Free Dirty Tricks by Michael Dibdin Page A

directly mentioned, it was subtly intimated in various ways that I was beholden to the Parsons for what was after all a free holiday, and was therefore expected to do rather more than my bit when it came to chauffeuring, chaperoning, shopping and suchlike chores. What made this all the more piquant was that so far from being free, the holiday was in fact bankrupting me. ‘It won’t cost you anything except for booze and eats,’ Dennis had told me. What he hadn’t mentioned was that we would be dining out in restaurants which had attracted a nod from Michelin, a faint damn from Gault-Millau or a paragraph of wet-dream prose in a British Sunday. My share of the bill rarely came to less than £30. What with contributions to the housekeeping, the holiday was going to end up costing me the best part of £500.
    There was no point in protesting, of course. The Parsons and the Carters were incapable of conceiving that anyone could be financially embarrassed by a lunch bill, particularly one which, as Dennis kept pointing out, was ‘bloody reasonable’. At least I had the money, painfully scraped together with a view to eventually taking a PGCE-TEFL course to upgrade my qualifications and enable me to escape from Clive’s power. Every penny of that meagre capital represented a pleasure foregone, a temptation denied, yet now I found myself wasting it on meals I didn’t want with people who regarded me as a poor relative. I was thus in the interesting position of paying to be patronized, asset-stripping my future and still cutting a despicable figure. Dennis would never let me forget what he had done for me, and come September I had nothing to look forward to except another year of slavery on Clive’s treadmill.
    One day towards the middle of our second week there Thomas Carter returned from a trip to the local market town with the news that he had bumped into a friend of his who was staying not far away. She had invited us all to lunch the following day, he said. It cannot be simply the distortions of hindsight that cast Alison Kraemer in the role of spoiler, for the effect was to throw us all into a foul temper, heightening the existing tensions until they exploded a few days later with devastating results. The very first view of the house put a dampener on our mood. Set a short distance off a minor road, approached by a winding drive flanked by poplars, it was everyone’s image of the ‘little place in France’, rustic but well-proportioned, manageably spacious, restrained but not austere, a Cotswold farmhouse with a French accent. That much was real estate, available to anyone with the right money, although it didn’t help to discover that Alison and her late husband, a philosophy don at Balliol, had bought it back in the early sixties for less than £2,000. What no one could have bought, what wasn’t for sale at any price, was Alison’s way with the place. Every geranium, every chicken, every snoozing cat was in its place, like so many movie extras. But that gives the wrong impression, for there was nothing whatever contrived about the effect. If only! What a relief it would have been to be able to dismiss it all as a Homes and Gardens photo-call, carefully stage-managed to make visitors drop dead.
    If I am to do better than merely throw up my hands and assert that Alison Kraemer was in some indefinable way ‘the real, right thing’, then I would suggest that the distinguishing characteristic of her ascendancy was the way she denied you any possibility of mitigating it. Most people go just that little bit too far, opening up a blessed margin of excess along which our wounded egos can scuttle to safety. With the upstart Parsons that margin was as wide as a motorway, of course, but even Thomas Carter, Nature’s gentleman, couldn’t help getting it ever so slightly wrong, in his case by bending over backwards to minimize his achievements and rubbish his accomplishments in order to spare you the painful comparison