Tim Parks
Europa

Europa (in Athens) does business

at truly reasonable rates.

You needn’t fear interraption

or the gainsaying of whims;

also, she offers irreproachable

sheets, and — in winter -

a coal-fire. This time, Zeus,

come as you are. No bull.

Antipater of Thessalonika

Love’s night & a lamp

judged our vows:

that she would love me ever

& I should neper leave her.

Love’s night & you, lamp,

witnessed the pact.

Today the vow runs:

‘Oaths such as these, waterwords.’

Tonight, lamp, witness her lying

— in other arms.

Meleager

Part One

‘My dear girl, where there are women

there are sure to be slaps. It was

Napoleon who said that, I think.’

Zola, Nana

CHAPTER ONE

I am sitting slightly off-centre on the long back seat of a modern coach crossing Europe. And this in itself is extraordinary. For I hate coaches, I have always hated coaches, and above all I hate modern coaches, not just because of the strong and nauseating smell of plastics and synthetic upholstery, but because of the way the supposed desires of the majority are now foisted upon everybody — I mean myself — in the form of videoscreens projecting from beneath the luggage rack every six seats or so, and of course piped music oozing from concealed loudspeakers. So that even as we pull out of Piazza dell’Università into the morning traffic on Corso Vercelli in this strange city I have lived in for so long of stone and trams and noble facades and Moroccans selling boxes of contraband cigarettes laid out on the pavements under propped-up umbrellas — because it’s raining, as it will in Milan in May — even now, before the long trip has hardly started, we are having to listen to a smug male voice singing with fake and complacent hoarseness about un amore passionale, which he cannot, he claims, forget, and which has destroyed his life forever, a theme, I suspect, that may be the very last thing one needs to be subjected to at only shortly after eight on a Monday morning, and not long after one’s forty-fifth birthday. Though many of the younger travellers are singing along (the way fresh recruits, I believe, will sing along on their way to war).

Yes, that it was a mistake, I reflect, sitting slightly right of centre on the long back seat of this modern coach setting out across Europe, that it was a big mistake to have come on this trip, I have never doubted from the moment I agreed to it, and perhaps even before, if such a thing is possible. Or let’s say that the very instant I took this decision was also the instant I recognized, and recognized that I had always recognized, that coming on this trip was one of those mistakes I was made to make. You were made to make this mistake, I thought. By which I don’t mean of course to put it on a par with the grander and more spectacular mistakes that have given shape and structure to what one can only refer to as one’s life, just that, upon having agreed, in answer to a request from a colleague, to sign my name at the bottom of a list of other signatures of other colleagues, I immediately appreciated that this was precisely the kind of squalid, absurd and wilful mistake that somebody like myself would make. This is the kind of thing you do, I told myself. You agree to travel for twelve hours on a coach in one direction and then, two days later, for twelve hours on the same coach (a modern coach to boot, with piped music and videos and synthetic smell) in the return direction, in order to lend your name, for the very little it is worth, to a cause which not only do you not support, but which from a purely intellectual point of view, if such a miracle exists, you oppose, you oppose it, and this, what’s more, through an appeal to an institution which again not only do you not support, nor subscribe to in any way, but which you frequently feel perhaps should not exist at all. This is the kind of person you are. And trying to find a comfortable position for my head on a brushed nylon headrest at the back of this big coach presently jammed at a crossing despite the green light, I reject once again that when, and this would have been early April, Vikram Griffiths said to me, clearing his throat and rubbing his fingers across a polished Indian baldness, as he will, or in his sideburns, or in the down of hair behind his thick neck, and then adjusting his spectacles, as he is doing at this very moment some way up the central corridor of this hideous modern coach, leaning stockily, dog nipping his ankles, over the shoulders and doubtless breasts of a young girl, gestures one presumes he makes out of nervousness and a desire to give people the impression that what he is saying is important and exciting — a dramatized nervousness is perhaps what I mean, a nervousness become conscious of itself and then tool of itself in a never-ending and self consuming but always coercive narcissism — when Vikram Griffiths said to me, swallowing catarrh, though without his dog that day, Jerry, boyo — because Vikram is not just an Indian but a Welsh Indian, the only Indian ever to speak Welsh, he claims — Jerry, boyo, we are going to appeal to Europe — clearing his throat again — and we would much appreciate your support, what I should have done, of course, was to laugh in his face, or produce some more polite gesture but of similar subtext, as for example enquiring, Europe? or just, Where, sorry? as though genuinely unaware that such an entity existed.

I should have refused. It surely would not have been impossible even for a man who is known to be living alone and enjoying a life of very few professional commitments to have found some kind of excuse relative to one of the three designated days when this particular modern coach was to be speeding up interminable kilometres of autostrada and autoroute to present our case to Europe. It should not have been impossible. Yet not only did I not refuse, but I actually leapt at the chance, I said yes immediately. Not only did I not look for an excuse to avoid this tiresome and I suspect hypocritical pilgrimage, but I actually overlooked the perfectly good excuse that did present itself, to wit my daughter’s eighteenth birthday, the party to celebrate which will take place tomorrow in my no doubt much-censured absence. And not only, I reflect, as the coach’s big engine vibrates beneath my seat — and what I’m trying to do I suppose is to grasp the nettle, all the nettles, just as firmly as ever one can — not only did I accept immediately, by which I mean without a second’s mental mediation, on reflex as it were, but I then went out of my way to make my acceptance affable and even friendly. I said, Why surely, Vikram, of course I’ll come, and I signed my name immediately and immediately, without mediation, I reached into my pocket to pull out the new wallet I had recently bought, as I have bought so many new things of the small and vaguely intimate variety of late, and paid immediately (which was quite unnecessary) the two hundred and twenty thousand lire the trip is costing, a sum which frankly, given the present state of my finances, I can ill afford. You can ill afford it, I told myself. Though I must say that money for me of late has been taking on the feel of a currency one is eager to be rid of before moving on to some other country, a currency, that is, that will not be current for much longer, and which it does not even occur to me might be exchangeable.

I paid my money to this Vikram of the dark skin, deep Indian voice and incongruously Welsh accent immediately and in order then to explain a readiness which I feared would not be understood (since when have you ever shown any inclination to fight for the cause?), I actually went so far as to say that since others were making the very considerable effort to organize this trip on everybody’s behalf, the least somebody like myself could do was to show solidarity and come along. I could read a book, I said, during the long journey, I had a lot to read for work, for prospective work, or I could just think (just!). And standing there in the spare because institutional room where our encounter took place, amongst graceless office furniture on a stone-patterned linoleum floor indifferently cleaned by a pampered and unmotivated menial staff, standing there talking to this man whose fecklessness rivals even my own, whose only stable relationship appears to be his passion for the mongrel dog whose hairs smother all his shabby clothes, I was trying to reassure him that there was nothing peculiar in my so rapidly subscribing to his courageous initiative, that there was nothing peculiar in my eagerly adding my name to his list of scrawled signatures. I was almost apologizing, for God’s sake, for enrolling in his expedition. Or rather, I was already concealing what 1 already knew in my heart to be the real and only reason for my behaving in this extraordinary and inconsistent fashion, for — my agreeing, that is, to come on this ridiculous and pointless trip; the same reason, it should be said, why I have now, even as I sit here churning these thoughts on the back seat of this coach as it inches its way out to one of those nodal points where the motorway system plugs into the city so that one can be sucked off at tremendous speed to some other and in every way similar city — the same reason why I have now suddenly buried my face in a book the words on whose pages I not only do not see but do not even really want to see. For she has just stood up to get down her dark leather document-case from the overhead luggage rack. She is in the third seat from the front on the left.

And to think, to think that for more than six months now, or is it a year? I had been speaking of myself (to myself) as a man healed, as a man emerging once and for all from the throes and miseries, and I suppose it has to be added ecstasies, of what I can only refer to as the great crisis, the great adventure, the great collision of my life, Yes, I had begun to look upon myself as that person who has been through it all and emerges the other side ‘a happier and a wiser man’, who glances back at others crossing life’s rapids with a sort of affectionate and satisfying irony. And chattering to myself in my mind, as one does, or buying furniture for my little flat, or purchasing all those little things — my new wallet — that I suddenly felt it sensible to replace, so that life could start anew, free from every encumbering reminder, I would tell myself: Splendid, not even a whiff of albatross, not a hint of that weight and stench you have carried around with you for so long! Yes, the road to excess, I would quote to myself, and I remember doing this with a cheerful complacence that it is embarrassing to recall, the road to excess — perhaps I would be putting on a CD of Handel or of Mozart (I had been keeping very strict control on my listening material) — truly does lead to the Palace of Wisdom. Though one might have quibbled over the word ‘palace’, I suppose. But even if designations along the lines of ‘service flat or ‘hovel’ or even ‘bunker’ would perhaps be more appropriate for the species of wisdom I had arrived at, the point I’m trying to make is that prior to meeting Vikram Griffiths, our Indian Welshman, in the English Institute staffroom that day, I had felt I was cured. No, better still, I felt I had cured myself. There was pride involved. For at no point had I sought help from anyone, had I? No, I had fought my own way out of the flood, born up by the scraps of reason and self-respect one inevitably clutches at once it becomes clear one has no stomach for the darker option. And if, after what seemed a very long time at sea, the surf had set me down at the last in a place that was far away from where I plunged in and quite unknown to me and above all lonelier than any other place I had ever been before, all the same it did give me every impression once I got there, once I closed the door on my tiny apartment, of being terra firma, of being, that is, a place of arrival, the kind of place to which the words ‘home and dry’, or at least ‘dry’,might be applicable.

Yes, for six months, I reflect, sitting slightly right of centre on the big back seat of this powerful modern coach setting out across Europe, for six months you have been telling yourself that you are out of the woods, safe, even happy. Not to the point of clapping your hands and stamping your feet, perhaps, but happy enough, happy enough. Until a man for whom you have no particular respect approaches you in your loathsome place of work, an occasional drinking companion, affectedly shabby, determinedly Indian, though brought up entirely Welsh, with a clipboard and a pen in his hand and a nervous over-excited coercive manner manifested above all by his constant throat-clearing and catarrh-swallowing, his constant fingering of sideburns and baldness, and this man explains to you an ambitious initiative for saving the very job you have been trying for years to find the courage to leave, a job that is the source perhaps, when looked at from one angle, of all your woes, and what do you do? What do you do? In the space of a very few seconds you forget the resolve, for such it had seemed, of the last six months and you offer, promptly, immediately, without mediation, your — and these were the very words you used — personal contribution to the group effort. And then because you have never, but never, shown the slightest interest in the past in saving this miserable but of course well-paid, fatally well-paid job which has kept us all hanging on here in a limbo without future or return, trapped us in a stagnant backwater where the leaves of falling years turn slowly on themselves as they drift and rot, and because you are sure that this man-with the handsome sideburns and balding nervousness never for one moment imagined you would lend your support, and in fact only really asked you because you both happened to be in the same room at the same time and he with his clipboard in his hand, you start to make all kinds of affable apologies of the variety, If others are doing so much, the least I could do, etc, and even explaining to him that you won’t really be wasting the time because you can take books to read. I have plenty of work I can take, you said in a ludicrous pretence of having pressing outside interests, and Vikram Griffiths said: Oh, no need to worry about entertainment, boyo — because Vikram, who has no official role in the foreign teachers” union, yet appears to be the only person who is capable of getting anything done, has this way of calling all males of whatever age ‘boyo’, as indeed he has of calling all females of whatever age ‘girlie’, which is part and parcel of declaring his Welshness, his incongruous Welshness, which of course draws attention to his Indianness, his un-Welshness, and also his matey, alcohol-fed nervousness and above all his alternativeness, his belonging to that revolution permanente, as the French like to say, or used to, that army of special and enlightened people, who are now so much an accepted and uninspiring part of our shadow establishment — No need to worry about entertainment, boyo, Vikram Griffiths says, clearing his throat and rubbing his hands together, because almost all the students coming along will be girlies, of course. At which point this man, no doubt delighted to have found such an unlikely supporter for his imaginative initiative, gives you the kind of wink which is also a leer, the kind of facial contortion, 1 mean, that a stand-up comedian might wish to cultivate so that not a single member of a huge theatre audience could misunderstand his insinuation. Because part of Vikram Griffiths’ manner, I reject, is to assume, ostentatiously, provocatively, a renegade complicity even with people whom he suspects may be on the other side. In fact, he said, his face still untwisting from its leer, the boys are already calling it The Shag Wagon, and he laughed a throaty, smoke-and-whisky laugh, and sucking in catarrh repeated, The Shag Wagon, still laughing, and then was giving me some statistics on what he expected to be the breakdown between the students, mostly girls and numerous, and the foreign teachers, ourselves, mostly men and few, and true to the totally inconsistent and 1 think 1 ought to recognize shameful way I was behaving, I am behaving, I laughed too. The Shag Wagon! I shouted with a quite unforgiveable mirth. The flicking Shag Wagon, who thought of calling it that? It’s brilliant! And Vikram said, Georg thought of it. You know what Georg’s like.

Which I did. I do.

And he picked up his list, which already had her name and Georg’s name signed on it, and, smelling of dog, dog hairs on his shabby jacket, though he can hardly bring the creature into the University, he went across the room to talk to another of my colleagues, while what I was immediately trying to remember was whether their names, hers and Georg’s, had been one above the other or one below the other on that list I had just signed and whether they had been written in the same colour and hence perhaps the same pen. And I couldn’t remember. As even now, sitting on the back seat of this modern coach setting out towards the putative heart of Europe and forcing my mind’s eye to open once again on the moment when I saw that list on his clipboard, the moment I so precipitously and it has to be said pathetically added my name to it, even now I cannot recall whether their names were together, or far apart, and not remembering, but trying so hard to remember, I am obliged for it must be the millionth time to acknowledge how humiliating it is to be throwing all my mental energy at a matter which is of absolutely no importance, and not even pleasurable in the way that so many other matters of absolutely no importance but to which one regularly gives one’s mind, as for example billiards, or TV documentaries, or even, though more rarely, one’s work, can be, if nothing else, at least pleasurable. Why does a man feel he has to take his dog with him everywhere? I ask myself. Why does a man have to put himself so much in evidence! An ugly dog at that. And how could it possibly matter whether she and Georg signed the Strasbourg list with the same pen and hence were perhaps together at the moment of signing? How could such a trivial coincidence signify anything at all?

But now I am interrupted by an Italian voice that asks: What are you reading?

For it has to be said that I am very far from being alone on the back seat of this coach. Indeed, if one could be alone, or even hope to be alone, hope that other people would leave one alone, in a modern coach then I would not hate them quite so much, since perhaps what I hate most about coaches is that they imply groups, and one’s forced or presumed participation in a group for a given period of time, in the way that, for example, buses or trains or even aeroplanes do not imply such scenarios, since in those cases everybody buys their tickets separately and separately minds their own separate business. Yes, coaches, I understand now, make me think of groups and the tendency groups have to operate at the level of the lowest, and perhaps not even common, denominator, and what I’m thinking of I suppose is parties of people singing together all in the same state of mind, a church outing perhaps, or old people embarking on package tours to pass the time, or adolescents on the way to support a football team, and, in general, I’m thinking of all the contemporary pieties of getting people together and moving them off in one direction or another to have fun together, or to edify themselves, or to show solidarity to some underprivileged minority and everybody, as I said, being of the same mind and of one intent, every individual possessed by the spirit of the group, which is the very spirit apparently of humanity, and indeed of that Europe, come to think of it, to which this group is now hurtling off to appeal. Whereas if I recall correctly, and it was from a book she once made me read or rather re-read, for she was always making me read books in the hope that 1 might recover my vocation, might truly become that person, that man (this was important), I had once shown promise of becoming — if I recall correctly, then the first mention of Europe as a geographical entity (was it Theocritus?) referred only to the Peloponnese, and only in order to distinguish the Peloponnese from Asia, only to demonstrate that the small peninsula had not been swallowed up into the amorphous mass of an ever-invasive Asia. Or so I recall, rightly, or perhaps wrongly, from a book she made me read, re-read, in her insistent and one must suppose laudable attempt to have me recover my vocation, to have me become, perhaps this was the nub, somebody she could respect. It was a claim to distinction, Europe, as I recall.

In any event, I am far from alone, here on the back seat, which is to say that on my right, trapped between myself and the window, I have a rather plain young woman with somehow swollen lips who has been chattering intermittently with the two girls in the seat in front of us and, ignoring myself, with the girl, over made-up, to my left, who is dead in the centre of the coach’s, one has to confess, comfortable big back seat, while to her left sits the handsome Georg, a German of Polish extraction, who is exchanging occasional pleasantries with the girl to his left, trapped between himself and the window, and again with the boy and girl in the seat in front of them, one of whom, the girl, is standing up with one knee on her seat and one very long and attractive leg out in the corridor, holding forth absolutely non-stop, in Italian, as is to be expected of a young Italian, on a variety of entirely predictable topics, as for example, the quality of different makes of jeans, including the pair she has on (allowing Georg to examine her leg and plump crotch attentively); the impossibility of finding a place in one of the smaller university class- rooms when somebody ‘important’ (not myself) is lecturing; the credibility of astrology and numerology; the ‘stupendous’ sound system in a new discotheque recently opened in the small satellite town of Busto Arsizio; and the extraordinary behaviour, in love and out, of her cousin Paola, who studies law at the Cattolica and who, on being left by her boy-friend of long standing, got a friend to phone him in the middle of the night as though from a hospital to say that a girl with red hair (i.e. herself) had been found in a coma after a horrendous car crash, the only piece of identification found on her being a photo of a young man with a phone-number on the back, the boy-friend’s — all this to make him feel sorry for her and guilty about leaping her and to have him rush off to hospital imagining he would find her dying, whereas in fact what he, the ex-boy-friend, did was to call her parents, who, and particularly the mother, went almost out of their minds with grief before Paola came in through the front door in an advanced state of drunkenness.

