Europa

CHAPTER SIX

I am lying on a narrow bed in an anonymous hotel room in the suburbs of Strasbourg, whether north south east or west I have no idea, nor interest, all I can see is that headlights pass at regular intervals stretching and flitting over wall and ceiling, their yellow glow softened by the synthetic mesh of the curtains, but with swift shards, as though of unpleasantly illuminating thoughts, where the material doesn’t pull to at the top. Attended by a slight rise and fall in the background swell of traffic noise, the intermittent brightness passes, a split second before the auditory peak, over a reproduction of something from Picasso’s blue period, a reproduction so flat in its printed melancholy, and so poorly framed in what must be extruded poly-something-or-other, it immediately makes you aware of all the other reproductions of famous paintings bought in bulk no doubt for all the other fifty or so rooms of this prefabricated, out-of-town hotel so suitable for accommodating large and unprosperous groups of coach travellers — pensioners, strikers, pilgrims — until the very subject, it occurs to me, of this reproduction hung between TV and bathroom in this room that could be any of fifty rooms in this hotel that could be any of a thousand hotels' has become, exquisitely and irretrievably, reproduction itself. This printed copy, I reflect, lying quietly in my bed, of a picture that by universal consent marks one of the supreme achievements of twentieth-century visual art is really none other than the epitome of reproduction, of reflected repeated printed-to-death sublimity, of modern myth turned motel chronicle, mass-produced and bought in bulk, as the meaning, I am now aware, of the lights that regularly slide over its textureless surface, and of the constantly rising and falling drone of traffic noise outside, must be monotony pure and simple, people following each other along the same tracks at the same speed at the same distance in the same vehicles through the night, through the day. And I realize, suddenly I know, that the couple embracing in this blue, but intermittently green landscape — beachscape — are not that intense blue couple the fabled Pablo Picasso painted, or sought to paint, or imagined he was painting, but another. They’re another. They look exactly the same, I tell myself, but they’re a different couple, both of whom are seeking to recapture, this must be the explanation, with no more than a stranger perhaps, or with a familiar person become a stranger, something they once felt elsewhere and with someone else, or with the same person before they became someone else. And watching them embrace there as the headlights pass again and again, each headlight different but each with the same effect, like the passing seconds, the passing hours, watching them locked in that embrace, the sea entirely flat behind them, you can see these two are at the thousandth attempt now, I mean at recapturing whatever it was, they’re years, if not decades on, so that it’s not really a conscious seeking they’re engaged in any more, they’re not expecting to recapture anything, but more a sort of mysterious imposition, this clasping, this rehearsal of intimacy, this placing of cheek against cheek, a blue and green ceremony they have forgotten the origins of, like the ceremonies Plutarch mentioned in Quaestiones Graecae and suggested were the most faithfully observed of all, the ones nobody could understand or explain to him any more.

The traffic is steady. The lights stretch and flit. It is past one 0’clock in this cheap Strasbourg hotel and for the last ten minutes, lying in just boxer shorts on this narrow bed staring at a poor reproduction of a sentimental painting by a lecherous Spaniard, I have been quietly laughing my head off.

I am laughing my head off because I am to be the Foreign Language Lectors’ Official Spokesman at the European Parliament tomorrow, and I am to address an assembly of the European Petitions Committee in English and another of Italian Euro MPs in Italian.

How it came about that these tasks were entrusted to me, how it came about that I, so incongruously, accepted this trust, and above all how it came about that I agreed to do so under her technical guidance and supervision, to the extent that I have already talked to her for several minutes about the exact composition and competence of the Petitions Committee and the political orientation of the dozen or so Italian Euro MPs who RSVPed our invitation to attend a meeting intended to voice our grievances to an audience who might see some small advantage in currying our favour — since EC nationals can now vote for Euro MPs in their adoptive countries — these are things that I am not sure I can fully explain, though they may have to do with the whisky I shared with Vikram Griffiths at the front of the coach as we drove across Switzerland, the exhilaration of finding a hand on my knee as the matter was discussed over dinner, my quotation, cruel but apropos, of Benjamin Constant, when Barnaby Hilson offered his own candidature as representative in a falsely self-deprecating attempt to resolve the deadlock between Dimitra and Vikram, and, last but by no means, as they say, least, my belated awareness, heightened perhaps by a disastrous phone conversation with my daughter, that I am once again on the edge of a tremendous psychological abyss, that the next two days, and in particular, the fourth of the fifth (though I have been unable to find the number 45 anywhere in my room), could prove fatal if I do not somehow break out of the suffocating isolation which brought me within an inch of striking the woman I love, I hate, in a crowded coach beneath the bearded smile and dubbed pieties of an American actor I have always loathed, thinking back on an incident of two years before that involved the sexual preferences of a man who appreciated that the only way to unite Europe was to run backwards and forwards across it with an army.

You should have a slug of this, boyo, Vikram Griffiths said, turning from trying to bribe the driver to take us into town in the evening of his own initiative without referring the time and expense to the coach company. You look terrible, he said, What’s up? So, lying with the instinctive fluency that years of betrayal engender (and if one is lying one owes it to the world to do it well), I said the combination of the coach’s movement and trying to watch Robin Williams seize the day had given me the most atrocious headache, and I told Vikram Griffiths, this feckless fragment of Empire (as he himself once described himself), this genius of broken marriages, bizarre manners and interminable good causes, this man who came to my house just once, his dog only a puppy then, and frightened my wife with his life story — told him that I had come to the front of the coach to speak to him because I had heard, in the Chambersee Service Station, Dimitra and Georg and her agreeing that he, Vikram, would have to be replaced, because incapable of putting a presentable face, I said (partly inventing, partly quoting), to our claims; he would make us look ridiculous, I said they had said, with his unkempt baldness, his bushy sideburns and wild gestures. Nobody sensible had sideburns like that, they said. Nobody drank like that! And of course I would have passed these observations on to him a half an hour earlier, I explained, I lied, when he spoke to me at my seat, except that the appalling Doris Rohr had been beside me then, Doris Rohr who inevitably, in her constant dread that we would overstep the mark, was doubtless on their (Dimitra’s) side and would have passed on my remarks (to him) to them. But the long and the short of the matter was, I insisted (partly inventing, partly not), that they were frantic; they were frantic, I said (frantic myself), and in particular they were frantic because he had started drinking in the Chambersee Service Station at only ten-thirty in the morning and getting the students to drink too, and nobody knew, I said they’d said, what state he would be in tomorrow, and people were rumouring that it had to do with the custody battle over his child, his son, which he had engaged in, they said, because of his ex-wife’s, first ex-wife’s worsening depressive state, but was nevertheless losing, partly because of his difficult separation from his second wife, which the court could hardly ignore, and so they felt it important, I finished, in a state of total self-loathing, staring past Vikram’s mottled baldness at the great sweep of windscreen collecting filth and spray from a French truck ahead, important to replace him with someone more apparently reasonable, someone who would guarantee respectability for our cause.

Then to his fair question, after a slug from his flask, why was I on his side over this matter, I who had never shown any interest in any side in this affair, let alone his, I who had even been heard to speak of wanting to be fired, I replied, no doubt rather distractedly, since actually I wasn’t thinking about the lectors’ grievance or our mission to Europe or Vikram Griffiths at all, nothing could have been further from my mind, but simply and miserably and exclusively about her and about Napoleon and the taste of his cunty triumph (so that if I was talking now, and in detail, about the lectors’ crisis and above all about the problem of our proper representation it was only in the forlorn hope that this would help me to stop thinking about what I couldn’t help but think about, stop myself from doing something irremediable, as if I hadn’t already done so much that is irremediable, surely that is the problem, that is why I am behaving in this quite absurd fashion, speaking so urgently of a subject that does not even minimally interest me) — yes, to his fair question, vis-a-vis my suspect allegiance, I replied that I hated it when people stabbed other people in the back. Yes, I hated that, I said, and at the same time was telling myself: You have done so much that is irremediable, and here you are now trying to stop yourself doing something else. Irremediable. That’s simple enough, surely. Even reasonable. Then the fact was, I said, because it seemed important to go on speaking, that I liked the way he,Vikram, treated the whole thing as a battle. Yes, he was willing to get his hands dirty, I said, at random, he didn’t whine, I invented, about rights as everybody else did, he didn’t believe that we really deserved the salary and conditions of work we were demanding, no, he just used all these complicated laws about Europe to see if they could be manipulated in our favour in the particular dire situation we were in back at the University. Quite irremediable, I told myself, remembering the blood at the corner of her mouth. Which was more honest, I said, taking a third and very long slug from his whisky flask. Yes, altogether he was more honest. And what I meant now was more honest than her, who always used to try to explain everything she did in terms of human rights and the need for experience and discovery of her inner being and her vraie sympathie pour les autres and never never never in terms of appetite and selfishness and stupidity. Since quite plainly, I told myself, the reason she doesn’t want Vikram to be representative has nothing to do with his ability or presentability or anything of the kind, and everything to do with her eagerness to grab the job herself as part of the PR operation involved in furthering her, as she sees it, career in Europe, which I too would have been invited to share in, I can’t help thinking, if only I hadn’t lost control of myself, as she always put it. You lost control, I told myself, as Vikram’s dog found something to lick from the side of my shoe. You did things that were irremediable. The dog licked earnestly. Someone must have spilt something on my shoe. Yes, we could have gone away to Brussels together. I can see that now. I watched the dog’s pink tongue against the leather of my shoe. And I could hear her saying the words: Let’s go away to Brussels, Jerry Let’s go away. Except that you lost control of yourself.

Vikram Griffiths was braced between two front seats when I said what I said. He had both hands raised to grip the luggage rack, coalie sideburns bristling and eyes narrow behind the cheap lenses he goes back to the UK for, to Cardiff, to get on the National Health (as she always went back to Rheims to have her teeth fixed, and as Georg, it finally came out, goes regularly to Germany for the drugs the mother of his child needs, driving through Verona on the way). And seeing how greasy those NHS lenses were, and how red and watery and unhealthy Vikram’s poor eyes behind them, as his dog’s eyes likewise are red-rimmed and unhealthy, it vaguely crossed my mind, so far as anything could get across that minefield at such a moment, that my colleague would be upset by what I had just said — that he didn’t believe we deserved what we were asking — he would see it as an outrageous accusation, a cynical assault on his sincerity, his credentials — wasn’t he the champion of modern left-wing holier-than-thou (except where women were concerned) political thought? Yes, I told myself, you have spoken out of turn, carelessly, as you so often do, you have offended a man whose whisky you are drinking and who is clearly eager to make friends with you, in the end a charming man, a man who has overcome all kinds of disadvantages, who is dealing with all kinds of personal problems, you have insulted him blindly, at random, merely in order to drag your mind away from the vomit it will not be dragged from. You have offended him, I told myself, and now Vikram Griffiths is going to be outraged, or cold, or upset, as I have seen him be on other occasions. Of course he believes we deserve what werre asking for. Of course he believes in Europe. And instead he laughed, Vikram Griffiths laughed, happily and throatily, and clapped me on the shoulder and he said dead fucking right, if fucking Europe decided against us he would never mention fucking Europe again, he couldn’t give a tinker’s fucking shite for a United Europe run by the German fucking Bundesbank who raised and lowered their interest rates exactly as it suited them, plunging the currency markets into turmoil. Rather the Raj, he laughed, though he had never been south of Rome himself, of course. The German lectors were the only ones who never never wanted to strike, he said, they always toed the line, always, they had such a respect for authority, for law and order; Doris Rohr, for example, he said, was, he knew, doing library work for her professor despite the strike, she was putting in her regular hours, despite the strike, so she could claim the salary she didn’t need. He put two fingers to his nostrils and sucked at his catarrh. Krauts were like that. No, he wouldn’t be at all surprised, Vikram Griffiths said, and clearly he was half-drunk and they were right about his not being presentable, they were right, he wouldn’t be at all surprised if Doris wasn’t the spy, unless it was Heike the Dike, the Austrian lectress, or lecheress, though you had to take your hat off to dikes, he laughed, clapping me on the shoulder a second time, if only in the hope they’d let you watch someday, he giggled, though he couldn’t particularly care for the idea of seeing Professoressa Bertelli on the job, despite her seminal text on Sappho — ha ha — and no, the only thing about our job, boyo, he said, since we’re speaking of jobs, he laughed, and he was rubbing the whisky flask beside his mouth now in much the same way children will speak behind a hand so that everybody can see they've got a secret to tell, the only thing that made our cause just, as he saw it, though one could never say this out loud, was, why should we be fire-able when others, the Italian professors, were not, and why should people who did even less than we did get paid even more? We were the only ones in the faculty who did any teaching at all, Vikram Griffiths said, the only ones with any sense of duty. He himself worked far longer and far harder and far better and far more generously than any of the professors. He loved teaching, he said. He actually cared about his students' welfare. Though that was more than could be said for Doris Rohr, or Colin Mattheson, if we were going to call a spade a spade, he said. Anyway, it was a fucking battle, he finished. I was dead fucking right about that. To the death. If they wanted to fire Vikram Griffiths they’d have to walk over his dead fucking dusky body first. And Daffy’s too, right? He slipped a shabby shoe beneath the animal’s rump and lifted it up till it yowled. Dafydd ap Gwilym, renowned for his lyricism.

Vikram Griffiths laughed as he spoke behind his whisky flask and the coach lurched to avoid some miserable humpy machine from backward Eastern Europe where they never learnt to build cars the way we did, and clutching at a seat-back for balance as the driver switched lanes, finger-nails slipping on the synthetic red velvet that looks so plush, that promises such luxury, the way all that is modern promises such luxury, invites such complacence, such sitting back in this world of paved roads and metalled directions, gleaming surfaces, reclinable seats, this world where everything is ready for us, technically, to be happy, I was completely disorientated, as I am so again now in this narrow bed in this suburban hotel, watching the light flit over and over Picasso’s lovers, completely and utterly disorientated, thinking of the important responsibilities I have accepted for tomorrow; and which somebody like myself should never have accepted, thinking of all the half-truths I shall have to tell if I am to do my job well, if I am to be loyal to my feckless colleagues (and really only the feckless attract my loyalty), and thinking once again of the way Vikram Griffiths so blatantly sought to establish a complicity with me, a complicity directed against Colin Mattheson, who he knows is my present drinking companion, by making this disparaging remark about Colin's not caring for his students. For Christ’s sake! As if I cared for mine! And what amazes me, going back now over this conversation with my drunken but endearing colleague, Welsh of Indian extraction, as I seem to be condemned to going over and over all my conversations, so that if I’m not engaging in a conversation you can be sure that I am going over one and generally wishing I hadn’t engaged in it — what amazes me is how I have never been able to be either an earnest supporter of good causes, or a manipulator, as Vikram Griffiths is somehow both, never an idealist and never a pragmatist, as she is somehow both, so idealistic in her love and so pragmatic in its distribution, but always as it were almost an idealist, yet not quite ingenuous enough, almost a pragmatist, yet too romantic, too scared perhaps, until at some point I fell into this role of the eternally rancorous detractor, but dreaming of some unimaginable commitment, some unimaginable propriety, which I almost achieved with her, but never properly believed in, until the day she made it impossible.

Then somewhere beyond Lucerne, having finished the whisky and feeling I wouldn’t last much longer on my feet and with the driver complaining to Vikram over the radio, now grinding out accordion-accompanied love, in German, that somebody somewhere was smoking, definitely smoking, and if they didn’t stop, he personally, the driver, would stop the coach and throw them off, because while his arm might be twisted into accepting a dog he would never let people impregnate his nice upholstery with smoke, he hated smoke, I said I would go and sort the matter out. I blundered back along the aisle, banging against the seats, remembering, incongruously, as I turned my head away from her, holding my breath against her perfume, how even on that trip to Rheims which remains for me, as Olympia for the Greeks, the very image of happiness (something past and distant and unforgettable), even on that trip she remembered to visit her childhood dentist for a filling she felt she had lost a piece of. Perhaps I had dislodged it with my fierce tongue, she sighed. She laughed. So that in the end I was granted two more days of paradise to lose because the man decided she needed a root canal.

