. That’s why I agreed to go away with him this weekend, to tell him that it’s all over.’

‘Seems rather a long way to go for that.’

Karen adroitly brought the waterworks on stream.

‘I was afraid! Afraid for us . Clive can’t accept that I don’t love him. I quite fancy him, but I don’t love him. I was terrified about what he might do when I told him I was pregnant by you. He’d been asking me to go away with him for ages, so I finally agreed, just so as to have time to explain things properly, to make him understand that if he cared for me he had to let me go.’

‘Sure, Karen.’

‘I wasn’t going to sleep with him! Do you think I could do that, knowing that I’m carrying your child inside me?’

‘Speaking of which …’

‘Look, let’s forget Clive. Let’s forget this woman you’ve been seeing. This is between you and me. Nothing else matters but this life we’ve created together. The rest is just play, but this is real. I know it won’t be easy. We’re too different for that. But we’ve got to try and make it work. We owe it to our child!’

I recognized this tune. I’d sung it myself once, back in the days when I was a penniless suitor and Karen a wealthy widow. But times had changed, nos et , it goes without saying, mutamur in illis . Karen was the suitor now, and I was not in the giving vein.