Dirty Tricks

‘Oh I’m not, Karen. It’s very much the same subject, isn’t it?’

She looked hesitant, unsure as yet whether there was anything to be worried about.

‘What exactly did you want to know?’ I inquired archly.

‘About the trains, of course.’

‘The trains to Liverpool, or to Banbury?’

Something flared briefly in her eyes, like a dud firework.

‘How did you find out?’

In other circumstances I would have stood up and cheered. Her response had not only put mine to shame, she had also returned my volley with awkward bounce and heavy top-spin. If I admitted bugging the phone, she would want to know what had made me suspicious. The answer, of course, was her pregnancy, but I couldn’t tell her that without revealing the truth about my vasectomy, which was far more than I was prepared to admit at this stage of the game. So I said the first thing that came into my head.

‘Clive told me.’

He eyes opened wide in shock.

‘No!’

I held my tongue.

‘He wouldn’t do that!’ she cried.

‘I can’t help wondering just how well you know him, Karen. Other than in the biblical sense, of course.’

She scrabbled in her handbag and popped a couple of 4 mg slaps of nicotine-rich gum.

‘I dropped by the school this morning to sound Clive out about the EFL business idea. We chatted for a while about how much he’d want in return for letting me access his network of overseas contacts and so on. Then he suddenly turned to me and said, “Look here, I think you’d better know that I’ve been stuffing your wife.” ’

Karen flinched as though the child she was carrying had suddenly kicked her.

‘I told him I didn’t believe him. “You don’t need to take my word for it,” he said. “You see she’s carrying my child.” ’

‘But he doesn’t even know! I never told him.’

‘You don’t need to tell him, Karen. There are lots of little signs which a man as sexually active as our Clive has doubtless seen before. Anyway, that’s all a bit beside the point, which is that while you’ve supposedly been working on your yoga every Wednesday night, you’ve actually been practising positions of a rather different kind.’

‘That’s not true! I only saw him once or twice, when things were going so badly between us two. We had a thing together before, when I was with Dennis. The only reason anything happened this time was because you were being so horrible to me. I wanted to reassure myself that I was still desirable.’

I laughed savagely.

‘Oh I see, it was all my fault!’

‘It was both our faults. But it wasn’t important. It was just a bit of fun as far as I was concerned. It meant more than that to him, though. That’s why I agreed to go away with him this weekend, to tell him that it’s all over.’

‘Seems rather a long way to go for that.’

Karen adroitly brought the waterworks on stream.

‘I was afraid! Afraid for us. Clive can’t accept that I don’t love him. I quite fancy him, but I don’t love him. I was terrified about what he might do when I told him I was pregnant by you. He’d been asking me to go away with him for ages, so I finally agreed, just so as to have time to explain things properly, to make him understand that if he cared for me he had to let me go.’

‘Sure, Karen.’

‘I wasn’t going to sleep with him! Do you think I could do that, knowing that I’m carrying your child inside me?’

‘Speaking of which …’

‘Look, let’s forget Clive. Let’s forget this woman you’ve been seeing. This is between you and me. Nothing else matters but this life we’ve created together. The rest is just play, but this is real. I know it won’t be easy. We’re too different for that. But we’ve got to try and make it work. We owe it to our child!’

I recognized this tune. I’d sung it myself once, back in the days when I was a penniless suitor and Karen a wealthy widow. But times had changed, nos et, it goes without saying, mutamur in illis. Karen was the suitor now, and I was not in the giving vein.

‘I’m afraid the prospect of surrogate fatherhood doesn’t attract me, Karen.’

As usual, she skipped the word which did not compute.

‘But you said you were! You said you wanted us to get married and have a child …’

‘Yes, but I was rather taking it for granted that it would be my child.’

She stared at me aghast.

‘It is!’

‘That’s not what Clive says.’

‘What does he know?’

‘What do you know? You can’t have been on the pill because you were trying to get pregnant with me.’

‘We used something else.’

‘What?’

She hesitated. Close-ups of Clive unrolling a sheath over his engorged member were definitely unsuitable for the family audience to which she was hoping to appeal.

‘An old balloon?’ I suggested. ‘Cavity wall insulation foam? Herbal pessaries? Whatever it was, it didn’t work. Be honest, Karen, you didn’t even want it to work. You were so desperate to get pregnant you were beyond caring who the father was. You’d probably have preferred it to be me, all other things being equal. But you weren’t really unduly worried about that aspect of it, were you?’

‘That’s not true! It’s your child! I know it is. Women know these things.’

‘OK, let’s get a paternity test done.’

‘No!’

She glared furiously at me. I shrugged.

‘I rest my case.’

‘Those tests can be dangerous! I’m not letting some doctor mess around with the foetus just because you’re a heartless shit who won’t believe what I say.’

‘If you think I’m a heartless shit, just wait till you tell Clive that he’s going to have to assume his responsibilities because we’re getting divorced.’

She stood up, her hands over her ears, rocking back and forth on her heels, muttering something I couldn’t make out. Then she sighed deeply and stroked her midriff, as though to reassure the foetus.

‘You can’t wriggle out of it that easily, you bastard! I’ll bring a paternity suit. I’ll get those tests done all right, once the child is born.’

‘As many as you like, Karen. All they’ll prove is that the only bastard round here is the one in your womb.’

That did it. She threw herself at me, shrieking and spitting, battering me with her fists and shoes. Women get a good press these days. It’s become intellectually respectable, even among those who otherwise reject gender- based distinctions, to suggest that they’re somehow intrinsically nicer than men and that the problems of the world would magically resolve themselves if we all became more womanly. In my view this is sexist bullshit. Given the chance, woman can be every bit as unpleasant as men. Karen’s expression as she attacked reminded me of photographs of Ilsa Koch and Myra Hindley. She looked quite literally devilish.

‘You cunt!’ she screamed.

The inappropriacy of this term of abuse was lost on both of us, I fear. Irony was never Karen’s strong suit, and I was too busy staving off her frenzied assault to appreciate it. Karen was smaller and lighter than me, but fitter and much more highly-motivated. She kneed me in the groin, savaged my face with her nails and battered my shins and ankles with her sharply pointed shoes. Her energy was demonic, the sudden release of months of pent-up