How adolescent that is, I reflect, watching the girl’s animated face. And how attractive. You have always had a fatal attraction to adolescent behaviour, I tell myself. Most of your own behaviour, I tell myself, is irretrievably adolescent. And in the meantime this stream, indeed this torrent of juvenile and absolutely indiscriminating, but at least unpretentious chatter has, for the half an hour or so that we have been forcing our way through Milan’s cluttered thoroughfares, together of course with an occasional burst of communal song when a new voice takes over on the airwaves crooning without fail of love whether happy or unhappy — this chatter and the singing, sometimes choral, of insipid songs, has so far been offering an excellent cover for what I’m perfectly aware will be perceived as my misanthropic behaviour, sitting silent and slightly off-centre in the back seat of this coach, the only place left unoccupied on my late (studiedly late) arrival, my face buried in a book, an attitude which unfortunately legitimizes the innocent question of the girl in the seat in front.

What are you reading?

This girl must be kneeling on her seat, because her arms are resting quite naturally on the top of the backrest above my face and her rather strong chin is just above her linked hands, head cocked to one side in an expression of friendly enquiry and what the Italians call disponibilitä, meaning openness, willingness to listen and to help, amenability. And though she is perfectly aware, it seems to me, of this body language, this simple friendliness she is communicating, there could be no question of her having deliberately and carefully adopted it, which is exactly the opposite of so many adults, I reflect, who are often amazingly unaware of what they have indeed been meticulously scheming, as when she, I am bound to remember now, told you that though she loved you dearly she felt she needed a little breathing space on her own before making the kind of decisions that would upset the vie tranquille that she and her young daughter had been enjoying since her painful separation from her husband. And her face as she said this had a wonderful warm poignancy about it, yearning would be an appropriate word, an expression I still remember very clearly, as if gazing at a loved one through prison bars, or in fading twilight, with all the intimacy of a love that cannot be, but an expression that time would all too soon reveal as entirely false and hypocritical, knowing what she knew then, as so many of the expressions, I reflect, that you yourself have adopted with your one-time wife and indeed with all those people who at some time and for whatever reason have become important to you and whom at some point in your life you could not have done without, have been entirely false and hypocritical.

I am not reading, I tell the girl in front of me.

But you have a book.

I insist to the perhaps twenty- or twenty-one-year-old girl that though this is self-evident, the fact is that I am not reading the book which, admittedly, I am holding open in my hands.

Why not?

Already, during the course of this brief exchange, I am aware of smiling wryly and generally sending out the kind of friendly, apparently avuncular social messages which I know are expected of me. It’s as if I had indeed been reading the book, but had now chosen to say that I was not reading it in order to tease and prolong the conversation, rather than just giving the girl the title of the thing and having done. Indeed it would not greatly surprise me if before very long I weren’t telling this pleasant young studentessa some small sad half-truths about myself merely in order to appear, as they say, interesting.

I explain to her that I am not reading the novel I hold in my hands, because I already know it to be a tiresome thing written by a woman who can think of nothing better to do with her very considerable talent than prolong a weary dialectic which presents the authorities as always evil and wrong and her magical-realist, lesbian, ethnic-minority self and assorted revolutionary company as always good and right and engaged, what’s more, in a heroic battle where LIFE will one day triumph over the evils and violence of an uncomprehending establishment.

Again I smile, warmly, to show that I am perfectly aware that this fierce demolition will seem pompous and presumptuous and even fascist, whereas what I really feel is that my criticism, far from exaggerated, is, if anything, inadequate, since what needs to be said is that people who do nothing more than analyse the world in a way in which it has grown used to being analysed, offering their readers the illusion of participating in a movement that gives them a sense of moral superiority with regard to a society they have no intention of ceasing to subscribe to (as indeed why should they?) — people, whether writers or not, of this variety deserve nothing better than scorn and perhaps a good deal worse.

But it would be unwise to say this. It would be, I have discovered, and indeed it generally is, unwise to say almost any of the things one feels most moved to say. Unless you can somehow present them as a joke.

So why are you reading it? she asks me.

In a pantomime of patience I explain that, as I have already explained, I am not reading it.

But you’ve got it open.

It was given to me.

She looks at me with big young eyes, wondering if she can ask the question, and perhaps because we’re on a coach and hence all part of the same group supporting the same cause, my cause, she feels she can. Who by?

I tell her: Somebody who wanted me to read it.

Clearly she is being teased, and clearly she enjoys being teased. She bounces up and down on her knees, she is young, she smiles, she raises an eyebrow (endearingly bushy), she cocks her head to one side, smooth cheek for just a moment against the synthetic stiff blood-red of the upholstery. Immediately I’m thinking that if I don’t tell her who gave me this book, with all that the two words involved would imply, perhaps I’ll have more of a chance with this young student, a thought which equally immediately short-circuits to have me thinking, uncomfortably, of Georg and of her, so expert in the withholding of information, so that in the kind of reflex that isn’t so much a decision as a small convulsion of self-recognition followed by fearful rejection (as of one throwing away a cigarette after the first puff), I decide I will tell her who gave me this miserable novel. I will tell her so as to save myself from all equivocation. Just as I open my mouth, she asks, Your girl-friend?

What?

Was it your girl-friend gave you the book?

She smiles warmly She is being bolder now. She has noticed — I saw her eyes — that I don’t wear a ring.! close my mouth, hesitating again, when our conversations if such we are to call it, is interrupted by an announcement. Vikram Griffiths is standing in the aisle of the coach up front by the driver and he has a microphone in his hand and his mongrel dog at his feet. His voice is harshly electronically deep, and deeply Welsh: Welcome to y’all! he begins, benvenuti, bienvenus, wilkommen, croeso, good t’see ya!

CHAPTER TWO

When Vikram Griffiths begins to speak, the girl in the seat in front of me, whose great brown eyes are of course like those of a million other Italian girls, not to mention Spanish and Greek and doubtless other races too, by which I mean to say, unique, splendid, eminently replaceable, swivels on her seat to pay attention, and what I’m telling myself now, slightly right of centre in the back seat of this packed coach, assailed by Vikram Griffiths’ efficiently amplified, demotic voice, what I’m telling myself is that I truly am in this now, in this coach I mean, like it or not, for twelve hours and then the two nights in Strasbourg and then twelve hours in the coach again on the way back, not to mention the danger that it could well be more than twelve hours, depending on traffic and circumstances beyond your control, since of course the moment you set out on the road with other people, the moment you undertake a trip together in a coach, the moment you commit yourself to some joint project, some communal enterprise, circumstances are always well and truly beyond your control.

I’m in. Deeply, inescapably in. We’ve already left Milan behind, we’re on the autostrada, speeding along, a solid group of us, so that, as when they bolt the doors on the plane and it moves out onto the runway, there can be no more getting out now before the other end, no more splitting us up into separate sovereign urges and desires. You’re in it now, I tell myself, with all these young students, girls for the most part, to either side and in front, beautiful and plain, and Georg next-but-one to my left, plus your other colleagues, liked and disliked, but mostly the latter, from France and Germany and Spain and Greece and God bless us even Ireland, and with her in the third seat from the front, with her dark brown hair and dark brown document-case that she just took down from the overhead rack, the same case where she used to keep such things as her train timetable and the rubbers we used and the photographs we took of ourselves with the time-delay, and then miscellaneous memorabilia of the air-ticket and hotel-bill variety, the receipts for meals I always had to be careful not to put in my own pockets, and my letters of course, my many many letters, some of them ten or even twenty pages long, some of them no more than fragments of poor poetry I had written, or better poetry I had copied out for her but which she never recognized, and later an aerosol can — of ammonia spray, as is the way with things that are intense and have to change, things that start well but can’t stand still and end badly, very badly, though now no doubt she will have nothing more in there than notepaper for the reflections she is gathering and will be using this trip to gather further, for her research into a possible constitution for a United Europe which is part of a competition she has enrolled in to win a Euro scholarship for a year’s work and study in Brussels, or so I heard from my daughter, a move that she sees as the indispensable next step in her career, for she still thinks of life in terms of career and self-realization, she is still at that stage.

Yes, I am in this now, with all the singing and the toilet stops and the making friends and the exchanging of addresses and the boredom and doubtless the confabulation as some try to grab more power and responsibility in our little group and others (myself) to refuse it, and the enormous waste of time it will no doubt be going through the bureaucratic procedure of presenting our petition to a European Parliament whose exact functions and powers and suffrage none of us understands, except perhaps her, perhaps the Avvocato Malerba, perhaps Vikram, and on the way back we will all have to discuss the importance of what we have achieved and mythologize it and tell ourselves we did well to come and that now we are safer, meaning that we can feel more secure that we will continue to receive our salaries for some time to come.

Yes, I am caught now, I am not in my small flat where the answering machine vets all the calls and where no photograph, ornament, poster or object of any intimacy whatever dates back before 1993, not in my own private space so dear to me and so dull, but here in the thrall of forty or fifty people. You are caught, I tell myself, trapped. And despite my late arrival, due mainly to a half-hour spent in a café on Corso Sempione debating all the reasons for avoiding this ridiculous excursion (without ever for one moment believing I would avoid it), despite my late arrival and all my misgivings, I must say that the thought that I really am in this now is beginning to get me rather excited, it’s cheering me up, so that already I am considering indulging in a little fling, an avventura as the Italians say, with one, with any one for heaven’s sake (for they are all the same to me — how could it be otherwise?) of these young women. You should have an adventure, I tell myself, looking around at the fresh young students, a little fling, in full visibility of everybody, flagrant. By which of course I mean in full and flagrant visibility of her. As if such a gesture could in any way upset her! As if she would care, which I know perfectly well she wouldn’t. On the contrary she would probably say, if we were to speak to each other at all on this trip, which frankly I doubt, she would probably say how pleased she was that I was having a healthy sex life, a notion this, whatever it might mean, that she always advocated and indeed used, as a precept, to excuse almost any behaviour, and by any behaviour what I mean I suppose is betrayal, which is surely the most terrible behaviour of all, and the most inevitable it seems sometimes. And this reminds me now how, with her historical studies, so similar to my own, and her desire for sophistication, or at least to be seen to be sophisticated, she liked to say that European hegemony in the world began with a woman’s betrayal, and she meant Helen, Helen’s betrayal, which prompted the Achaean triumph and the shift of civilization’s centre from east to west, Troy to Athens and thence of course further west to her beloved Paris. Another protagonist. Every epic adventure (I remember her saying this and myself thinking how intelligent she was and how well-read and articulate), every epic adventure turned on a woman’s betrayal, of father, family, or husband — Medea, Antigone, Ariadne — and she would laugh her laugh, her liquid French laugh, and whenever history’s wheel began to move, she said, it was betrayal set it in motion — Hitler’s of Stalin, De Gaulle’s of Britain — and she said that so long as we saw our affair in the wider world perspective I need never worry about feeling guilty or justifying myself.

She laughed her very French laugh. And if I mention that a second time, the Frenchness of her laugh, it’s because I’ve just remembered that I found her laugh special and I’m trying to remember exactly what it was like, because so often one remembers that something is, was, wonderful or special without being able properly to recall it, or properly to savour it, or understand exactly why it was so. One remembers that one would like to recall it. One remembers in order to be frustrated, in order to savour not the thing itself but its absence, the shape of its absence. And thinking of this while sitting slightly “right of centre — on the big back seat of this big packed coach with Vikram Griffiths launching into his amplified speech somewhere on the autostrada north of Milan, clearing his throat, his ridiculous mongrel dog Dafydd snuffling round his legs, grizzly wet nose patted by all the girls, it occurs to me that one of the main things I fell in love with when falling in love with her was her foreignness, and the remarkable thing about this is that I had already fallen in love with foreignness once before, of course — my wife — with hardly spectacular results, and here I was doing it again, so that you might well suppose that if I were to go to live in Africa or Asia or Russia or the far north or the polar south, if I had the energy, that is, or the courage or optimism to move around like that, as some people so amazingly do, I would probably fall in love with foreignness over and over again and be at the mercy of every different cut of female lips, eyes and nose, every different cadence of female vocal cords, every language, gaze and gait, since quite probably it is foreignness and only foreignness that is capable of making me fall in love, lose control, approach a state of adoration — except of course that I’m perfectly aware that I shall never fall in love again.

Nor would I want to.

Nor am I remotely interested in thinking about such matters, or in reading about them, or in talking about them, so that if I do think and read and talk about them incessantly, then it is presumably because I am compelled to do so. Presumably.

I’m at sea again, that’s the truth, clutching the very bad book my eighteen-year-old daughter gave me, sitting amongst a coachload of sirens and ne’er-do-wells, while at the front, microphone in hand, Vikram Griffiths — and apparently he explained to the coach driver that he absolutely had to bring his dog along, because if he left it with the wife he is separating from she would never give it back to him — is explaining in a surely exaggerated Welsh Italian (but he knows how much people love his quaint, or as they put it folkloristico incompetence, his extraordinary mixed-ness and minority-ness) the reasons for our trip, id est,the unlawful, on the part of the University, reduction of our salary, the attempt to limit to four the number of years we can renew our contracts, the threat of firing, the misrepresentation under oath of the nature of the work we do (i.e. our professors’ work), the refusal to comply with court orders, even orders emanating from the European Court, the arrogance in short of the Italian state in its dealings with us through the University and hence our decision to take a petition to the European Parliament and to insist that pressure be brought to bear to reinstate those of us who have been fired, return our salaries to what they were and pay damages for lost salary and likewise for the psychological distress brought about by this illegal and disreputable way of treating us.

Am I right or am I right? Vikram Griffiths shouts (in Italian, demotic), upon which everybody claps and cheers, the dog Dafydd barks and is made a fuss of, since women so love to make an exhibition of their affections, chasing his tail wildly, and now Vikram, sucking in catarrh, thanks the students who have come along for their solidarity and he says how impressed officials at the European Parliament will be by this broadly-based support since it indicates that the students have a rapport with their foreign-language teachers and are aware and care, and the press will surely notice this and hence the University will be forced to take note too, since the last thing they need is for the classrooms to be occupied.

Is he right or is he right?

There is another loud, mainly feminine cheer with canine echo and Vikram Griffiths, stocky, charming, brilliant, makes a mistake, whether of grammar or of stress, or of both — of both — with almost every Italian word he utters, though apparently he speaks Welsh perfectly, and what he is not saying of course to these students who have come along to support us, and in some cases one imagines with genuine altruism, sacrificing precious hours and days that they could have used revising for the exams that are to be held immediately upon our return — what he does not say is how little work we foreign lectors do for our living, how long and lazy our summer holidays are, how little some of us are qualified, how many of us got our jobs because we just happened to know the professor with the gift in his hand, and one of us is having a lesbian relationship with her professor and another is taking money together with his professor to fix exams on behalf of rich and incompetent students, and many of us worked for our professors privately in language schools and translation agencies before we got our jobs, so that getting them was just an extension of an already established collaborazione, as the Italians like to put it, and he doesn’t say that many of us have been deeply corrupted by receiving an easy and not ungenerous salary for work that nobody checks or even remotely cares about, and that most of us are terrified by the idea of having to go out and find other work and actually make our money in some way that corresponds, however remotely, to the amount of effort we put in. You yourself are terrified, I tell myself, by the prospect of having to find other work. Why else would you have stayed for so long? And Vikram Griffiths, with his handsome sideburns, his subcontinental charisma, and his dog named after the great (apparently) Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, a man who revolutionized forever the metrics of that language now spoken by so few, Vikram does not say that when we arrived at the University long ago each one of us signed a contract in which we accepted that the maximum duration of our job would be five years, because of course we imagined that we would use this time to become something else — a writer, a painter, a mother, a professor, an entrepreneur — but that by the end of those five years, our various private projects having failed, or not having satisfied us as we expected, we couldn’t leave, we could, not give up our empty jobs.

