‘I’m most dreadfully sorry,’ she burbled. ‘I was miles away, I’m afraid. I had no idea …’
She broke off, staring at me.
‘Oh,’ she said shortly, ‘it’s you.’
‘I’m afraid so. You should have stayed up your own end of town. You get to run into a better class of person there.’
She coloured.
‘I’m sorry if I sounded rude. I’m a bit shocked.’
The damage to the BMW turned out to be negligible, but Alison’s elderly Saab had suffered a broken headlight and badly buckled fender.
‘Doesn’t look too good,’ I told her. ‘You’d better have a mechanic check it over before you try and drive it.’
‘I’ve got some camera-ready proofs in the back. I can’t leave them here.’
‘I’ll run you home.’
I visualized Alison as living in a classic North Oxford mansion set on a bosky avenue amid the murmuring of innumerable dons, so I was surprised to find myself directed up the hill to Headington. We turned down a flagrantly suburban side-street near the football ground. A few hundred yards further on, though, venerable stone walls sprang up on either side and we were suddenly in a picture-book Cotswold village tucked away out of sight in the ignoble fringes of the city. We passed a rural church, a country pub, and then turned down an unpaved cul-de-sac running through a dense cluster of beeches and pines to a four-square Edwardian villa with overhanging eaves and low-pitched roof.
‘Thank you very much for the lift.’
‘Why don’t we ring a garage and have them meet me at your car with the keys? It’ll save them a trip out here, with all the time and expense that’ll involve.’
If the location of Alison’s house was a surprise, the interior was everything I had expected. Antiphonal choirs of rosewood and mahogany gleamed darkly in rooms dominated by the rich pedal-tones of velvet curtains and hand-printed wallpaper. The furnishings were genially promiscuous, a jetsam of objects of every style eloquently evoking the varied and wide-ranging currents which had washed them up together here. Alison led me through the hall into the kitchen, a sprawling space with a flagstone floor dominated by a huge table, a Welsh dresser and rows of large cupboards. A set of battle-scarred Le Creuset pans nestled on the Aga where a Persian cat was profoundly asleep. On the wall nearby was a notice-board to which were pinned various notes and lists, telephone numbers, business cards and two concert tickets. While I looked around, Alison set about phoning one of the ‘little men’ who supply her class with everything from free-range pork to spare parts for obsolete typewriters.
‘That’s all arranged then,’ she told me, putting down the phone. ‘I said you’d meet him at the car in ten minutes.’
I had fancied myself a connoisseur of contrast, a gourmet savouring the sweet-and-sour clash between my present lifestyle and the one I had left behind me in East Oxford. But it was quite a different contrast that struck me there in Alison’s kitchen: the aching disparity between the woman who stood there, impatient for me to be gone, and the one I was going home to. I had gained much by marrying Karen, but now the thought of all I had lost rose up to overwhelm me. I found myself wondering who that second concert ticket was intended for. For some reason, Thomas ‘we make music together’ Carter crossed my mind, so after delivering the keys to the mechanic I stopped at the ticket agency. The concert was the following Wednesday. That was Karen’s yoga night, so there would be no difficulty there.
That night in bed I had a genuine orgasm. By now this was so unusual that Karen didn’t even realize I’d come until I told her. What I didn’t say was that I hadn’t been making love to her but to Alison, taking her from behind on the kitchen table, her rump high in the air and her toes squirming helplessly an inch or two off the floor. As I’ve already explained, I felt absolutely no lust whatsoever for Alison Kraemer. I’d made love to her class of Englishwoman before, and had no particular wish to renew the experience. They’re all gauche and giggly in bed, by turns prudish and gushing, fidgety and frenetic one minute, in rigor mortis the next. If by some miracle they manage to achieve an orgasm, they don’t know whether they’re coming or going. Indeed, most of their problems spring from the fact that for them the two functions are deeply connected. ‘Have you finished?’ they ask as you lie gasping, and when they switch on the light you expect to see a sign over the bed, NOW WASH YOUR HANDS.
Despite this, it was Alison Kraemer I made love to that night and every night thereafter. As engaged couples used to make conversation and play parlour games in lieu of the physical pleasures they were forbidden, so I imagined erotic scenes with Alison to console myself for what was denied me: walks and talks, games and jokes, company, solace, an end to my dreadful, soul-destroying loneliness.
It was for her daughter, of course, the second ticket. I never thought of that. I thought I’d exhausted every possibility, rivals of every pedigree from the Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies to a rough-trade gamekeeper out at Shotover, but I never thought of family. Lovers don’t. Family’s the other mob. Family’s legit, but we’re where the action is. They’re a safe investment, but in love you can make a killing overnight. Metaphorically speaking, I hasten to add.
Anyway, there she was, a pert little fourteen-year-old following the action in her score and pointing out all the wrong notes, mistaken entries and interpretative lapses to her doting mamma. They cost a hell of a lot, these Oxford prodigies, but it’s worth every penny. The effect is even more telling than the BMW, because while anyone with the necessary can buy one of those, these kiddies are not just paid for but born and bred as well. In short, they’re advertisements not just for your financial status, but for your impeccable intellectual and social credentials. When Rebecca Kraemer remarked, as the last murmurs of the slow movement died away, that it was such a pity the conductor was still following the now-discredited Haas edition, she was telling everyone within earshot — which included half the audience — everything that Alison could have wanted them to know but naturally wouldn’t have dreamt of mentioning herself.
I slipped away before the encores and hung around in the courtyard outside the Sheldonian until the Kraemers emerged. I then plotted a converging course through the crowd and greeted Alison with feigned surprise and genuine pleasure. She appeared disconcerted, even flustered. Hello, I thought, maybe there’s something in this for you after all. A woman as socially assured as Alison Kraemer doesn’t get her knickers in a twist just because an acquaintance, however unsuitably married, asks her how she enjoyed the concert.
‘Are we going soon, Mummy?’ demanded young Rebecca, who seemed to have taken an instant dislike to me.
‘Past your bedtime?’ I joked.
The child glared at me so fiercely that I tried to ingratiate myself by asking who was her favourite composer.
‘Faure,’ she replied.
‘Mine too.’
She arched her eyebrows.
‘I’d have thought Brahms and Liszt would have been more to your taste.’
The two names she had mentioned are of course rhyming slang for ‘pissed’, but nothing in Rebecca Kraemer’s innocent little face betrayed whether or not she was aware of this. I turned to her mother.
‘Alison, there’s something I want to say to you.’
‘Is your wife here?’
This threw me, but only for a moment.
‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘To
Rebecca was looking pointedly from one of us to the other like a parody of a spectator watching a tennis rally.
‘Look darling, there are Rupert and Fiona Barrington,’ Alison said. ‘Do just pop over and ask them whether Squish and Trouncy can make it under their own steam on Saturday or whether they’ll need a lift.’
With a mutinous glance, Rebecca sped off. Her mother looked at me, her face as still and hard as a life mask.
‘I can’t bear you to think ill of me,’ I said.
