Dirty Tricks

this interruption. As usual, we were at cross-purposes from the start.

‘I won’t go behind his back,’ she said. ‘It may seem stupid, but that’s the way it is. What happened the other day was wrong. I was drunk and I …’

She fell silent, looking uncertainly at the students.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘They won’t understand as long as you speak quickly.’

I was being tactful. Given Karen’s broken-nosed vowels and head-banger intonation, they wouldn’t have understood if she’d spelt it for them.

‘You mean I could say anything at all?’ she asked with a mischievous smile.

I glanced at Helga, but she was busy sticking her tongue in Massimo’s ear. Karen took something from her handbag and slipped it into her mouth like a communicant self-administering the host.

‘Just my knickers,’ she murmured, catching my eye.

‘Sorry?’

‘Nicorette. Denny won’t let me smoke. Kills the taste of the wine, he says.’

She fell silent. Then an internal bulkhead gave way somewhere and she blurted out, ‘We don’t do it any more, not really. Not enough. And I need it, and sometimes …’

She broke off.

‘Ooh, this is fun, isn’t it?’

As she eagerly scanned the blank faces turned like sunflowers towards us, I felt almost faint for a moment, overwhelmed by her excitement and my own desire. I no longer cared about Clive finding us together. I no longer cared about anything but the sexual charge passing between us.

‘I want you, Karen,’ I murmured. ‘I want you properly.’

She squirrelled away at the nicotine-laden gum.

‘I know. But I can’t. At the end of the day, he’s still my husband.’

‘What, so you’d be sick as a parrot if we went over the moon together?’

This was the tone to take with Karen, I decided. Coming on all awed and respectful would just put the wind up her. Most women don’t really have a very high opinion of themselves, so if you start treating them as something special they think, ‘Oh God, sooner or later he’ll find out the truth, and then he’ll despise me.’ Much better to make it clear from the start that you’ve seen through them, and you still fancy them rotten.

She shrugged stubbornly.

‘That’s the way it is.’

‘You interrupted my class just to tell me this?’

‘What? No, I just dropped by to invite you to dinner on Saturday. We haven’t got your number, you see. I was going to leave a note, but there was no one at Reception and then I heard your voice in here. Thomas and Lynn will be there. He’s Denny’s partner, you’ll like him. Half past seven for eight.’

I nodded curtly.

‘Fair enough.’

At the door she looked back.

‘And I am sorry. About the other. I just can’t. I do like you, but I can’t.’

The door closed behind her. I looked round at the class, my finger hovering above the tape-recorder.

‘All right, let’s try again. How many people are there and what are they talking about?’

Helga put her hand up.

‘There is a man and a woman,’ she enunciated fastidiously. ‘He wants to — how do you say? — “fuck” her? And she, I think, also wants to fuck him. Yes, I’m sure she does. But her husband is a problem.’

I nodded coolly.

‘I see. And why is her husband a problem?’

To my astonishment a forest of hands shot up around the class.

‘Izza money,’ said Massimo. ‘Always same ting widda womans.’

‘She is want more,’ ventured Yolanda.

‘Yes,’ Kayoko chimed in. ‘Can’t get enough.’

Like the kraken stirring in its primaeval sleep, one of the Turkish twins rumbled into speech.

‘Chopping,’ it said.

I stood staring at them in utter bewilderment. I was the only one who hadn’t understood.

You know those days when you’ve got it? When everyone looks at you expectantly and everything you do is significant, when men defer and women give you cool, appraising glances? What is that stuff? Maybe the clothes, you think, but the next time you wear that outfit you’re The Invisible Man. No, it wasn’t the clothes. So what was it? Certainly not the radiant glow of confidence and success, or it sure as hell wouldn’t have worked for me that Saturday round at Ramillies Drive. Which it did.

I was irresistible. I could have levitated, spoken in tongues and changed the Perrier into Dom Perignon. I disdained such vulgar exhibitionism, however. I made no attempt to impress or ingratiate. When Thomas Carter asked me how I liked Oxford, I made a wry face and said, ‘Mmmm …’ Normally I would have sounded like a tongue-tied half-wit, but that evening my response appeared to hint at the inexpressible depths and nuances of my infinitely complex relationship with the city, together with a gentle rebuke to a question which was either fatuous or unanswerable. The Oxford manner, in short, the knack of which consists wholly in getting away with it.

I could have got away with murder that Saturday night, although under the present circumstances I had better add that I made no attempt to do so. What I did get away with was arguably worse than murder, and revealed for the first time something of what I was letting myself in for by getting involved with Karen Parsons. One might even argue that if that elusive mantle of desirability hadn’t happened to fall on my shoulders on that of all evenings …

But the past conditional is a notoriously tricky area, even for mother-tongue speakers, and there’s no point in speculating on which way the final result might have gone if we wouldn’t’ve scored that first goal, Ron. The fact is that before the evening was over I had not only penetrated Karen sexually, but perhaps even more important we had shared a good laugh together at Dennis’s expense. If you can make her laugh, they say, you’re half-way there. If you can make her laugh while you’re coming in her mouth, then you might be said to have arrived. And if you can do all that with her husband just a few feet away, blissfully unaware that he’s the butt of the joke, then yours is his house and everything that’s in it, old son.

The other guests that night were Dennis’s partner in Osiris Management Services, Thomas Carter, his Welsh wife Lynn, and a menopausal colleague of Karen’s called Vicky. Compared with the Parsons’ previous dinner party, this was a relaxed affair. As an American, Carter was a non-combatant in the class warfare which terrified the Parsons. This was just as well, because as a native he would have been a bit hard to take. Thomas Carter came right out and told you that he thought England was the only truly civilized country in the world and that as the most English of English cities, Oxford was its heart and soul, the core of everything that had formed us, the repository of our values and the guarantor of our standards, an expression in stone of our whole Western civilization, a cultural Stonehenge which, etc, etc.

In England, that kind of patriotism is something you do with other consenting adults under the covers with the lights out, and usually comes with various unpleasant side-effects such as xenophobia, anti-Semitism, Anglo- Catholicism and so on. But Thomas Carter was from Philadelphia, and his love for Oxford and for England was a pure boyish enthusiasm as innocent as a passion for preserved railways or real ale. He was also very charming, an easy smiler, witty, relaxed and vivacious. With the British, any relationship begins heavily in debt. You have to spend years and years working off the initial residue of suspicion and diffidence before you’re even out of the red, let alone seeing any positive return for your efforts. Meeting Thomas reminded me that human relations don’t have to be like this, that in other countries you open your account in credit, and unless you squander that goodwill by behaving like a complete arsehole, the mutual warmth continues to grow with every subsequent encounter, as though it were natural for human beings to get on together.

Lynn Carter presented a striking contrast to her extrovert mate. Her personality was drab, earnest and humourless and her appearance calculatedly unattractive. To be honest, it looked as though she had given up on