We are lost, I reflect, this is the truth about my colleagues and myself in this coach, we are lost in this foreign country that isn’t ours, this Europe that may or may not exist, and we wouldn’t know what to do if we had to go home. To a man, a woman, we are scared of going home, because most of us are forty and beyond and trapped in this place where life once deposited us, this backwater where autumn leaves circle slowly as they rot, and the unmarried women amongst us are scared of losing their one pillar of security, their state salaries and later of course their pensions, and the married women with families are scared of losing their one outlet from their claustrophobic domestic lives, and everybody is scared, I tell myself, as Vikram Griffiths talks on and on, scratching his sideburns, then his dog’s ears, of the loss of identity that would be involved in not being able to say, I work for the University, this is my reason for being where I am, in this foreign country, and not at home in Paris or Athens or Cologne or Dublin or Bruges or Madrid, though most of us frankly have forgotten what home was like. When it suits us we idealize home, I reflect, and again when it suits us we demonize it, and we say we could never have gone on living under Thatcher or under Kohl, or with our parents, or near our ex-wives, or in the intellectual climate in Greece or in Glasgow. Vikram Griffiths doesn’t say to these thoughtless, though for the most part charming students, that many of us dream of returning home, but with someone we love, from a position of strength (as they say), as I was obsessed for a long time by the idea of returning to England with her, and she I believe, or so she told me, by the idea of returning to Rheims with me, and indeed we did return there, to Rheims, or at least it was a return for her, and that was a week of such love, such pleasure, as I shall never forget, though she became restless towards the end, complaining how cold her city was and how provincial and narrow-minded its people. She would rather have been in Paris, she said. We must go to Paris together next trip. But we never went to Paris, we never will go to Paris, and it is quite ridiculous, I tell myself, that you are thinking about all this now with Vikram announcing that we shall be stopping shortly for people to pee and announcing that he will be arranging for us all to go for a dinner tonight in Strasbourg, and that rooms in the hotel are double, with two single beds that is, although beds can always be put together, can they not? Ha ha. Even if there is always the risk of someone falling down the gap in the middle at an embarrassing moment, and hence we should choose our partners now without delay or shame, ha ha, and he produces his theatrical wink, exactly the same as I got in the corridor when he told me that Georg had christened our coach The Shag Wagon, and frankly I must admit that it hadn’t occurred to me I would have to sleep with somebody else. Who shall I sleep with? Who shall I ever sleep with?

CHAPTER THREE

Freud ironized when people superstitiously ascribed meaning to the casual repetition of a number or a word, when they wanted the contingent world to mean and be more in their regard than it possibly could, or were afraid that that might be the case, afraid of some conspiracy between psyche and everything other. So that when I read Das Unheimliche in the ridiculous period when I supposed myself an interesting subject for analysis, I imagined that perhaps like me Freud suffered from the opposite problem, that the more some word or number or name was repeated the less it began to mean, the less anything means. Far from being portentous, the words dissolve to mere sound. Hence, for example, if I never say her name, although I think of little else but her, it is partly because that name is still so powerful that its very articulation causes an emotional seizure, an immediate tension that I feel physically, but also and perhaps more importantly, because by never saying it I keep it that way, I prolong its power, I prevent its dilution in repetition, the way a word like Europe has been diluted into thin air with all the times everybody says Europe this and Euro that, though once it was the name of a girl a god became a bull to rape and half the heroes hoped to find.

In any event it then turned out, when she gave me his, I mean Freud’s, biography to read during that, as I said, self-analytic, euphoric, and above all infantile wallowing that was the first splendid year of our relationship — it then turned out that Freud himself, though he never publicly admitted it, had become fascinated by the repetition in his life of the number 62 — on a coathanger, on a hotel key — so that he began to believe he must die at that age. And sitting slightly right of centre in the back seat of this coach, having successfully kept my head down and options open throughout the frenetic discussion when everybody was trying to get the bedfellow they wanted, or perhaps trying not to get the bedfellow they didn’t want, or alternatively insisting that they have a private room so that they could then introduce into it, should the occasion arise, the bedfellow of their choice, I’m surprised when the wide-eyed girl in front suddenly turns to ask all of us behind to guess what our seat numbers are without turning to look at the plastic tags on the headrests, to guess the number and to scribble it down on a piece of paper. And while everybody else is wildly out, I guess, with a sudden perception of its obviousness, 45, which is my age of course, as 045, I see, when I write the number down on the back of this morning’s café receipt, is the phone code for Verona, where she lived until so recently. Four five. I remember Freud, and it occurs to me, as these things unfortunately will, that perhaps I am going to die this year or even this week, for tomorrow will be the fourth of the fifth. Though Freud did not die at sixty-two.

How did you guess? the girl asks, and she is doing that business of cocking her face to one side again, bouncing slightly on her knees, rocking, so that her head bobs up and down above the back of her seat.

I just felt the number 45 come to my mind, I explain. Then not wanting, from sheer vanity, to say it was my age, nor to appear ridiculous by speaking of intimations of mortality, I surprise myself by adding and at the same time in a way discovering: Perhaps it’s because I live at number 45, Via Porta Ticinese. From the corner of my eye I can see Georg smiling wryly, and naturally he thinks I looked at the number tag some while ago and am lying now, and rather pathetically in order to get the girl’s attention, whereas in fact I am telling her the truth to get her attention. For I did have this intuition, there’s a part of me is genuinely alarmed. I do live at 45 Via Porta Ticinese and no longer at number 7 Via delle Rose as for so many years. The number 45, I tell myself, did simply come to you, invaded your mind, uninvited. That’s frightening. Which then reminds me — but I wonder if there is anything now that will not remind me — that all in all this is not so unlike the way I drew her attention when first we met. I mean, I told her, as now, the truth about something which wasn’t really explicable, an intuition that invited ridicule, but that proved to be an important discovery for me. I said — and in the sudden awkwardness and intimacy that can come with the closing of lift doors I was trying to explain my lack of enthusiasm for a job that I had had for years but to which she had only just been appointed and was excited about — I said I somehow felt that the University and indeed the whole city of Milan had been a kind of trap for me, a kind of spell, and that what’s more I had the feeling, insistently, that there was another place where I was meant to be, or perhaps a whole other life I was meant to be leading, a different destiny.

I remember laughing, embarrassed, as the lift doors opened again on another floor, and it’s easy to imagine, looking back these four and more years, that this embarrassment, this sense of having said a puzzling and disconcerting thing that I hadn’t meant to say, made me attractive, in the way vulnerability is attractive, if only because it invites the exercise of power.

But what makes this moment here now in this speeding coach with this pretty girl so different from that moment then in the lift four-and-a-half years ago, is that I was unconscious of it then. It was a delicate and unconscious seduction then, without any studied effects, just two people with no idea at all of the adventure they were about to embark on, an immensely precious moment precisely because so dense with consequence and so blind (so that if the encounter were depicted on some vase of ancient Athens or of Crete, there would be all sorts of mythical animals round about, scaly, hoofed and horned, and a seer looking on who foresees everything, who knows everything that must happen, but who also knows he must not speak and will not be understood if he does, since foresight, and indeed wisdom in general, can never be passed on, only memories, only the interminable schadenfreude of narrative). And I shall never be able to do that again, I tell myself here in the coach. Never again such a blind seduction, such a blithe leaping into the dark, as if doing no more than stepping out of one’s own front door. For everything is conscious now, everything is mapped and charted. And this is something she never understood, I don’t think, my ingenuousness, I mean, in the lift that day, my forty-year-old boyishness, to the extent that when we first made love, and this was in the flat in Via Mazza with her daughter out at the nursery and Greta, the friend who was sharing the place, speaking interminably on the telephone which she would take out on the balcony for privacy, not realizing that her inane conversations were all the more audible through the open bedroom window — when we had finished making love she laughed saying how quickly we had ended up in bed together, and this was partly, she said, partly, because I had been so brazen, saying I was unhappy with my marriage like that no more than two or three sentences into our first conversation. And in the lift of all places.

I genuinely had not appreciated that implication in what I had said, though now she mentioned it I realized that it had indeed been there, and had been meant, for I couldn’t at the time have been more unhappy, and when I spoke to her like that, complaining about what I saw as a boring job, what I had really been doing was complaining about the wife who, playing on my own weakness, my sense of ‘responsibility’, kept me in that job, A different destiny! she laughed, A spell! You’re so romantic!

But an hour or so later, when I was in the kitchen washing dishes I hadn’t even eaten off in response to an embarrassing need I always feel to offer practical help and lend a hand and show that I am a good modern man, even when betraying my wife, she was suddenly at my ear whispering, Turn around, and when I did so it was to find a meat-knife at my throat. She burst out laughing, the steel was actually against my skin, then she kissed me with very deliberate passion, which thrilled and frightened, precisely because so deliberate, so knowing, and, handing me the knife, she said, Alors, use it! Cut yourself free! It takes more than just a kiss to break a spell, and again she burst out laughing in that very foreign very French laugh that I need only walk to the front of the coach to hear again, since she laughs unceasingly. That French laugh. She is all lightness and laughter. Only it would not quite be the same. Her voice has never sounded the same since the day I ceased to believe in its complicity.

But now Georg, tearing up the metro ticket he wrote his guess on, is saying that he lives at number 63 Viale Lotto, that his birthday is on the nineteenth of the eleventh, and that his car registration number is Ml 807 653, but that none of this would even begin to lead him to deduce, or no? that he is sitting in seat number 47.

Georg is very droll and my girl and the other girls laugh at this and they begin to talk about numerical consequences and about tarot. The girl to my right with the swollen lips knows how to read cards. She will read Georg’s cards, she says, if he wants. He raises and arches a very blond eyebrow, poses an expression of wry concern. The girls laugh again. Georg is deadpan. The last thing I need to hear is that I’m going to meet a handsome stranger, he says. The girls giggle. Until, with a ridiculous awareness of competition, of being two men among so many girls, of a bait that could only make a complete fool of me were I to rise to it, as I did rise to it so hopelessly and helplessly once before, I decide to seek refuge in my book. Read, I tell myself. I turn to my book again. Read. Do not rise to the bait, I tell myself. Do not engage in this conversation. Stop thinking of the number 45.

Determinedly, I turn the novel over in my hands, inspecting its extravagant cover, the extravagant endorsements of names one presumes are famous. And I find myself asking, Why did your daughter give you this book? Why did she do that? Presumably in the hope that her father would share her enthusiasm for this fantastical tale of five poor young ethnically mixed East End urchins who start a rock band to collect money for the Third World and are constantly cheated and done down by the forces of capitalism and in particular because the lead singer is black and lesbian and has magical powers. Your daughter must have imagined, I tell myself, trying to ignore a story from the girl with her leg in the aisle about a woman in Naples who repeatedly dreamt the number of the hotel room she died in on the day of the great mezzogiorno earthquake, your daughter must have hoped, expected, that you would share her enthusiasm for this book. So you should be more patient, I tell myself, more tolerant. If only out of fairness to your daughter. You should try to relax and enjoy this book, which was certainly written with the best of intentions. Now they are talking about someone who dreamt the date of his child’s murder. I find my place some thirty pages in. But no sooner have I read a paragraph of this, as I said, extravagantly praised book by a fashionable woman writer, no sooner have I begun to tackle a flashback to lesbian incest between the lead singer and her twin sister, later tragically killed in a racist arson attack on a Brixton discotheque, than I remember how fascinated I was when she told me all the details of her lesbian affair with an Islamic girl who had been her housemaid and who the monstrous (but wealthy) husband had slapped round the face when he discovered them in bed. Why didn’t he slap her? I wonder now. Until suddenly it occurs to me — and at last this is a new thought, the first for many days if I am not mistaken, and for that reason alone electrifying — it occurs to me, as the narrator returns from the flashback to resume interracial love-making with the ruthless record producer’s neglected wife, that given this tendency on her part (and now the girl on Georg’s left is talking about a pilot whose income tax code, or at least alternate letters and digits, coincided with the flight number of the plane he crashed), given this tendency, lesbian I mean, on her part, she may one day attempt to seduce my daughter, who sometimes baby-sits for her daughter. Such a thing is perfectly plausible, I tell myself. Your daughter is an attractive girl. She often goes to her flat now she has moved to Milan. To baby-sit. Why shouldn’t she try to seduce her? After all, she is eighteen as of tomorrow. And I have to ask myself, is this perhaps what the gift of this literary eulogy to lesbianism is foreshadowing, or even post-dating? Could it be that your daughter is already having an affair with your ex-mistress?

Sitting slightly off-centre in the back of this coach hammering due north towards the imagined focal point of a continent whose precise borders have never been clear to me, and in the midst of this chatter of anecdotes about coincidences and intuitions notoriously catastrophic, I suddenly find myself bound to consider as lucidly as ever I can this new and increasingly shocking thought, this hypothetical lesbian relationship between my ex-lover and my daughter, a relationship, I reflect now, which would in no way be a crime under the law as it stands, as so many of the most terrible things we do to each other, I tell myself, are not even misdemeanours, in legal terms, are they? since we are all free agents, so called, I tell myself, except where property and money and the most basic aspects of physical well-being are concerned. Yes, I try to consider such a relationship — her and my daughter — in its practical, erotic, social and spiritual aspects, with all the awful and fascinating images such an eventuality conjures up. And I’m appalled. Partly by the idea itself, but mostly by the thought that I have had this idea. Why do you have ideas like this, I demand of myself? I’m furious. Though at the same time I can’t help wondering at the astonishing fact that after eighteen miserable months I am still able to formulate a new thought, however unsavoury, however unwanted, about a situation whose exotic and squalid permutations I imagined I had already shuffled and reshuffled in every possible self-destructive combination.

Such, in any event, is my state of mind when Vikram Griffiths appears at the back of the coach together with his dog, snuffling and wagging, to say in a low but excited voice, squatting down, to myself and to Georg, and hence inevitably to the girl between us, that he is convinced there is a spy amongst us, a turncoat, a scab, someone who, in return for guarantees that they won’t lose their position, is keeping the University informed as to our every move and who, when we arrive in Strasbourg, will be behind the scenes putting the University’s case to the very important people we have arranged to meet and above all taking notes of what we say so that the University will then be in a better position to prepare a rebuttal. And the thing to do, Vikram Griffiths says in his low, deep voice that everybody can hear, all the time playing with the ears of this nondescript mongrel dog, the thing to do if we manage to find out who this spy is, would be to throw them off the coach immediately and leave them to walk back home.

Turning to look out of the window, still with my daughter’s possible lesbian seduction in mind, I see the drizzle is thinly persistent as we leave the dull ribbon development north of the city for the duller reafforestation of the first hills that climb towards Switzerland, a country which despite its centrality and its admirable example of the possibility of federal coexistence between different ethnic groupings is ironically not part of that Europe to which we are appealing. Through spattered perspex I see the drizzle, the sharply rising hills, the fleeting proliferation of all those details one so pointlessly takes in each moment one travels, only to expel them a moment later, like the air we breathe, the people we speak to on the street, and I must say, looking at that glum rain, the dark gesturing of those slopes, that the idea of walking back home is not unattractive, not unattractive at all, though from further up in the mountains would be better. Yes, walking back, I reflect, as the crow flies, under rain, through wet grass, alone, sovereign, preferably with streams to wade, rocks to scale, is not an unattractive prospect. I can imagine bruising my knee and my cheeks scoured by strong winds, a half-eaten apple in my pocket, and there would be mud, nightfall and dawn, ditches and crusts. How adolescent and attractive that is! But I say this of course because I’m already remembering how I once thought, indeed how I once wrote, in a letter to her, though whether it was one of those I sent or one of those I destroyed or one of those I neither sent nor destroyed, I cannot recall — how love (I meant our love) might be likened to some exotic holiday location where you arrive by plane with a pocket full of credit cards and an immense and criminally complacent smile on your face, only to find when the statutory fun is over that there is no flight back, you have to walk back home. And somehow you have lost everything, your ticket, your Eurocard, even, worst of all, your carta d’identitd. You have to walk back, no planes now, alone and barefoot, over the wildest terrain, crossing angry seas on makeshift rafts, without any sense of direction, without even looking forward particularly to the arrival, without even knowing perhaps what home would look like when and if you got there, for somehow you have no memory of what it might feel like to say to yourself, Now I am at home, now I am back. Until, caught deep in the forest, or exposed on a rocky hillside under a twittering of unseen birds, the obvious finally occurs to you: you’re not even on the same planet. That plane- you boarded flew you to a different world. The love plane. Thus my scribblings in a letter to her, remembered now on the swaying coach. It was a miracle of science, I wrote. I don’t know whether I sent the thing or not. As for walking home, you might as well set out for Andromeda on foot.

A spy! Vikram Griffiths repeats, clearing his gravelly throat.

But Georg, to my left, is wry. Georg has an immense capacity to be composed and to be wry, about which much, very much could be said. On the other hand, who would want to take this quality away from him? Who would not envy him? To Vikram’s Welsh-English, Georg replies in German-Italian. How does Vikram know there is a spy? he asks. Has he found a cigarette packet with a radio transmitter inside? A bug taped under the collar of his dog? Or a false moustache? Has some top-secret document gone missing?

But at this point both Colin and Dimitra come down the aisle to join us, for with the kind of postures Vikram has been assuming, bending down, loudly whispering, scratching in his sideburns, adjusting his cheaply framed glasses always askew on a somehow exotic stubbornness, a nervous intellectual charm, set off and thus enhanced by this shaggy, nondescript outdoors sort of dog he has, and smells of — with all this posturing it is perfectly obvious that the trip’s first serious confabulation has begun, the first council of war. So now there are three people plus the animal crowded into the aisle where it meets the big back seat and of course the girl on the seat in front of me turns round again, kneeling, and she smiles, and noticing her Vikram Griffiths ruffles her jet-dark hair with great familiarity, much as he does with his dog, and calls her Sneaky and asks her how she’s doin', without a 'g', because it ought to be said in Vikram’s defence that he knows the names of all the students, whereas I can never remember any of them, and if he can’t remember their names, he gives them nicknames like Sneaky, or Sly, or Boris, so it’s as if he knew their names, and understandably this makes him popular, the way clowns are popular, and renowned for finishing sadly and badly.

