Dirty Tricks

‘I don’t.’

‘You do! You must. You couldn’t be all that you are without despising me. But it’s not what you think, you see. It’s not what you think at all.’

Rebecca bounded back like a retriever with a stick.

‘Squish broke his ankle in Klosters and is being invalided home and Trouncy wants to know if she can bring Jean-Pierre, their French exchange. She says he has amazing hands, whatever that might mean.’

‘All right, but what about transport?’

Rebecca hared away again.

‘Anyway, I really can’t see that it matters one way or the other what I think,’ Alison said.

‘It matters very much to me.’

‘Well I’m not sure it should.’

‘I’d just like you to know what really happened, that’s all. The situation is very different from what you suppose, from what anyone supposes.’

Rebecca was already on her way back.

‘Will you meet me for tea one day this week?’ I said urgently. ‘How about that place in Holywell Street?’

Tea has always seemed to me a childish and pointless affair, but it has the advantage of being morally blameless and socially safe. Nothing naughty has ever happened over tea.

‘Fiona says we can all fit in the Volvo,’ Rebecca announced, ‘but Rupert says he doesn’t see why they should act as bloody chauffeurs for their friends all the bloody time.’

‘Rebecca!’

‘I’m just quoting, Mummy. Anyway, Fiona told him not to be so bolshie, they’ll come about twoish and don’t forget you promised to give her your recipe for clafoutis.’

Alison waved largely at the Barringtons, who semaphored back.

‘I’m particularly fond of the slow movement of his second piano sonata,’ Rebecca confided to me.

The kid was coming round, I thought. My charm wins them all over in the end. Conscious that it would be very much to my advantage to have an ally within Alison’s gates, I replied warmly, ‘Me too.’

Rebecca gave a squeal of delight.

‘Really? It’s an unfashionable point of view.’

‘Is it?’

‘Definitely. A downright faux pas in fact.’

Alison regarded me as though I were a dosser who’d just importuned her for some spare change.

‘Will Friday do?’ she said.

‘What, Mummy?’ asked Rebecca, suddenly anxious.

‘Nothing, darling.’

Oh but it was, I thought. It was really quite a lot.

When I got home I looked up Faure in the Oxford Companion. He didn’t write any piano sonatas, of course.

‘First of all, let me just say that everything I am going to tell you is the complete and absolute truth.’

The little tea-shop was pleasantly uncrowded. Full Term had ended a fortnight earlier. The Easter tourists hadn’t yet arrived. For a few weeks Oxford seemed like a normal city instead of a theme park.

‘You sound so serious.’

‘It’s no joking matter, at least to me. But I suppose I also intend a warning.’

Alison raised her eyebrows.

‘As in “this programme contains scenes which some viewers may find distressing or objectionable”.’

She nodded.

‘Go on.’

‘When Karen broke the news of our marriage so crudely at Thomas’s party, and I saw the look on your face, I understood for the first time the force of that old cliche about wishing the floor would open up and swallow one. I could tell what you were thinking. You were thinking that I had married her for her money, and that she’d married me for … all the wrong reasons. You were wondering how long we’d been lovers. Perhaps you were even wondering about Dennis’s death. Did he fall or was he pushed?’

‘No!’

Alison’s denial was so forceful it attracted the attention of a couple at a neighbouring table. Like a batsman rehearsing a shot after playing and missing, she repeated quietly, ‘No. That’s not true.’

‘I don’t mean to impute mean or vulgar opinions to you, Alison. But I saw judgement in your face, and it shattered me, precisely because I knew I must seem to deserve the very worst that anyone could imagine. And it wasn’t just anyone, it was you. That made it almost unbearable. Right from that very first day in France you made the most tremendous impression on me, Alison. When we met again at the funeral, I knew that I had to see you again soon. I said so at the time, if you remember. I looked up your number in the phone book. I was going to call you and …’

I broke off. Alison refilled our cups and for a moment we took refuge in the polite rituals of milk and sugar.

‘A few days after the funeral,’ I said, ‘Karen phoned to ask if I’d come over and help her dispose of some of Dennis’s effects. She said she couldn’t face tackling the job on her own. The Parsons had been good to me. It was the least I could do to help Karen out now. We spent two or three hours bagging up clothes to take to the charity shops. Then Karen went downstairs to make some tea. When she came back … she didn’t have any clothes on.’

Alison herself was wearing a rather shapeless dress made of some fabric suitable for curtains, which covered her body like a dustsheet draped over furniture. Her fingers twitched nervously at the buttons of the high collar.

‘The ridiculous thing is that I wasn’t remotely attracted to Karen. Those scrawny, neurotic women are not my type.’

I allowed myself a brief glance at Alison’s ample contours.

‘That’s no excuse, of course. I knew perfectly well when I allowed Karen Parsons to seduce me that I was not acting rightly. I was simply too stunned to protest. I thought she must be unhinged by grief. It never occurred to me for a moment that she had planned it all in cold blood.’

‘I don’t find it particularly surprising that you allowed yourself to be seduced by her. What I do find surprising …’

‘Is that I married her.’

She sketched a shrug.

‘It’s no earthly business of mine, of course …’

I leant forward.

‘After what had happened I couldn’t face trying to contact you. I felt polluted, tainted, defiled, unworthy of anyone except Karen, who repelled me. I told her I didn’t want to see her again. She pleaded and begged me to change my mind, but I was adamant. Finally she dropped the bombshell. She was pregnant, she said, and I was the father.’

Alison looked away out of the window at the facade of New College opposite. I sighed deeply.

‘I couldn’t see any other honourable way out. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned. Perhaps I should have been frank with her, admitted honestly that I didn’t love her and that if she insisted on marrying me she would be condemning both of us to a joyless union. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I honestly thought she loved me so much that she’d been prepared to get herself pregnant to trick me into marriage. However badly she’d behaved, it was my duty to stand by her and the child. Telling her the truth about my feelings, or rather the lack of them, would just have made our life together even more intolerable.’

To harmonize my body language with Alison’s, I turned to look out of the window. As our eyes met in the glass, I realized that she was not admiring the flaking stone blocks opposite but using the window as a mirror. It was me she had been looking at all that time, but secretively, like a girl.

‘It was Karen’s idea to keep the wedding quiet,’ I went on. ‘She claimed people might be shocked at her