At the back it was Colin, the tottie-man, smoking, holding a cigarette between finger and thumb, the coal turned inward to his palm, as if this could ever hide the smoke drifting out. I told him of the driver’s threat, at which, enjoying the opportunity to impress with childish transgression, for this is what groups do to people, and above all what they do to people like Colin, who are simply begging for some formal situation in which transgression will be visible, he scuttled to the stairwell leading down to the door just in front of Doris Rohr’s seat — the driver wouldn’t be able to see him there, he said, as if it was a question of seeing — and poking his head round grey-trousered legs, for Barnaby Hilson was now sitting next to Doris Rohr, earnestly discussing the merits of the Dead Poets, he took a pantomime drag with pouting moustache and said, Suck. Di’n’t I say suck was anuvver of me fav’rite words!

While everybody was laughing at this, I took his place, which is to say I took my own place, because it was number 45 again, as I couldn’t help noticing on the oval plastic tag sunk into the luxury red velvet which must not be impregnated with smoke, and exactly as I did so and remembered once again, as if I had ever forgotten, my age and her phone code and my address, I heard Barnaby Hilson, who is Irish and a writer, in his late twenties, objecting to Doris Rohr, who’d felt that the nice boy’s suicide was unnecessary that the film was so good precisely because the boy does die, that is, it was a good film because the director had allowed something to happen, he hadn’t shunned the obvious fact that seizing the day was dangerous. Aspirations are dangerous, I heard Barnaby Hilson say, as I sat down on seat 45, with no other aspiration, it occurred to me, than to get through somehow. To get through what? Just through, I shall get through, I keep telling myself, I must get through, what else can I do but get through, however unlikely that sometimes seems? Whereas Barnaby Hilson of course is a budding novelist, Irish, ambitious, Catholic, young, and he likes to hint at successes by complaining about low publication advances and literary mafias in imperialist London, and the subtext of all his conversation, even this debatable remark on the supposedly courageous narrative structure of a box-office blockbuster, is that he, Barnaby Hilson, a clever, clean-shaven boy from a middle-class family in County Cork, has a real vocation; for him the job of foreign language teacher at the quite atrocious University of Milan is a mere, though always properly discharged (because he has a sense of self-respect), sideline, to pay his way, while the rest of us are really rather sad cases with nothing to do but mark time and cling to our salaries; and my problem dealing with Barnaby Hilson, who has had one novel published in Ireland and more recently one in paperback original in imperialist London, is that I couldn’t agree more, but I hate him for saying it, for reminding me of it, as if I needed reminding. So that when, later on, I quoted Benjamin Constant at Barnaby Hilson across the huge table of one of those irksomely German stube-style restaurants with their long plain scrubbed wooden tischen where strangers are supposed to sit elbow to elbow under hunting trophies and be jolly together, as if belonging to the human race meant we had anything in common — when I quoted Benjamin Constant to Barnaby Hilson, who was offering himself as, as he put it, a compromise candidate in a delicate situation, I did so entirely out of envy and rancour and not with any desire whatsoever to become the foreign lectors’ representative to the European Parliament.

And because I thought she might recognize the book I had got it from.

I sat down in seat 45, wondering if the powers that be, like the script-writer of Dead Poets, would have the wisdom to allow something to happen on this otherwise preposterous and preposterously dull trip, and on my left this time, as I lowered myself on to the big back seat of this powerful modern coach crossing the Confederation of Switzerland, on my left was a new girl with a plaster-cast on her ankle who was deep in conversation with Georg on her other side, and what she was saying, very earnestly, as I tuned out of Barnaby Hilson’s conversation and into hers, was that she didn’t expect she would ever live to be forty. Georg smiled his mature man’s smile and asked her why, and he winked at me across the girl as I sat down wishing I hadn’t drunk Vikram s whisky, or that there had been more of it. These girls are so young, Georg’s wink said, while she — and since I can’t remember her name, can’t remember whether she even told me her name, I’m going to call her Plaster-cast-tottie, as if I was speaking of a conquest to Colin, because that kind of vulgarity cheers me up, if only by reminding me how callous and downmarket I can be — yes, Georg winked while Plaster-cast-tottie, or perhaps just Plottie, explained that she would never get to forty because there were so many diseases and wars and things. Georg smiled again and admitted he was forty-three.

Colin was stubbing his cigarette on the fire extinguisher and with his curling lip beneath thin moustache he asks, What diseases? Wass the problem, luv?

AIDS, she says demurely.

Oh, AIDS, Colin says, climbing out of the stairs, ‘ow’s a nice girl like you supposed to get fuckin’ AIDS, fuckin’ Ada? and everybody laughs. Or perhaps around Italians one should say fuckin’ Aida, he adds. And everybody laughs again. Nicoletta in the seat in front laughs and Maura beside her laughs and Georg laughs and says, avuncular, in Italian, to the girl beside him, between us, If Colin hasn’t got AIDS it can’t be that ubiquitous, can it?

The girl laughs.

Who says he hasn’t got it? I suddenly join in. It’s the whisky speaking. And I add, in English: AIDS aids for the man who’s got everything, which is the kind of joke I crack when we’re talking tottie over billiards.

Oh speak for y’fuckin’ self, Colin says, swaying in the aisle. Oh thank you very much, Mr Jeremiah. And for stealing my seat, cunt. He winks and taps his nose. Anuwer fav’rite word.

All the girls laugh, because people in groups do laugh at this kind of thing; sometimes it seems there is nothing that people in groups will not laugh at, or rather giggle about, as on other occasions it seems there is nothing people in groups will not do to other people in smaller groups or no groups at all, and Plaster-cast-tottie, who I’ve now noticed has a low-cut sweater and generous breasts though on the kind of stocky body that could only make itself desirable between say thirteen and thirty, Plaster-cast-tottie says, unasked, that she doesn’t believe in God, but she doesn’t disbelieve, she is searching, Plottie says. This girl is very earnest, but very flirty too, with a sort of bold, glassy stare that demands to be exchanged. Perhaps she knows that her attractions are only the attractions of youth. Perhaps she knows she has to use them now. There is something very glassy and very bold and very hyper about Plaster-cast-tottie’s stare and she keeps pushing a page-boy fringe from her eyes. So then I ask her, because suddenly it seems I'm talking to people, I'm talking to everybody, I've given up all hope of hiding away in books I don’t want to read, i've given up all hope of cultivating aloofness and dignity, I ask Plottie, what does she mean, she is searching? What does it mean when people say they are searching? Where do they look, how do they look, what do they actually do when they are searching?

Nicoletta appears from above the seat-back in front and smiles at me from her big eyes and the girl is faintly reproachful, as if to ask why I have neglected her so long, staying at the front talking to Dottor Griffiths and then not even acknowledging her a moment ago when I came back and flopped into my seat. As if there were no intimacy between us. I smile back, and I’m aware that I like this girl who cocks her head to one side and smiles reproachfully, as though at a puppy that’s misbehaved, I like her because she is so different from her, and at the same time Plaster-cast-tottie is telling me-she has a blue bead necklace she is winding round a finger- that what she is searching for is something that will give her an equilibrio interiore. She’s twenty-one and she still hasn’t achieved an equilibrio interiore, she says, and this time Georg lets a very broad smile cross his face.

You bastard kraut, Colin shouts. I saw that smirk. Don’t laugh at the little girl as if you were so fuckin’ superior. An equilibrio interiore is fuckin’ important, Colin says, standing in the middle of the back passageway right in front of us, enjoying his theatrical belligerence.

Georg only smiles the more.

Unwisely, I throw in, I'm forty-five and I've never achieved an equilibrio interiore.

Colin says: Oh, aren’t we sturm und drang! Not bad, eh, he adds, elbowing the attractive Monica of the slim jeans and the cousin who wants ex-boy-friends to feel sorry for her, Not a bad range of cultural reference, what eh? Very Euraufait, no? Euraufait. J for joke. He shakes his head. Shove up a bit, love, this sod has stolen the seat I stole from him.

Colin sits on Monica’s legs even before she has a chance to move and starts to explain his Euraufait joke for the benefit of the young Italians who haven’t understood, while I’m thinking, Why can’t you be like Colin? Would you like to be like Colin? What on earth do the girls think of him? Beating someone across the face is irremediable, I tell myself. Much worse than anything Colin does. Until with a sudden determination to participate at all costs, to escape at all costs the Furies pressing, their faces against the wet coach windows where hills are massing again now under a heavy shower surreal with doodlings of afternoon neon, I ask, Hands up those who have achieved an equilibrio interiore, come on, hands up! And of all those sitting in the back two rows, to wit Margherita in the extreme left corner, Georg, Plaster-cast-tottie, silent, pouty Veronica on my right, Graziano, Monica, Nicoletta and Maura, and Colin on Monica’s knees, of all these only Graziano and Nicoletta half put up their hands.

Explain, I say, determined now not to be left alone with myself for one more minute of this trip, determined to talk, to be the centre of attention — so that now lying here on my narrow bed in this Strasbourg suburb, whether to north or south or east or west I neither know nor care, it occurs to me that this must have been the moment when I consciously changed plan, or rather became conscious of having unconsciously changed plan, having opted in a complete and bizarre swing of temperament, not for silent reserve, but for a virtuoso performance. From now on you will perform nonstop, I told myself. For the next forty-eight hours and with the help of a little whisky perhaps and enormous reserves of nervous energy you will be deeply ironic and sparklingly witty, and she will see you being brilliant and crackling like a firework and she will imagine that you have got over her entirely and she will be intensely jealous of the young women you’re talking to and will deeply regret…

Explain, I demand.

Graziano, in the second seat from the back on the left-hand side, has an open, boyish face whose patchy unshavenness suggests how young he is. He shrugs his shoulders and smiles shyly Cost, he says.

But you feel you have achieved an equilibrio interiore?

He smiles.

Georg says smoothly, Leave off, Jerry.

I just want him to explain how he does it, I said. With the best will in the world, I asked the boy, What do you do? I mean, how do you fill the time? Let’s see if that gives us the clue.

Wanking, Colin suggests.

Only Plaster-cast-tottie laughs. That gave a naughty little girl away, didn’t it? Colin says. Don’t we know a lot of naughty words?

Colin! Georg says. For Christ’s sake!

So then Graziano tells us that he plays the guitar, classical guitar and folk songs, that he attends meetings of Rifondazione Comunista and delivers leaflets for them because he believes they’re the only political party who seriously want to help poor people. He reads a lot for his exams and helps his father on their grandfather’s smallholding near Lodi which they work Saturdays and Sundays and sometimes in the evenings in summer. They grow salad greens and aubergines and peppers.

Rifondazione Comunista! Maura, beside Nicoletta, protests, and it’s the first thing she’s said that I’ve registered. How can you support Rifondazione Comunista when it’s them prevented the Left coming to power?

But I suggest we leave aside the politics. The last thing we need is an argument about politics. No, what we want to establish, I say, is whether there is anything profoundly similar to each other and different from ourselves in the lives of those claiming to have achieved an equilibrio interiore. Something that might indicate how the rest of us can get there. No trouble with women? I ask Graziano.

The unshaven boy smiles, embarrassed, pouts, shrugs.

Have you got a girl-friend? Monica asks. Squeezed next to her, Colin makes a face.

Graziano says he goes out with two or three girls now and then, on and off, but he hasn’t got a girl-friend.

Blessed state, I tell him, but Plottie says why, she is unhappy because she hasn’t got a boy-friend, or rather because the boyfriend she had was an idiota.

Exactly.

And Colin says, What’s this with the indefinite article in front of boy-friend/girl-friend? The singular crap. When the girls smile, he says in his most Brummie Italian, False presumption of binary opposition.

Georg says: We can’t all be as emancipated as you, Colin. Which is such a beautiful piece of hypocrisy, coming from Georg. He turns to the girls and is smiling especially warmly, I’ve noticed, at the small red-head Veronica with the swollen lips, though in a very quiet and correct way. Colin is avant-garde, he says, forerunner of the new man.

When Georg smiles his face takes on such an expression of wry wisdom, of one who’s been there and come back, one who knows what he knows; it’s as if in his case the whole of self had been transmuted into the Brahminic bird, not a small part of one’s identity observing the whole, but the whole observing a mere shadow, an efficient routine put on for his own amusement, and it occurs to me now that when he sent those flowers, when he made those phone-calls and insisted so much, and later when he explained to her how the mother of his child suffered from an incurable disease, which she then explained to me as if this somehow made what she had done not only perfectly reasonable but generous, towards a man in a difficult predicament, her vraie sympathie pour les autres, yes, it occurs to me that when he did all these things, which he has done, I happen to know, with scores of women: the seduction, the sad story that excuses him from any involvement, and then the gift, in this case The Age of the Courtesan with the neat calligraphy inside to write down an expression he imperfectly remembered from her, or more likely she imperfectly remembered from me, The taste of triumph, it was all a game to Georg, or rather it was pure form in which he had no investment at all. Or there was investment, there is, but only in the form, the motions, the image of himself he projects, and not in whoever happens to be the object of those formal motions on any particular occasion. Which may be why he is so convincing. Certainly little Veronica is warming to him, doubtless thinking how mature he is. And he is. And the galling thing for me, one of the many galling things for me, the many many galling things, is that even now, even after marriage and separation and eighteen months’ shiftless shagging around, or amour amok as Colin always says, even now I can’t behave like this, like Georg, with the tottie I meet, I can’t observe the traditional formulae, I can’t tell my sad story to advantage. And somehow this makes me less, rather than more convincing. You are less convincing than everybody else, I tell myself. For example, everybody thinks now, as I ask Graziano these questions, that I am playing, I am teasing, I am being cruel. But I am not playing. I am not teasing. And I am not being cruel. I really do want to know how someone can achieve an equilibrio interiore. Then everybody imagines, when I can’t become heated about my rights, about my salary, when I can’t undertake a battle for the job that puts bread in my mouth, that I am merely flippant. Or cynical. But I am not flippant. Or cynical. I’m lost.

Your breath smells of whisky, Plaster-cast-tottie says. She looks me in the eyes, pushing her page-boy fringe from her forehead. She stares glassily at me from too close, but with youth and sex written all over her.

It must be because I drank some whisky

Got any for us? she asks. She’s speaking Italian and she has that endearing boldness of people determined to be adults for the first time, more adults than an adult, which is to say adolescent. So I say, Non c’é piú — All gone — in the voice parents use with their tiny children.

Antipatico, she objects.

Oh, if the naughty girl likes whisky we can buy her some this evening, Colin says. Whisky is another favourite word.

And you? I ask Nicoletta, the other possessor of an equilibrio interiore. Tell us. Is Rifondazione Comunista the key?

Or have you got a dog? Colin asks.

Nicoletta isn’t flustered. She’s kneeling on her seat, but turning this way and that, a slim young body, though sadly flat-chested, so that if, it occurs to me with fatal inappropriateness, if I should score tonight with Nicoletta, I shall have to say that I like tiny breasts, love them, as I did once with a girl who became known as Psycho-tottie who was the first I had, or had me, after the disaster, by which I suppose I mean the Napoleonic episode. Yes, I swore to Psycho-tottie that I adored breasts that were no more than a sort of sad fried-egg with nipples, but she knew it wasn’t true, and I called her Psycho-tottie, telling Colin about her, because of a way she had of bursting into tears in the middle of love-making, something that I presumed had to do with a previous lover, but I felt it wiser not to enquire. The last thing you want, I told myself as she cried, is a story like your own.