I’m all right, thank you, Dottor Griffiths, the girl says, in English. Her strong chin dimples in embarrassment when she speaks, but with his fingers scratching at the back of his neck, Vikram has already turned away. He is saying excitedly: Dimitra, Dimitra, come here then, you tell them.

Dimitra is a Greek woman. She begins to explain. In her role of presidente of our union it was obviously her task to inform the head of the language faculty that we had voted to abstain from our duties for a period of three days in order to take our case to Europe. Right?

Dimitra has this manner of interrupting herself to demand consent, as if always ready to hear an unvoiced chorus of bloody-minded rejection. Her most characteristic gesture in our long, tedious and above all contentious meetings is to offer her resignation so that she can then be begged to withdraw it, arid she invariably is begged to withdraw it, not because any of us loves her or wants her to stay or even remotely likes her, but because none of us is sufficiently dedicated to the notions of justice and solidarity we all talk about to take upon ourselves the onerous job of president, excepting of course Vikram Griffiths, who cannot be president, because too conflictual and too crazy, but who nevertheless, despite holding no official position in the union at all, is effectively our leader anyway. Or at least, the only person who does anything.

Right? Dimitra demands.

Georg quickly agrees that of course Dimitra had to go and see Professor Ermani.

It was my job, she adds, never satisfied with mere consent. I had to go and see him. Otherwise we might have put ourselves in a position of illegality

Quite, Vikram says, rubbing his sideburns. God save us from illegality. And having been to prison twice and proud of it, he winks, which Dimitra chooses not to notice.

So, while waiting for Professor Ermani, she says, to finish a phone-call in his office, she, Dimitra, noticed a memorandum on his desk on which she managed to read, albeit upside down and in her second language, the results of the vote taken only the previous day and only after a long and fraught debate (in which Dimitra herself had actually opposed Griffiths” plan, or at least its timing, had said that it would be provocative and dangerous and all in all sheer folly to go to Europe during term-time). Crucially, she had been able to see on Professor Ermani’s memorandum that the names of those who had voted for and against were clearly indicated.

Which can only mean, Vikram Griffiths butts in, that some shit at the meeting went straight to Gauleiter Ermani afterwards to report. There is clearly a traitor among us, a spy.

Who is it? He covers both nostrils with thumb and forefinger and sucks hard to clear his sinuses.

Who was at the meeting? Colin asks in what is a Brummie Italian now, and he gives me a little wink of hello from above a facile moustache, too neatly trimmed, because Colin is “the person with whom I occasionally indulge in tottie-talk, or pork-talk as he calls it, a supremely blokish recounting of our various amorous adventures.

Everybody was at the meeting, Dimitra says, and even anybody who wasn’t could have found out who voted for what, within a name or two, from the others.

The point is, Vikram Griffiths announces — and it’s not hard to imagine, I tell myself, that he is actually quite happy to be away from the difficult separation proceedings with his second wife, the acrimonious child-custody battle with his first, and above all happy, I reflect, to find himself involved in a drama — our struggle with the University of Milan — where he is inconfutably on the side of justice and morality, since in the end this is what all of us long for, is it not, to be engaged in a drama where we know what we want and what we’re doing, and are quite sure we are in the right and can feel a strong sense of purpose and identity and self-esteem and heroism even. How else explain, I ask myself, all the religious crusades and wars pursued up to and far beyond the point of madness, the environmental movements and concern for animal welfare, not to mention all the novels about the same? How else explain this enthusiasm for Europe? — The point is, Vikram says, that from now on we will have to behave as if they knew everything we are doing and saying. And well have to find out who it is. He grins determinedly, digging his fingers into his dog’s fur: It’s going to be a witch hunt.

But the moment he says the word ‘witch’ I’m thinking of her again. Yes, here on the big back seat of this big ugly modern coach crossing Europe, in this controlled environment, so called, of ducts and vents and conditioned air, this triumph of modern mechanics, I’m thinking of her again, as if a great divide had slid down between myself and the others, some invisible screen with enormous and surely marketable capacities for insulation, or as in a dream where one is shouting screaming clawing unheard unseen only inches from people behaving politely at mundane cocktail parties.

But what do I think of when I think of her like this, suddenly isolated, shut away against my will, or in some curious perversion of the will, in this claustrophobic space, this living tomb I am inexplicably digging for myself? What do I think of? What does it really mean, I ask myself in sudden angry rebellion, to say that you me thinking of her? What is this relation between the enigma that is yourself, this voice of yours, and the enigma that is her, her body, her laugh, the area she occupies in space? Why don’t you turn your mind inward now, I suddenly decide, to resolve this once and for all, to confront, once and for all, these moments of sudden and tremendous alienation, so that you can then clear your thoughts and turn them freely to the pressing questions of your colleagues and your job and your future and your ability to maintain in the manner to which they are accustomed the family you have left, not to mention the wider issues of Italy and of Europe and of how you should behave on this trip in this coach where you are going to support a cause that not only do you not believe in but which you do not even remotely care about, since the only thing you care about, I tell myself, quite ruthlessly now, however much you might like to care about other things, as for example the new furniture you must choose for your flat, and the small car you would like to buy, and your daughter, yes, your daughter, the only thing you care about, I tell myself, is her, or rather what happened to you with her.

And what did happen? Do I even know? Perhaps not. Definitely not. Perhaps I shall never know what happened to me with her. Only I know that of all people I have known she was the one I was happiest with, the person I most idealized, the person I was prepared at the last to leave my wife and daughter for, and simultaneously; yes, exactly simultaneously, and both lines of thought are at once attached to and separate from a thousand corroborative details (words images songs smells moments situations), I am thinking that she is the person who most betrayed me, who most completely and so carelessly destroyed me, the person who most built me up and then casually blew me away, blew me to smithereens, made a nothing of me. Because if a man, I reflect, is already next to nothing when he can’t take his work seriously and when people tell him, albeit kindly (and one is thinking here of old friends and family), that he has failed in his vocation, which was to have been, my vocation, but here one has to laugh, to make some sort of contribution to classical studies, so called, and above all, or so I once wrote on a piece of paper for others more important than myself who might have found a research position for me, to reconstruct, so far as such things can be reconstructed, the psychology of the ancients, to savour their minds and the way they lived inside the natural world, at home in it in a way we never can be, the patterned constellations over their heads throbbing with deities, the deep wells they drew their water from encircled by serpents, and not a single holy text (I’m thinking of pre-Orphic times) or social manifesto, or sniff of political correctness to slip a credit card between themselves and the sacred — if, as I was saying (and how relieved I am when I can digress a moment, when my mind, however briefly, finds some other channel to flood) — if a man is nothing when he can no longer follow even this most tenuous of vocations, classical scholarship, or some similar respectable spin-off, as for example teaching, or translating, or even writing a decent text-book, any sort of respectable and remunerative occupation that might have grown out of that presumptuous vocation, then he is doubly nothing when all at once at forty-three he finds himself leaving his wife and children, he finds himself without his family, so deeply betraying and betrayed that he himself cannot help, cannot help, I tell myself, committing the ultimate betrayal of all, which is not falling into somebody else’s bed (how remarkable that one should ever have imagined such a thing), but abandonment, abandonment. And certainly even if one never could and indeed one never would say that this is her fault any more than mine, or even see much point frankly now in attributing blame to anyone, still it is inescapably true that she had to do with it, with what has happened to me, she still has to do with it, she still holds me under her spell, she is or was and I don’t really know what I’m saying now or what I might mean by this, but it seems to me she is or was or might still be my access to the sacred, the irreducible element in my long negotiation with the other, by which perhaps I mean death, or nature, some part of life’s interminable equation that cannot come out until this harping voice, which is my mind, or part of it, is stilled forever. So that when I think of her, as I was trying to say, it is a witch I think of, a witch I cannot stop thinking of. A witch I am endlessly hunting. And at that very moment Colin leans forward and says her name.

It could be her, he says in his execrable Brummie Italian that makes the students smile. His moustache is the kind airmen used to wear. It could be her, the spy. She’s after that scholarship business they’re giving away, in’t she? He switches to English. And old man Ermani’s something to do with that. She’s in with Ermani.

There. He said her name. Because this is the kind of person Colin is, I reflect, the kind of person who immediately names names of colleagues, speculating without a moment’s hesitation on their betrayal, and also of course he is the person I sometimes spend whole evenings with, talking tottie over glasses of beer and billiards, talking nipple-hue and pubic-definition over cigarettes burning in ashtrays, because one of the things that has come out of all this, this debacle, this retreat from Moscow, is that! have no self-respect. You have no self-respect, I tell myself, the way you talk about sex and women now, with Colin, And when I think of who I was, what I was, at thirty, at thirty-five, and of the airs I put on, discussing matters social, political and moral in appropriate tones of earnestness and concern, and then of what under those airs was really in my mind, that groping after something darker, that strange waiting as if for life to begin, or end, or begin to end, in an explosion of denial of all one imagined one had been, if I think of that then I have to laugh, a long and mirthless laugh, and in the billiard hall with Colin we discuss our most recent conquests and what we have done with them, and we refer to them by some easily distinguishable characteristic, as for example where they live or what they do or what they’re like, so that they might be called Bologna-tottie, for example, or Opera-tottie, or in one case Psycho-tottie or even Armpit-tottie, because it is forbidden to mention their names, since this would suggest involvement and respect, which are taboo for those of us who have decided that boorishness is our only hope, that sex is purely physiological, with the result that the only thing I cannot, I must not, I do not, and I will not tell Colin, is how everything I do with them, with these women I find, or who find me, from time to time — and particularly most recently with one I call Opera-tottie — how everything I do with them is an attempt to make them repeat what I did with her and she with me those halcyon days of three years ago, and I’m talking of course about the fourth floor of the Hotel Racine in Rheims where we did everything and said we would love each other forever. Yes, yes, we went that far, and the curious thing was how we both really meant it and knew it meant nothing. All this must be taboo between Colin and myself, indeed is the difference between Colin and myself, is what is left of my self-respect.

At least we could ask her straight up, Colin says determinedly. I mean, ask her if she told him anything.

Vikram Griffiths has his fingers behind his neck, rubbing up and down intently. Dimitra turns to look up the aisle to check that she is still in her place, and I’m struck by how completely unpleasant I find Dimitra, unpleasant in her busy busyness, the denim jeans, denim jacket, and in a sort of righteous truculence that glowers even under the brightest Greek smile and lipstick. What would it be like to fuck Dimitra? Daffy-dog has his wet nose in her crotch now. And why do you always ask yourself this question even of a woman you find so unpleasant? As if you were under orders somehow. As if in this controlled environment you had no control at all.

Then with that extraordinary smoothness he has, Georg says, lightly, that all this is distasteful and that it is a mistake to start naming names. What sort of example are we setting for the students who have come to support us and who want to see us united and helping each other, and showing group spirit, not fighting amongst ourselves? If there’s a spy, then let him or her be, there’s only so much harm they can do. Isn’t there? We have nothing to hide.

Georg is right, or at least extremely persuasive, and above all pacato, as the Italians would add, which is as much as to say even and reasonable and calm, such admirable qualities. As she too was pacata, I remember, when saying almost the same thing to me: what did it or could it matter if there had been a betrayal, so long as we were so happy together? What difference did it make, what harm could it do? she demanded. Why should she tell me who it was? Why should I care to know the name? So that it wasn’t so much the fact that she confessed, quite unnecessarily, what had happened that bewildered me, as that she didn’t see it as a confession, she didn’t perceive it as a problem. She was principally mine, she said, as I well knew, it was only — and really she was just trying to explain, not to apologize — only that there had been all those times, hadn’t there, when she hadn’t been able to see me because I was married and had a child and had insisted for so long on keeping up appearances so that inevitably …

She said these words to me in French, but I recall them now, and have recalled them if once a thousand times, in English, suggesting how quickly one makes things one’s own, how everything that is said to you is as much your hearing of it as their saying. For indeed everything she said to me she said in French, or Italian, and ninety per cent of it I remember in English (though I believe it is what she said that I remember).

But what galls me now is that perhaps she was right about this. Perhaps she was right and had I behaved differently, one way or the other, I could at least have had something, or perhaps everything, I wanted, if only I had known or decided what that was (unless it was the not knowing that I wanted, the delirium of the impossible decision?). Yes, had I left home immediately our affair began, I could surely have had her, and had I let things ride a bit more and not been so intense and jealous, then I could still perhaps be married, even happily married, or at least pleasantly, and still be seeing my mistress too, and fucking her and telling her I loved her and cared for nobody else, and perhaps occasionally fucking others too just for good measure and generally living a life of perfectly manageable hypocrisy to the benefit of everyone, and one thinks particularly here of my eighteen-year-old daughter whose coming-of-age party will be held tomorrow in my no doubt much censured absence.

She said my terrible problem was my mulish Anglo-Saxon Protestant absolutism, extremism, so mulishly absolute and so extreme that I was atheist without my atheism bringing me the slightest of benefits, so absolute and extreme that I attached such ludicrous pluses and minuses to words like sincerity and hypocrisy, not understanding that those two ideas were never truly incarnate but in constant negotiation a fusion you could never separate out, and if only I would loosen up and become more European and appreciate that while it was important, supremely important, to have values and ideals, it was a halfwit’s mistake to insist anybody live by them — as I myself hadn’t lived by them, had I? — then everything would be okay. Everything was okay, she said. Because nothing had really happened. Had it? She laughed and said not to worry, everything was okay, nothing had really happened, and I hit her, perhaps to show that something had happened, I hit her, hard, and that was the beginning of the end for me. The moment I hit her, I tell myself sitting here slightly right of centre on the long back seat of this coach, was the beginning of the end for me. Something shifted, something had happened. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Colin were not right that she is the spy, and I say this not because it would suit her personal interests, which of course it would in a way, but because she probably would not even bring the whole thing to consciousness unless someone challenged her about it, the way I challenged her earlier that fateful day, though only very casually, just wishing to be reassured, about the receipt from a café in Várese being between the pages of the book she had lent me, and even then, even when she brought it to consciousness, she wouldn’t really feel it was wrong talking to Ermani, as she never really felt it was wrong fucking Georg. She wouldn’t feel it was wrong telling him which lectors were in favour of what and which against, since Ermani is friendly to hex and went to school with her ex-husband and is helping her with her Euro-scholarship application, her essay on a constitution for the whole of Europe which should win her a year’s paid research, so called, in Brussels. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. After all, we’re talking about someone who throughout a long and, if it was nothing else, torrid adultery not only continued to go regularly to Sunday morning mass, but even to help at church functions and encourage her young daughter to participate in every way and to take her first communion in a beautiful lace-trimmed dress that she made herself and frequently showed me and discussed the details of, the lace, the trim mings. We laughed together, I remember, thinking how similar those trimmings were to the laciness of her underwear. She laughed her French laugh. So no, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she were the spy. But clearly Georg, who of course lives in Várese (and who, she says, though she never actually told me the name, insisted so much that what could she do? phoning her every day like that and even sending her flowers), Georg is right that it would be a mistake to suggest to the students that we are divided, though of course he is saying this in front of the girls in the back and next-but-back seats and in rebuke, though pacato, of Vikram and Colin and Dimitirá, all seething, you can see, for drama and vendetta, all feeling personally injured by what has happened, the presence of this spy, the evidence of this betrayal, and thus in many ways not unlike myself. You are not unlike your colleagues, I tell myself, however much you may choose to despise them. What did she mean, what could she do? How could she imagine you wouldn’t feel betrayed?

I say: Wouldn’t it be more logical for me to be the spy? Shouldn’t you perhaps be throwing me out of the coach?

The girl Vikram called Sneaky immediately smiles intensely at me, and just as her lips part and I think, Now she is going to speak to me, I see that she is not smiling at what I said at all, but mouthing the words of a song which has begun to come over the coach stereo in a low throb. It’s the song has made her smile at me, one of those songs one hears everywhere and pays absolutely no attention to, so that you only recognize the refrain as a kind of distracting bleep in the background noise. And the refrain is Sei un mito, sei un mito — You’re a myth, you’re a myth — meaning no more in Italian than ‘something wonderful’ on the lines one supposes of ’fabulous’ in English, which I always take as meaning ‘too good to be true’. Sei un mito. She mouths and smiles at me.

It would be much more logical for me to be the spy, I insist.

Why? Colin is chewing gum.

I’ve always thought our demands were over the top, you know that, and then I’ve never believed in Europe anyway. It’s a myth.

I say it with a coy smile on my face.

