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expensive wine and prawn-flavoured corn snacks, being courted . What was going on? Were the Parsons into troilism? ‘Suburban couple seek uninhibited partner, m or f, for three-way sex fun.’ That was the sort of thing I could imagine Denny and Kay going in for, at least in theory. It would go with the decor. But in practice Dennis was too repressed to actually go through with it. Even his drinking had to be packaged as an aesthetic experience.
    ‘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