(2013) Collateral Damage

by Colin Smith

  He felt safe cocooned in the familiarity of his car, content with his steady, safe progress towards the capital. On the radio the cricket commentator was describing the umpires' inspection of the sodden wicket in a tone lesser nations reserve for the deaths of presidents. He twiddled blindly with the tuning knob. First he found some Mahler, but he was in no mood for all that Germanic gloom. Then he caught the end of a news bulletin whose last item was about fighting in Beirut. As usual, it was difficult to understand who was fighting who and for what reason. Maronites, Palestinians, Syrians, Shi'ites, Israelis - they all seemed to change sides as often as those barons in the Wars of the Roses. Would they never tire of killing each other, he wondered? He shrugged the question off. He blamed the years spent learning and then teaching history for a basically apolitical philosophy. Home or abroad, he understood most of the issues, but cared about none of them.

  He continued to turn the radio tuner until the car was suddenly full of a country and western ballad of love and violence. He sang the chorus aloud, beating time on the steering-wheel with his left hand. 'Maybe too-mor-row a bullet will find me ...dah dah di doo dah ...sweet Ro-zee-ta's door.'

  The reason why Dove was so happy was that in a couple of hours he would be reunited with his wife, from whom he had been parted for almost an entire week. He had married her three months ago after several unsatisfactory affairs, two of which had ended in disastrous, and in one case almost homicidal, experiments with cohabitation.

  Getting acquainted with the opposite sex had always been difficult for him. Women were often attracted to his hulk - he was well over six foot and still something of a star at the local rugby club - but he usually found it difficult to make the sort of flippant small talk that helps fire the opening shots of a relationship. And although, at thirty-two, he was by no means past his prime, his shaving mirror told him that he had definitely lost that first gloss of youth. There were lines around his eyes and occasionally he thought he detected a grey hair sprouting like a distress signal in the morning stubble on his chin. In the last year or two he had also put on a depressing amount of weight. He was smoking and drinking too much and his doctor had warned him that coronary thrombosis was not confined to the over forties. Dove had begun to consider the possibility of dying a bachelor and had even started a rather morbid study of two elderly unmarried colleagues in the common room, miserably ticking off points of appearance or traits of character that were in any way similar to his own. Then he met Emma.

  Emma was a skinny blonde with an urchin hair-cut and good teeth, considering the number of cigarettes she smoked. She was a little above average height and a complete chameleon in that, depending upon the company, she could be a model out of the pages of Harper's, a whore or a hippie just in from Katmandu. She was one of those women who used everything she had to maximum advantage. She was clever, and she walked and talked and put her clothes together in such a way that she was always the cynosure. She was casually, almost absent-mindedly promiscuous, having once declared that sex was the most overrated thing since Picasso. When she wanted a man her signals were clear and unambiguous. As far as Dove was concerned she was everything he had ever wanted in a woman.

  She had a small private income which enabled her to drift in and out of work when she felt like it. The jobs were usually as somebody's assistant in advertising or television and she was quite ruthless in using social contacts to get them. She almost invariably started well, but soon became bored and after a few months went away on a long holiday from which she did not return. The male friends whose influence had got her these jobs, often through considerable effort on their part, usually forgave her because she was the kind of woman who made most men feel heroes whether she slept with them or not. Certainly this was the effect she had on Dove, who knew the real Emma about as well as he knew royalty.

  They had met at a dinner party in London six months before he returned to his native Midlands as head of the history department at a large comprehensive school. At the time, Emma was working as personal assistant to a hard charger in advertising called Toby. She was beginning to get bored again. Toby's latest thing was cocaine, something he had been introduced to during a recent trip to New York: he liked to lick it off her. Even that had begun to pall. She felt she had done everything: taken every kind of stimulant, slept with every kind of man, done every kind of job she could possibly find interesting. It was true that she had not, in spite of the urging of some of her feminist acquaintances, tried a fully-fledged lesbian affair - though she was not entirely innocent in these matters, having taken a tumble or two at boardingschool in her youth. It had begun to occur to her that about the only thing she had not sampled was marriage; and, since it was hardly an irrevocable step nowadays, she was of a mind to give it a try.

  The dinner party took place at the home of an old university friend of Dove's who worked on less important accounts in the same firm as Toby and was delighted to have persuaded his illustrious superior to visit his humble abode south of the Thames.

  Dove was then, as was often the case, without a steady woman friend. He had been invited to partner a grass widow who, on learning that he was a schoolteacher, launched into a diatribe on standards in state schools and the prohibitive cost of private education. Dove was at the point of shutting her up by affecting total agreement when, almost an hour late, Emma and her boss arrived.

  Toby wore a red velvet jacket, jeans that were too tight for him and a little chain of Masai beads around his swollen neck. It was obvious from their flushed faces and loud voices that they had already had a lot to drink and possibly more besides.

  At first it went well enough with a lively discussion between Dove and Toby about the pros and cons of reintroducing capital punishment for terrorists - a conversation sparked by another bomb in Belfast. Dove protested violently against Toby's modishly right-wing views. 'Nothing can be as bad,' he said, 'as telling a man or woman the exact time, place and manner of their death and then dragging them screaming and shitting to some gallows or firing squad.'

