The vasectomy dated from 1980, when a girl I’d been sleeping with told me she was embarazada. So was I. The expectant mother was sixteen years old and one of my students at the school in Barcelona where I was five months into my first teaching job. My contract was promptly terminated with extreme prejudice. The girl’s family paid for her to fly to London to get an abortion. I went by train.

After that I was blacked by the quality schools, but I soon landed a job for the rest of the year with a cowboy outfit in Italy who needed a replacement teacher in a hurry. Before going, though, I had it out with my dick. This wasn’t the first time it had got me into trouble, but I intended to make damn sure it was the last. Let’s face it, those who can, have fun. The others, too poor in pocket or spirit, have children. Any parent who says he enjoys it is a liar. You might as well say you enjoy being crippled. Karen saw things very differently, of course. She just couldn’t wait to go through with the whole messy, life-destroying business. The absurd excitement she displayed at the prospect of becoming a mother confirmed my worst opinions of her. Feminism has been wasted on women like that.

The most amusing thing about the period of my engagement to Karen was the degree of role reversal involved. Not only were we going through the timid rituals of conventional courtship after a six-month diet of take- away sex, but I was the one who insisted that it stay that way until we were legally united. It’s incredible what an aphrodisiac the prospect of motherhood can be for some women. Once the magic word ‘baby’ had been spoken, Karen was in a permanent state of arousal. Sex with me was no longer a sin but the way to salvation. Magna Peccatrix was about to be beatified as Mater Gloriosa. All she needed was a touch from my magic wand. That was all very well, but I had my own position to consider. You know what women are like. They’ll promise you the earth to get you to come across, then treat you like dirt once they’ve satisfied their maternal cravings. I couldn’t afford to risk being left on the shelf once Karen had had her way with me. Her desires were my only hold over her, so despite her frantic pleas I refused to go any further than finger-fucking until she had signed on the dotted line.

When the formalities finally took place, it was a very brief ceremony. Our solicitors had prepared the necessary ‘instruments’, and all Karen and I had to do was ‘execute’ them, but when we emerged into the mild sunshine of Beaumont Street twenty minutes later, my life had been changed out of all recognition. I entered the premises an unemployed teacher living on charity in a rented two-up, two-down off the Cowley Road. Now I was a man of property, the joint owner of a large house in North Oxford, with investments so extensive I had no detailed idea of their scope and access to current and deposit accounts totalling well into six figures. I felt all weepy and emotional as Karen and I drove home together. Happy endings always make me cry.

Two days later I drove the BMW back to Winston Street and cleared my room. Trish and Brian were out at work. I left a cheque for the amount Trish had loaned me, plus a month’s rent in advance and a brief note saying that I was going to stay with an unspecified friend in North Oxford. I didn’t mention my marriage. At my suggestion, Karen didn’t tell any of her friends either. Although we both knew that we were acting from the best possible motives, I argued, other people were always ready to place a malicious interpretation on their neighbours’ doings and it might therefore be better to wait before breaking the news.

Karen welcomed this as further evidence of my tact and seriousness, which she ascribed to a sense of responsibility at the prospect of becoming the pater of a tiny foetus. I was amazed and terrified at the change I had so casually brought about in her. I felt like Frankenstein, quailing before the monster I had created. The Karen I had known a few months earlier, a simple, straightforward creature with healthy appetites, had been metamorphosed by my spells into a raving obsessive who regarded the spawning of offspring not as a lowest-common-denominator activity like excretion but as a moral and creative achievement on a par with, say, painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. All we had to do was bump our uglies.

