Dirty Tricks (5 page)

‘Good green fruit on the nose. Young and vibrant. Soft round buttery fruit in the mouth, trailing off a little on the finish.
Very
chardonnay. Lovely concentrated body. Surprisingly firm grip.’

He bought his wine from a mail-order firm, I later discovered. Each case came with tasting notes, from which Dennis was given to quoting extensively. The point of the whole performance was only partly the usual snobbery and one-upmanship. The essential purpose was to disguise the fact that Dennis was an alcoholic. He wasn’t out to get drunk – perish the thought! – but to savour the unique individuality of each wine to the full. Dennis didn’t drink, he degusted. Well fair enough, whatever it takes. But if he couldn’t even get pissed in his own living room without all this blather it was hard to imagine him asking casually if I’d care to step upstairs for some kinky sex.

Still, I wasn’t complaining. I didn’t know what was going on, but I was happy to be there, sipping Dennis’s eight-quid-a-bottle plonk, trading glances with his vibrant young – well, youngish – wife and openly admiring the charms of her lovely concentrated body. Since I wasn’t in a position to return the Parsons’ hospitality, I felt an obligation to provide conversational value for money, so I embarked on a series of anecdotes about my time abroad, some true, all exaggerated, a few plain invention. You may have the house and the car and the job and the security, I was saying, but I’ve
lived
. That’s what I was saying to Dennis, at any rate. The messages passing between Karen and I were more complex. As the wine took hold I glanced in her direction with increasing frequency, often to find her already looking at me. Or else she would turn round, as though sensing my gaze on her skin, and for a moment as brief and yet momentous as a pause in music our eyes talked dirty. Then she slumped back in her chair, mouthing the nicotine-dosed chewing gum she used instead of cigarettes, and I thought I must have imagined an intensity of which she was surely incapable.

That evening the Parsons were meeting friends for an early meal before going on to the opera. How times had changed, to be sure! When I grew up, opera had all the allure of a
thé dansant
on Bournemouth pier. Now it was like Wimbledon. People who couldn’t tell Weber from Webern went along to cheer their favourite tenor and be seen with their bums on a fifty-quid seat. Dennis thoughtfully offered to drop me off in town.

‘Save you 30p, it all adds up,’ he said, reducing my glamorous cosmopolitan personality to its due place in the Oxford scheme of things.

He paid for that, though. Just before we left, while Dennis was in the loo, I grabbed his wife and kissed her on the mouth. Karen made no attempt to break away or to respond. She just stood there, trembling all over. Then the toilet flushed and we wrenched violently apart, as though each of us had been struggling to get free all along.

Dennis appeared in the doorway, grinning cheerfully.

‘All set?’

When I worked abroad, I lived like a gentleman of leisure. Unless I was awakened by the departure of a bed-fellow who had to work or study, poor girl, my day began at about nine or thereabouts, with a leisurely shower and a small black coffee. The rest of the morning I might spend at the beach, in season, or in the park or a café, reading or catching up on my correspondence, or chatting to friends and acquaintances, as the whim took me. Then came the delicious moment of the
aperitivo
, that sense of the whole city beginning to wind down towards lunch, which I took at any one of a dozen excellent and welcoming restaurants where I was sure to be hailed and called over to one table or another. After a leisurely meal it was out into the sun-drenched streets again, replete and relaxed, in boisterous good-natured company, for an excellent coffee and a cigar.

Sated with a whole morning of freedom and indulgence, work seemed almost a pleasure, the more so in that my students were in the same post-prandial daze as myself. All serious business was dispatched in the morning. No one expected to achieve anything much after lunch, so the mood was languid and light-hearted, as though we were just pretending. The hours slipped past almost unnoticed. Outside the window dusk had fallen, the sky glowed in exuberant shades of green and pink. Soon my working day was over, but the night had only just begun, the streets and piazzas just beginning to hum with life. Where would I spend those precious, unforgettable hours tonight, and with whom?

