Michael Dibdin: Dirty Tricks

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.