  'Society has the right of revenge,' said the advertising man.

  'Not society,' said Dove, 'Perhaps the individual...'

  'That's anarchy,' snapped the other, pouring them both generous glasses of their host's wine to show there were no hard feelings.

  To Dove's great delight, Emma took his side and called her escort 'a sadistic swine' in what he thought he detected were only half-joking tones. Her agreement was genuine, and reinforced by Dove's capacity to remain lucid and relatively unheated on a large amount of drink, allowing his opponent to ramble before he attacked in quick, accurate sentences. The only indication that the schoolteacher had been drinking was a slightly flushed look, almost as if he suffered from high blood pressure. Toby had a reputation for incipient violence when drunk: the raised voice; the gunfighter stare; the pounding fist on the table - even the carefully thrown drink if he thought he could get away with it. Emma doubted whether he would try anything on this occasion. Dove's hands quite swallowed a wine-glass and she noted approvingly that his height and breadth easily compensated for a few spare pounds. By this time Toby's argument had degenerated into a dreary catechism of 'drag 'em out, string 'em up, and shoot 'em.'

  When at last he had said his piece it soon became apparent that his muteness was not the reciprocal silence of the conversationalist, but that he had fallen into a drunken stupor. Their host was neither insulted nor amused. Instead, mortified by this apparent rejection on the part of his brilliant and honoured guest, he became deeply depressed.

  It was Emma who salvaged the evening by first of all calling a taxi for her companion and then refusing to accompany him when it arrived. After Toby had been removed she concentrated all her attention on her stunned host - picking up the pieces of his shattered ego, polishing them and putting them back together again until he was restored to perfect working order. It was well known that he was one of the best account executives in the firm, everybody said so. It was all very well
for that fat slob to write copy about airlines (who couldn't do that?) but what was really stunning was the way he had handled that bathroom equipment account. Nobody could understand why that gross idiot got the best accounts. When it came to real flair, she said, Toby had about as much sensitivity as an elephant in a banana patch. As the brandy was produced, her host protested that none of this was true, could not possibly be, but Emma appealed to his wife for support and together they all agreed, Dove and the grass widow included, that beneath their host's awful, lovable modesty lay true genius.

  It was Emma's performance: the rest were merely the chorus. Dove watched her with awe and admiration. When it was time for them to leave she allowed him to give her a lift home.

  'That was nice of you,' he said in the car.

  'What was?'

  'Making him feel good, tending his wounds.'

  'He was awfully hurt, poor man, like a wounded seal.'

  'Yes.'

  There was a pause while she lit her own cigarette (this made Dove cross with himself, but he couldn't find his lighter in time). 'The trouble is,' she said, 'he is a bit of a drip and fatty's better at his job.'

  Dove winced at 'fatty', not being over-streamlined himself.

  'He's a good man,' he said, 'I've known him for years.'

  'Are you a good man?'

  'Of course I am. I beat little boys and play rugby.'

  'Oooh,' she said. And shortly after that they scrummed down for the first time.

  Dove was thinking about his wife now as the miles swished by in a series of blue and white road-signs. He couldn't believe his luck when she agreed to marry him and live in a converted cottage in what he liked to think of as the country but was known to the General Post Office as part of the West Midlands conurbation. For a few weeks she had even found herself a job in Birmingham, with a small advertising company whose accounts were mostly to do with the motor trade. Then, having completely re-organised the office and made one young man entirely dissatisfied with provincial married life, she tired of it. 'I think I'd like to be a kept woman for a while, darling,' she explained.

  She still spent a fortune on clothes, but they were usually paid for from her income, which came from a trust fund set up by her maternal grandfather. Dove gathered he had made a fortune by doing something unspeakable in southern Africa. Her parents, a brigadier and his wife, lived in a converted oast-house in Kent. They didn't much care for Dove - 'no background and far too polite' - but at least he was white. They had never quite got over the time Emma brought a West Indian mechanic home and wanted to establish him in the garage business.

  'Hypergamy - the act of marrying above your station. That's what you're about to do,' Roger Day, the English teacher and his closest friend at school, had said after he first met Emma.

  Well, he'd been wrong, hadn't he? And so had a lot of other people, thought Dove, reducing speed to avoid sodomizing an articulated truck which had decided to leap into the centre lane. It had worked out all right.

  She went to London rather more often than he would have liked, but that was to be expected: she liked to shop and when it came to clothes there was no denying that Birmingham wasn't London.

  Now a very pleasant weekend lay ahead. They were going to meet in Frenchie's pub in Soho where they would drink kir, and afterwards they would have dinner at Bianchi's in Frith Street. Emma had introduced him to both places. Tomorrow, if she'd finished her shopping, they'd probably look in at a couple of exhibitions he had noted in last week's Observer. There was a play they wanted to see in the evening. After dinner, best of all, slightly drunk and full of good food, they would go to bed.