Vikram Griffiths laughs and the girl next to Sneaky, who can only be described as prettily made-up and entirely uninteresting, very belligerently asks why, why is Europe a myth, on the contrary a united Europe is our only hope for the future. Unity in Europe is our only hope for keeping the fascist nationalists out long-term, she says. Dimitra agrees. You have no sense of history, she tells me, still caressing the dog’s snout in her crotch. So I ask, jokingly, if others present are aware what the divorce rate is in marriages between people from different European countries, and when of course they don’t know, as why on earth should they, of what use are statistics to any of us? I tell them fifty per cent higher than an average of the average in ‘each of the countries concerned. Fifty per cent.

Vikram is looking at me with curious red eyes as if at some oddity he has just remembered never having properly explained to himself — my eager participation in this trip perhaps. He clears his throat and grins: You’re talking about yourself, Jerry boyo.

And about you, I tell him.

Twice fuckin’ over, Vikram laughs.

And me, Georg admits happily.

So that in the space of a moment three men in early middle age have managed to tell a number of twenty-year-old girls that they are divorced and ergo available, though in Georg’s case this is something of a simplification. Rather than mentioning her own separation, Dimitra has got up to return to her seat. You are rather beginning to like Vikram Griffiths, I tell myself. Quite unexpectedly, you are beginning to like him.

Then Colin brags that he doesn’t know why we bothered getting hitched at all. He never has. He wriggles his moustache. Know the word ‘hitched’, love? he asks, turning to the girl with the long legs and quality jeans. Know it or not? Where is your English in the end? Don’t you girls study English? What’s going to happen to you at the exam, I don’t know.

This is Colin’s way

Let me teach you my favourite words, he insists. The girls giggle. Sneaky is still mouthing Sei un mito, and still, quite ingenuously, she smiles at me, bouncing on her seat, and her smiling again makes me ask, What are you going to do about such a young woman who will keep smiling at you like this from great brown eyes (a sort of bright vulnerability suggests contact lenses), who will keep bouncing on her chair and resting her long neck and strong chin on the crinkly white headrest cover — jet-black hair just trembled by the air from her ventilator — and then letting her head cock slowly to one side while the bright eyes hold yours. How am I to behave?

Cuddle, Colin says ominously Anybody know what ‘cuddle’ means?

He hams his Brummie accent, I tell myself, the way so many ex-pats ham their lost identity. The moustache is a pose. Yes, he hams this unpredictable matey belligerence, this curiously Midlands attitude. Colin is home away from home, I reflect, even if not the home you ever really liked.

‘Cuddle’ is p’rhaps my most favouritest word, Colin says. He overdoes it, pouting, twisting his chin from side to side in his collar. You know what ‘cuddle’ means, girls?

The girls, the two in front of me, the two each side of me and the one in front of Georg, all say no, they don’t know. What is the word again, please? Thus the girl with the swollen lips.

‘Cuddle!’

They shake their young heads.

I'll show you then, Colin says in his Brummie swagger, funny and frightening, and, grabbing the girl Vikram called Sneaky, who is closest, he pulls her to his chest. Then exactly as he makes that gesture, that coercive embrace, I feel a pang of jealousy, I feel that somehow this girl (who has been exchanging smiles) belongs to me, than which nothing could be further from the truth, of course, and sitting here slightly off-centre on the big back seat of this racing coach with the stocky Vikram Griffiths up against my knees winking his comedy-hall wink again, and gorgeous Georg laughing his cultured German laugh, and then Vikram shouting (now Dimitra’s gone), Ask ‘em if they know what ‘shag’ means, Colin boyo, give ‘em the direct method on that one! I wonder, Why, why this pang of real jealousy for a girl you met only half-an-hour ago, and young enough to be your daughter? Why are my emotions so inappropriate? I ask myself. Because it’s propriety that we’re talking about in the end. I must remember the word propriety. Why am I reading the slightest signs of complicity as if they were the hallmarks of a fairy tale in the making? What is this immense promise I am always imagining in every woman I meet, as if the girl and I were already in league in a refined and tender and emotionally sensitive way against the Colins and Vikrams and Georgs of this world, the boors the libertines the rakes. And I am reminded, instantly, and with an almost overwhelming sense of derision and loss of faith, of how we used to lie in her sheets Friday evenings feeling deeply in love and infinitely superior to those who just screwed around, and the irony must surely be that with all that happened afterwards, the complicity betrayed and the determination to beat her betrayal out of her, or out of me, yes, out of me perhaps, the irony must be, I tell myself, that I still feel superior, and my superiority lies in the violence of my reaction, which is ugly, in the depth of this obsession, which is crippling and exhausting. Yes, your superiority, I tell myself, if such it is, lies in the fact that all the women you’ve seen since, you’ve seen not for their own sakes but only in order to repeat every gesture and caress you enjoyed with her, which is unspeakably ugly. Your superiority actually lies in your self-derision, your rancour, your inability to stomach yourself, which is ugly and unhealthy So that in my superiority, if that is what it is, I am uglier and unhealthier still than Colin, who is now saying that his next favourite word is ‘squeeze’. ‘Sque-ee-eeze’, he repeats, drawing it out quite obscenely, rolling stale chewing-gum along his lips as he does so. Do they know what ‘squeeze’ means? But before they can say no and hence give him his chance to demonstrate I ask the young girl Sneaky what her real name is and she smiles. Nicoletta.

I’m Jerry, I tell her. Then at my prompting everybody on the back two rows of this coach announces their names, and so we have Margherita on Georg’s left by the window, and Bruna the heavily powdered girl between myself and Georg, and Veronica, tiny, generous lips, to my right, and in front, going from right to left, Maura, belligerent, politicized, and Nicoletta, whose friends call her Niki, and the other side of the corridor Monica of the long legs in quality jeans, and Graziano, a tall lean eager boy with acne and a copy of the communist, ex-communist, newspaper, Unitd.

‘Squeeze’, Colin repeats, who is nothing if he is not stubborn. Know it or not? Again he shows his chewing gum. Come on, ‘squ-ee-ee-zah!

Georg leans forward, Means stringere, he explains.

Georges accent is German, very correct, very proper, and this fits somehow with the way he holds himself, with the straightness of the back of the neck, which makes the face tilt down a little, a little pedantically, but at the same time cool, relaxed. A man ageing with dignity, I tell myself, almost with nobility. A man who sent heaps of flowers and phoned so often that what could she do?

‘Squeeze’ means stringere, if applied to people embracing, or spremere, if applied to fruit. He smiles, deprecating, cool, like the pro who has just defused a bomb too primitive for him to claim- glory. The girls giggle. Because Colin is mouthing, I can think of somethin’ else we could spremere.

Georg. She was fascinated by his foreignness perhaps? Almost hourly he phoned, she said. She fell in love with that Germanic authority, that smooth Teutonic wisdom, the charmingly formal gestures, the simple assiduousness, the flowers delivered by a reputable company. I’m just about to plunge into my blind alley again, my splendid isolation, when Vikram Griffiths says, Hey up, Dafydd, what’s this?

The coach is pulling off the road.

CHAPTER FOUR

In the service station I quoted Thucydides, and this is something, sitting once again on the coach, but in the third seat from the back now on the right-hand side, and so in front of Nicoletta and Maura, because Colin has stolen my place and is at this very moment (I can hear his nasal voice) proceeding with his lexicon of favourite words, cuddle squeeze rub neck (verb form) smooch pet, etc., this is something I can’t forgive myself.

The actual words I quoted, I remember now, sitting beside the somewhat morose Doris Rohr, whose only exchange with me so far has been to express her concern that we, and in particular Vikram, are asking too much of the University, that perhaps we should have accepted a cut in salary in return for certain guarantees, for her terror is, she says, that we will now all lose our jobs precisely because of this asking too much and that she as a result will be left unemployed and unemployable at forty-three (so says this well-married woman who arrives at the University in one of two fur coats and whose lipstick, make-up and perfume seem to conspire to express the complacency of wealth, rather than the lure of sex) — the actual words I quoted, dredging them up from my love affair with the classics of twenty and more years ago — and it was her genius to realize that in reviving that love affair she was reviving my youth, she was making me feel strong and enthusiastic again, to the point that I actually began to apply for jobs and to read and think again, and even my wife cheered up at the sight of me cheering up and began to encourage me and, encouraging me, became attractive again, so that a wonderful and wonderfully inebriating equivocation developed and continued for nigh on two years, an equivocation which would only make the taste of humiliation and betrayal and abandonment all the bitterer when finally the truth came out of course, but that’s as maybe — yes, the words I quoted, as I was saying, were as follows: We believe, out of tradition so far as the gods are concerned, and from experience when it comes to men, that as a dictate of nature every being always exercises all the power he has at his disposal, and the occasion for my quoting this portentous and unhappy credo was partly brought about by a decision taken last night by the German Bundesbank and partly by my finding myself next to the Avvocato Malerba in the queue at the till for the purchase of a café au kit and croissant at the Chambersee Service Station.

We filed into the Chambersee Service Station, built as was to be expected in the ubiquitous Euro-architecture of curved cement-and-glass surfaces, with a generous bristle of flagpoles outside displaying the colours of every nationality the franchise-holders hope to take money from and inside a sense of disorientation generated by flights of steps and walkways and signs that are no longer in any language but just cups and knives-and-forks and wheelchairs and crossed-out dogs all presented in stylized white lines on plastic blue squares, and in fact the moment we’re through the steamy swing doors, heavy against the cold, almost all the girls, none of whom is wearing a skirt, follow the sign displaying a human figure distinguishable from another human figure precisely and exclusively because it is wearing a skirt, or dress, rather than trousers, reminding me of something I read not so long ago in Corriere della Sera where a woman contributing to one of those deja vu debates about the discrimination against the fairer sex inherent in the insufficient provision of lavatory facilities in public places remarked, against the swim of the debate, that as she saw it the queues outside ladies’ lavatories were really caused by the fact that women like to go to the loo together, and to chat there for a while, which again reminded me, though how this can be I don’t know (perhaps just the thought of the way women are with each other, something I have always been envious of), reminded me of a desire I frequently used to express to her, usually immediately after we had made love, that I myself would like so much to be a woman, just for a day, or a week, I would like to know what it feels like to be a woman, and this desire was, and sometimes is, a terribly real and intense desire and part of a sort of deep biological yearning of mine, a yearning to do and to be and to have everything. A yearning against mortality, I presume. Or ultimately, since life is distinction and choice, a death wish.

When I mentioned this to her, she would always reply that I wanted to be a woman so that I could make love to a man. In a very profound part of myself I was homosexual, she said, and I should try to have an avventura sometime with a man as part of this voyage of self-discovery that I had embarked on with her, part of this quest for a happy healthy sex life, as she always put it which would make me a profoundly wiser more even-tempered understanding fellow. But I said no, no, I wanted to be a woman for a while, only a day perhaps, or not even, so that I could have sex with another woman, so that I could lose myself in femininity, be all woman licking woman and woman licked by woman, so that I could have sex with her, but she laughed at my excitement and said what a profoundly male and banal fantasy that was and in the end perhaps nothing more than retrospective jealousy because she had once said that the best sex in her life she had had with her Filipino cleaning girl

With these ideas flashing through my mind as we entered the service station for our ten o’clock coffee stop, I was reminded again of my new thought of ten minutes ago, that she might be having a. lesbian affair with my daughter, and partly because I wanted to be reassured that this was not the case, and partly because in this way I would be able to see when the girl Nicoletta came out of the Ladies and thus to contrive to go and sit next to her for the coffee and croissant I planned to eat, I decided not to go up the stairs with Colin and Vikram and Georg in the direction of the stylized cup, but to cross a granite-tiled floor and walk past the stylized skirt and trousers to where a stylized telephone receiver pointed the way to three small booths against a cement wall, one of which, thankfully, took my Eurocard, thus resolving the problem of my not having any Swiss currency.

The phone rang for a longtime, so that I began to think I would just have to hold it there ringing for four or five minutes until the girl I was interested in, or imagined I might be interested in, or might be interested in me, came out of the loo, but finally my wife did answer and, on hearing my voice, immediately asked why on earth I was calling. Yes, my wife was her busy, peremptory self I could even hear the vacuum-cleaner booming in the background, which probably explained why she hadn’t heard the phone for so long. And I have to confess that I found this cheering, this business of the vacuum-cleaner, and her peremptoriness, and the fact that although it must have been perfectly obvious I was calling from a call-box she didn’t think to ask me where I was. I found it cheering because for about one second it gave me the passing and extremely rare sensation of having done the right thing — you did the right thing leaving her, I told myself — since I often feel that one of the reasons our marriage reached the sorry state it did was my wife’s obsessive use of the vacuum-cleaner, and not only of the vacuum-cleaner but of every cleaning implement, product and aid available to modern man, or rather invented by modern man for modern woman. Simply, the vacuum-cleaner was always on, nudging round my feet when I was trying to read on the sofa or to play draughts with Suzanne, clattering against the bedroom door when perhaps I was trying to sleep late on a Saturday. And this was nothing other, I believe, than one of my wife’s many ways of expressing her suffocating desire to ripristinare, as the Italians say, to be constantly returning things to their pristine state, or more particularly in my wife’s case, her desire to have everything remain exactly as it was the day we were married and moved into the new flat which I had made the terrible mistake (in this case absolutely formative, one of the grand structural mistakes of my life), the terrible, mistake of letting her parents buy for us and of living in ever since, or at least until about eighteen months ago, which means I was there nineteen years, nineteen years, and every year the shutters had to be re-varnished and the walls re-whitewashed and the window-frames re-sealed, and in our relationship too it was likewise understood that everything had to be freshly whitewashed and re-sealed, everything had to be kept in a perfectly mint emotional state, and in particular it was tacitly understood that we had to use the same love language, forever, the. same cooing little terms of endearment we had used during our courtship of twenty-one years before, terms that I have absolutely no intention of evoking here and now, although I can sense their presence as I sit turning over and over my thoughts in the third seat from the back of this powerful modern coach pounding across Europe, I can sense them lurking there below the surface of consciousness, below the modulations of this voice, below the vibrations of big tyres on smooth tarmac, they are present to me, hard dark rocks I would founder on if I went that way. One uses words, love words, I tell myself, for years and years, only to discover one morning that they mean nothing any more. Not only do they mean nothing, but they are dangerous. They are frightening. And yet my wife insisted on our using them. You haven’t called me this for ages, my wife would say, or, Why do you get so angry when I call you that? I refuse to evoke even one of them here and now. My wife insisted that we went on using these words far beyond the point of exasperation, words, as I said, that had meaning once but now meant only the meaning they had lost, the meaning all words always lose when you use them too much and find they mean nothing at all, not rocks then I suppose, but corpses, has-beens, different from the living, different from the never-alive, corals perhaps, sharp and dangerous, hundreds of thousands of sharp little dead creatures. Our love words.

Yes, we had to be forever in love, I remember now, my wife and I, so that one had the feeling of something that had solidified, terribly, an awful process of fossilization, a shell one had made for oneself, but that somehow wasn’t the right shape any more, wasn’t appropriate any more. Again it was a question of propriety, I tell myself, sitting beside Doris Rohr. And perhaps this was why she and Suzanne, our daughter, could never really get on together, because Suzanne would insist on growing up, on not staying the same, and hence was a constant reminder to us that we were not the same either, offering as she did that yardstick of age and of all its attendant transformations in the flesh which children must offer and parents must take note of.

I wanted to have a word with Suzanne, I said.

Her birthday’s tomorrow, my wife said drily.

I told my wife I was perfectly aware my daughter’s birthday was tomorrow, but even as! said this I would have liked to have added something to ease this studied and obvious unpleasantness, because it is unthinkable really that two people should live together for nigh on twenty years and then have nothing more than their mutual irritation to trade on the telephone, unthinkable, but apparently the norm, or almost (when things are not worse), and sitting here on the blood-red upholstery of this hideous modern coach, where six video screens have just been lowered in perfect simultaneity from wells fixed in strategic positions in the overhead luggage racks, and where Doris Rohr is offering me an expensive chocolate, her mauve nails turning the pages of Marie Claire, sitting here thinking of that phone-call to my wife conducted in the freezing entrance to the predictably and it has to be said depressingly designed Chambersee Service Station while watching for sneaky young Nicoletta to come out of the loo, and, from the corner of my eye then, seeing her come in from the coach and head off up the stairs to the cafeteria, perhaps the only woman on the trip to be wearing a skirt as depicted by the stylized sign, so that even from the phone-booth I could see the achingly slim calves black-stockinged above high heels scraping the stone steps like so many matches struck on sandpaper — sitting here in the coach, my mind prey, as it has been for so long, to every passing thought, but somehow not only the prey but the aggressor too, or a prey to its own aggression, self-consuming — sitting here in this parlous psychological state, it once again, I mean as a result of this phone-call, strikes home to me how much I have lost: my role as father and husband, the obviousness of my old life, the simplicity of being somebody’s husband, somebody’s father, the readiness of an explanation when required, being able to say, This is who I am and what I do. So that as the video two seats in front of me begins to glow and one or two people pull pink curtains against the rain outside to make the screen more vivid, it occurs to me that if I lose my job as well as everything else, this job that I always saw as a mere stepping-stone, a sensible way-station, an income to tide me over while I picked up my ticket to somewhere else (until, like my marriage, it became a desert island, a place of loathed and ultimately terrifying convenience), if I lose my job, I will have lost the last element in life, after wife and daughter and mistress, that gave me any sense of role and identity. And I begin to think, for the first time, that perhaps this trip was not a mistake after all. Perhaps it isn’t a mistake, I tell myself. Perhaps I should take it seriously and work hard at it alongside the others, lobbying Euro-MPs and talking to the press and generally making every reasonable and democratic effort to save this last attachment I have to the common-sense world of role and identity and usefulness and source of income — myself as paid language teacher at the University of Milan — You should take this trip seriously, I tell myself, very seriously, and stop pretending to be so superior to crazy Vikram with his drink and his dog and his victim politics, and dull Doris with her chocolates and magazines, and dour irritable Dimitra with her square-jawed determination to keep her place on the gravy train. You are arrogant, I tell myself. You are irretrievably arrogant. You are obsessed by the notion that you are somehow superior to every task you have been allotted and every person you have shared your life with. This has to stop, I told myself. You have to stop.

