Authors: Michael Dibdin
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 being a woman. Not that I’d blame anyone for that. Let’s face it, would
you
want the job? Lynn Carter had put in her time down there on the sexual shop floor – there were two teenage sons to prove it – but now she’d taken early retirement. Fair enough, but where did that leave her husband, so full of vim and vigour? Where did Thomas go to get retooled these days? Who was mucking him out and hosing him down? It had to be Karen, I reckoned. I wasn’t vain enough to think that the way she had come on to me that first night was solely down to my resistless charms. Like the Carters’, the Parsons’ marriage was in turn-around, only there it was Dennis who was the sleeping partner. Karen had admitted as much the day she came to the school. Which left her as Thomas’s
vis-à-vis
.
On another occasion, this suspicion might have been calculated to cripple me with a sense of my own worthlessness. Who was I to be taking on a contender like Thomas Carter, a management consultant and the owner-occupier of a £500,000 property set in the accessible Arcadia of Boars Hill? My Early Intermediates had unwittingly pointed out the parallels between Karen’s refusal to ‘go behind Dennis’s back’ and the recorded conversation about money and shopping I had played them. In other words, the reason for my coy mistress’s quaint sense of honour was nothing more nor less than financial prudence. Whatever Dennis’s other shortcomings, he footed the bill. My salary was barely enough to keep me in sliced white and undies, never mind maintain Mrs Dennis Parsons in the style to which she had become accustomed.
As if to make this quite clear, the other charity guest that night was Vicky, a career spinster with beefy-jerky skin and a mouth as tensely muscled as an anus. During one of her absences from the room everyone shook their heads and agreed that Vicky was ‘a very sad case’. The implied judgement on me, Vicky’s notional partner, should have been enough to send me into a screaming spiral of paranoid depression. But that evening nothing could touch me. The only effect of these humiliations and challenges was to make me even more determined to overcome Karen’s scruples.
Dinner itself was a relatively painless affair. Karen wasn’t trying to impress anyone, so we ate promptly and quite well. She seated me on her right, and I made my first direct pass as soon as we sat down. The first course was avocado with prawn cocktail dressing. No problem there. While my right hand spooned up the sweet pulp and hefted my glass of Alsace riesling, my left explored the contours of my neighbour’s inner calf and the hollow behind her knee. I’d expected some token reluctance, a bit of chair-shuffling and so on. There wasn’t much else she could do without attracting attention, but I definitely expected a bit of the old argy-bargy before she let me get down to business. I mean, it’s traditional, isn’t it?
But Karen didn’t have much use for tradition. She stiffened when I touched her, just for an instant, the way you do when you feel something on your leg and aren’t sure what it is. After that the only clue was her heightened responses to everything
else
that happened, a too-eager agreement, an over-emphatic laugh. Like she was high, not on booze or pills but some of that good mellow shit that used to go the rounds at the first dinner parties I ever went to, at Liza’s place, when the world was young and lovable.
I’d like to comment briefly on two aspects of Karen’s response to my attentions, both of which are fundamental to a correct understanding of later events. The first was what I might call her physical candour. To an amazing – even an alarming – extent, Karen Parsons was totally straightforward about what she wanted to do with her body and what she liked having done to it. The quality I’m referring to was something common enough here in Latin America, but very rare in the land of booze and animal fats, where the women seem to have taken to heart mad Hamlet’s advice to let their honesty admit no discourse to their beauty. Even in bed, they’re hypocrites. Karen wasn’t. If you put your finger up her bum while she was coming, she didn’t pretend to object just to stop you running away with the idea that she was the kind of woman who wouldn’t object if you put your finger up her bum while she was coming. On the other hand, she wasn’t a Manuela either. There were limits to what Karen would let you do. It was just that she didn’t lie, to herself or others, about what they were.
My second observation demonstrates the absurdity of the idea that our relationship was, to borrow the elegant formula adopted by one news comic, ‘the perverted passion of two sex junkies who would do anything – even kill – for their fix’. In fact what the same tabloid, in a characteristic retreat into prudery, terms ‘the sexual act’ was never more than a
terminus ad quem
for us. This is evident from Karen’s ecstatic reaction to my attentions that evening. It may be mildly titillating to feel a hand on your knee during dinner, but in itself it’s not going to bring you off, is it? ‘The hurricane of their all-consuming lust for each other,’ continues our over-titillated hack, ‘swept away every obstacle that stood in its path.’ The author of these words clearly had his pen in one hand and his dick in the other, and had forgotten which was which.