I’m not interested in politics, Nicoletta says, though I do think it’s important to have ideals.

You betcha, Colin says.

Georg asks, Like?

Nicoletta puts the tip of a thumb between her teeth, smiles. She is such a little girl, but apparently so sensible, so genuine, with an imminent, immanent, motherliness about her.

Well, things like this trip, she says. Helping people in need, people who are being treated badly.

Dead right! Colin applauds but at the same time I feel warm breath against my ear, and Plaster-cast-tottie is whispering: Niki fancies you, did you know that? She fancies you. Though later it would be her, Plottie, who put her hand on my knee under the wooden table of the stube-style restaurant after I quoted Benjamin Constant in response to the sickening false modesty of Barnaby Hilson’s self-candidature to the position of lectors’ representative to the European Parliament: The mania of almost all men, I quoted, later on in the evening, leaning across the scrubbed top of the stube tisch — and it was my first contribution to a long discussion — The mania of almost all men is to appear greater than they are; the mania of all writers is to appear to be men of State. There was a short silence of incomprehension, before I added, since she clearly hadn’t recognized it, Benjamin Constant, De I’esprit de conquéte et de l'usurpation. Vikram Griffiths said in a loud Welsh voice, What if I propose our Jeremy as a candidate? and at the very same moment Plottie slipped her hand on to my knee and squeezed, definitely squeezed, but I was merely mortified to see that there was still no sign of recognition, or even gratitude, on her face.

CHAPTER SEVEN

It occurs to me now that memories act on me the way alcohol does, they excite and depress me, they inflame me, so that after all the talk in the coach about how only a sense of acting for a good cause could lead you to an equilibrio interiore, and after having to hear Georg agree with this and then add, along the same lines, that even when you weren’t acting for a good cause you should never act in contradiction of your beliefs, in a negative cause as it were, since moral contradiction led to mental turmoil, he said (speaking all the while in his measured pacato tones for the benefit of the young Veronica), and after remembering-, as inevitably I would then remember, how she insisted that on being invited to spend that first weekend in Várese she had not gone there in contradiction of all she had promised to me, no, since she had not gone there thinking to make love at all, but only, she said, to be close to someone the mother of whose child was in hospital, and hence the fact that they had made love in the end, she said, was just something natural, something that had arisen out of her vraie sympathie, the last piece, she said (and these were her very words), in that complex mosaic that friendship is, and thus not something she would, or could, ever feel guilty about — after all this, as I was saying, on the coach through the afternoon, this inflammatory cocktail of piety and platitudes spoken and remembered on top of a considerable amount of whisky, how could I be expected to conduct the phone-call I fell into shortly after checking into my room with anything like a clear head?

There was a mill of students around the reception desk when we climbed off the coach with Vikram Griffiths reading out names and handing out keys from an envelope while the sour proprietor, furious about the dog, tried to get people to be quiet enough for him to speak on the phone. Never seen a more tottie-rich environment, Colin laughed, and he had Monica’s bag over his shoulder and another girl’s too, because a gentleman would never allow a young lady to carry her luggage, he said, and he insisted on delivering the bags right to their rooms: I shall not let a lady carry a bag in my presence, he announced, while both girls were fighting, pretending to fight, to grab their things off him and he was shoving his way through the others with one pink and one neon-green backpack held high above his head, when Vikram called out my name, then called it again when apparently I hadn’t answered the first time, and he told me I was to share room 119 with the Avvocato Malerba. We were the only two who hadn’t settled on a partner.

I took the key and walked down the linoleum corridor to this shamelessly anonymous room where I now lie disorientated, unable to sleep, on a narrow bed, as yellow headlights turn Picasso’s blue period to green and perhaps in the next room Mondrian’s Composition in Red, etc. to orange, etc., or a Van Gogh sunflower to cellophane, and the first thing I did, on getting in here, and this must have been perhaps seven o’clock in the evening, was to go to the phone and call my answering machine in Milan, which told me, in Italian, that I was out and that if I left a message I would phone myself back as soon as possible. Pressing the code on the beeper to retrieve any messages, I thought of the tiny tape whirring backwards and forwards on the small shelf in the narrow passageway of my minuscule apartment, stale and dark with the shutters down and all my nice books and pens and intimate odds and ends, recently replaced, in safe and shadowy order; and I thought how only twenty-four hours before I had been safe in that room, which was my room, and only mine, perhaps the first room that has been truly and exclusively mine in all my life. I had been safe and functional and had imagined myself cured, or almost, or at least convalescent, whereas now I knew that the contrary was true and that away from that neat and narrow retreat into order and limitation I was quite lost, completely without definition or identity, and that what lay ahead of me, until such time as I could return to my small apartment, was nothing but ever more bizarre strategies for avoiding the worst. A female voice announced, Hello, it’s me, and asked whether perhaps I was really at home but just not answering the phone, since it seemed too early in the morning, the voice said, for me to be up and out. No? Hadn’t I said I was never up before nine? With all I did in the evenings, ha ha? The voice left a message saying it would call back later, which, after a couple of beeps, it did, now leaving another message saying it only wanted to say how much it had enjoyed the evening before, thus confirming that this was Opera-tottie, whose peculiar urinating habit I have still to tell Colin about. There was a pause, followed by a nervous, calculated, adult woman’s laugh, generated in Monza, stored in my sitting room in Milan, heard, without interest, in Strasbourg, and she rang off. Then another voice announced name and time of day and said she had finished her thesis summary and would like to fix an appointment to bring it over to my flat for me to see, as I had suggested. Would Friday at five do? and this was a mature student who I was planning to lure into my tottie trap (Colinism).Then after another silence of beeps and scratches my daughter said: Daddy? Daddy, have you already gone? She was speaking English to please me, and since she never speaks English to anyone but myself, and then only rarely, her voice, in English, has a babyish, uncertain tone to it, an endearing childishness, so different from her adult, rather brash Italian, and she over-accents the ends of all the words: I was just calling to see iff you likedd yourr presentt, she said.

From along the corridor I could hear the girls refusing to let Colin bring the bags into their room and he protesting that he had never been anything but a gentleman. I phoned my daughter at once and got my wife’s voice from the kitchen phone over the throb of the dishwasher. The skylight was leaking again, she said. I asked to speak to Suzanne. It was pouring, my wife said. It had been pouring all day and the skylight was leaking. Then Suzanne came on the extension, where I could now pick up the gibberish of the television. Suzi, I said. My wife rang off, taking the dishwasher with her, and I said I was sorry I’d have to miss the birthday party. I had tried to get out of this business, but in the end I felt a certain obligation when everybody’s job was at stake, not just my own.

My daughter asked me had I read Black Spells Magic, and I said about half, and she asked what did I think, and still inflamed from all that had been said and remembered on the coach, and what’s more irritated with myself now for having lied about my motives for coming on- this trip, and not only for having lied about them, but for having heard in my own mouth precisely the kind of pieties I have no time for in others (a certain obligation!), I began to say, injudiciously, just as the Avvocato Malerba walked into the room with a far larger suitcase than anyone could possibly need for two nights, that although I was enjoying the book overall I found bits of it hard to take.

Don’t you think all her magic stuff is great though! my daughter said.

I said I had only got to the bit where their love-making in the lift emanates a power that puts all the stockbrokers’ computers on the blink.

Isn’t that brilliant! my daughter said. It’s a fantastic metaphor.

Of what exactly? I asked obtusely, and what I remember now, lying in this lurid, insomniac dark, is that although I was perfectly aware, at this point of the conversation, of the impending danger, aware I mean that I was perhaps about to argue with my daughter, or at least to disappoint her, almost the only person in the world I would rather not argue with or disappoint, I nevertheless, inflamed as I was, already knew that I would not be able to resist saying what I feel has to be said about books like this, perhaps because it sometimes seems that all that has happened to me, all that I have allowed to happen to me, has intimately to do with such books, or at least the mentality they are steeped in, which is of course exactly the mentality of the person who can pretend, on accepting an invitation to spend a weekend with a man who has bombarded her with flowers and phone-calls, that she is not going to his house to make love but only in order to add one final piece to the complex mosaic that friendship is. To wit Georg’s no doubt considerable cock. And twisting the receiver cord round my finger, I told myself, All her love for you was mere whorishness.

My daughter was saying, Obviously it’s a metaphor of how human emotions and sensations — I mean when two people make love like that — are stronger than electronics and money.

The Avvocato Malerba had now laid out three sober and, to my untrained eye, identical suits on the bed and was going through a pantomime of gestures to ask which wardrobe he could use when I objected to my daughter, who is eighteen tomorrow and hence at just that age where you begin not to know whether you should still be making allowances, that this was precisely the kind of comforting cliché it was so easy to sell to people, was it not? Didn’t she think, I went on to ask, trying to indicate to the Avvocato Malerba that he could have either of the wardrobes, or both, since I had no clothes worthy of hanging, unless with myself in them, didn’t she think that in the end this book was not unlike a narrative version of a Benetton advertising campaign, Hands Linked Around the World and such-like stultiloquence, United Colours of Good Conscience, etc., etc., while all the while the company, as here the author, sorry authoress, was sensibly pocketing the cash that came with a higher moral profile. Entirely inappropriately, I was furious. The Lira’s fallen fifty points against the Deutschmark today, I said. I want to see what love-making could reverse that.

You don’t approve because it’s lesbian sex, my daughter said, switching to her adult Italian. And I had offended her. Your daughter, I thought, your delightful daughter, Suzanne, has given you a book for your forty-fifth birthday and you are telling her it is terrible. Your daughter is trying to establish a new relationship with you after the period of hostility that inevitably followed your walking out on her mother and herself and then again the shocking stories she quite probably heard about you from her. She has given you a birthday present, something she did not do the previous year. She has called you in your flat, something she has done no more than two or three times in this whole period of separation, the norm being that it is you who call her, you who visit her, engaging in conversations of an almost palpable limpness and hostility. Your daughter, I thought, has given you a present and called you. She has left a message on your answering machine. In English. And what do you do? Rather than sharing, or at least tolerating, her enthusiasm for what is in the end no worse than another kitsch expression of present-day orthodoxies, you simply confirm what an offensive and irretrievably acrimonious person you are by judging the book according to standards perhaps exclusively your own and anyway entirely dependent on your own peculiar vision of the nature of contemporary decadence.

Why don’t we talk about it when I get back? I said. Hotel calls are expensive, I said, and I wondered, Did she have lesbian tendencies, or didn’t she? The Avvocato Malerba was selecting a shirt and tie.

All men are afraid of lesbians, my daughter laughed. Come on, Dad, loosen up, go with the flow. And she laughed again, rather mockingly. At which, instead of repeating that we should talk about this when we were together and could relax, I foolishly, on the line from Strasbourg, began to object that, quite the contrary, men were not afraid of lesbians at all, they were fascinated by lesbians. Lesbianism was the only aspect of the book that even remotely interested me, I told her. And this was the truth. But all the same, I insisted, as far as the doubtless imaginative scene in the lift was concerned, I just felt that such a prurient enlisting of fashionably transgressive multiracial pop eroticism to blow away the paper tiger of white male domination symbolized by the computer circuits of an evil stock-market could hardly represent the apex either of literary achievement or of intelligent political comment. Could it?

Was I right in imagining my daughter had begun some kind of relationship with her? How often had she been babysitting? — And how was it my wife could look on with such indifference while her daughter baby-sat for her husband’s ex-mistress? Was she deliberately encouraging the kind of relationship she thought would make me jealous?

I don’t understand you, Suzi said, and she asked, why did I have to talk in this pompous way? She didn’t understand at all. So that now, rigid on the bedspread while the Avvocato Malerba drew the curtains before removing his jacket and shirt, I recognized this as another of those increasingly frequent conversations where one feels that one must reconstruct the entire history of Western thought just to knock the undesirable parts down again, say absolutely everything in order to say anything at all. Which at the price I was no doubt paying to call suburban Milan from suburban Strasbourg, at hotel rates, would be imprudent to say the least. Such is the power of money over human relationships. And once again it occurred to me that one of the sources of immense uneasiness in my marriage had always been the growing preoccupation that both my wife and in a different way my daughter were, if not stupid, then hardly very intelligent No, they are not particularly intelligent, I told myself. They don’t discriminate. They don’t think. And the agony here is that one feels presumptuous and. judgemental in reaching such conclusions, in deciding that one’s wife and daughter are not particularly intelligent, yet on the other hand one cannot help but be aware of the evidence that comes constantly before one’s eyes. So that perhaps one of the reasons I fell so completely for her when I did was the illusion she managed to generate of being deeply wise and extremely intelligent. The illusion. Let’s talk when I get back, I said to my daughter.

She laughed. Switching back to English, she said, You always back down from an argument, don’t you, Daddy?

Happy birthday as of tomorrow, I managed, and finding, on getting the phone down, the Avvocato Malerba buttoning a white shirt over a grey hollow of chest hair, I asked him — I would pay the phone-bill of course, I said — if he knew what Nietzsche had once written down in his notebook as the most cogent argument against his own cherished notion of The Eternal Return, the eternal repetition of all things?

Determined to show off his English, which it occurs to me now might be a plausible reason for his having agreed to come on this trip — seventy-two hours of free English lessons — the Avvocato Malerba said he found Nietzsche unbearably presumptuous and judgemental. He actually used those two words, presumptuous and judgemental. The world would have been a better place, said the Avvocato Malerba, without people like Nietzsche, who had been criminally responsible, he said, for the rise of Nazism and Fascism. He preferred Spinoza himself. So there seemed no point in telling the Avvocato Malerba, or indeed any person who could prefer Spinoza to Nietzsche, that the most cogent argument against the notion of the eternal return, for Nietzsche, was the existence of his mother and sister.

But going over all this now on my narrow bed after the extraordinary farce of the stube supper and the brief conversation with her vis-a-vis the exact composition and competence of the European Parliament’s Petitions Committee, and then the absurd group walk in the wet night, arm-in-arm with the long-legged, sadly flat-chested Nicoletta in search of a late-night bar — going over this and struggling to get a grip on the day’s events, as I appear to be under some kind of obligation, vain as it is compelling, to get a grip on everything, which is to say on myself, I am struck by the question, How can I preserve my relationship with my daughter? How can I behave towards someone who would be deeply offended and hostile if I told her what I thought about almost any issue worthy of discussion, to whom, if I wish to keep the peace, I will always have to say things like, I enjoyed the book overall, but …, or, I really tried to get out of this trip, but … For years, I tell myself, tossing and turning in my bed — because I have never quite known what to do with my arms when I am trying to go to sleep, and particularly when I am trying and failing to go to sleep — for years you have sought the affections of your daughter, sought the heart of your daughter, as before for years you sought the heart and affections of your wife, only to be thwarted by your daughter’s taking offence at observations so reasonable as to be self-evident, as before it had been your wife who took offence at such observations, all perfectly reasonable and even, so far as you could see, self-evident. Where do people put their arms when they sleep? For years, I reflect, one curries the favour of a person, one feels the need for a relationship with that person, one feels that one will be a lesser person oneself if one doesn’t have that relationship, only to discover, in a trice as it were, that the chief obstacle to that relationship is the other person’s lack of intelligence and discrimination, only to see, from one day to the next it seems, and perhaps after years of frustration, the blindingly obvious fact that you have been so desperately contriving to ignore: this person is not particularly intelligent.