Since his return home, the prodigal’s life had been rather different. Classes were no longer in the afternoon and evening, after work. They
were
work, and the students, who were paying through the nose for them, were grim, resentful and bloody-minded. My day began at seven with unwanted glimpses of Trish and Brian’s intimacies, followed by slurped tea and munched toast in the communal kitchen. Then it was on to my bike and off to spend the rest of my day banged up with a bunch of sullen, spoilt brats in order to make Clive Phillips even richer than he already was. ‘The eternal student,’ Dennis had joked. The joke, of course, was that the real students were currently being head-hunted for posts with starting salaries in excess of 20K.

That term, the second half of each morning consisted of a two-hour mental sauna with my ‘Fake’ Early Intermediates. There were seven of them, and it was a source of perpetual wonder to me that they’d ever learned to speak their own languages, never mind anyone else’s. The exception was Helga, a Euro-slut from Cologne who should have been several grades higher but kept deliberately failing the aptitude tests so as to be with Massimo. A Latin looker whose stock response to any correction was an impatient ‘Izza same!’, Massimo combined staggering conceit, total ineptitude and a winsome, self-ingratiating charm which would have been hard to take in a toddler, never mind a beefy twenty-year-old. He and Helga sat at the back of the class, groping each other up in a flurry of smirks and giggles. In front of them sat Tweedledum and Tweedledee, a pair of Turkish twins whose soft, pale, shapeless, perfumed flesh irresistibly suggested the cloying sweetmeats of their native land. Then there was Kayoko, the Girl Who Couldn’t Say No. Asked, for example, if she was from New York, the Tokyo-born lass would blushingly reply, ‘Yes, I’m not.’ Yolanda and Garcia rounded out this select group. Yolanda was a spotty, bespectacled girl from Barcelona who spent her time translating every word I said into Spanish for the benefit of Garcia, a missing-link anthropoid from one of your immediate neighbours. For reasons which will become clear in due course, I prefer not to specify which one. Nor is Garcia his real name. In fact, given his track record, even his real name probably wasn’t his real name.

It wasn’t like working here, where I could slip into Spanish when things got ropey, and afterwards we’d all go to the bar and tone up the group dynamics over a few drinks. The only
lingua franca
this lot shared was English, and they didn’t speak English. Not only that, but they were never
going
to speak it. I knew it and they knew it, but we couldn’t admit that we knew it. We wouldn’t have understood each other, for one thing. So all I could do was to prance about waving flashcards and realia like a second-rate conjuror at a children’s party, and try not to glance at my watch more than once a minute.

The main item on the agenda the following Monday was a listening comprehension exercise based around a tape-recorded ‘authentic’ conversation. In fact I’d carefully scripted the whole thing, grading the language to keep it within the students’ capabilities. ‘Fake’ Intermediates were students who had done the Beginners’ course but learned nothing from it. Indeed most of them had made a kind of negative progress. Not only were they still ignorant of the language, but they now had a sense of personal inadequacy – totally justified, I might add – which manifested itself in a stubborn refusal to learn anything. The aim of the gist-listening session was to try and break down this hostility by showing the group that they could understand two native speakers talking ‘naturally’, in this case about a shopping expedition. Ideally they were supposed to pick up that the woman (Trish) was asking the man (me) for money – an all-too-authentic situation, this. The first run-through was a complete failure. Even my most basic pre-set question (‘How many people are talking?’) proved to be over their heads, so I rewound the tape and tried again. If all else failed I could usually rely on Massimo getting an ego-boosting tip from Helga, who wasn’t allowed to take part herself. We were about half-way through the second audition when the door opened and Karen Parsons walked in.

I wasn’t best pleased to see her. It was bad enough to have to spend my days acting as occupational therapist to a bunch of linguistic basket-cases without having my social acquaintances dropping in to witness my degradation. Moreover one of Clive’s many draconian rules was an absolute ban on personal visitors during school hours. There was even a story, not necessarily apocryphal, that when a message arrived to tell one of the teachers that his father had died, Clive had insisted on waiting until the lunch break before passing it on. I already had reason to suspect that I was by no means flavour-of-the-month at the Oxford International Language College. If Clive caught me entertaining a lady friend in the classroom, I would be out on my ear in no time at all.

So when I asked Karen what she thought she was up to, I was merely expressing my irritation and anxiety at 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.