Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

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?