How should I behave towards my daughter, I ask myself? Shall I lie on my right side or my left? And more in general, I ask myself, how should I behave towards anybody when almost anybody would be offended if I honestly discussed with them almost anything I care about? Or on my stomach? Which is the opposite of the illusion she brought, of course. The illusion she brought was that everything could be said. Every tic and quirk. Every masturbatory impulse. Every passing opinion, however, extreme and unacceptable. The inebriation of total intimacy, that was what she brought, on the fourth floor of the Hotel Racine, where everything was clear, everything was said, everything was acceptable, in a rapture of total communion, until the first piety, the first lie, not more than a fortnight later, when she said that she did not wish to compromise the serenity of her young daughter in a new and perhaps risky menage, and then the entirely gratuitous revelation, not three months after that, of the simultaneous mosaic of friendship she had been laying down with another man, unmistakably, though never admittedly, my colleague Georg, right down to the cod-piece, the cock-piece, at the centre of that tasteless mosaic, out of vraie sympathie, she said, because he insisted so much, with flowers and phone-calls, and then worse still somehow, worse than all this, the unwillingness to retreat from what she had done in any way, the unwillingness to see it as shallow in any way, to regret having done it in any way, to regret having so gratuitously told me that she had done it, to regret having so gratuitously blown away the foundations of our illusion, my illusion, that intimacy, and worst of all, worse than everything else, my sudden awareness of her almost constant use of such expressions as Í haue made my choices in life, or Je suis allée jusqu’au fond, or Je n’y suis pas allee pour faire l'amour, or There's no point in crying over spilt milk, my sudden awareness, I mean, that she wasn’t wise at all, that I had been a complete, and utter fool ever to imagine her so, that I, a stupid man, had left my wife for another stupid woman, until the moment I shouted whore and hit her. Irremediably.

How can I discuss things with people if discussion inflames me, if discussion makes me violent? Or is violence the only proper response when you are right, for years and years you are right and others are so obstinately wrong? But then why do you imagine, I ask myself, pushing my hands under the pillow now — and if my wife, my daughter, my lover have anything in common it is that they have all asked this same question — why do you imagine that you are right and that everybody else is wrong? I can’t answer. Yet that is exactly what I do imagine. Wouldn’t it be madness to suppose one was wrong merely because others did not agree with you? Where would that lead? You believe what you believe, I told myself. There’s no way round that. Even if you have frequently acted blindly and foolishly. And lying on my back now with my arms on my chest in this narrow bed in this Strasbourg hotel that I am beginning rather to like, if for no other reason than its appropriate awfulness, it occurs to me that the only way for someone like me to behave is to wait for dumbshow situations like the hand on the knee from Plaster-cast-tottie, and to go for them.

The hand on my knee! I can still hear talking, laughter, glasses, distantly from the lobby, despite the protests of the proprietor, who was nevertheless ready, after our vain, drizzly search for a suburban night-spot, to sell us what Eurobooze he had (cognac, brandy, pernod, grappa — bottles of it — which people acquired quite wildly in infantile gestures of group bonhomie) before he drew his bar grille down and complained about the noise, as nations selling bombs like to complain about the noise when other nations explode them, as she complained when the love and dreams she nursed me on for so long came back to her in blows and ugly phone-calls. Yes, I can still hear talking from down the passageway through the thin prefabricated walls and the squeal of young girls' giggles and occasionally Vikram’s Welsh voice in Welsh song, or Colin shouting his favourite words, or a sort of fruity nervous guffawing that comes I suspect from the ambiguous Avvocato Malerba. So that most probably, if I wanted to, I tell myself, that hand, Plottie’s hand, could still be made to engage in something more than a caress of the knee — it’s only one o’clock, or thereabouts — I could still capitalize on that promised intimacy, or at least contact, with this strange girl. And the fact that I did nothing to capitalize on that caress under the table, indeed quite the opposite, discouraged, even spurned it, is, I suppose, reflecting on it now, here in this hotel room where I have just realized that I shall never really be able to talk to anybody about anything, both heartening and unnerving — heartening because it suggests that you are not on for absolutely anything, you are not totally a slave to that, to sex, in the way on occasion, very many occasions, you have been; and unnerving because it may well be that you acted as you did out of an incorrigible romanticism. You are an incorrigible romantic, I tell myself. How fascinating that those two words should have wed together in standard collocation. An incorrigible romantic. For sitting on the other side of me at the massive grosse tisch around which, to pre-empt any formally convened meeting of the lectors, Vikram Griffiths raised, over a sort of dumpling stew, since it turns out that Strasbourg is as much German as French, the pressing question of our representation to the official institutions of the European Parliament, thus muting the carefully prepared attack on him by conducting the affair in the presence of the students, who love Vikram and tend to equate him, and particularly his bushy sideburns and his drinking habits and his well advertised and injudicious private life, not to mention his embodiment of two ethnic minorities, with an idea of revolution dear to their innocent hearts — yes, sitting on my right side at that moment when the hand to my left reached across and firmly took my knee under the table was the ever more engaging Nicoletta, she of the flat breasts and equilibrio interiore, and of course it was she, Nicoletta, who later, in the fruitless search for a bar back in les banlieues when the coach driver had gone to bed and the group had lapsed into that sort of wilfully daredevil sentimentality that dictates that an evening cannot be allowed to end but must be made mythical in some bar or other under a tidal wave of alcohol, it was she who took my arm and invited me, for the air was a mist of dark drizzle, to share her umbrella, a gesture I immediately and excitedly compared, even equated, with that previous gesture — the hand on the knee — from young Plottie in the restaurant, to the extent that the thought, There must be something about me today, crossed my mind, Spoilt for choice I am, I told myself, Sneaky Niki indeed! — the kind of presumptions you have to laugh at later, you have to mock and poke fun at, for it wasn’t long after I had been drawn under the umbrella and then into a conversation which seemed to have to do with difficulties the dear girl was experiencing at home with her widowed mother, it wasn’t long before I began to realize that far from being a gesture of sexual complicity, this, of Nicoletta’s, this drawing me under her umbrella, was no more, no less, than a gesture of friendship! And decidedly not the kind of friendship whose mosaic would require the placing of my cock-piece in its centre. I had turned down Plottie’s brazen advance for friendship!

The German stube restaurant was perhaps the fourth restaurant our group of forty and more had tried after the coach driver abandoned us at the edge of a pedestrian area in heavy rain of the same weather pattern, no doubt, that was leaking through the skylight of what was once my home in the suburbs of northern Milan. Overwhelming a dozen quiet, Monday-evening clients, silently mulling over their chunks of boiled pork beneath the glazed stares of nobly stuffed stags and owls on wood-panelled walls, we were allowed to pull two great stube tischen together to accommodate us all, Dafydd the dog curling up on a seat to nibble at his hind parts, while Georg and Doris and Heike the Dike negotiated the cheapest group menu with a solid proprietress, many of the students being short of cash, and particularly so after it now transpired that in the brief space of our coach journey from Milan to Strasbourg the Lira had fallen not by fifty but by seventy points against the Deutschmark, and similarly against the French franc, and was still falling, indeed plummeting, on the so-called international markets, to wit New York and Tokyo, where it seemed, or so the Spanish lector Luis claimed to have heard on the hotel television, that people simply did not want to have anything to do with the Lira any more. And while Georg was negotiating with the proprietress in German, a language I once knew but have now forgotten, wilfully I sometimes think, Vikram Griffiths, infinitely more astute than I imagined, stood up as soon as everybody else had sat down and suggested that in the face of the present economic crisis the lectors could perhaps pay more for their meal in order to allow the students, who had so generously decided to lend their support to our cause, to pay less; we could fork out to ease the burden on them. That is, Vikram Griffiths suggested a redistribution of wealth, something which, lying as it does at the heart of the socialist ethos, and more in general at the core of what the Italians with technical piety and pious technicality like to refer to as consociativismo, the others in the group could hardly disagree with, though some wanted to, and in particular Colin, I felt, who is the tightest person with money I have ever known. And perhaps Doris Rohr. The lectors would pay half of the total between them, Vikram Griffiths suggested, and the students, of whom there were more than twice as many, would also pay half between them, meaning we would pay more than twice as much pro capita as them, Vikram Griffiths said, and he ordered ten jugs of the house wine and further suggested that before the food arrived we might as well resolve at once the pressing question of our representation at tomorrow’s important encounters, since he personally had no intention of wasting the latter part of the evening at a meeting. He was going out on the razzle. Devaluation or no devaluation. If they wanted to unfrock him, he laughed, let them do it now.

The silence that followed this supremely political manoeuvre confirmed the Indian Welshman’s cleverness, with the students clearly wondering what the trouble was, and what on earth ‘unfrock’ could mean, and those lectors who were against Griffiths finding themselves embarrassed to have to say so in front of students to whom he had just generously awarded the cheapest of meals. Then how could they speak against his drinking at precisely the moment they were so eagerly filling their glasses themselves? So it is, I thought, that one thinks all kinds of unpleasant things about a person, one denigrates that person in the urgent chatter of one’s mind, or in complicity with a third person or persons, one denigrates and wholly condemns a person and draws a certain satisfaction from having done so so comprehensively, but then hesitates to say what one thinks in public, and particularly in front of that person themselves, finding quite suddenly that one is, in some obscure way, ashamed of opinions one nevertheless still feels it perfectly legitimate to hold. One hesitates, for example, to say to one’s daughter, I think the problem here is one of your ignorance, or to one’s wife, I think the problem here is your terror in the face of change, in the face of life. Instead one stays silent and polite. Such is the nature of consociativismo, the sad glue that keeps couples and countries and coach parties together. Until the day you walk out or hit someone, or drop a bomb.

But for Dimitra, perhaps, that moment had come. Or was close. Insisting on her Greek Italian, she started to say that, no offence meant, but there were those who felt that his,Vikram Griffiths’, how could she put it, wildness — she tried to smile at the students she knew — might not be entirely appropriate for the kind of interlocutori we were likely to find at a major international organization and in particular at that legislative body that ultimately held the key to our long^running case against the Italian state. There was a noisy silence until the Avvocato Malerba now saw fit, as an outsider, he said, with a particular perspective to offer, to intervene, and having begun by saying that he himself thought it might be unwise of us to discuss these matters over dinner, rather than in more formal circumstances, he proceeded to analyse the legal weapons that the Community, as he insisted on calling it, as if there were but one community in the whole world, laid at our disposal. Like children admitted to the adults’ table for the first time, the students sat paying serious attention to the Avvocato Malerba of lean neck, dusty features and ponderous manners, as he took us through the niceties of that clause in the Treaty of Rome which forbids discrimination against citizens of other member states and posed the question how best such discrimination could be made to emerge for the kind of people we would find ourselves presenting our case to. The students sat listening, Plottie on my left and Nicoletta to my right, and then dozens of sensible and silly and pretty and plain girls under the dim stube light, faces concentrated, even devoted, as if any of what the Avvocato Malerba was saying could remotely matter to them, while Colin on the other hand, half-way down on the left-hand side, Colin to whom this matter matters enormously, since Colin has neither the inclination nor perhaps the capacity to engage in any serious work and counts greatly on his,gravy train and his adequate supply of fresh tottie, is rolling up small balls of baguette and flicking them insolently at the various girls he is interested in, who smile and look pained. And she of course has pulled out a pen and is taking notes. Upon which it occurs to me that she and the Avvocato Malerba are the only two people who have dressed up for this dinner. The only two people who have made that kind of effort. For beside his sober suit and tie, which I now realize has on its blue background that circle of yellow stars which symbolizes our European solidarity, twelve identical yellow nebulae encircling a void, she is wearing the tight black chiffon dress with black beading down into a pronounced cleavage which she liked to wear the two or three times we went to the theatre together, or the opera once, and beneath which I know she invariably has her black suspender gear with red trimmings that so excites her when she sees herself, ice-cold Martini in hand, in the full-length mirror of a hotel wardrobe, just as it excites her, she always said, to have her thick dark hair pulled up tight, as it is now pulled up very tight, with a great wooden pin through it that keeps the tension on her scalp all day, and as her slightly undersized bra, she said, kept her slightly oversized breasts forever in a state of slight tension, at once uncomfortable and exciting. And precisely as the Avvocato Malerba, pressed by Dimitra, explains that his point is that any presentation must approach the problem from two angles: on the one hand a genuine feeling of injustice, this for those Euro MPs who are not experts in the field but will respond emotively, and on the other a meticulously technical presentation of the legal nitty-gritty, for those on the Petitions Committee who would be only too ready to find the kind of flaw in our case that would save them from having to consider it seriously — precisely at this moment, when the Avvocato Malerba is trying to establish the strategy our representative must adopt and hence, by inference, the qualities he, or she, must have, I am seized, seeing that low-cut dress I know so well, by such a vision of love-making, such an immediate and overwhelming impression of skin and hair and perfume, such a meticulously technical sense of the adherence of underclothes to slightly heated flesh, the give of a bra undipped, flattened nipples plumping, and then the glassy pornographic reflection of all this in the mirror of the fake, or no, perhaps genuine, antique wardrobe on the fourth floor of the Hotel Racine, so inflamed by the smell of skin and sex, that I have to grab my glass and down, in one gulp, a very considerable quantity of very poor quality house wine, a gesture that has Nicoletta turning to me in concern, while Dimitra predictably interrupts the Avvocato Malerba to say that all things considered she is not convinced that Vikram Griffiths is really the best person for either of these modes of presentation. Plottie bangs me on the back when the dregs go down the wrong way, then bangs again, harder, upon which it comes to me, coughing fiercely over remembered rapture, a comic, ludicrous figure with cheap wine in his windpipe, a girl thumping on his back, it comes to me that the presumptuous, judgemental Nietzsche went mad at forty-five. Didn’t he? Wasn’t it forty-five? Or at least in his forty-fifth year, I can’t remember. I must check. Assuming there is still time.

CHAPTER EIGHT

She was proud of being French, she said, because the French Revolution lay at the heart of modern Europe. The principles of liberté, fraternité, égalité had transcended national borders and become the rights of every man, and finally the principles upon which the whole of Europe was built. In the great release of energy which came with the separation from her husband and her daughter’s first attendance at nursery school, she bought quantities of books and suggested we read them together and discuss them together. It would be exciting, she said, to have a fresh and intellectual relationship with someone after the years of tedium and near-moronic materialism with her picture-frame-entrepreneur husband. Plus it would be good for me, she said. It would be important for my sense of self-esteem, my sense of being someone going somewhere. So we read Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant and the Duchesse d’Abrantes and Michelet, which had been her special area of study, and we read Xenophon and Thucydides and Plato and Aristophanes, which had been my area of study, and we discussed them together, usually after making love, in the afternoon in the pensione she stayed in when she taught consecutive days in Milan. We lay on the narrow bed, still clasping, still hot and damp, and we discussed, after perhaps hours of mutual adoration and oral sex and never without a bottle of Martini, for she was addicted to ice-cold white Martini, Plato’s notion of a realm of ideal forms, and we would try to relate that to the way the Revolution had, as it were, discarded men to champion an idea of man, an ideal man, since surely, or at least this was my feeling, it was this shift that lay behind the notion of égalité and of a single civil code for all the world. Man should be an incarnation of an idea rather than himself. Man should be a European. Or we would discover that Plutarch’s picture of Sparta was not unlike stories of Stalinist Russia, not unlike, in other ways, The Reign of Terror, or Nazi Germany — a European speciality, it seemed — and apropos of police states various we came across that other line of Benjamin Constant where he says: There is no limit to the tyranny that strives to extort the symptoms of consensus. Then discussing all these things quite seriously — orthodoxy and state terror and media hype — while drinking Martini and smoking the Gauloises Blondes she smokes, we would fall to making love again, remembering how all the great men we were talking about had loved women passionately, Talleyrand to start with, and more coyly Chateaubriand, not to mention Alcibiades, and how the great women we were talking about had loved men likewise, and likewise passionately, Ariadne and the Duchesse d’Abrantes, Madame de Staél and Medea, and how Napoleon had certainly been lying to Madame de Staél when he said the best women were the women who bore most children, that was Sparta talk, since the best women, it was obvious I said, coming up for a moment’s air from the taste of my triumph, the best women were the women who turned you on most and fucked you best. And fucking then, after those long and learned conversations, perhaps in the soft warmth of an autumn afternoon with the shriek of the trams clanging through the open window from the streets of ‘an ever-industrious Lombardy, we felt so sensual, and so intelligent, and intelligence seemed part of sensuality and sensuality part of intelligence and both together at once sacred and revelatory, though revelatory quite of what it would have been hard to say. Of their sacredness perhaps.

