town with the news that he had bumped into a friend of his who was staying not far away. She had invited us all to lunch the following day, he said. It cannot be simply the distortions of hindsight that cast Alison Kraemer in the role of spoiler, for the effect was to throw us all into a foul temper, heightening the existing tensions until they exploded a few days later with devastating results. The very first view of the house put a dampener on our mood. Set a short distance off a minor road, approached by a winding drive flanked by poplars, it was everyone’s image of the ‘little place in France’, rustic but well-proportioned, manageably spacious, restrained but not austere, a Cotswold farmhouse with a French accent. That much was real estate, available to anyone with the right money, although it didn’t help to discover that Alison and her late husband, a philosophy don at Balliol, had bought it back in the early sixties for less than?2,000. What no one could have bought, what wasn’t for sale at any price, was Alison’s way with the place. Every geranium, every chicken, every snoozing cat was in its place, like so many movie extras. But that gives the wrong impression, for there was nothing whatever contrived about the effect. If only! What a relief it would have been to be able to dismiss it all as a
If I am to do better than merely throw up my hands and assert that Alison Kraemer was in some indefinable way ‘the real, right thing’, then I would suggest that the distinguishing characteristic of her ascendancy was the way she denied you any possibility of mitigating it. Most people go just that little bit too far, opening up a blessed margin of excess along which our wounded egos can scuttle to safety. With the upstart Parsons that margin was as wide as a motorway, of course, but even Thomas Carter, Nature’s gentleman, couldn’t help getting it ever so slightly wrong, in his case by bending over backwards to minimize his achievements and rubbish his accomplishments in order to spare you the painful comparison with your own lacklustre status. Both, in their different ways, were measuring the distance between themselves and others. Alison Kraemer simply didn’t seem conscious of it.
Lunch was an omelette and a salad and cheese and bread, and it was the best meal we’d eaten all holiday. The eggs were from Alison’s hens, the leaves from her garden and hedgerow, the cheese from a neighbour’s goats, the bread chewy and wood-scented. Alison presided in a relaxed way, finding things for people to do, drawing them out, drawing them in. She did not offer us a tour of the house. She did not put on a tape of Vivaldi. She did not press drink on us. It was all most agreeable.
I can imagine what’s going through your minds at this point. This answer is no, I didn’t fancy her. Not remotely. Not then, not later, not at any time. Alison was resolutely unerotic. This had nothing to do with her looks, which were traditional English upper-middle class, soft and rounded, sweet yet sturdy. If the daemon that fired Karen had invaded Alison’s body, locking its carapace to her face and swarming down her throat like some nifty parasitic alien, it would have had her coming on like Mae West in no time at all. The material was there, but Alison simply didn’t project, physically. Nevertheless, she had a strong effect on me, and an odd one. In her presence, after almost a year, and in a foreign country at that, I felt I had finally come home.
When we returned to our gentrified cow-flop that afternoon everything seemed tawdry, vulgar and second- rate. More significantly, so did everybody. All the nagging discontents that had accumulated after ten days together burst out in a series of rows that increased in intensity and duration as the evening wore on. Broken corks and ineffective tin-openers sparked off major incidents. Unforgiveable things were said, and then repeated with morbid satisfaction by the aggrieved party in the manner of beggars displaying their sores. As darkness fell and the booze took its toll, people began to drop out. First Floss and Tibbs retired to their tent to dispel this foretaste of the middle-aged grossness that awaited them in the exercise of their healthy young bodies. Lynn sat slumped for a while in catatonic gloom, scratching bubo-like mosquito bites and reading about foreign horrors in an Amnesty International magazine, and then she too turned in. Only the Parsons stuck gamely to their gory sport, circling each other like bull terriers in a pit, with Thomas and I as spectators and referees.
The nominal subject of such quarrels is of course secondary to the couple’s need to hurt each other, but in this case it appeared to centre on the Parsons’ childlessness. From Dennis’s drunken hints that memorable evening in Ramillies Drive I had gathered that the reason for this was Karen’s sterility, so I was somewhat surprised to find her going on the offensive.
‘God knows why you ever married me! It certainly wasn’t for sex.’
Dennis grinned.
‘You reminded me of my mother, darling.’
‘Too bad you couldn’t make
I held my breath, waiting for the knock-out punch. If what Dennis had told me was true, Karen was wide open. But he said nothing.
‘Time we got some sleep,’ said Thomas.
Dennis drained his glass.
‘Right.’
‘Not with me you bloody don’t,’ Karen told him, striding into the house. The bedroom door slammed shut behind her.
‘You can have my room, if you like,’ I said.
I made it easier for him by saying I wasn’t tired, I wanted to stay up and star-gaze, and anyway the sofa in the living area was very comfortable. All of these were lies. What I was really counting on was finding my way to the bed which Dennis had been denied. I needn’t have worried about him being too delicate to accept my offer. In fact he didn’t even seem to feel that it required any show of gratitude. Why shouldn’t he take my bed? I wasn’t paying for it, after all.
I sat outside beneath the upturned colander of the night sky until Dennis’s snores had settled into a consistent rhythm, then made my way inside the house and across the living area to the door behind which Karen lay naked. I was sure she would be waiting for me, but the door was locked. I tried calling softly, but there was no reply, and I did not dare make more noise for fear of disturbing the others. In the end I retreated to the sofa, where I spent a cold, uncomfortable and furiously sleepless night.
I was awakened shortly after dawn by Floss and Tibbs. They were finally off to Italy and wanted to make an early start. When Dennis emerged I reclaimed my room, flopped out on the sheets impregnated with his distinctive odour and slept fitfully until just after ten, when a hot slice of sunlight which had been working its way across the bed reached my face.
The house was silent. The surface of the swimming pool was quite still, except for a set of small rings around a drowning fly. I jumped in and frothed about a bit, then went back inside and made some coffee. The silence, like the sunlight, was palpable, sensuous. I lay back on the hot canvas of a recliner and closed my eyes, soaking it in. I may have dozed off for a while.
Some time later I heard a chink of glass and looked up to find Dennis sitting at a nearby table with a half- empty bottle of chilled rose. Lynn and Thomas had gone walking with Alison, he said. He didn’t say where Karen was. We sat drinking wine and nibbling olives. Dennis was knocking the stuff back like lager, not even bothering with his usual patter. After a lunch of Roquefort sandwiches and the remains of last night’s salad, he went inside to lie down. I curled up in the shade of the parasol and tuned in to the natural static.
I was aroused by a metallic clatter. To my unadapted eyes the scene looked as bleached-out as an over- exposed snapshot. I could just make out a figure wheeling a bicycle up the drive. It disappeared round the corner of the house. I sat up, rubbing a patch of raw skin where the sun had found out my shoulder. Inside the house doors opened and closed. Pipes hummed, drains slushed, the gas geyser whomped into action. I skipped across the baking flagstones, eyes clenched against the brutal light. In the living room, Dennis lay across the sofa on his stomach, face flabbed up at an angle on a cushion, mouth gaping. I padded past him, towards the bathroom. The door was ajar. In the shower cubicle, water hissed on ceramic tile or clattered on the green plastic curtain, according to the gyrations of the nude body within.
No one of the post-
‘Be finished in a mo.’
I stepped out of my swimming trunks. Her expression hardened.
‘I’ll scream!’ she warned.
I pulled back the shower curtain, exposing her fully. We stood inches apart, divided by the spray of lukewarm water, not touching, our eyes locked together with almost coital intensity. Then, without the slightest warning, just like that first time so many months before, Karen jumped me. Her legs hooked around mine, her arms clasped my
