‘I suppose so. It’s just …’
‘What?’
She sighed.
‘It isn’t going to be easy, that’s all.’
By contrast, her husband sounded genuinely pleased that I was coming. But of course he didn’t have anything to lose, as far as he knew. Karen did, and I could quite understand her apprehension at the prospect of trying to maintain her rigid code of etiquette beneath the hot southern sun, in a festive holiday atmosphere, with both of us under the same roof twenty-four hours a day.
Personally, I didn’t think she had a chance.
In anticipation and retrospect, holidays come into their own. We’re all salesmen then, armed with brochures, videos and amusing anecdotes. Real time is more problematic. Looking back, that holiday in France formed a point of no return in my relationship with Karen. On the ground it felt very different: confusing, stressful, messy, tiring, incomplete, frustrating.
The villa had turned out to be a converted barn featuring renovated stone walls, distressed oak furniture, and a large resident population of rats, bats, wasps, flies, spiders and cockroaches, all of which strongly resented our intrusion into their habitat. A farm on the other side of the lane provided fresh eggs, the stench of cow shit, and a rabid mongrel roped to a tree who barked for twenty minutes whenever a car went by. The main selling point was a heavily-chlorinated pool in which we swam (except for Dennis, who didn’t know how) and a variety of insects drowned. The tiled terrace, complete with metal table, coloured parasol and Ricard ashtray, commanded an extensive view of a valley studded with similar villas, similar holidays.
Thomas Carter had found the property ‘through a friend’, and there were some mutterings of discontent about his choice. From my point of view, though, it wasn’t the house that was the problem but the people. In Oxford, Karen’s insistence that our affair be conducted in public was just about feasible. At the villa it was out of the question. There were seven of us sharing the place, the Carters’ eldest son and his girlfriend having invited themselves along at the last moment, and their movements were completely unpredictable. I would have needed an air traffic control centre to keep track of where everyone was at any given moment. Moreover, as the joker in the pack, the only person without a partner, I was a subject of general interest, and to make matters still worse, Lynn Carter had conceived a pallid intellectual crush on me and was always hanging around trying to engage me in conversation. ‘It isn’t going to be easy,’ Karen had remarked when she heard I was coming. Not easy for her to deny me, I’d assumed she meant, not easy to continue denying herself. But Karen had been on these holidays before. She knew the score. Not easy for
Meanwhile I saw her breasts for the first time. So did everybody else, for that matter. The rest of her was also naked to all intents and purposes. Karen didn’t dress well, trying unsuccessfully to disguise her wolfish sexuality with lambs-wool pullovers and flowery skirts. But once stripped of sheep’s clothing, her body made stunning sense. As I watched her turn and bend and lie back, oiled and tanned, her supple contours powered by a madness only I knew about, the idea that Karen ‘wasn’t my type’ seemed a quaint irrelevance. I felt like a kid again, skewered by desire, every passing girl a kick in the balls, humiliated and tormented by lust. Women never understand the way it
It soon became clear that I was not the only moth cruising Karen’s flame. The Carter boy, Jonathan, known for some reason as Floss, took to spending long hours by the pool in a barely concealed state of voyeuristic arousal. He and his girlfriend Tibbs were supposedly en route to a camping holiday in Italy, but the lure of Karen’s nudity proved too powerful and this project was indefinitely postponed. The shameless bitch openly encouraged her young admirer’s attentions, summoning him to fetch her a drink, move the parasol, even to rub sun cream on her topless back. All quite harmless fun, no doubt — even Karen wasn’t going to seduce her husband’s partner’s teenage son — but I was not best pleased, especially since Tibbs showed no reciprocal interest in me. An energetic girl, she spent the day swimming, jogging, cycling and hiking before retiring to their tent, blissfully ignorant that the thrust of Floss’s nightly attentions was directed not at her but the succuba who also haunted my dreams.
The fact that I had an admirer in Thomas’s wife just made matters worse. Not only can’t you always get what you want, half the time you get what you don’t need either. I certainly neither wanted nor needed Lynn Carter, a woman of uninspiring appearance and a dreadful bore to boot. Since Karen Parsons was denied me, I resorted to polishing up my French with
‘You two spend a lot of time talking,’ she remarked one day, materializing beside my chair as Lynn shambled off into the house in search of tea to counter the Dionysiac influence of the southern sun.
‘Lynn does a lot of talking. I do a lot of listening.’
‘You talk too! I saw you.’
Karen had been in the pool. Her breasts were covered now, but I could see the shape of the aureoles through the wet fabric. Water dripped from her crotch and streamed down her legs. I dared not touch her. Lynn might reappear at any moment, Thomas was rambling in the woods somewhere near by, Floss and Tibbs were playing badminton just round the corner. Ironically enough, only Dennis, sleeping off a heavy lunch, posed no threat to my desires.
‘What you talk about then?’ my tormentor demanded.
My eyes caressed her body languidly.
‘Mrs Carter’s taste runs to topics of fashionable concern. Her position is essentially uncontroversial, eschewing any extreme ideas which might conceivably add a flicker of interest to her otherwise predictable views. I sit there going “Mmm” and “Mmm?” at appropriate moments and greedily noting your every twitch and shudder down by the pool. In my mind’s eye, your body is liberally smeared with a mixture of walnut oil and Nutella spread. I am slowly removing it with my tongue.’
Karen looked sullenly down at the crazy paving, where a small ant was wending its way homeward with part of a dead butterfly on its back.
‘You never talk to me.’
‘I understood that it was forbidden unless Dennis was within earshot.’
‘You never talk like that to me!’ she repeated shrilly.
I have never liked shrillness, particularly when allied to Liverpudlian vowels and a cock-teaser’s soul.
‘Karen,’ I replied coldly, ‘you and I have absolutely nothing to talk about.’
But I mustn’t let you run away with the impression that I spent all my time lounging around the pool. In fact such moments of leisure were relatively rare. Although the subject was never directly mentioned, it was subtly intimated in various ways that I was beholden to the Parsons for what was after all a free holiday, and was therefore expected to do rather more than my bit when it came to chauffeuring, chaperoning, shopping and suchlike chores. What made this all the more piquant was that so far from being free, the holiday was in fact bankrupting me. ‘It won’t cost you anything except for booze and eats,’ Dennis had told me. What he hadn’t mentioned was that we would be dining out in restaurants which had attracted a nod from Michelin, a faint damn from Gault-Millau or a paragraph of wet-dream prose in a British Sunday. My share of the bill rarely came to less than?30. What with contributions to the housekeeping, the holiday was going to end up costing me the best part of?500.
There was no point in protesting, of course. The Parsons and the Carters were incapable of conceiving that anyone could be financially embarrassed by a lunch bill, particularly one which, as Dennis kept pointing out, was ‘bloody reasonable’. At least I had the money, painfully scraped together with a view to eventually taking a PGCE- TEFL course to upgrade my qualifications and enable me to escape from Clive’s power. Every penny of that meagre capital represented a pleasure foregone, a temptation denied, yet now I found myself wasting it on meals I didn’t want with people who regarded me as a poor relative. I was thus in the interesting position of paying to be patronized, asset-stripping my future and still cutting a despicable figure. Dennis would never let me forget what he had done for me, and come September I had nothing to look forward to except another year of slavery on Clive’s treadmill.
One day towards the middle of our second week there Thomas Carter returned from a trip to the local market