But how infantile! I think now, sitting up suddenly in another narrow bed and feeling the chill on my shoulders, a flash of yellow light crossing my face. How utterly infantile! And how extraordinary, I tell myself, sitting bolt upright on this narrow bed and shivering in this miserable hotel room, how infantile that you should ever have engaged in such conversations! How humiliating to think that you were not aware of the merest vanity in all this, the spurious stimulation of imagining yourself wise and communing with someone wise, discussing the world of pure form, or the noble savage, or the social contract, etc., when the only thing really speaking between the cheap sheets of that cheap pensione with the supermarket Madonna over the bedstead and the daguerreotype of the Duomo by the door was the sly old complicity of cock and cunt. What else? And remembering how, after my not incomprehensible choking fit at the farcical stube supper, I had retired to the loo to piss, to get a grip on myself, and seen a certain graffito there and thought certain thoughts, until I shouted out loud (over a urinal produced by Ideal Standard), How little philosophy helps! it comes to me now, in the soft slide of passing headlights, that the reason philosophy helps me so little is because the kind of philosophizing we traded on that narrow bed in the Navigli, the grand thoughts and acute perceptions we whispered back and forth, the parallels across thousands of years and the flattering identifications of ourselves with the great figures of Western history and mythology, was no more than another tool of mutual seduction, like the smell and smoothness of skin, like the tone and accent of her foreign voice, her French laugh, like the diving cleavage of that beaded black chiffon and the delirious awareness of her tottie-tackle (Colinism) beneath. Thought itself is an erotic memory for you, that is the truth, I am bound to admit now, sitting up in my narrow bed in this Strasbourg hotel which might be any of a whole series of hotels we once stayed in. Yes, the headiness of thinking, and I mean the sort of thinking that approaches mystery and sacredness, the sort of thinking that makes life exciting, is the same headiness of burrowing into her twat on soft Milanese afternoons with the clang of the trams ringing in the air and a low honey sunlight stealing across the wall Thought, like hotel rooms, reminds me of her. And perhaps this explains why I simply stopped reading, from one day to the next, after the Napoleonic debacle. For two years, I tell myself, you read intensely, insatiably, with immense pleasure and with a deeply gratifying sense of power and self-esteem, because reading was to do with her, and to do with conversations you had with her, to do with what she wanted to make of you and what you wanted to be for her, until, from one day to the next, you could not read any more. And not only were you unable to read any more, but the meaning of everything you had read to date was suddenly and frighteningly shifted, was even inverted, from self-esteem to self-loathing, from a belief in your own intuition to a conviction of your own blindness, a conviction born from the irony that you had read in so many places of the experience you were now going through, to wit the experience of betrayal, of being cut off, abandoned by the gods, of intensity enjoyed and intensity lost — and, quite apart from reading about it, you had even inflicted that same experience on your wife — but still without ever believing that one day this might happen to you, just as one never truly believes, perhaps, in the sense of savouring fully and accepting completely, that one is going to die. From one day to the next you stopped reading entirely. Black Spells Magic is perhaps the first book you have seriously tried to read in a year and a half. Does this explain your inappropriate anger with your daughter? That she should have invited you to start reading again with this ridiculous tale of the magical and politically correct powers of sexual passion! And how bewildering, I tell myself, sinking back on my pillows, how ominous, that once again today, this very evening in fact, on the coach returning from the stube supper, you should have sat by her side, her in her black chiffon dress with full French tottie-tackle beneath, and once again heard her say, vis-a-vis the founding brief of the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament — its function, that is, as a body for righting all wrongs — that the principles of liberte, fraternité and égalité lie at the heart of modern Europe.

Still choking with wine over the stube tisch, I escaped Plottie’s strong hand to recover in the lavatory. And it was here, relieving myself before returning, that my eyes unerringly picked out one of a score of graffiti above the urinal I had chosen, or that had chosen me: Elene, someone had scribbled — amour fugitif di quelques minutes, dont je me souviendrai pour toute la pve! My immediate response to this, splashing on to Ideal Standard in the semi-basement lavatory of a German restaurant on dubiously French territory, was to laugh, to laugh out loud, too loud, to tell myself, in the words of the man who went mad at forty-five, that There are no facts, but only interpretations. This biro scribble between smutty porcelain and barred window giving on to a courtyard of bins and sodden boxes has no more to do with you, I told myself, than the number 45 printed on a plastic oval and sunk into the synthetic plush of a luxury coach seat. Freud was right, I thought, to laugh at those who feared conspiracy in the contingent world. And if he suffered from the same problem himself and feared he might die at sixty-two because of the number’s frequent appearance right around his sixty-second birthday, then he had all the more reason for laughing at it, for laughing at himself. You can never go wrong when you laugh at yourself, I thought, and I told myself that what I must do was to take control of my mental processes, to repossess myself, as Freud no doubt had repossessed himself, I must stop functioning as a Black Hole dragging down all around me into a solipsistic world of unbearable density. No facts, I told myself, re-reading that graffito, only interpretations.

But how little philosophy helps! Tucking my cock in my pants, I was reminded for some unfathomable reason of the Eleusinian mysteries. My special study it was to be, at last light thrown on that most obscure of Athenian traditions, the twelve-mile dance down the Sacred Way to Eleusis, the group hysteria under pure light of midsummer: sex, ecstasy, possession. I read everything I could find about the subject and discussed it at length with her in Pensione Porta Genova, and once I remember her hugging me tight and gesturing to the room and saying this was our Sacred Way, these embraces our Mysteries, she had tears in her eyes, but I never mentioned to her then what now seems the only sensible comment I ever found on the subject, or rather somebody else did, because it was quoted in the kind of scholarly work I once dreamed of writing myself. What were the mysteries, asks Aristophanes? The saying of many ridiculous and many serious things. Eléne, amour fugitif. Thank God her name was not Eléne.

How infantile! I sink back on my bed. But will there come a moment, I ask myself, when your disgust now will seem as infantile as your vanity then? Will there? One can only hope so. One can only hope that self-loathing will one day seem as foolish as self-esteem. Certainly there will never be a point of rest, I tell myself, never an equilibrio interiore, the mind anchored to a world of pure form or in reposeful contemplation of the Dantesque divine. Not even if forty-five does prove fatal I remember stopping in amazement once at those lines in Chateaubriand when he talks about the dusty thoughts of the dead, when he asks, musing in some revolutionary cemetery: Who knows the passions, the pleasures, the embraces of these dry bones? More than once it has occurred to me that there is already something posthumous about my present existence.

Returning to my meal from Hommes et Eléne, it was to find my colleagues in the middle of an amicable show of hands. While I peed and philosophized, Vikram Griffiths had already been voted out. His minority culture credentials, his friendship for animals, his generosity with other people’s money, his considerable charm, had not been enough. And it occurred to me, as I sat down at the stube tisch, how appropriate it was of my colleagues not to have waited for me. I had said nothing during the discussion. I had said nothing on the coach trip from hotel to town during which Barnaby Hilson, experimental novelist of middle-class Protestant Dublin family and bland good looks, had played traditional Irish tunes on his traditional Irish tin whistle and Indian Welsh Griffiths and English Colin danced an unsuitable highland fling in the aisle while I was forced by powers beyond me to analyse every back and forth of the ill-judged telephone conversation with my daughter. So much for your decision to be extrovert, I told myself. So much, I thought, returning to my seat from the lavatory, for all your decisions. Then sitting down I was just in time to cast the vote that deprived Dimitra of a majority. I raised my hand as the count was being taken and I thought, apropos of absolutely nothing: Dimitra is the spy. Dimitra announced the shock-horror of’ Professor Ermani’s having a list of those who had voted for the trip to Europe precisely because, having given him the list herself and having agreed to keep him informed, as a matter of courtesy (after all she had voted against the trip), she felt it wise to invent the spy story so that nobody would ever imagine it could be her, Dimitra, who had told Ermani what everybody would be surprised he knew, assuming that knowledge should ever come out. And at once I felt fascinated, appalled, by how devious people can be; then, reflecting that I had no grounds for believing what I had just supposed, I felt even more appalled by how devious I could imagine people being. As if in a world where nothing can be said (to my daughter for example), where the truth can only bring offence (to my wife for example), there were nothing for people to do but be endlessly, infinitely devious, though always behind a smoke-screen of the noblest values. So you betrayed your wife for years, I thought, telling yourself all the while that it was precisely the outlet this betrayal afforded, the pleasure and emotional release you derived from it, which would allow you to keep the family together, telling yourself, ludicrously, that betrayal was a form of faithfulness, as if love, obsession, whatever, were things that could be managed and manipulated and made to serve an overall strategy rather than simply things that happen to you and that you will never never understand, like being born or dying.

I sat down, somewhat flushed still with the wine and my choking fit and my inflammatory memories, to find, on the table before me, pork and dumplings abandoned in a stagnant pool of thin broth, and immediately, without mental mediation, I cast the vote that tipped the balance five to four against Dimitra, the spy, whose fiercely powdered glare upon my raising my arm cheered me up, galvanized me, to the point where I was actually paying attention. And the person I paid attention to, of course, was her. Because this must be the moment, I thought, that she had been waiting for. Unfrocking Griffiths, I thought, with all he had drunk and the way he was behaving, winking at all the girls and putting arms round shoulders and talking about going on the razzle afterwards, trying to translate the notion of razzle for those who didn’t understand, and using the sleeve of his tatty blue sweater to wipe the dumpling soup from his chin, had not, for all his apparent political astuteness, been too difficult. And the students understood in the end, despite their groans, despite their no doubt vraie sympathie for someone who not only was not quite white but was giving them a cheap meal into the bargain. They’ were all from wholesome middle-class families in the end. They understood that Vikram Griffiths’ kind of revolutionary behaviour would not impress a major international institution of the variety they themselves would one day like to work for. Why else were they studying for a degree in languages if not to work one day for a major international institution? So it is, I thought, sitting down at the table to discover from Plottie that Vikram Griffiths had already been voted out, six to two, in my absence, so it is that while one’s sympathies lie in one direction one ends up choosing another, or accepting another, out of a sense of realism, by which of course we mean a sense of fear, a sense of obedience to laws we imagine greater than ourselves. As for example morality, or society, or history. So it is, I told myself, forking a dumpling into my mouth, that one stomachs more or less any mess one’s nose is pushed into, in the name of history and common-sense and realism, until the day comes when something inside simply compels us to behave in the least realistic manner imaginable, compels us to fly in the face of all prudence, as when I said on that same narrow bed in Pensione Porta Genova: I want to leave my wife for you, or later still when, quite gratuitously, after years of caution and realism, but definitely operating under the strongest of compulsions, I told my wife everything that had happened and destroyed her world for her.

Getting rid of Vikram Griffiths had been easy. Then the hostility Dimitra aroused by speaking against the Indian Welshman, Dimitra of the brick-orange lipstick and solid Teutonic nose under Macedonian black eyes, had been sufficient to prevent her from being elected either. We had elected Dimitra as president of the union on two or three occasions now because on each of those occasions no one else would contemplate doing the job, except Vikram, who again was unacceptable since he would have proposed an indefinite strike more or less every time we had an assembly, and this was something that the German contingent in particular just could not deal with. But when it came to representing us to the powerful institutions of the European Community there were more than two candidates. For this was a brief appointment, and perhaps interesting, perhaps useful. So now it must be time, I imagined, for her to put herself forward. As she had no doubt always planned. Or for someone to do that for her.

Amidst the general chatter, having returned to my seat and cast my vote and filled my mouth with German dumpling, I watched her. She was looking across the table at Georg. And I thought, She is still in complicity with Georg. They only made love once or twice, she said. Out of friendliness (this around the time I said, I want to leave my wife for you). Yet she is still in complicity with him, in a way she could never be with me. And quite probably, I told myself, their names were indeed together on that list you so hastily and unwisely signed in the drab offices of the Istituto di Anglistica that morning of three weeks ago. Their names were together, above and below each other no doubt, and written no doubt, for all I cannot rightly recall it, with the same pen. As far as this trip is concerned, they were already and always in complicity. As two people who have briefly been lovers then use that intimacy as a bond, an alliance, a secret society, for all future mutual convenience. And one can’t help wondering at the maturity, as she would say, of this, the good sense, the fact that there are people who know how to enjoy themselves without coming to grief, without intensity, those lovers who see each other occasionally, when convenience permits, and fuck each other cordially, perhaps with a little healthy back-massage to boot, and then are perfectly content if the opportunity doesn’t present itself for weeks and even months. And one can’t help wondering why you came on this trip, I tell myself now, if their names were together on that list, if they were already in complicity. Why did you come? Why did you insist on this mistake, when you had the perfect alibi of your daughter’s eighteenth birthday party, now to take place in your much-censured absence? And the only idea that springs to mind is that you came on this trip, having seen their names together on that list, to savour defeat once again, to rediscover intensity. The defeat and intensity, for example, of finding that this trip is precisely one of those convenient occasions when she and Georg can get together and, cordially, fuck. Now, in this very hotel perhaps. At one in the morning. A few rooms down from your own. Who knows? As yellow headlights pass over some reproduced masturbatory ecstasy by Gustav Klimt. And I am reminded of the time she told me that she had bought an ammonia spray and was keeping it in her handbag. We were speaking on the phone, and she said, So don’t say I didn’t warn you, but then immediately began talking about the possibility of another night together. It was me who hung up.

Then Georg had indeed just begun to raise his even, pacato voice above the chatter, no doubt to propose her as our representative, this being part of a pre-arranged plan, when Barnaby Hilson, he of the experimental novels and traditional tin whistle, cut in. And this is what Barnaby said in his rather Irish Italian: that the important thing was for us to remain united. He fiddled with his cutlery as he spoke. That there must be no hostility between the representative and other key members of our union. He looked down at his fingers, disarmingly embarrassed. That we must work together to win our rights, with no suspicion that the person doing the representing was in any way acting in his personal interests. He looked up and smiled with impeccable mildness and cleanshaven good nature. He himself could be such a person, he admitted. He had never shown any ambition for power in the union, he said, and indeed was thinking of leaving the University in another year or two, as this was not, as most of us knew, his principal career, he remarked. His tone was apologetic, since the embarrassment, the endearing embarrassment, of superior beings upon their declaring their difference from the rest of us is only another way of foregrounding that superiority, of course. Also, he said — and now his shy wryness was illuminated with a youthful smile — also, an Irish person would never put the backs up the powers-that-be in the Community the way a German, a French, or above all a British representative might. Because Ireland, he said, still speaking in this amiable tone, was a weak member of the Community and a willing member and clearly represented the oppressed rather than the oppressor on the international world stage, which was an important advantage, he said, again lowering his eyes to fiddling hands. Thus in the present circumstances, Barnaby Hilson said — and I noticed what exceedingly long and blond eyelashes he had — he was wiling, though only too aware of his limitations, to put himself forward as a compromise candidate in what was rapidly becoming a delicate situation.