  They were staying at a flat near Sloane Square which belonged to one of Emma's friends. Dove wasn't sure who they were or whether they would be there or not. As a rule, her friends made him feel uneasy. It wasn't that he couldn't handle them. On the contrary, being a bit of a prig he often felt morally superior, but they represented part of her life that he knew nothing about and, more important, did not want to know anything about. Most of them he failed to recognize as individuals, but saw only as a backcloth to his wife. Emma had neglected to mention the names of these people near Sloane Square on the telephone, an omission that was entirely in character.

  4. Emma

  Emma was in bed with Toby - one friend whom Dove would have remembered. She liked having sex in the afternoon. She always said it took the tension out of the evening. Emma usually 'had sex', too, rarely made love. She was peculiarly honest about things like that.

  'Oh God, do you mean, do you really mean,' Toby was saying, 'that I have to vacate my own bloody flat for you to cavort over my finest linen with that dreary husband of yours?'

  He was doing his best to sound indignant, but he was feeling much too pleased with himself to convey any real reproach. It had been a bit demoralizing when Emma rushed off and got married like that. Then a couple of months later she'd started drifting back down to London and they'd hopped between the sheets again just as naturally as if nothing had happened. 'Do you have an open marriage?' friends asked. 'More ajar,' said Emma. Of course, Toby suspected that he wasn't the only one on her itinerary, but it was nice to be included. She didn't even seem to mind that he had run out of coke. But he felt some sort of protest was necessary. After all, it was a bit thick. For a start he'd have to change the sheets.

  'That's what you promised, darling,' said Emma, turning a long, bare back to him as she searched among the glasses on the bedside table for one with enough Scotch left in it to extinguish her cigarette. As she did so Toby noticed a small brown mole just below her left shoulder-blade. This tiny imperfection excited him. He wanted to smother it with kisses. He leapt on her.

  'Gerroff,' she growled. 'My knight approaches. Even now his chariot passes the Watford Gap service station.'

  'Do you mean that '69 Cortina he took you out of my life in?'

  'Don't be a snob. Only parasites can drive Lamborghinis. Useful members of society get Cortinas.'

  'Useful members of society are very boring,' said Toby. But he did not have the energy to overcome resistance. A delightful languor was beginning to creep over him which was spoilt only by the knowledge that it was not going to be allowed to develop as it should into a blissfully spent sleep. It had been a very tiring afternoon. It had started not long after midday with champagne before lunch, gathered pace with a couple of good bottles of claret over the meal, hovered provocatively for a while over the coffee and brandy then, for a man who despised exercise, become distinctly energetic before they surfaced gasping, like swimmers, for glasses of malt whisky and cigarettes in bed. He allowed her to leave his bed and watched her slightly unsteady progress towards the bathroom door. 'Lovely, dirty bitch,' he thought fondly.

  Under the shower Emma was getting cross with Toby. Great oaf, she thought. Perhaps Stephen was a bit boring sometimes, but it wasn't his bloody place to say so. Yet, as she mechanically worked a Corsican sponge about her body, she asked herself: he is boring, isn't he? And the answer came back loud and dear: yes, oh yes, boring and a bit thick at times for all that calm, rational, unhurried approach of his. And there were other things that irritated. Sometimes he was more of a hypochondriac than she was: always trying to cut down on booze and fags and worrying about his diet just because his quack had once mentioned the word 'coronary'. Then there was the matter of, oh Christ, call it what you will: class, background. Sometimes those flat Midlands 'a's of his which had sounded so attractive, so D. H. Lawrence when they first met, made her squirm. There was also no denying that they had a different attitude towards many things. Money for one. For Chrissake he was depositing fifty pounds a month into a building society somewhere and she knew that soon she would be expected to walk without resistance into a three-bedroomed semi and there breed kids until it was time to become the headmaster's wife.

  Then there were his dreary friends. Roger Day, the English master, for instance. A real drongo with a beard who thought he was Hemingway. Once, for the hell
of it, she had flirted with him. Naturally, he'd run a mile. Ugh!

  Of course, she knew she was to blame. She'd wanted to get married. She'd played Stephen along like some prize salmon and brought him panting to the bank. Now the kindest thing to do would be to get out before things went too far. Perhaps this weekend would be the best time, in London on her own territory. He would be terribly hurt and she wasn't looking forward to that because he was, she supposed, a good man, which was why ultimately she found him so fucking dull. Yes, this weekend was the best time, but she would have to be careful how she did it. Should she tell him or leave a note and disappear? Something like she didn't think it was working out and she was going to stay with her parents for a while. Nothing at all about Toby and the rest. There was a television research job coming up she thought she could get which involved a trip to Buenos Aires. Urban guerrillas and all that. It might be the answer. She didn't want to be around after she had told him.

  Despite the warm water she found herself shuddering. Good heavens, I'm frightened of him. It came to her as a genuine surprise. Then she thought: why not? There was something about Mister Stephen Dove sometimes, something most women sensed and some men, which said he could be an extremely violent man. She gave another little shiver and stepped out of the shower. As she reached for a towel she thought: perhaps that was what attracted me to him in the first place.