But then the words gravy train remind me that I had vowed I would leave this job, which is a pointless and soul-destroying job. You have been doing the same job year in year out for fifteen years now, I tell myself, staring at titles on a video screen as Doris Rohr pops another chocolate in her elegantly made-up mouth. You have gone on and on doing exactly the same thing, teaching huge groups of students who are never the same from one week to the next and with whom one has no contact at all and who are only interested in passing their exams, punching their meal-tickets. Indeed many of the students on this bus, I tell myself, to whom you were no doubt hasty in your attribution of altruistic impulses, are perhaps hoping that their faces will be remembered by the foreign lectors, ourselves, and that they will thus get better grades in their oral exams. For having come on this trip. For having lent their support. For years and years, I tell myself, suddenly extremely anxious, you have gone on and on teaching students interested in nothing more than the acquisition of a convenient piece of paper, a convenient passe-partout, students with no interest at all in English, all the while nourishing, cherishing, defending, the initial illusion that you were somehow transmitting culture to these people. This has to stop, I tell myself, refusing Doris Rohr’s offer of a Walnut Whirl. I should never have taken this job at all. Or never have stayed there for more than a year or two. Then reaching this conclusion, and terribly aware that only a moment ago I had reached the exact opposite conclusion, I am appalled at my own vacillation, at my loss of direction and purpose, as this whole trip, I’m obliged to observe, has been a terrible loss of direction for me, a deep lesion in the identity and resolve I had so carefully been constructing, reconstructing, in my little flat with all the new personal items and objects I had slowly been accumulating, to wit my wallet with its purpose-cut spaces for an Italian identity card, an Italian driving licence, my keyring, purchased in heavy snow from a Moroccan on Via Manzoni, which has a little leather pouch the perfect size for a Johnnie (it is presently loaded), my new leather jacket to replace the one she helped me buy, my new music collection, after I threw out the old with all the French singers she taught me to listen to and all the sixties music I rediscovered — yes, I’m appalled, appalled by the idea of being in my job for the rest of my life, and equally appalled by the idea of losing my job and being alone with nothing whatsoever to do or be for the rest of my life — I hate the expression ‘the rest of my life' — and without of course, it occurs to me now, a ready supply of young women, which has been, as I said before, together with screen-based computer games and biliards and arguments about politics, an important solace for me over the last two years. But above all I’m appalled by my lack of resolve, by my not knowing what, even if I knew how, I should do. I’m appalled by my constantly being appalled.

Suzanne was out, my wife said. I could get in touch with her this afternoon.

Okay

But then although these credit-card calls are expensive and I really had nothing to say, I made a conscious decision to stay on the phone to my wife for a moment or two longer, partly because Sneaky Nicoletta was not out of the loo yet and partly because she had barely reached the top of the stairs and I did not want to give her the impression that I was still at the stage of hurrying off phones to follow her about and thus still dangerous, although of course I’m perfectly aware that I came on this trip for no other reason than to follow her about, and it may even be that I am still dangerous, something I can hardly deny having been. Indeed, if there is one legitimate, or at least convincing thought in my mind on those occasions when I stand by the phone thinking, Now I am going to call her, now I can’t stop myself calling her (so that my finger will begin to punch, or until very recently, the buttons 045), it is the desire to show, in the course of a light and relaxed conversation, that Í am no longer dangerous and that I deeply regret having been so, the desire to end the affair well (when in fact it ended long ago and badly). And if I have learnt not to pick up the receiver on those occasions, or at least to stop dialling after the five, it is because bitter experience has taught me that the longer I go on talking the more violent and outraged I will become, the more dangerous I will show myself to be. How could she say that nothing had really happened, she who had previously insisted to me how important it was to have things happen in life? Make something happen, she said. She put the knife to my throat. It takes more than a kiss to cut yourself free, she said.

But mainly I decided to stay on the phone in the service station to my wife because taken by the idea of coming away from this conversation with something resembling cordiality, or even a deep mutual acceptance. I constantly hope that we can somehow still be friends, my wife and I, despite this terrible thing that has happened to us. It’s a desire, I sense, which always seems to be the aspiration of he or she who has abandoned, but never never never of he or she who has been abandoned, as I would never want to be her friend (what could that mean?), but only to be her lover again, her beloved again, which is why I suppose my frequently repeated attempts to engineer a happy ending, after all was already over, were so disastrous, because the truth was I was still hoping in some part of myself deep down that it hadn’t ended at all, that the discovery of a happy ending might become a new beginning. And I wonder now, could this be my wife’s problem, could this be why she is so difficult sometimes? She wants a new beginning. She wants me. to start using those words again. Those words that would be like spitting sharp stones. And’ how tedious, I think, how unbearably tedious life is to be forever engineering these same problems that everybody has written about and suffered over for centuries, for millennia: Ariadne gazing out to sea from an empty beach and Samuel Pepys going crazy for his serving maid. To mention but two.

So I told my wife, apparently by way of easing the tension, that I was reading this book Suzanne had given me for my birthday my forty-fifth birthday, a book called Black Spells Magic, and my wife said, yes, Suzanne had been raving about it for weeks and had bought copies for everyone she knew, but no, she, my wife, hadn’t read it. I thought how typical this was of the sublime lack of interest my wife has always shown for the lives of those around her, for the influences, adventures, friendships and agonies that are changing and reshaping those lives, and even for the simple details: why somebody is late, why somebody is calling from a phone-box; and I thought how this lack of interest had enabled me to conduct an intense love affair and to start reading and thinking and laughing and living again, without my wife’s showing the slightest curiosity about what was happening to me, and later, again, had allowed me to stop living, to descend into utter mental darkness, to withdraw into the silence of complete and total alienation, so unlike my normal, talkative, and on occasion people have gone so far as to say charming self, without my wife’s appearing to notice anything at all.

Well, I was a shade concerned, I said to my wife, how pro-lesbian this book was, you know? I hoped Suzanne wasn’t getting ideas into her head, I hoped there wasn’t any more to it than met the eye. But no sooner had I touched on this particular subject, which masked what in the end is my first new thought vis-a-vis her for some weeks or months, than two things happened at once: Nicoletta came out of the loo about twenty yards away, saw me, smiled at me; and my wife a hundred miles away burst out laughing. Typically then, it was precisely as I demanded to know what was so funny, winking at the same time at Nicoletta, who is rather taller than I had thought, that I appreciated that she, my wife, was right. She is right, I told myself, while she went on. laughing. She is perfectly right. It is ridiculous of you to be so concerned about the sexual orientation of your daughter, eighteen years old tomorrow on the fourth of the fifth, and thus entirely beyond your jurisdiction and probably even influence, and especially ridiculous since that concern, though your wife couldn’t know this, was only felt with regard to a possible relationship between your daughter and her, your ex-mistress, a relationship (lesbian), what’s more, that in the delirious post-coital moments of three and four years ago, you had longed for for yourself. Why shouldn’t your daughter at eighteen have the pleasure of a lesbian encounter? Not to mention, to stay on the subject of your being entirely ridiculous, the present instance of your having more or less decided, while worrying about your daughter, to try to seduce, on this coach trip, a girl only two or three years her senior.

How are things looking jobwise? my wife asked quite kindly, apparently appreciating and deciding to satisfy my need for cordiality, but I said my money had run out and got off the line.

I caught up with this girl Nicoletta about half-way up the cement stairs and, speaking to her in English, which! knew she would take as a compliment, I remarked with the most engaging and I suspect infectious bonhomie, that these cement stairs resembled nothing more, did they not, than those at the University, where one had to pick one’s way through students standing and sitting and chatting and even snogging on occasion. She laughed to hear me deliberately use a word she had just learnt from Colin’s favourite lexicon, and with one of those wonderful gestures that Italian girls are always making and that English girls never make, or I don’t recall them making, she slipped her hand under my arm to proceed the last dozen or so stairs together in close and amicable contact, with me saying that this inflicting upon us of the same architectural pattern in more or less the same materials the world over was at once inevitable yet depressing, and her laughing and saying that that must be the third or fourth pessimistic thing she had heard me say, and then even leaning slightly against me, which at once delighted me with the electric stupid and wonderful thought, I’m on here, but at the same time unnerved me because it occurred to me that far from feeling jealous, or even, and less interestingly, happy for me, which is not something frankly I would care for, she would think me monstrous to be arm in sentimental arm with a young girl after only a couple of hours together on a coach. She would think this was proof of how completely off the rails I was. She might even go and say something to her, to the girl, or to me, about my dangerous past. So that, turning the final corner of the stairs, I took the opportunity of having to push open another double glass door to disentangle myself from the young Nicoletta, and at the same time noticed, as I stood aside and ushered her through in an exaggeratedly cavalier fashion, that the anorak she was wearing was a dead dark blue and very shabby and her jeans likewise and her shoes clumpy and sensible. And while I couldn’t help feeling how delightfully endearing this was, together with the fact that she wore no make-up on a tissue-pale face with that jet-dark hair above, still I immediately felt a pang of regret for her more flamboyant femininity, manipulative though it may have been, her sharp high heels and short skirts and suspender gear et al., which she would keep on while she masturbated for me in Professor De Santis’s office, or later, in the period when she still liked to think of my jealousy as something of a joke and invited me to belt her arse. I regretted her theatricality, the feeling you had with her that she would and could squeeze, as Colin would say, the very most out of life, and above all — and this was so refreshing after my wife’s obsession with varnishing and cleaning and repairing — her determination to shake things up, her pleasure in seeing things change, people change. Her desire to have things happen. Whereas this little girl, this nice-mannered Nicoletta of the jolly bounce and cocked cheek, already pulling out her little black purse from one of those hideous fluorescent nylon pouches all young Italians tie about their waists, this charming young girl, now remarking with resignation that she has no Swiss francs, is clearly of the common-sense variety. At the most. she will kiss and make love. I will never be able to take her through the Rheims routine.

Then in the queue with trays and a mill of people, I was just pointing Nicoletta to the small sign in six or seven languages that indicated that we could pay for our beverages in Swiss francs, French francs, Austrian schillings, Deutschmarks, sterling and, yes, amazingly, Italian lire, when the Avvocato Malerba, who was immediately in front of me in the queue, leaned towards us to say that although this was true it didn’t make sense to pay in lire because the exchange rate was so unfavourable. The exchange rate was about forty lire to the franc worse than you could get at the Bureau de Change downstairs (there had been a small blue plastic sign with a white stylized image of a stack of coins on a pile of banknotes, though of course they will never change coins, just as most girls never wear skirts) and this in-itself, the Avvocato Malerba went on, meaning the Bureau de Change exchange rate, was more than thirty lire worse than the exchange rate yesterday, for the simple reason that the Bundesbank had been expected to lower their Interest rates at a meeting yesterday evening, but then hadn’t done so, thus throwing, as it emerged from the morning paper and indeed from the chaos in the Bureau de Change downstairs (where they did not even want to see Italian lire), the European currency markets into complete turmoil. Yes, our dear Europe was in turmoil, announced the Avvocato Malerba. And he thus suggested, raising his voice now, because of the noise two loutish French schoolboys were making choosing a pastry, that we might take some Swiss francs from him, repaying him, if we insisted, in lire at the rate he had, with uncanny foresight, exchanged them at the day before, i.e. something to the tune, all told, taking into account the devaluation of the lira and the price-exploitation practised by the Chambersee Service Station cafeteria, of eighty lire to the franc more favourable.

This was my first encounter with the Avvocato Malerba, who I knew taught a course on Employment Legislation in the Law Faculty and had been encouraged to come along by Vikram to present the legal side of our case as lucidly as possible in the event of our having to talk to legal experts and above all in the event of our having to explain why, while it was perfectly normal to hire people on only a one- or two-year contract in the UK or France or Germany, in Italy, or at least in the public sector, this could only be considered as a case — of discrimination against foreign teaching staff. The Avvocato was a tall, dry-looking man, not far off retirement it seemed, but surprisingly boyish in manner when he began to talk, almost childishly animated you might say, and painfully eager to please, as witness this very generous offer, made in a stiltedly correct English, to save a little money for two people he had never met before.

I immediately wondered, while we were more or less bound to accept and Nicoletta made all kinds of ingenuous murmurings, in an equally stilted though less correct English, as to how kind he was being, what on earth had prompted this elderly lawyer and university professor to waste two, no, three days in coaches and service stations and cheap hotels with a gaggle of young girls and a motley of feckless foreigners whingeing about the job they’d be lucky to lose. Did he just want to see the European Parliament, was he the spy who was keeping the University informed of our every legal move? I remembered now that both Dimitra and Georg had been against his coming, finding it strange that somebody in the employ of the University should see fit to support our cause in this open and indeed recklessly obvious fashion, and particularly someone, they were Dimitra’s words, who had no history of left-wing militancy or union activity.

All the time I was thinking this and choosing my croissant from what looked like a very weary pile, and hearing Nicoletta introduce herself to the Avvocato and the Avvocato saying what a wonderful name she had and how Nicoletta derived originally from the Greek nike, victory — all the while this was going on I was growing more and more intensely aware, to my great surprise and trepidation, of her voice, yes, her voice, immediately behind me, talking to Vikram Griffiths and insisting that we have a proper meeting on arrival at the hotel this evening to decide the strategy for our approach for the following morning, to decide above all, she said, not to mince words, who should be our representative on this occasion.

It was the first time, I should explain, standing beside Nicoletta and the Avvocato Malerba choosing pastries from a glass case in the Chambersee Service Station, that I had heard her voice for some months. Despite working in the same institution, we have both gone out of our way to avoid each other since the last tremendous encounter of perhaps nine months ago when first we made love and then shouted at each other until I held a knife first at her breast and then at my wrist and then wept and hit her and finally went off to smoke cigarettes all night on the sofa and drink heavily while she slept in my bed, the first time I had heard this French voice speaking Italian with wonderfully over-pronounced ‘r’s and under-pronounced ‘l’ and its curious inversion of Italian intonations, this voice that in its time has whispered to me almost every loving word and erotic provocation one person can whisper to another and then again has shouted almost every extreme of contempt and derision. And even as I listened to the way she was rather unpleasantly hectoring the clownish Vikram Griffiths, who of course was convinced, having arranged everything himself, that he was to be the representative, but at the same time, to show off to the students, was pouring whisky from a hip flask into his plastic coffee cup and then going over to the window to wave down, cigarette in hand, to where two girls were walking his shambling dog (crossed out of the service station by a small blue sign) — even as! listened to her following him and hectoring him, I knew that it would never be over for me. Never. Your stupid heart, I told myself, as Vikram Griffiths, hardly helping his cause, now made a joke about the whisky being called Teachers, will always leap on hearing Italian spoken with a French accent. Always. You will never get ‘beyond this, I told myself. Old Dafydd’s a terrible shagger, Vikram laughed, given half a chance. He was waving at the-window. Never. A shaggy shagger, he laughed. Then, together with a sense of resignation and defeat, I was suddenly filled with an immense and absolutely crazy desire to make myself heard, to see if my voice, my English voice speaking Italian in an inevitably English accent, mightn’t have the same effect on her, while she argued with Vikram Griffiths, as her French voice was having on me while I engaged in a less than enthralling conversation about exchange rates with the Avvocato Malerba. So that when, a metre or two on, at the till, the Avvocato laughed and said how strange it was to have Germany playing the spoilsport in Europe, and not Britain, a real reversal of roles, the Avvocato Malerba said, I immediately and patriotically and very loudly objected that these things were never a question merely of one country or another’s being more or less altruistic, but of each country always exercising all the power it had at its disposal to get, so far as was possible, what it wanted, what it perceived, that is, was in its, and only its, best interests. For this is what it means, I said, to be a sovereign individual, a sovereign state.

I raised my voice quite considerably as I engaged in this argument, surprising young Nicoletta and the Avvocato Malerba not a little as the latter paid exactly eighteen Swiss francs and forty-five — yes, forty-five — centimes for three coffees, a pastry, a croissant and a cream cake, upon which Nicoletta immediately began to fuss in her money pouch, trying to establish how much exactly she owed. Just as this service station, I insisted, still in the same hectoring tone, and thus not unlike the voice she had been using with Vikram Griffiths, this Swiss service- station, despite its friendly display of flagpoles suggesting adherence to the current orthodoxy of some kind of fraternity among nations and the generally fashionable notion of solidarity, this service station was chiefly and properly concerned in exacting the maximum price (in whatever currency) consistent with people’s continuing to purchase the optimum volume of the merchandise it supplied. No, you will never get beyond this, I told myself, but with a curious surge of elation now. As if it were pleasant to be stuck here. As if glad to know where I was.