Barnaby Hilson’s modest self-candidature was immediately seconded by Doris Rohr, who had clearly enjoyed their animated Dead Poets conversation, and again by Heike the Dike, who perhaps finds those long eyelashes attractively effeminate, and again by Luis, who, coming as he does from the Basque country, perhaps has a sentimental affinity for the evocative if limited music of dead if not decently buried minority cultures. A vote was thus proposed over what remained of the dumplings in broth and the ten jugs of very poor quality house wine, and there was a definite look of concern on her face now at seeing herself about to be pipped at the public post by this charming, experimental and above all Irish novelist, about to lose this role that she had no doubt hoped would lead her to important contacts with figures, preeminently male, in important institutional positions, men with whom she could perhaps profitably have discussed her essay on A Future Constitution for a United Europe. The vote was thus about to be taken, doubtless in favour of our charming philosopher-king Irishman, who I do honestly believe would have made a presentable and conscientious representative, when, out of the complete silence I had maintained throughout, indeed had imposed on myself ever since putting the phone down on my daughter and hearing that the Avvocato Malerba preferred Spinoza to Nietzsche, I suddenly and for no reason I could imagine found myself quoting, in Italian, the same Benjamin Constant I had once read with such pleasure, between fucking and fellatio perhaps, in Pensione Porta Genova: The mania of almost all men, I said, leaning across the scrubbed stube tisch where two or three of Colin’s tottie-directed baguette pellets had fallen into a pool of spilt wine and broth, while another stuck to the fur of Dafydd ap Gwilym, now furiously attacking his hind parts on the seat beside Heike the Dike, is to appear greater than they are; the mania of all writers, Barnaby, is to appear as men of state. Benjamin Constant, I added, feeling dazed as one who has blundered into stage lights, or a fly compelled to halogen, De l'esprit de conquéte et de I’usurpation.

Immediately I had finished speaking, Vikram roared with laughter. For Vikram Griffiths of course, despite his show of general bonhomie, despite his apparent couldn’t-give-a-toss attitude to losing his representative role on a trip which is entirely his own inspiration, loathes Barnaby Hilson. Vikram Griffiths loathes Barnaby Hilson in part because Hilson usurps his, Vikram’s, role of charismatic figure from much-loved ethnic-minority culture and in part because Hilson has a serious project in life and gets on with it, working hard in the mornings and pursuing an entirely stable and sensible private life with his rather older English wife, who is commendably jovial and practical, and their two small, doubtless delightful children, boy and girl. Vikram Griffiths, understandably, loathes Hilson, and now, quite probably in a fragile emotional state after having been voted out by his colleagues on this trip which was absolutely his own invention, and with a child-custody battle going on back in Italy with his first wife, a woman frequently obliged to seek psychiatric help, not to mention financial claims the second wife is making in their protracted and apparently extremely acrimonious separation proceedings, involving, amongst other things, the ownership of their ugly mongrel dog, he roared loudly with laughter, perhaps drunken laughter, and said, Compagni! I propose our English Jeremiah as a candidate! At least he can always quote the bastards someone they’ve never heard of! Upon which, immediately, without any mental mediation whatsoever, but rather as even a suicide might instinctively grasp at a rope thrown to him in swirling waters, I said okay, I would do it, if people wanted to vote for me. But I would need, I said — and how quickly one thinks when one doesn’t try, when one is possessed by one’s thoughts, rather than possessing — I would need somebody to advise me on what exactly I would have to say. I would need advice and help. From somebody who knew something about Europe. Surprisingly, Dimitra at once and enthusiastically seconded Vikram Griffiths’ proposal, remarking that my Italian had a more official flavour to it than Barnaby's, plus I was quite a lot older, which might be useful, she said, in allaying the unfortunately widespread impression that foreign language lectors were, as in some other countries, or should be, mere graduate student teachers on a brief stage away from home. Then, after a moment’s hesitation (the Avvocato Malerba being unexpectedly deep in conversation with’ the tiny southern girl beside him), she spoke out to accept what had so obviously, I felt, been my invitation to her. She would advise me, she said. She had done a lot of research on the European issue, she said, speaking not to me, oddly enough, but across the table, to Georg perhaps, perhaps to Dimitra, as if to say, This is an okay solution, we can go with this. Then she was writing an essay, she said, on A Possible Constitution for a United Europe, and as far as our own case was concerned, she said, she knew all the pertinent decisions of the European Court of Justice and its exact area of competence. She would assist me in talking directly to people, if I liked. And I was voted in. Eight votes for and only one abstention. My own.

On the square outside the cathedral, the students danced. I can see them again now if I shut my eyes. This is the square where Michelet tells how Saint-Just chained Eulogius Schneider, ex-monk turned revolutionary, to the guillotine for having forced a girl to marry him, pain of death to her whole family. The coach was late. The rain had stopped. Laughing together, the girls began to sing on the wet flagstones in a flapping breeze with the great facade of the cathedral rigorously floodlit behind, and then to dance. They sang the same song the radio had played three or four times during the journey, Sei un mito — You're a myth — and they danced in damp anoraks. The dog was sniffing against wet walls. And gazing at the facade as these girls swayed and danced, full of enviable high spirits and with that lightness young women have when they move to music, gazing at the cathedral, as Colin joined in, beside Monica, and Doris Rohr in maroon trousers studied the cosmetics advertisements in luxury shop windows, I reflected, leaning against a post forbidding parking, that every major monument in Europe is now- cleaned and floodlit. Everything ancient and medieval, I thought, as the girls danced, some beautifully — and she was deep in conversation with Georg, by a window full of pipe tobaccos — has been appropriately sandblasted, cleaned and illuminated. It is impossible, I thought, hugging myself in the cheap coat with which I recently replaced the leather jacket she bought three years ago, even to imagine these stony martyrs being in the gloom now, impossible to imagine these angels and gargoyles in a dark wind or under moonlight. I should never have told my wife, I thought, as the dog. cocked a leg. Impossible to see them as part of our lives, our nightmares, potent in the gloom, sacred in darkness or starlight. I should never have opened my mouth like that and destroyed her life. Why did this thought come to me now? These monuments have been neutralized by the light, I thought, by the light and by carefully researched detergents. They have been made part of the modern city. They have been subtracted from us and made possible for us. I should never never have told my wife that the only person I had ever been truly happy with was her. Why on earth did I do that? Squares where people hanged and lynched and guillotined each other and, in general, committed all sorts of irremediable crimes, are now attractive areas of floodlit public art, I thought, emptied of their potency precisely by the zeal with which we have focused on them, cared for them, illuminated them, absorbed them into the on-off neon of our intermittent modern night, our world of time-switches and default settings and above all discrete units of measure — I should never have told ray wife that even the smell of her body repulsed me — where nothing is absolute, I thought, nothing is safe from division and subtraction and quantification, where no one sacred facade, or person, or vision looms supreme in the consciousness, singular or collective, but cars pass endlessly, lights stretch out endlessly, and above all at regular intervals, where you count your lovers, all egales, all libres, at regular intervals, each a discrete and equal unit, clasping and unclasping in endless reproduction under intermittent light, this world where Colin says, Orgasm achieved, all tottie is old tottie. How could I tell my wife that the only sex that mattered to me had been with her? I should never have done that. I should never have beaten her across the face. Napoleonic debacle or no. It was the end when you hit her, I told myself outside the floodlit cathedral, when you saw the blood at the corner of her mouth. New pastures, Colin says over the billiards table, new treasures in tottie-town. Onward. The girls are singing, Sei un mito. The dog shivers at the end of his pee. They are even holding hands in a circle, wonderful twenty-year-old Italian girls under yellow French street-light, the willowy Nicoletta, the pouty Veronica, the breathy, breathtaking Monica, all swaying together, all apparently unaware of one of the great cathedrals of Europe hugely floodlit behind them on a square where the guillotine once stood. Why on earth did I take that line on the phone with my daughter, as if her choice of reading material could possibly matter? Except that occasionally a girl stops and exclaims, Che hello! Che bella piazza! And now they want to draw their teachers in. Now they want to dance together as a group, with their professori, whose jobs they’ve come to save, as young women are always eager to save something or someone far beyond their power to save, singing a song together, something they have heard on the radio, to do with solidarity, as a group, and already Vikram Griffiths is clowning with them, a cigarette between his lips, and now she has joined them, with Luis, so pleased about the collapse of the Lira because he means to change all his savings in Barcelona into lire to buy a flat in out-of-town Milan. And watching these people dance, together, as a group, in this Cathedral square in the centre of Europe, in many ways a beautiful scene, in many ways a touching scene, I ask myself if I will ever be able to sandblast and floodlight her image in such a way as to turn it, like this cathedral, into an attractive decorative landmark in my mental landscape. Will my wife ever be able to do the same with me, with the man who so completely and carelessly destroyed her? The rain falls again. The Avvocato Malerba skips under an umbrella plucked by the wind. The girls are giggling. The dog barks at their heels. Will I ever be able to dance careless of the rain in front of her neutralized floodlit image, having accepted it as a central but perfectly manageable interior monument from a past one may as well remember for the good as the bad, the kind of once sacred place one might choose to visit occasionally, on high holidays perhaps, just to get a feel for how it was, how I was, but without any sense of obligation or compulsion? Will I ever be able to do that? Will I ever be able to read a book again? Will I ever be able to talk like old friends with my wife? Until it occurred to me, leaning against a post in suddenly heavy drizzle in the central square in Strasbourg staring at the white light over white sandblasted Gothic figures, as young Plaster-cast-tottie, unable to dance, hobbled up and stood beside me and — after the bold hand on the knee under the stube tisch just a few minutes ago — now took my arm and actually leaned against me, as if in need of support — it occurred to me, smelling a perfume so sweet as to be sickly, that perhaps the time has come to start using her name. Perhaps I came on this trip to start using her name. Perhaps I got myself elected union representative to the European Petitions Committee to put myself in a position of inevitable attrition, to be obliged to speak with her, to work with her, to start the sandblasting.

The great Mister Jeremiah Marlowe, said Georg approaching. Georg wears a trilby out of doors, though he is not balding as I am. The coming political man, he said, drawing us under the awning of a bar. I said Vikram had taken it well, being voted out, and Plaster-cast-tottie, detaching herself a little, but not entirely, said how sorry she was for Vikram because he was such a comic and 'simpatic' person, and you could see he cared, she said, but hadn’t wanted to show it, Georg shrugged his shoulders. Griffiths is a maverick, he said. Then he began to ask if I genuinely felt I was up to making the presentation of our case, because if not, there was a written speech which he and she and Dimitra had prepared for whoever had to make the presentation, detailing the exact nature of our grievance and in particular the legal justification for our claim both to permanent contracts of employment and to salaries equivalent to that of an associate professor, albeit at the most junior level, i.e. two-and-a-half million lire a month after tax. The whole thing was a question, Georg said — and this was absolutely crucial — of comparison within the relevant framework. And while he began to explain then, very seriously, that the point was that all comparisons had to be made within the reality that was Italy, rather than allowing myself to be drawn, should there be any open discussion, perhaps with the press, into comparison with legal systems outside Italy, which tended to be less favourable to employees in general and University employees in particular (since European law stated that we should have equal rights within the system of the country we lived in, rather than generally across the Community) — while he explained all this carefully and usefully, I found myself recalling, as Plottie gave my hand a squeeze, for the coach had arrived now and people were trooping towards it, I found myself remembering how she had once made a comparison which was supposed to be favourable to myself. In response to my continued anguish at her betrayal, she remarked that he, and she meant Georg (though she has never to this day admitted it was Georg), had not been alla sua altezza a letto, not at her level in bed, as I on the contrary was. She laughed, she was naked, we had made love. She said — no, she sighed — He wasn’t really at my level in bed, you know. The way you are. This was perhaps a week or two after the phone-call when she talked about the ammonia spray She sighed again: In the end, we only made love two or three times, she said. And the fascinating thing here was how she imagined this comparison would cheer me up, offering as it did, as she doubtless saw it, a convincing reason for her decision to come back to me, particularly after I had done the honest thing now and left my wife, she said. Whereas what struck me was the subtext that, had Georg proved to be at her level in bed, then perhaps she would have stayed with him. Love does not, or should not fall within the realm of comparison, I thought, walking through blown rain across the central square in Strasbourg towards our big modern coach with the pally Plottie to one side and sensible Georg to the other, the latter properly concerned about the source of income that allows him to support the chronically sick mother of his child. Love should lie outside the world of analogical procedure, of comparisons within the relevant framework and discrete units of measure, I thought, climbing on to the coach in a press of girls giggling and singing and with the distinct feeling that Plottie was seeking to appropriate me and was being remarkably straightforward about it. Though of course, I thought, climbing the steps, looked at from another point of view, one is always seeking comfort in comparison. One is always saying to oneself, At least you’re not so badly off as so and so, at least you haven’t had such an empty life as so and so, or suffered so much as so and so, this person you read about and that person you knew. Or one even catches oneself comparing the bodies of casual lovers with her body and saying, This arse is better and younger and fresher than hers, this skin is smoother and softer and sweeter than hers. One believes, I tell myself here in the hotel room gazing at those clasping Picasso lovers, who would perhaps have looked well against the anodyne facade of a floodlit cathedral, one believes one desires uniqueness, yet one seeks comfort in comparison. One constantly, obsessively, compares one’s own story with everybody else’s, until, not finding quite the like, one realizes that one’s banality lies precisely in uniqueness.

In the crush of the coach, she called, Sit here a moment, Jerry, so we can go over tomorrow.

There were Dimitra and Luis in the seat in front, Vikram Griffiths with Heike the Dike behind and the wet dog wagging his wet tail in the passageway At which it flashed across my brain, quite inappropriately, undecided whether I should sit with her or not, that I dislike dogs intensely. And particularly wet dogs. I dislike the easy affection people have for dogs, which costs nothing and can never be betrayed. The animal was frantic for some reason, leaping up to paw Vikram and slapping its wet tail in the passageway. I hesitated. People thrust their dogs upon you, I thought in the crush of the coach, undecided whether to sit next to her or not, expecting you to show affection for the creatures, merely because they are dogs, when the truth is you feel no affection for them at all, only a profound sense of irritation, expecting you to respect themselves, the owners, for the relationship they have with their pets, the sacrifices they make on behalf of these representatives of a now vanquished Nature, when you feel nothing of the kind, only dismay that people should find such relationships necessary. All the girls were laughing as the dog pranced. Hey up, Vikram called. He rubbed the creature’s nose against his own, so stuffed with catarrh. And suddenly I was aware of a great loathing for dogs, as if they and all they stood for were entirely responsible for my inability to decide whether to sit myself down beside my ex-mistress or not. 1 was furious. We should go over what you have to say tomorrow, she said. The creature slapped its wet tail repeatedly against my leg. There are some important political decisions. Plottie came back along the corridor and tugged at my sleeve. Her smile was warm. Clearly the girl believes she has established some kind of intimacy or complicity with me, I thought, whereas Nicoletta, towards whom 1 thought 1 might have felt something, has disappeared. Where was Nicoletta? 1 should sit next to Nicoletta. And somehow that decided me and 1 sat down next to her, without so much as exchanging a glance with Plottie, entirely spurning the girl and her generously open advance.