No problem, you might think, given our track record in that particular event. And as far as Karen was concerned you’d be right. There were changes of style and technique, of course. Oral sex was definitely not in favour any more. This and all the other alternative orifices fell into disuse. Henceforth all traffic was routed down the main line. Even once we were acceptably coupled, though, the differences were obvious. Before, Karen had made love with hysterical urgency, a compulsive satisfying her greed. Our sex was anarchic, sufficient to itself, without perspectives. But that was in the past. Now the expression on Karen’s face as she lay beneath me, knees pulled up to her chin to facilitate maximum penetration, was of a recent convert taking communion. Rapt, ecstatic, she willed me on to ever-greater feats of ardour. It wasn’t just impregnation she was after, it was quality impregnation. She might have been wearing a sign like those you see in car windows: GIVE MY CHILD A CHANCE — DON’T PULL BACK.

In principle I was quite prepared to oblige. I may have my faults, but ungratefulness is not one of them. Karen had done her bit for me and I would have been more than happy to reciprocate. But though the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak. It wasn’t a question of impotence. I just couldn’t come.

In the old days this would have been all to the good. There was nothing Karen had liked better than being taken on a guided tour of three or four climaxes. But the new Karen had become sickeningly selfless in bed. It was no longer her orgasms that excited her, but mine. Her own afforded her nothing but a transient thrill, but mine supplied another dose of semen to chuck at the uterine wall where, sooner or later, she reckoned, some of it must stick. Marathon bonking was therefore frowned upon. What the market demanded was frequent and copious ejaculation. And since the supplied response was lacking, I had to fake it.

The simulated male orgasm has attracted very little attention by comparison with its female equivalent, not because it isn’t as common, but because it’s in no one’s interest to publicize the fact. Both sexes like the idea that women pretend, men because it confirms their suspicion that their partners are basically frigid and devious manipulators, women because it gives them a delicious sense of power to think that the delirium which men fondly ascribe to their virile prowess is no more than a hollow civility, like laughing at Grandpa’s jokes. By contrast, neither party has any desire to suggest that men might do the same thing. We males naturally reject the idea that we’re not at all times ready to cream anything that moves as a monstrous slander on our virility, while women certainly don’t want to think that creatures whose sexual urges are so undiscriminating that they have been known to rape grannies and animals and even corpses, for God’s sake, could possibly find them so unattractive that they need to simulate orgasm.

But it’s a funny old business, sex. In order to keep an erection long enough to fake orgasm, I had to imagine that I was making love to Karen. I was, of course, but that wasn’t enough. I needed the fantasy angle. I needed to call up the heroic days when Dennis was still around, and we were young and carefree, bonking our brains out while he shouted banalities from the foot of the stairs. In Dennis’s presence I became an outlaw once again, and Karen my moll. When he was there we were Bonnie and Clyde, now he was gone we were Blondie and Dagwood. Or rather, now he was gone, I was Dennis.

If I’d been smarter, or less vain, I might have realized that this meant that my former role was now vacant.

The news that Karen and I were married was made public at a buffet brunch given by Thomas and Lynn Carter to which we had been invited — or rather Karen had been invited, and had asked if it would be all right to bring me along. Thomas and Lynn owned a spread on Boars Hill, an annexe of Oxford closely resembling the WASP’s nest suburbs of Tom’s native Philadelphia. It spelt money, but in a style which brought the denizens of North Oxford out in flushes of embarrassed superiority. It was a further proof of Thomas Carter’s blissful innocence that he evidently had no idea that his swimming-pool, tennis court, fitted kitchen and high-tech appliances were as contemptible to the class whose values he so admired as the Parsons’ van Gogh prints and Dacron three-piece suite. He blithely led his guests to the picture-window framing the classic ‘dreaming spires’ view of the city, pointing out the various features, distinguishing the cathedral from St Mary’s, Merton from Magdalen, the fantastic lacework of All Souls from the monastic sobriety of New College. ‘He really knows his Oxford!’ he thought we thought, while every enthusiastic word and expansive gesture in fact revealed that the poor bugger hadn’t a clue about the place.

The gathering was a complex affair, socially. A representative sampling of Osiris Management Services’ clientele was there, beefy ballocky blokes who prized the rugby scrum of life as much as an opportunity for putting the boot in as for winning the ball. To them, the occasion was just another hospitality tent, an opportunity to claw

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