The effect of my raising my voice was that the Avvocato Malerba now felt obliged to object — though he did so with a commendable mixture of politeness and jocularity — that this was a very cynical, typically Anglo-Saxon, and above all un-European way of viewing the world. There were clearly, he said, picking up what had now become, with his offering to pay, our collective tray, those in Europe, visionaries, who thought chiefly of the common good — Jacques Delors and Prime Minister Gonzalez, to name but two, and likewise the Dutch Prime Minister, was it Maartens, who …

But before he could finish speaking and with a quite ludicrous and shameful sense of triumph, as though of a child crushing an insect, or a Rottweiler snapping at some innocent hand that wishes to feed it, I began shouting that far from being Anglo-Saxon my views had been most eloquently expressed by Niccoló Macchiavelli and before that, and even more eloquently perhaps, by the ancient Greeks, whose culture surely lay at the heart of European identity and whose alliance of city states had quite probably been the first example of a European joint venture, though one established primarily of course against an outside enemy, not in the name of any fine principles, and always fraught by internal power games, of the kind, I insisted (aware now as we moved across the fluorescent-lit space that she must be no more than an arm’s length away on my right), of the kind that had led the great Thucydides to say, and I quoted, speaking far louder than I needed: We believe, out of tradition so far as the gods are concerned’, and from experience when it comes to men, that as a dictate of nature every being always exercises all the power he has at his disposal

There was a brief silence.

The Bundesbank included, I added.

Shall we sit here? Nicoletta asked. I owe you five thousand three hundred lire. Oh forget it, the Avvocato Malerba said. No, please. But I insist. Grazie, Nicoletta said, blushing, it’s very kind of you. At which the Avvocato Malerba looked up and, smiling at me from his somehow dusty but boyish cheeks, said, Just take it as a demonstration that not everybody is obsessed by the exercise of personal power, a statement which, on the contrary, I could have shown, only demonstrated the truth of what I had said, in that it served most perfectly to make him look gracious and myself foolish, and all the more so when, on turning round, I realized that she would not have heard at all. She had crossed the whole cafeteria since I last saw her and was now leaning over Georg, deep in confabulation.

CHAPTER FIVE

Robin Williams has just read Carpe Diem to his Dead Poets Society. How everything leads back. Does he have daughters? Lear asked, of anybody remotely unhappy And even this unexpected analogy, Lear, Cordelia, leads me back through my own daughter’s fantasticated lesbianism to her. She is the centre, of the world and this trip a vortex, the mind channelled, like the chase of traffic through this interminable tunnel beneath the Alps, in that one direction, her slender video-lit neck just a few paces further forward, but ever distant despite the headlong flight of this coach, these thoughts, never to be touched again, or licked, or when your nail trailed the knuckles of her spine. Everything is past, I tell myself, and yet because of that more present than ever. As if the only paradise one might ever set out to explore were paradise lost.

And it is this, sitting here on the third seat from the back in this luxury coach racing on a slight downward slope beneath incalculable tons of rock through one of those engineering feats which have given us the miracle, so called, of rapid communications, it is this that I cannot understand: how presently omnivorous that past is, how Robin Williams quoting Horace in an Alpine tunnel immediately recalls Robin Williams speaking a demotic DJ Italian in Buon Giorno Vietnam when my wife was away at the sea with Suzanne and she on the red couch at home in only a silk nightdress admiring the dubbing, saying how clever it was to have matched such rapid speaking and punning, how clever dubbing was in general, putting words in people’s mouths, annihilating differences, annihilating barriers — she would love, she said, to get a job in dubbing — and I can smell the sweet perfume in her hair fallen slantwise as she absently preens, I can sense the neatness of her posture sitting cross-legged, telling me in French that this Italian dubbing of American English was so good. And for all my adoration, I tell myself now, for all her complacency, the barriers between ourselves were such, though I didn’t know it then, as no polyglot facility or engineering prowess could ever resolve. The words, as now on the screen, were one thing, but the gestures came from quite another language: two cultures indifferently superimposed for the convenience of apparent comprehension, the luxury of immediate entertainment.

Cars overtake in the tunnel. There are red lights and glare. To the right, yellow neon every so many metres spangles on the curved plastic of our modern coach window, flashes chemically over the deep red upholstery, altering the colours on the screen, as if through fading and intensifying filters. And watching Doris Rohr (who always votes against strike action, who openly says she would be willing to accept less money so long as she can keep her job, her precious job, she whose husband is a surgeon, she who has to decide which of her holiday homes to spend the long summer break in), watching this German woman pensively unwrapping another of her expensive chocolates in the insistent on-off of a dark under-ground brightness, her fingertips plucking unseeing at coloured foil, her eyes happily fascinated by Robin Williams and by the sort of contemporary pieties these films purvey and that we all identify with in opposition to a status quo which miraculously no cinema-goer is ever part of, yes, watching solid, square-mouthed, brick-lipsticked Doris, it occurs to me, sitting on the third seat from the back of this coach full of, to use a Colinism, shaggable young women, it occurs to me I was saying, what an incredibly foolish philosophy the expression carpe diem enshrines.

Carpe diem, yes, yes, seize the day, seize it, now, and now, and now, then to be marooned there in those few precious hours, days, months, whatever, it doesn’t matter, of love, of passion, marooned for all the waste sad time that must stretch after, not shovelling shit against the tide as my wife, would to keep the corpses at least enburied, our grave-clothes decent if nothing else, her impossible struggle to ripristinare, nor gracefully chasing about the mythical urn in the bliss of the moment anticipated — those routine or romantic relationships with intensity, with beauty — no, but waltzing, as I am waltzing, with the living dead, the memory trapped in the groove of an endlessly repeated pirouette pushed to the furthest extremes of vertigo, she and I here, she and I there and then (when the day was so fatally seized), she and I as we might have been, today now, side by side on this seat, in this coach at this moment, her head against my shoulder, now now and still now. Which is the worst waltz of all.

I hate myself for quoting Thucydides, for shouting at the Avvocato Malerba in the Chambersee Service Station. I hate myself for having come on this trip. My idea, when Vikram Griffiths placed his clipboard beneath my nose in the miserable and amorphous institutional space of the foreign lectors’ tutorial room — my idea, or rather the idea that so seductively presented itself, was that of showing myself in public again, no, showing myself to her again, of demonstrating that I wasn’t the least bit troubled by the sight of her or even by the sight of her confabulating together with Georg. I would show her, and myself — this must have been my idea — that these things did not touch me any more, because she had not after all, I told myself, had such a determining effect on my life. Quite the contrary. She had merely been the catalyst I needed to make a change in my life, merely the particular day I had chosen, at the last, to seize: Tuesday, though it might perfectly well have been Wednesday; her though it could equally have been Psycho-tottie or Bologna-tottie or Opera-tottie. Yes, I would come on this trip and be urbane and relaxed. That’s what I imagined. I would watch lights flash on and off in deep Alpine tunnels and the effect would not become an image of my obsession, pulsing, lurid, unflattering. For I had left obsession behind, I told myself, when I moved into Porta Ticinese number 45, when I changed my whole music collection, when I bought a new wallet, a new briefcase, a new coat.

So I would come on this trip and I would be sensible and witty and just slightly but not overly ironic when my colleagues talked of community spirit and group identity, when they made a great show of their knowledge of the legal niceties of Italian Law and European Law, of the way in which we have been victimized and of our ultimately inevitable victory. I would be friendly, savvy, even helpful. And at the end I would return home unscathed, though perhaps with a fresh tottie or two to place on the old back-burner, as Colin puts it, one or two new phone numbers to inscribe in the old carnet. I would have been near her — this was my idea — for three days, and nothing out of the ordinary would have passed between us, nothing would have happened, and this in itself would be the beginning of the happy ending I hoped for.

But I wasn’t ready for it. And had I been ready, it would never have occurred to me to do it, I wouldn’t have needed it. Had I been ready, I would have appreciated that this was not what I hoped for at all, this prosaic, sensibly cheerful fellow seeing through the world with a sort of mild, devil may-care indulgence. I would have known that what I hoped for, what I still hope for, against all the good sense in the world, was, is, some impossible turning back of the clock, not so much a softening on her part, but on mine, on mine, since she has never forbidden me to speak to her, she has never said it was impossible. On the contrary, the last time we met she said she hoped one day it might be possible again, she said one day I might see things as she did.

But most of all, as it turns out, I wasn’t ready for the train of thought that begins now as Vikram Griffiths, who despite the film has been walking up and down the aisle, his mongrel trotting at his heel, continuing his never-ending parleyings with all and sundry, perhaps in search of the notorious spy — as Vikram Griffiths leans over me, his breath full of whisky, his clothes of dog, and, nodding to the video screen, suddenly pale as the coach shoots out of the tunnel into a world of white mist and drizzle amid the great looming shapes the Alps are, frozen in the contortion of that last orogeny, majestic and broken — leans over, clears his throat and says low, so as not to be heard by Doris, What do you think, boyo?

This business about a meeting this evening?

No. The shagplan, man! He grins, fingers in his dark sideburns. The film! he explains. Don’t tell me you hadn’t realized why I chose it? Fuckin’ toss in itself of course, but gets the girlies in the right old mood, you know. Love thy teacher. Thy Teachers. Carp the old diem. Can’t get more fuckin’ appropriate than that, can you? Without writing ‘shag me’ up all over the screen.

My Welsh colleague with the Indian skin puts his arm round my shoulder with what is now an extraordinary assumption of complicity, an avuncular matiness, as if to force me to declare myself in some way. The dog thrusts his snout between the seat and the underside of my knee.

Can you? he insists.

At random I agree, I laugh half-heartedly, I ask, Got anything lined up?

But he’s already saying, I don’t mind yours either. Lovely little girlie. And he nods back to Nicoletta.

Who I now realize I have forgotten. Astonishingly, in the space of only ten minutes of having her sitting behind me rather than in front, I have forgotten about Nicoletta, her little glow-coloured purse and sweet gratefulness, clean forgotten, as they say the way I am so often forgetting the names of my tottie, so that sometimes someone you supposedly made love to only a day or so before, Bologna-tottie for example, will call you on the phone and you simply cannot remember the name. Or worse still, you can’t remember which of two or three names. You know it’s Bologna-tottie, but you can’t remember whether Bologna-tottie is Francesca or Marta or Valeria, and for a moment you’re desperately flustered, searching for the name, before recalling with a sigh of relief that so long as you don’t care, it is perfectly possible to carry on not only a conversation but an entire relationship, or avventura as she always used to call them, without ever using the caress a woman’s name is. Except that this in turn only reminds you that her name on the contrary, her Christian name her surname her second name her daughter’s name her home phone number her work phone number her address her bra-size her birthday her saint’s day her daughter’s birthday her necklaces her earrings her bracelets her brooches her ankle-bracelets her shoe-size her complete wardrobe her favourite drinks pastas meats and sweets her brands of perfume of deodorant of cigarettes of tampons of chewing gum, and a thousand other details are things you will neper be permitted to forget. You will never be permitted to forget them. So that on more than one occasion, having got the phone down on some nameless tot tie, I have found myself dialling her number, automatically, without even being aware of it. 045, it begins, it began, for Verona, for my age. Then I stop.

Nice little girlie, my colleague is saying. Sneaky Niki.

Turning my head for a moment I see that the charming and charmingly forgotten Nicoletta is having to lean, because of Vikram’s balding head, over to the middle of the seat behind me, in order to see, on the video screen four places up, a cluster of boys who, under the influence of their charismatic schoolmaster, are now, somewhat improbably, reciting Wordsworth in a cave by torchlight. The world is too much with us late and soon, these Americans read, badly, and in Italian to boot: Il mondo é troppo presente….

Bit young for me though, Vikram laughs. And he whispers: Perhaps I'll take a poke at old Doris. Because another thing about Vikram Griffiths is that he never misses an opportunity to remind you that his preference is for older women, even fifty- and sixty-year-olds, and this is part again of his wilful outlandishness, his determined declaration of difference, in all its possible forms (the whisky flask! the red cravat!), and simultaneous demand for acceptance. He is different in order to crave acceptance, I tell myself. As if he had got himself born half-Indian in Wales on purpose. And in the early fifties at that. Vikram Griffiths, I tell myself, as he leans over me to make a pantomime show of squinting down Doris’s cleavage, has made a destiny out of circumstance, has multiplied and magnified his separateness a thousandfold, the better to demand that we accept him. Even tossing in a shabby mongrel dog to the bargain. An ugly dog. A smelly dog. Named after a Welsh poet. Worth a squeeze, Vikram laughs, his arm round me, fingers of his other hand fidgeting in his dog’s prosaic ears, and all at once I appreciate that I find all this endearing, I find it attractive, and sad, as if, far from having put one over on me by getting me to come on this questionable trip and by taking these little liberties of complicity — the arm round the shoulders, the innuendos, etc. - he were himself in danger somehow, vulnerable, in need of help. He cares so much about keeping this dull job, I tell myself, about leading the boys to victory, about being our misfit, alternative leader, whom we must love. It’s touching.

Pouting his lips in a kiss,Vikram is saying: Anything to do a proper lady a favour, boyo. He taps his nose. Especially if she’s a frau.

The only problem, Vikram, I warn — and how witty can be sometimes! — is that a delicate personal kindness like that, shown towards one of our Teutonic colleagues, might be mistaken for merely another manifestation of Euro-solidarity. You know? More political correctness — Celt to Kraut — than the gesture of a sensitive, passionate man.

Ah, yes, the ambiguity of the Euro-shag! Vikram nods his sideburns, apparently pleased to be called a Celt, while on the screen a curiously sexless Robin Williams expounds to his eager class on the theme of living one’s life to the full. I might just have to toss the old sou’wester at someone else’s door then, he laughs. And then he says her name. He might shag her, he says.

Go for it, I immediately tell him.

Y’see, what I fancy there, he says, in his interminable search for intimacy, his low voice that is never low enough (and there is a positive gale of whisky on his breath), what I fancy about that, is the razzled, last-orders look, y’know, the mauve lipstick and the skirts and stockings and shoes. The gear. Very French.

Give her hell, I tell him. My voice is flat. Quickly I say: By the way, I hope you’ve got it all organized for tomorrow? I mean, who we meet, what we say? The great campaign. Treaty of Strasbourg.

Right enough, he laughs. Then amazingly, and with that awesome remorselessness with which things can go wrong sometimes (as when, at billiards, the white shoots unerringly off three cushions into the centre pocket, doesn’t creep or slither down like the balls you’ve aimed, but slams straight home, as if nothing could be more meant, at some metaphysical level, than the unfortunate coincidence) — amazingly Vikram Griffiths announces, Oh yes, when it comes to campaigns, fuckin’ Napoleon Bonyfarts got nothing on this boyo. This boyo just rolls on from one war to the next. I’d’ve stuck the old Duke’s mercenaries right back in their Wellington boots.

And Vikram goes on then, after the brief interruption of a feminine cheer when Robin Williams invites his students to tear pages out of the books they or their parents have paid good money for, to explain the details: the Welsh MEP who will meet us and prepare us for our meeting with the Petitions Commission; then the presentation itself; then …

But I’m lost, I’m suspended between the chattering video screen and Vikram ‘s now earnest Welsh rhythms in a world where, quite apart from the subsiding ripples of pain that fanned out from the word ‘razzled’, and the vaguer, deeper disquiet generated by the fact that people don’t know about us, to the extent that this man can merrily talk about having a poke at the woman who has meant most to me in my life, apart from all that I’m suddenly riveted by the recollection of the last time Napoleon Bonaparte crossed my path, a recollection of such absurd and tangled complexity, such abject consequence, that I find it remarkable that my mind can hold it all together as a single entity, a single feeling, can say to itself, Ah, the Napoleon thing. For this anecdote, this little — no, not little, this personal — horror story, which I immediately understand I am doomed to go picking over for at least the next hour, like a ghoul over his own carrion, is the kind of improbable agglomeration of negative material that would seem to crave just one nice international word to sum it up and get it out of the way as soon as possible; the way there are convenient words like Inquisition or holocaust or pogrom which sum up whole epics of human awfulness so that they can be got out of the way with the greatest rapidity, buried forever in the immense sludge of world wide buzz^words and brand names — global warming and Gor-Tex, Coca-Cola and ethnic cleansing — or rather perhaps, assuming we have a certain level of culture, as the Italians like to say, we may exhume such words from time to time in well-written novels, serious films, to enjoy the pang, to check that it’s still there, to feel good that it is still there, as so we should, then to push them even deeper in the shit once again (in fact it’s rather unusual, now I come to think of it, that neither Black Spells Magic nor Dead Poets Society has aired the holocaust as yet, seen fit to set its compass by that convenient lodestone of human cruelty).