The truth is exactly the opposite. Karen and I went out of our way to place obstacles in our path. We became connoisseurs of obstacles. We collected them like rare orchids, gleefully sharing our latest acquisitions and discoveries. That was the secret of Karen’s
empressement
. It wasn’t what I was doing that was turning her on but the fact that I was doing it there, doing it then, in front of her husband and her husband’s partner and her husband’s partner’s wife and one of her own colleagues. Karen wouldn’t commit adultery behind Dennis’s back, but there was nothing that excited her more than doing it under his nose. Feeling my hand on her leg, the fingers fanning out, stroking to give pleasure, squeezing to show need, a little dumbshow of love being played out on her skin. And meanwhile, above-board …
‘Jane Grigson says to sweat them lightly in butter.’
‘Perspire, surely?’
‘I still swear by Delia.’
‘Did you know you can
chambrer
wine in the microwave?’
While Lynn and Thomas and Vicky and Dennis chattered, I sat back and let my fingers do the talking. Nevertheless, after ten minutes or so my hand on Karen’s knee was starting to feel like one lump of meat resting on another. It was time to sign off before familiarity bred contempt, and just in case it already had I decided to hurt her.
A gentleman may be defined as someone who never inflicts pain unintentionally, and where women are concerned I’ve always prided myself on being a perfect gent. Apart from Manuela – we really must find time for a word or two about Manuela soon – I’ve never got any mileage out of hurting women. This is a cultural difference, I think. Here in Latin America there’s traditionally been a lot of pain involved in relations of all kinds, from the family to the state that is modelled on it. There are complex historical reasons for this, just as there are for differences in the amount of seasoning used in cooking. People here are used to a fairly high level of pain, just as they’re used to a lot of chilli in their food. Life would be bland without it. I was astonished by the amount of pain that Manuela seemed to thrive on. It was only when I stopped hurting her that she got worried. She thought I was cheating on her, you see, hurting another woman behind her back.
Anyway, before taking my hand away I reached over and pinched the tender flesh on the inside of Karen’s leg until she moaned. Conversation stopped and everyone became frightfully solicitous. Karen brushed them off with talk of a ‘little twinge’ that she got from time to time and rose briskly to clear the table. I muttered something about helping and followed her out. I found her standing by the sink, which she was filling with hot water.
‘Have you seen the furry liquid?’ she asked without looking round.
The last thing I had expected from Karen was an imaginative feel for language, but this was almost poetic: the soap foam as fur on the skin of the water. With a sudden rush of tender emotion I hugged her.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, and kneed me in the groin.
‘Anything I can do?’ ventured Vicky, appearing in the doorway. ‘What are you doing down there?’
I smiled at her over gritted teeth.
‘Banged my funny bone.’
‘Ah, there it is!’ cried Karen, seizing a plastic bottle with green lettering. ‘Furry liquid’, I realized belatedly, was simply her Merseyside pronunciation of the well-known brand of washing-up liquid which the Parsons favoured.
‘God it’s big.’
‘Enormous.’
‘Impressive feel in the mouth. Tremendous length.’
Dennis glanced at his tasting notes.
‘ “The aroma leaps out of the glass and assaults you while your senses wallow in big good fruit and a long, long finish.” ’
He inhaled deeply.
‘Big, hard, hot, juicy, fruit attack on the nose.’
‘Generous but well-structured body.’
‘Soft but beautifully tight. Very firm.’
‘Relaxed tannic grip.’
‘Lingering finish.’
‘Long final note.’
The scene was the Parsons’ living room. Not the sitting room across the hall, to which we’d retired after dinner. That was for guests, and the guests had gone, Vicky by half past ten, the Carters an hour later. By now it was almost one, but Dennis still wanted to party. Karen was lying stretched out on the sofa facing me, staring up at the ceiling. Since the departure of Thomas and Lynn she had drunk much and said little. Dennis lay sprawled in the armchair between us, his feet propped on the glass-topped coffee table amid an array of empty bottles. In the course of the evening we had sampled a wide variety of wines, and were now experiencing a woozy sense of disassociation that was like being drunk and hung-over at the same time. It was nevertheless quite a shock, when I next glanced in Karen’s direction, to realize that she was masturbating.
I instinctively looked away, the way children do when they see something naughty, as though witnessing it might incriminate them. Then I looked back. There was no doubt about it. Her left hand was curled down under the hem of her skirt, which she’d pulled up on that side. She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse that left her arms bare to the elbow. The muscles rippled lightly as she worked. Her right knee was raised to form a screen that prevented Dennis from seeing what was going on, but she made no attempt to conceal it from me. On the contrary, she was staring at me with an almost manic intensity.
I thought I had just about run the gamut of sexual experiences, but nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I found it incredibly erotic, and the more Dennis maundered on about boiled sweets on the nose, the more erotic it became. His wife’s head gradually fell back, her mouth open and her eyes still pinned to my face, the whites showing like a frightened horse. Her legs were slightly parted and her toes curled convulsively, as though trying to find some support to relieve her vertiginous predicament.