Ah, the polis! I said facetiously as I sat down, and immediately I was trying to jog her memory again, as 1 had tried and failed to jog her memory with Benjamin Constant, tried and failed to jog her memory earlier in the day with Thucydides. A protagonist in the polis at last, I repeated. Thinking óf Aristotle. Thinking of her. The dog barked. Of the Pensione Porta Genova. But from in front, her face poking between two head-rests, Dimitra said, The police? Where? She seemed anxious. I would have laughed, but nobody else had seen the joke. For everybody had begun to advise me. I was sitting on the fourth or fifth seat from the front on the left-hand side of a powerful modern coach negotiating the ancient centre of floodlit Strasbourg and I was being advised by five or. six people at once: the Petitions Committee at eleven o’clock, the lunch with the London Times, the meeting of Euro MPs, the different approaches required for each, the importance of getting and keeping all the students there to show we had support, the importance of seeming seriously professional. The wet Dafydd now on his lap, Vikram said, With the Italian Euro-MPs you have to stress there’s no way out for the bastards in the Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione. The legal point we should stress, the Avvocato Malerba said, a little breathless from his exertions, is that the only employees in the Italian state education system who do not have permanent contracts are yourselves, foreigners. This is clearly a case of discrimination. She said: The purpose of the Petitions Committee is to set in motion the necessary machinery to right all wrongs presented to it within the Community. That was fair enough. But when she went on to say that as such — and since the president of the commission was French I might usefully remark on this — as such the organization was inevitably founded on the same principles that had guided the French Revolution, and indeed the whole formation of Europe over the last two centuries, to wit, liberté, égalité, fraternité — when she said this, my mind froze. You are sitting, I told myself, next to the woman who took you to the furthest extremes of erotic pleasure, the woman with whom you imagined you were sharing serious philosophical conversations in a pensione in the Navigli where trams screeched on soft spring afternoons, the woman whom you described, criminally, to your wife, as the only woman to have made you truly happy. You are seated next to her and she is wearing her black chiffon dress, short above black-stockinged knees, which she often wore in those days, to please you, and she is repeating, in your presence, perhaps hoping to impress the Avvocato Malerba, who does not seem immune to female charms, the same banal reflections she has forgotten she once expressed to you on the second floor of the Pensione Porta Genova, and again quite probably on the fourth floor of the Hotel Racine in Rheims, where we did everything and promised everything in an intensity never to be recovered or repeated. Fraternité, she was repeating now from three years before, is just an older formulation of the modern ideal of solidarite. This is the woman you are sitting next to, I told myself. And I thought how fortunate it was that I was surrounded now by six or seven other colleagues and that Dimitra was once again discussing the question of the spy (convinced now that it must be someone from the ever-diffident German department), and in short how lucky I was that there was no danger at all of my suddenly trying to beat some sense into life, to recover some meaning by pounding her chiffon dress with my fists. This is the part she acts, 1 thought, as she went on to say that a proper presentation of our case within a historical perspective could only help. She acts a part. With everybody. How she laughed when I told her Plato wanted people who acted parts to be banned from his Republic. Georg wasn’t at her level in bed, she said. She only did it two or three times, out of vraie sympathie. I should never have told my wife, never never have said such terrible, destructive words to a woman I had lived with eighteen years. The last piece in a mosaic of friendship, she said. Because he phoned so much and sent flowers. Above all I should never have said I found the smell of her body repulsive. However true it is. And then the business with the mother of his child. The mother of his child was so ill, poor thing, and he so heroic to stay with her. How could I care so much about a fuck or two, she said. How infantile of me! There was a way in which the English were still barbarians, she said. Why do I care what books my daughter has been reading? No wonder they had trouble with Europe. They lacked the subtlety Catholic cultures had. They lacked the flexibility. Unless Suzanne really is her lover? The spirit of compromise, she said. Of negotiable identity. It was an expression she had found in a book on psychoanalysis in the period when she was convinced an analyst could save me. People still talk about salvation. Though not my wife. My wife knew from the moment I opened my mouth that there was nothing to salvage. She who had spent all her life pretending old things were new. Your eyes are glazing, I told myself in the coach, speeding out to the suburbs. You are losing your grip. You are no longer following the excellent arguments being deployed by your excellent colleagues with a view to protecting the excellent job you cannot bear. Analysis could save you, she said. It could save us! My wife never talked about saving anything. Give her that credit. This was in the days she implored me to go back to her, the days she seemed happy to be slapped about, if it helped me to get over it, she said. Ishould see an analyst. But my wife knew when something had been blown to smithereens. And once she said very earnestly: They weren’t just mots sur l’oreiller, Jerry, the things I said to you, not just frasi di letto, pillow talk. I really meant them. But I was appalled, and I was appalled again now in the coach, eighteen months on, to think that there was, there existed, a set and accepted expression in French — mots sur l’oreiller — and again a similar expression in Italian — frasi di letto — and that she knew these expressions and used them, and that she distinguished, so readily, between the times she meant the things she said in bed and the times she did not mean them. This was Catholic subtlety. They weren’t just frasi di letto Jerry, she said, and doing so she managed to transform everything she had ever said to me into a frase di letto, and I hit her. Perhaps that was the night I finally hit her too hard. The night of the second trip to a second hospital. You are losing your grip, I told myself, sitting in the fourth seat from the front on the left-hand side of this powerful coach now shuddering over at a suburban traffic-light, all the panels trembling. The night of the story about the bicycle accident. The last night. How could you have lain in your bed and told your wife everything? Everything we did. Has she used her frasi di letto with your daughter? Has your daughter replied with expressions from Black Spells Magic? Your eyes are filling with tears, I told myself. You are on the edge of making a major spectacle of yourself. Lick me inside out, baby, the lead singer says to the record producer’s wife. You have not a single sound cell in your brain. Just one more moment of this, I thought. One imagines a dog’s tongue. Just one more moment. Then Colin leaned over to me from across the aisle, Don’t know about yours, he whispered, but my evening’s soubriquet is Tittie-tottie. Keeps letting me take a dekko down the Grand Canyon, He meant Monica, And four seats further back Barnaby struck up on his tin whistle. Whisky in the Jar. Daffy-dog licking his chin,Vikram began to sing: the Kilkenny Mountains; Captain Farrel; mushereen m’doran da' And he shouted: Who’s for the nearest bar as soon as we’re back? The girls roared, Barnaby played his tin whistle, But the devil’s in the women, sure they never can be easy, mushereen m’doran da’. To everybody’s delight the dog yowled. Get a grip, I told myself. People were shaking with laughter. No facts, I told myself, only interpretations. The dog yowled again. As if he understood, Vikram clapped. And in the hubbub she leaned over and said, with vraie sympathie, whispering in my ear, Are you okay, Jerry? I said yes. I laughed. Just feeling my age, I said. Forty-three isn’t the end of the world, she told me.

CHAPTER NINE

The outrage of obstructed energy. Impulse without fulfilment. Can any Petitions Committee ever right this wrong? Very deliberately on my narrow bed in this nondescript hotel room where at one-thirty or — forty the apparently staid Avvocato Malerba still hasn’t returned to his bed, I start to masturbate over Plaster-cast-tottie. I start to masturbate, after my normal fashion. But to do this I have to remember what she looks like. What does she look like? And all I can remember is the unconcealed disappointment in her bright glassy eyes when, rather than remaining behind in the hotel lounge on our return from the stube supper, I elected to follow Vikram Griffiths and others out into the night in search of a bar, leaving her and her hobbling plaster-cast behind. I elected to go on this alcohol hunt, I reflect now, because she — had elected not to go on it, just as I elected to come on this coach trip because she had elected to come on it. Whether I choose to be where she is, or where she isn’t, it is always she who governs the choice.

Vikram Griffiths exchanged some words with the sour proprietor, who apparently gave directions as to where we might find a bar open. But Vikram spoke no French and the proprietor did not seem eager that we find this bar. Perhaps he imagined that a fruitless walk in the suburban rain would bring us back respectably sobered. My mind buzzing with the thought that she did not even remember my age, which is somehow forgivable between a father and his children, or even between man and wife, but not between the lovers we were, I pushed through the glass door with other students to be pulled aside then by Colin, who confided that he could hardly shag in his room with Saint Barnaby there, could he? The experimental Irish novelist had already twice phoned his wife about a baby with a sore throat. Because our affair was about being a certain age, I told myself. So he would have to go to Tittie-tottie’s room, Colin said, where gentlemanly courtesy might just oblige him to shag Tittie-tottie’s tottie-mate as well, he laughed. Our affair had to do with age, I was suddenly thinking, as Colin marvelled at the alliteration of Tittie-tottie's tottie-mate. Though she was more the kind of party who was likely to go down well at a charity ball for the blind, Colin laughed. Go down, damn you, he laughed. He gestured with an imaginary cue. How could she miscalculate, I thought, knowing so well, as she must, the exact difference in ages? Charity ball! Colin laughed. Colin brays rather than laughs. Get it? He sneers rather than brays. Tottie-mate would be an excellent title for a centre spread, he said. But there is no evil in Colin, I thought now, reflecting that he too was exactly ten years younger than me. You never feel Colin could harm anybody. Never broach the breach unsheathed, he laughs. And I thought, looked at in a certain way, age was the only truly important factor in our relationship. We would never have had an affair like that at a different age, at different ages. How could she have thought I was forty-three?

People milled under an awning outside the hotel where wind was sweeping the thin drizzle against carelessly parked cars. Beyond a low hedge lay the road that now sends intermittent light flitting about my room. Vikram Griffiths came out singing Whisky in the Jar again, then explaining that he never put his dog on a leash. Never. He laughed, scratching a sideburn, and apparently he had quite forgotten about the question of our representation at the European Parliament, the precariousness of our jobs, his acrimonious court cases back in Italy. With a studentessa under each arm of his loose open mac he shouted, Follow me! and made a dash through a gaggle of girls into the phosphor-lit rain. And, still obsessed by the notion that we had loved each other only and exclusively because we were a certain age, I found myself admiring Vikram Griffiths for this, this drunken cavalier carefreeness, and I- envied him. I envied Vikram Griffiths for the way he turns his energy outward to whatever is available, whatever woman, whatever amusement, and appears to be satisfied with it, willy-nilly. While I implode. You eat your heart out, I told myself, watching Vikram with a girl under each arm heading towards the glare of oncoming traffic, singing about Captain Farrel and his treacherous Jenny. You eat your heart out and vomit it up, and eat it out all over again. Why have you suddenly become obsessed with this question of age? And I experienced then, so soon after sitting in the coach and hearing her talking about the principles of the French Revolution, as if she had never said these things to me before, indeed as if nothing had ever passed between us, as if the earthquake that completely altered my mental landscape had not even been registered on any of the scales properly established for measuring these things, I experienced such a sense of desperation and self-loathing and absurdity that I turned back, on impulse, towards the hotel with the intention, hardly creditable, of venting my rage on Plottie, of simply grabbing the Plottie girl and dragging her, plaster-cast and all, to some secluded corner of the hotel to be thoroughly shagged, as in the past, I suppose, I have vented my rage on Psycho-.tottie and Photo-tottie and Dimple-tottie and others more memorable for their soubriquets than their sentiments. One says one’s rage was vented, but the truth is it never was, it was always intact after orgasm, if not magnified, with the added curiosity that these women never felt that any rage had been vented upon them, never imagined anything but affection on my part, even passion, they mistook rage for passion, and so were happy as a rule and spoke eagerly of a next time, as witness Opera-tottie and her generous phone message. One hadn’t even been cruel! And this makes matters worse: I mean when every woman is the wrong woman but reminds you of the right woman, when venting is not venting, but reminds one of venting, or of how things were before the notion of venting had even occurred, the time when it was impossible to imagine not having an outlet for the person one had become through being with her. And lying in my narrow bed, recalling that moment in the wind-swept carpark when I envied Vikram Griffiths for the ease with which he turns his energy outward to whatever’s available, and, as a gut reaction, turned back to vent my forty-five-year-old rage on Plottie, it occurs to me now, here in my hotel room, casting about for an image to masturbate over, that what Picasso’s lovers are really seeking in this flat reproduction of their intermittently lit clasping, this miserable simulacrum of a great modern masterpiece that I have been staring at now for upwards of an hour, is themselves again. They are seeking themselves as they were when they made each other themselves. Yes, this is something I understand now, as one understands so many things no sooner than it’s too late. And I had just turned round to go back to the lighted porch, to go back to the Plottie girl — and through wet sheet glass I could see the Avvocato Malerba deep in conversation with Georg, no doubt discussing the finer points of the legal case I shall tomorrow, incredibly, be presenting to’ the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament — when an umbrella burst open in front of me and Nicoletta said, Don’t go back. Share my umbrella. And immediately I was elated.

Here then is another bizarre thing: the fact that you were elated when Nicoletta, entirely absent from your thoughts for at least the previous half-hour, now opened her yellow umbrella and invited you under it, immediately slipping her arm into yours, as she had done earlier on in the day climbing the concrete stairs of the Chambersee Service Station. You were elated, over the moon no less, the mental volatility of the perfect lunatic.

Unable to masturbate over Plottie’s glassy disappointment, I find myself sitting up in bed again. I’m sitting up shivering in my bed. First you set off, I tell myself, on the trip to the bar because of her, then you turn back from the trip to the bar because of Plottie, and finally you set off on the trip to the bar once again because of Nicoletta. You are no more than a ball in a bagatelle, shot for one brief second over the moon. Nicoletta opened her umbrella and invited you under and slipped her arm in yours and immediately you were over the moon. Immediately a voice sang out: You’re on here, Jerry! And it sang, There must be something about you today! First Plaster-cast-tottie and now this. Sneaky Niki. Spoilt for choice I am! Thus your own mental rhetoric. In the space of one split second, I tell myself, you went from the most total misery (over her extraordinary miscalculation of your age) to the most gushing exhilaration and optimism. You thought, Love is a movable feast, Jerry, go for it. Thus your criminal naivety. You thought, why should I cry over split milk, and you thought, there is no reason at all why I shouldn’t fall in love all over again with this young and beautiful if somewhat flat-chested girl. Thus your asinine presumption. At which juncture, sitting here rigid and shivering on my narrow hotel bed, it has to be said that there can be no hope for a person as absurd as I am, no hope for someone capable of such extraordinary vanity. Though quite what one might mean by hope, I’m not sure; I suppose what she meant when she spoke of an analyst being able to save me; or perhaps what Plottie meant when she spoke of some improbable equilibrio interiore.

I was under Nicoletta’s umbrella. We were striking off on a walkway beside a dual carriageway. Vikram Griffiths was trying to teach his two girls The Green Green Grass, explaining in between whiles that before coming to Italy he had never been south of Eastbourne. Nor north of Clwyd if it came to that. Then came a long gaggle of students and lectors under umbrellas and rain-hoods beside a muddy verge with no sign anywhere of any sort of building that might house a bar, though a huge billboard above chasing cars announced La ville veste les femmes núes, and at the rear there was myself and Nicoletta, with me wondering, as she spoke of difficulties at home since her father’s cancer, whether this was one of those occasions where one would ask for a kiss or simply try to snatch one. Her mother, Nicoletta said, speaking to someone she had only met that morning, a man any woman should have seen had designs on her, had become terribly morose and withdrawn after her father’s death and hardly talked, but at the same time she, the mother, tended to get upset if she, Nicoletta, or her twin brother or older sister, went out of an evening, as if they were somehow deserting her. Yes, they’ll all come to greet me, came Vikram’s voice. Then a peal of laughter. The green green grass. And while I began to appreciate, not without a prick of resentment, that the kind of complicity Nicoletta had imagined, on inviting me under her yellow umbrella, was one oí friendship, and far from the variety that might require for completion the cordial placement of my cock-piece in its mosaic centre, I nevertheless, resentful prick though I am, became extremely helpful and began to talk persuasively to this tall-necked young girl with her over-sweet perfume and delightful red hair-tie on the blackest, raven, almost blue hair (which I would be so willing to bury my face in and adore) — began to talk about modern theories of grieving and about her mothers inevitable jealousy that her children had their lives entirely before them (a feeling I have all too often experienced with my own daughter) whereas her life (the mother’s), at least as she was probably seeing it at present, was behind her, had ended, and badly at that, or at least unluckily, with her husband’s death. Vikram Griffiths started into Men of Harlech. And the only thing to do, I suggested with the sort of wisdom that comes from knowing absolutely nothing about a situation, was to be patient: her mother would no doubt come out of this with time, life would force her to.