Oh for just one word for my Napoleonic anecdote! To be able to say, Chaeronea, the Terror, or Waterloo, and never to have to retell the story at all, never to have to think of it or through it at all. I hate having to think of things, having to go over things. The tyranny of memory But in the meantime, I suddenly tell myself, how remarkable, isn’t it, that while listening to Vikram Griffiths, now saying that it’s important the girlies are properly shown around the Parliament and hence able to feel that they have taken part, that they didn’t come allthis way for nothing, and while observing Doris Rohr, with whom I have no particular axe to grind, trying to find the space between one seat and the next to cross her thick legs in those kind of loose, too sharply creased woollen trousers (maroon) that in semiotic terms at least would surely permit her to use the men’s lavatory, how remarkable that while taking all this in, and at the same time allowing once again the complex misery triggered, absurdly, by the name Napoleon to explode in your mind, you are nevertheless still able to marvel at the extraordinariness of a brain that can do all this at once, a brain that can be totally obsessed and yet totally conscious of everything that is not obsession, locked into a tremendous, perhaps unforgivable alienation, yet aware too of a change in the hum of the coach, a change that must be the result of switching from a smooth road surface to a rough, with some of the American college boys in this pretentious and unlikely film being punished now for having left the school premises to read their Wordsworth and Whitman in the more romantic surroundings of that underground cave, perhaps grotto is the word, and Vikram doing his whisky-inspired imitation of a plummy Queen’s English to say: After which ceremony we are graciously invited to a jolly luncheon with the correspondent of the London Times. So that there is always Self, I tell myself, taking up pretty well the whole of the picture, but equally invariably there is always that little Brahminic bird sitting on one corner of the frame observing Self, observing everything around Self, and saying, To what end, to what end? And did you remember to pay the phone bill?

Or so I thought. I thought psychology had established this business once and for all, this doing and observing oneself doing, and some very long time ago too. Until I challenged her about it. Until I said: But didn’t you even feel bad doing that, wasn’t there a small part of you watching as you did it, or, in this case, said it, a small part, detached, smiling wryly, sad?

And what I meant was, Will you offer me nothing I can cling on to, no small sop of remorse, of the variety I have always been willing to give to my wife, to help her, if only for my daughter’s sake, to believe that I’m not all bad, to help her feel the past was not a farce? Our marriage was worth something?

And she said no. There were no small parts of herself that saw or did or said anything different from what the main part of her did or said or saw. Because she was a happy, together, integrated person, she insisted, in French, though I remember it in English. And just at this very moment, she went on in an inappropriately husky voice, just at this moment what she was seeing was me, what she was doing was lying there spread out naked like melted butter on fresh baguette, and what she wanted to say was, Make love to me! Why bring up that whole ridiculous story again now that we’ve got over it, now that we are back together and with nobody between us at last on one side or the other. And she said: Who cares how this came about? The fact is, it’s what we wanted!

But I was holding a copy of a coffee-table book, entitled The Age of the Courtesan, and inside the lush front cover of this extremely lush and doubtless expensive exercise in historically aware prurience — as gifts of flowers also are never vulgar and always expensive, as telephone-calls from charming and assiduous suitors are always welcome and all the more so if they come long-distance and cost a great deal — inside the front cover, and in turquoise-blue fountain pen, someone had written, in Italian: The taste of triumph — how can I forget? And there were two tiny mistakes in the way this Italian was written, one of syntax and one of spelling, as if the whole thing had been spoken-written-thought in a foreign accent.

It’s not, I said, and as Vikram lurches off up the aisle ruffling girls’ hair as he goes, I find myself mouthing the words now towards her back, or rather towards that sliver of shoulder and freckled neck I can see as she sits entirely engrossed in the vicissitudes of the Dead Poets Society, quite oblivious, though occasionally passing some comment to her companion, who I can’t see, but I believe it must be Luis, a Spanish teacher of quiet, reflective, unreproachable character, and what she’s saying no doubt, as one of the romantic young Americans under the influence of the excellent Robin Williams now argues with his parents about wanting to become an actor rather than a lawyer, what she’s saying is how good the dubbing is — un vrai miracle de la communication, I remember her telling me — No, it’s not, I mouth — and I’m repeating the words by heart almost a year after the event — it’s not that he gave you the book, or even that he wrote that in it. It’s not that that upsets me.

She lies there on white sheets staring at me, so beautiful and beautifully, if only one could detach oneself.

Et alors?

It’s that Í said than They were my words.

At first she didn’t understand. I had to point to the dedication again. The taste of triumph. Then she didn’t remember. She did not remember. Whereas I will say this of my wife, that though she was/is criminally inattentive, would not notice if you were sitting in front of the TV weeping or had an adulterer’s grin all over your face as you washed the dishes, she did at least remember things, she would never forget a moment that had been precious. How else would she have known in what state things must be preserved?

She, on the other hand, had clean forgotten. As I have clean forgotten Nicoletta. The kind of cleanliness which really is a blessing.

The name Napoleon? I said. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? His letters to Josephine?

Because when I first managed to invent a fictitious conference and we spent three days together in her ex-husband’s second or third or fourth house that she still had the keys to in the mountains above Bolzano — and this was the first time we had been away together, the first time we had actually spent the night together — there was no running water. The pump had been turned off, there was no running water, and though I spent hours at it I couldn’t work out how to prime it. So she couldn’t take her bidet. She couldn’t soap and perfume herself as she so much liked to. And this worried her. She didn’t want to be putrid, she said, when I went down on her, as I invariably would. I invariably go down on women. I can’t understand men who don’t. Life, Colin says, is a muff mountain.

So it was then, in her husband’s somewhat twee ski and hunting retreat, surrounded by cuckoo clocks and stuffed birds and the like, that I told her what I was surprised that, as a Frenchwoman and indeed a student of the Revolution, she didn’t already know — about Napoleon’s letters, when, on return from military campaigns, he would command Josephine not to wash for at least three days before his arrival. He liked her gamey.

We laughed and hugged, thinking of raunchy Josephine, and it would be difficult to exaggerate, assuming I would ever wish to exaggerate, how much we were in love then, how much we believed we were in love then, which is the same thing, I imagine, how much, for example, we stared and stared into each other’s wide eyes, how immensely gratifying it all was. And drawing on the classical education that she was so determinedly re-galvanizing in me at that point in order to stimulate my sense of self-respect and of purpose, to give me back a vocation, a sense that I could do something and be somebody, I said that returning from Marengo, from Austerlitz, from Jena, from the Europe, in short, he imagined he was liberating and uniting, returning from his military campaigns and approaching Paris and the crowds and the celebrations, the wonderful thought of how Josephine wasn’t washing, of how her plump little puss was getting stickier and saltier, must have been, for the victorious Emperor Napoleon, the secret taste of his triumph.

We made love, our first whole night together, and though it was wild and wanton, I tell myself now, it was religious too. There was an awesome approach to the sacred, even a sense of becoming sacred oneself. It was she not me first used ‘ the word, first wept and laughed, so that it seemed and seems now here on this coach inconceivable to me that she could later have told my little expression, the secret taste of his triumph, to Georg, and told it without even remembering where it had come from, or, assuming she did remember, without respecting that moment’s apparent uniqueness, a moment never, we would have thought at the time, to be crassly repeated or dubbed or offered in ten translations (putting words in people’s mouths) to whoever happened to phone with a certain insistence, whoever happened to draw on the services of a national network of florists to send a tangible sign of his lust.

The taste of triumph, he had written, losing the classical reference suggested by the possessive, which was the remark’s only wit, the only thing that redeemed it from the merest male chauvinism. And then that How can I forget? Well, only too easily, it would appear. And I don’t even turn my head to envy his straight German nose and wryly wrinkled brow as he sits pacato behind, intent no doubt on a pasty-faced Robin Williams now contemplating the very bad news that the sensitive young student has killed himself over his Dead-Poets-induced actor-lawyer dilemma.

I don’t believe you, I shouted. And I don’t believe you could have gone to bed with someone just because they phoned so often and sent so many flowers and insisted so much you could not refuse. What does it mean, you couldn’t refuse?

I was shrieking at her on a hot afternoon in her Verona flat. I was shrieking. First she had said she was leaving me just when I had said I wanted to leave home, for her, I wanted to be with her. Because she wasn’t ready, she had said, to compromise the serenity of her young daughter in a new and perhaps risky menage. Then I had left home anyway, too betrayed and betraying to continue with the old facade. I told my wife everything and left home. Then she had come back to me. What, a month later? She was ready now, she said. She said she just hadn’t wanted to be the one who made me leave my wife, surely that was understandable, but now that I had left her of course she wanted to be with me. She came back and we were happy. We were wildly happy. Perhaps two weeks. Until, in response to the merest enquiry about a receipt from a café in Várese found between the pages of the Michelet I had borrowed from her, she told me entirely gratuitously (for she could perfectly well have hidden it from me) that in fact the real reason why she had hesitated before, when I offered to leave my wife for her, was not, after all, because of her daughter’s psychological welfare, or her scruples vis-a-vis my making such a radical decision for her, but because she had just started a second affair. She was having a second affair, she told me. But that was over now, she said. Three weeks ago. So first she says no. Then she comes and says yes. Then she blows my world apart with this story, told entirely gratuitously, of a second affair conducted during our apparently perfect passion, during the passion where we had both stared into each other’s eyes and sworn we would love each other for ever. And now, after weeks of unhappiness and confusion, just when I finally seem to be getting over this, when I have finally accepted that, given the difficulties of her affair with me, it was not unreasonable for her to have tried to dilute that intensity with a casual avventura elsewhere, at this very point I discover The Age of the Courtesan, I discover the taste of triumph. His triumph. Which she hasn’t even tried to hide. You didn’t even try to hide it, I protested. What I mean is, I discover who she is. And that the whole thing meant- nothing at all. There had been no great passion.

Then, since it seemed at the time to be the only way to maintain any seriousness at all, any sacredness at all, I hit her. That was the second time. All your life, I reflect, you tell yourself you are a pacifist, you tell yourself you will never hit anyone, you never have hit anyone, you can’t imagine yourself hitting anyone. And then you do. When she said nothing had happened. You hit her, hard. But immediately you regret it. Immediately you tell yourself that you will never hit anyone again. And you feel this vow is stronger now. Because of the experience of the first time. Forewarned is forearmed, you tell yourself. I will never hit anyone again, you tell yourself. But then you do do it again. You find The Age of the Courtesan with that triumphant dedication, not even hidden, barely remembered, and you hit her again. I hit her across the face, very hard, I who never hit anybody, not even as a boy, and she cried and said, Again, hit me again, if it will get it out of your system. And I did hit her again, even harder, two or three times, across the cheeks and face, and I was appalled and begged forgiveness and hit her again and we made love, until she found she couldn't move her jaw properly, it clicked when she opened and closed her mouth, and I took her to the casualty ward at the hospital where we invented some story which they clearly didn’t believe about her catching her chin on one of those fold-up garage doors, and even while they were shaking their heads in disbelief, all I could think, repeating it over and over to myself, was that she was not the person you imagined her to be. I had fallen in love with someone and she had turned out to be someone else. And already Í was someone else. And even though that night was spent together and there was no suggestion that we were breaking up or that it was all over, still I understood now that everything was impossible, everything was past.

Dead Poets Society has reached its climax. Robin Williams has been fired by the reactionary school authorities who do not realize what a splendid life-force, despite the suicide, our million-dollar actor is. Robin agrees to go, with a certain nobility, with the wisdom of he who accepts the inevitable having carped his diem — the wisdom, in short, that I lack. But the boys in his class are challenged to show their solidarity, to show that their relationship with their teacher was a real one, of trust and complicity and mutual respect. And to do this, one by one and very bravely, they climb on top of their desks, a gesture of wilfully making oneself visible and vulnerable, for of course they have been forbidden to do so by some conservative schoolmaster eager to tidy away the whole unfortunate affair and get back to some serious teaching. The boys climb on top of their desks because they feel the need to show their love and support and affection for Robin and to show above all that the past was worth something, even if the future must now be different.

On six video screens speeding across a soon-to-be^united Europe a dozen American college boys stand up on their chairs and then on their desks, and I can see, sitting here on the third seat from the back, how this wonderfully kitsch scene, where we all enjoy feeling that we are on the right side and revelling in our sentiments, is actually drawing tears from many an eye in our group, and not least, amazingly, from the expensive, soft-contact-lensed eyes of Doris Rohr, whose own lessons one imagines must be the last word in the dusty formality of the day unseized, since teaching, for Doris, is merely a necessary and unfortunate corollary of having a position. Yes, a fat tear is rolling down through heavy powder on Doris’s cheek. She is weeping for Robin, as others once for Hecuba, and at this point I too get up from my seat. I can’t stand it any more.

I get up from my seat. But without standing on it. The coach is charging down those long curves that- lead away from the Alps. Swaying up from the red upholstery, I stumble a moment, for someone has left a bag in the passageway. Head down! a voice shouts, in Italian, We can’t see! I start to lurch forward up the carpeted passage, which has small rubber squares every pace or so. The light from outside comes in in chinks and slashes, since the curtains are drawn on the video, a muddled, fluid, mobile light. There’s the throb of the road beneath my feet and sudden gleams of reflected daylight glancing over the seat backs.

I draw level with her, level with her seat, where, as expected, she is utterly engrossed in watching how even the last and weakest of the boys has the courage to climb on his rickety desk and declare his sniffling allegiance to his crazy non-conformist schoolmaster, who, intercut with the brave boys, is beaming with poignancy, his pointed nose red with emotion. And she too is beaming. Her face, which always had a friendly, nibbly rabbitiness about it, is smoothed out and as if polished by the soft-hued light playing over her cheeks, and her eyes like Doris’s are shiny with the pleasures of vicarious emotion, I’m barely a foot away.

Then standing here, swaying in the passageway as this multi-facility air-conditioned coach abruptly changes lanes to overtake something slow, I experience an overwhelming sense of incongruity and inconsequentiality, of the unlikeliness and unloveliness of everything, both within my head and without. Here, only inches away, I tell myself, is the woman who more than any other gave you the illusion of love, who made you believe, no, who systematically undertook to make you believe, that you had taken a wrong turning in life, as she put it — your marriage — and that all you need do to feel whole and happy again was to take matters into your own hands, reverse that decision: Be yourself, I remember her saying; as she was also capable of saying such things as honesty is the best policy and make love not war, and even, on our return that night from the hospital, despite a heavily bandaged jaw, that there was no point in crying over spilt milk, an expression which exists, remarkably enough, not only in English, but in Italian and French as well, and even, I believe, in Georges German, and is equally ridiculous in all of these languages, since what would one ever cry over, I demanded of her then, what would one cry over if not spilt milk? I wanted to hit her again for saying that. For the stupidity of saying that. Would you cry over milk if it hadn’t been spilt? No, it’s over spilt milk you cry, people have always cried. Nor does there need to be any point in it at all. Whoever suggested there need be any point in crying, I tell myself now. And sensing, with this sudden and atrocious awareness of incongruity, literally inches from this woman who fills my thoughts incessantly and to whom I have nothing to say, sensing that I am only seconds from that awful brink where I might try once again to drum some meaning into absurdity, to force a resolution that cannot be — with the back of my hand, I mean — I tear myself away to stumble forward almost to the front of the coach, where Vikram Griffiths is talking to the driver.

I stand by the front seat. There’s the huge curved windscreen, spattered with spray from the road, but gorgeously clear, clearer somehow than the air it pushes before it, or giving a greater illusion of clarity. And here, standing up front while we overtake a truck from Trieste carrying two great blocks of stone up to France in that constant sorting and resorting of things the race always seems to be involved in so that a million Chambersee Service Stations can be built all over the world and can all look exactly the same, I’m able to overhear Vikram wanting to know from the driver how much extra he would charge for taking us into central Strasbourg tonight and what’s the latest he’d be willing to pick us up on the way back, because having come all this way, Vikram laughs, appealing to that old male solidarity, we’re eager to see a bit of action, aren’t we, and if…

But I’m too agitated to hear this out. I butt in.

Vikram, about that meeting they want this evening …

When he turns to look at me, there’s surprise on his face, as there was surprise on his face when I suggested I might be the spy, and likewise that day I grabbed his clipboard and said, yes, of course I would come on his trip, of course I would lend my support.

You do realize it’s all been set up to dump you?

The driver is saying something and Vikram with his fingers in his sideburns laughs and says eleven’s okay but later would be better, and no, he won’t be leaving the dog in the coach. He takes the dog with him. Everywhere.

Dimitra’s in on it, I insist, and Colin and Georg and — and I said her name. But her surname. She’s in on it. They let you set up the trip because you’re the only one who believed in it, but now they’re going to vote that you’re not fit to represent us when we actually get there. Because you’re too unstable. And I said: I just want you to know that I’m on your side. I’ll vote for you.

Vikram fiddles in the pocket of his shabby tweed jacket. His dark eyes are bloodshot. You should have a swig of this, boyo, he says, producing the whisky flask. Because you look terrible.

I lifted the bottle to my mouth. I took an extremely long slug, and exactly as I did so a truck went past and the address of the company written on the container this truck was carrying was Stuttgart, Widenmayerstrasse, 45.

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