We were talking under the girl’s yellow umbrella while I resentfuly tried to come to terms with the idea that her invitation to walk along under its dripping rim had had nothing to do with any plans to seduce me, let alone shag me rotten before the evening was out. Perhaps your mother will even take another husband, I announced thoughtfully. I had as much chance of sleeping with Nicoletta, I thought, as of taking the Madonna from behind. It was as easy and as difficult as that. But Nicoletta said that that was impossible, her mother could never love anybody else. She could never love anybody after her father. With whom she had been very much in love. To the exclusion of all others, she added, unprompted. I asked her her mother’s age, and she said forty-five. Then, responding rather well I think to the-nth recurrence of this number, almost as if it were an old ailment I had finally learnt to put up with, I laughed out loud, even good-heartedly. I laughed and said, Perhaps I would marry Nicoletta’s mother myself, we were the same age, after all, and instinctively the two of us, man and girl, squeezed each other’s arms a little harder and exchanged entirely friendly smiles in the street-lit gloom of the umbreEa as Vikram Griffiths now stopped the group at a crossroads surveying blocks of flats to the right and, across a soaking urban highway, low industrial buildings to the left, and admitted he had no idea where he was. My mother would like you very much, Nicoletta laughed, I think, and I laughed — call me Niki, she said, everybody else does — and Vikram Griffiths said we would have to turn back. That miserable bastard at the hotel with his miserable directions! Dafydd! he shouted, then slowly sang for the girls who were learning, With the foe towards you leaping, You your valiant stance are keeping. Dafydd! And lying here now on this narrowest of divan beds, not even waiting for sleep, not even trying to masturbate, not even wondering about the Avvocato Malerba’s delayed return, I am struck by the amusing fact, this very early morning of the fourth of the fifth in my forty-fifth year, that not only did a young woman offer me her friendship this evening, rather than her body, her affection, rather than her sex, but what’s more that I amazingly walked along beside this young woman for almost an hour in the sifting rain, and condescended to her, discussing fashionable grief-theories and other psychoanalytical simplifications of everyday calamities, some of which I vaguely remember allusions to in the atrocious Black Spells Magic, not to mention the execrable Dead Poets Society, and even began to pretend to myself, like the infantile and incorrigible romantic I am, that perhaps this gesture of friendship, of affection (complete with jesting vis-a-vis a possible relationship with her mother!), was somehow better or more appropriate than the gesture of straightforward sexual complicity offered by the Plottie girl (young enough to be my daughter), as if, apart from the easy good conscience that comes from talking sympathetically to another human being about their insoluble troubles, there could possibly be any use to me in the mere affection of a no more than moderately intelligent twenty-one-year-old.

Why haven’t I given the girl her tottie-tag as yet? What is wrong with me? Or am I simply hoping that chaste friendship first will eventually lead to more serious sex later? Will lead to Rheims?

Quite suddenly I’m furious with myself. Furious. How could I possibly have imagined that the caress under the table, the blunt message of the hand on the knee, the leaning against me in the drizzle by the floodlit anodyne cathedral, was not infinitely preferable to earnest talk under umbrellas about the nature of grief? Grief. I was offered sex with no frills, for Christ’s sake, and turned it down for a discussion of everyday misery, playing kind Uncle Jerry, wise Uncle Jerry, disinterested Uncle Jerry, who might at most amount to a sensible last resort for Mummy. It would have been less absurd, I tell myself, to have joined in with the choral expression of Welsh nationalism led by a man whose features and skin-colour suggested the subcontinent. An Englishman, I tell myself, in France singing a Welsh nationalist song, led by a man whose mother came not from Bangor but Bangalore, would have been less absurd! And if I cannot masturbate over Plottie, I decide, and I can’t, because I can’t imagine her, then I shall masturbate over someone else. My mind wrenches viciously to Opera-tottie. I rehearse our first meeting at an evening course I gave for high-school teachers: Echoes of the Greek Classics in Modern English Literature. A tall, solid woman, handsome legs boldly crossed in the front row. I recall the first smiles of obvious complicity. I remember the difficulty of approaching her at after-course drinkypoos in a busy bar in Via Fatebenesorelle with one particular pain-in-the-butt who just would not go away. Somehow I appreciate that despite a kind of sadness that hangs about her — no, it’s because of that sadness — she goes. She’s porca, I tell myself, drinking too much after my mediocre lesson. She wears stockings, not tights, I tell myself. And all the while, as I become outrageously unpleasant with this pain-in-the-butt who just will not leave us alone, who will not understand that I want to make a pass at this woman, here in the bar, now, I’m thinking that the amused awareness of her smile across the table definitely promises porcheria, promises filth. As likewise the blonde-brown hair that keeps falling across her face. A lined face, carefully made up, with exactly that bold poignancy of recently lost youth, exactly that shrewdness that recognizes a red carpet when it’s rolled out before her. Then her postcard, then my phone-call, then the dinner, the ritual swapping of our sad stories, somewhat tedious, but at least safe in the knowledge that it was definitely on — one can listen for a long time to someone’s failure to become anything more than an amateur opera singer when the brushing of knees under the table reassures you that some pretty high notes will be struck later on. Then at last the undressing, the slightly thick, softening body squeezed tight in tight underwear, the particularly high waistline of fancy pants, and then my tongue under the flop of the breasts. But no sooner have I started to fist myself seriously over this stuff than I get a very strong image of myself masturbating over her breasts, myself coming over her breasts, and she taking the sperm on her finger and rubbing it on her lips and drawing me down to kiss me. And the reason I get this image is perhaps because this is exactly what we did, only last night to be precise, only about twenty-eight hours ago. Incredibly. Though I haven’t thought of it so much as once since then. And the reason I masturbated over her breasts, which is also perhaps the reason why it hasn’t so much as crossed my mind since, is that I set up the whole evening, clinically you might say, with the specific intention of doing just that, the specific intention, that is, of repeating what had been done before on one quite mythical occasion with her, in her husband’s second house in the mountains, if I remember rightly, when for the first time in my life I masturbated in front of a woman. So that immediately her image is now superimposed over Opera-tottie’s, though Opera-tottie’s expression sticks, a haunting mixture, on a rather pudgy face, of lust and compassion, as if aware that she is acting out a part for me, doing me a service, perhaps, who knows, in order to save me, such missions being something that so often seems to get mixed up with female gratification. This superimposition upsets me. I become conscious of the words I am muttering to myself as I masturbate, the same words that so excited Opera-tottie: I want to smother you in sperm, I want to come on your breasts, in your face, in your mouth, in your hair, I want to drown you in sperm and then fuck you and fuck you and fuck you, etc. And I become conscious, but I was always conscious, it was never out of my mind, that these are words I first spoke with her, since before her I had never experienced the liberation of saying such words to any woman. The first time I came on her breasts, in her face, the first time she flicked her tongue in my anus, the first time I flicked my tongue in hers, the first time she finger-fucked my arse while blowing me, and all the words we spoke as we did it all, the wild wild words we spoke, in Italian, in French, in English, and the book we found that claimed that the whole elaborate structure of Greek rhetoric and philosophical dialogue had been built around the art of seduction. How excited that made us. The Athenian obsession, this rather unorthodox book said, that the beloved should concede her or his graces willingly, rather than being forced, had been the driving force behind all dialectic. What important discoveries we imagined we were making! Behind all persuasion lay the libido. Lay our sex talk. Our shag chat. How superior we were, what initiates, and how we despised a crass world that had forgotten how to love, as the Athenians despised the mental sloth of the Spartans, whose women were merely obliged to submit. And for the first time, here in this Strasbourg hotel room, in the heart of Europe, it comes to me, perhaps prompted by that ridiculous conversation about Nicoletta’s grieving mother, that masturbation will always be an expression of bereavement for me. Every sexual fantasy I ever had was fulfilled with her. And so, in a sense, stolen from me. The day seized and lost. There is as much chance, I tell myself, of my concentrating on Opera-tottie or Plaster-cast-tottie as of seeing the moon beside the sun. Over the moon indeed! I cannot masturbate, that is the truth. I cannot masturbate, in the same way I cannot read, in the same way I cannot think, in the same way I cannot talk. Because all of these things are intimately connected with her. Yet, I have to masturbate, I have to read, I have to think and above all I have to talk, inside my head and out. I have to be with her.

With mindless urgency, in the small hours of the fourth of the fifth, perhaps fatal, not long after my forty-fifth birthday, I catch myself stumbling out of bed and into my trousers. My shirt I left inside my sweater and I pull them on together. I have no idea what I shall do, only that it must bring some resolution. There is still soft chatter from along the corridor, the occasional giggle. Closing my door I’m aware I haven’t put my shoes on, my hair is uncombed. I stride with empty determination on a coarse synthetic carpet. And two exquisitely disconnected thoughts cross my mind: that I am the University of Milan’s lectors’ representative to the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament, instituted to set all wrongs to right, and that Nicoletta’s tottie-tag will be Not-So-Sneaky. Or no, Sneaky, for irony. Sneaky-tottie. My mind is in pieces. Each door I pass could be hers.

The lobby-cum-lounge opens up at the end of the corridor: armless armchairs scattered about low tables, cut-glass ashtrays under concealed fluorescent light, great windows polished black behind lace curtains. A low ceiling is supported by thin, square white pillars. Wass the difference, girls, comes a voice from the far side, Wass the difference between fear and horror? Tell me that. There are still ten of them perhaps, sprawled over chairs and carpet round a table full of bottles glasses empty packets of eats and fags the far side of a tropical tree that must be fake. Titter and giggles. Under the table, the dog is again licking his genitals. With loving absorption. Fear, Colin begins, fear is … Lurching round the tree I see that Plottie is sitting on the Avvocato Malerba’s knee…. the first time you don’t make it the second time. Georg is not there. She is not there. While horror is … They are not there. Immediately, I must know who Georg’s room-mate is. Who her room-mate is. I couldn’t give a damn what Plottie’s up to. Are they around or are they in their rooms? I couldn’t even masturbate over Plottie. The quiet rhythm of the dog’s licking makes a mockery of your attempts to masturbate, I reflect. Are they together, or are they not? Horror is … Oh I don’t think I can tell ‘em this, Colin laughs, perched on the edge of a chair with Tittie- to trie’s decidedly grand canyon beside him, and either they have shagged already or have missed out on shagging, perhaps due to difficulties with the experimental Barnaby and the charity-ball party. Jerry, you know this joke. Do you think I can really tell ‘em what horror is? Who are they sharing with? Why didn’t I make a mental note when the rooms were being allotted? Why wasn’t it obvious that the Avvocato Malerba came on this trip solely and exclusively to tottie, came because Vikram Griffiths coined that expression The Shag Wagon? No, it was Georg coined that expression. Georg. I am suddenly overwhelmed by the need to know if they are fucking now. A matter of absolutely no importance to me. It’s vital. I must find out, I must resolve something. All these years and I haven’t resolved anything! I am still exactly where I was when I first hit her so long ago. Vikram Griffiths, with his arms round Heike the Dike of all people, is splashing whisky on to the dregs of something else. Wine? Grappa? Jerry where did you fuck off to? He offers the glass to me. Full And now I need a cigarette too. Better late than never, he grunts, sucking in catarrh. Or is this the first of the breakfast crowd? He prods his dog with his toe. If I could lick my cock like that I’d never go out of the house. He laughs. You can even hear it, he laughs. Per favore, one of the girls says, per carita. But suddenly I need a cigarette. Who will give me a cigarette? The shameless old shagger, Vikram grins, scratching in a sideburn. If fear, Colin repeats — Colin always has that facetiously patronizing tone to his voice, why do they put up with him? Why don’t they hit him? — is the first time you don’t make it the second time, what do you think horror can be? Heike says she hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s talking about. Somebody grabs the ashtray just before it falls, but sending stubs flying all the same, while I can already see myself going down the corridor and listening at every door. Í must know. It’s an entirely vivid picture. There are only, what, forty rooms. Fifty. And myself with my ear pressed to the brown-pink-painted door of every one, listening for sighs and squeaks. Listening for her Mais oui, mais oui! It’s the blatancy of people like the Avvocato Malerba that amazes me. Man Dieu! Mon Dieu! Not unlike the blatancy of a dog who licks his genitals in public. And of course like every awful, inappropriate and above all humiliating action, this image of myself eavesdropping all along the corridor, listening for her mots sur l'oreiller at every door, is immediately immensely seductive. The blatancy of a respectable professor on the point of retirement stroking a girl’s thigh as she sits on his knee in a hotel lounge. But why not for heaven’s sake! Why not? As when I prowled about outside her Verona flat for hours, chain-smoking tipped Gauloises because they reminded me of her. I must have a cigarette. To catch them at it. To know. To confront. Georges car was there. To achieve some resolution. To suffer. I’m sure it was Georg’s. And Plottie, first with her hand on my knee, then her arse on his. Why not? Why didn’t I take the licence plate to compare it later? Statistics have proved, Vikram is claiming, that people of mixed race shag more and better than their pure-bred counterparts. His laughter is raucous. I cadge a cigarette, having imagined, during what I now see as that masterpiece of self-deception which was my ‘recovery' that I had stopped smoking. Do we expect the likes of Plottie to be faithful? What for? I hate cadging cigarettes. Especially from someone you’ve never spoken to before. A student with red hair. If you have a bad idea, I tell myself, be sure you’ll act on it. How could I ever have imagined I’d stopped smoking? Per l'amore di Dio tell us! says Tittie-tottie. Tell us what horror is. Red-hair lights my cigarette. Cadging a cigarette, it occurs to me, becomes an image of one’s humiliation, of everything one’s been reduced to. She’s called Serena. But then how could I ever have imagined I’d recovered? Horror, says Vikram Griffiths — would I beat on the door if I found them? Would I be able to restrain myself, would I be able to stop myself from becoming totally violent, from seeking to resolve the situation once and for all? — horror is a wet afternoon in Swansea with no booze and your girl-friend with the Red Army in. He laughs loud, squeezing an arm round Heike the Dike’s shoulders. But it’s forced. I suddenly see that now. Vikram Griffiths is morose from hours of drinking. I’m suddenly aware of that. Then I ask myself, could it be that her room-mate is Heike and Georg’s Vikram? Could it be that these two, Vikram and Heike, are only here in the lounge so late to give the others some time in bed, their own jokey arm-in-armness a sort of comic reflection of the others’ embrace? Perhaps they wish they’d gone to sleep hours ago. They’re only staying up to do the others a favour. Horror is English Three, says Plottie, when Ermani sets the dictation. Incredibly, I’ve managed to sit down, rather than set off along the corridor. Incredibly, somebody actually giggled at Plottie’s unimaginative remark. How could I ever have wanted to sleep with her? Tubby, dull, silly. The Avvocato Malerba is playing with the beads of her blue necklace. I’m on the floor. She’s pushing her fringe back. I’ve got the whisky in my hand and I’m on the carpet with my first cigarette in weeks between a certain Valeria, small and peppy, tousled black hair, boyish body, and the belligerent Maura, who sat beside Nicoletta, sorry Sneaky-tottie, on the coach, saving her very occasional remarks to further the cause of the moderate Left. Nah, nah, Colin says. 1 can’t tell them. Too adult. Three of the girls are pulling at his clothes and pinching him to get him to finish his joke. You can’t just leave a joke hanging in the air! But I’ve seen him do this trick once before. In a bar in Sesto San Giovanni. No, I can’t be responsible for corrupting a group of nice young women, Colin protests. He smoothes his moustache in a pantomime of serious reflection. It was the first night I slept with Psycho-tottie. Which resolved nothing. He finds a Queen’s English: You are acquainted with my moral values, I’m sure. Plottie watches from Malerba’s knee, though somehow they’re not quite together. The truth is I admire their blatancy. My vocation, says Colin, for the preservation of innocence. Comes a shout: I'll strip off my top if you don’t tell us inside one minute! It’s the peppy Valeria. Exactly one minute, she shouts. That’ll show him who’s innocent! Peals of laughter. Go on then! One minute, she shouts. And counting. Now where were me reading glasses, Vikram Griffiths says, ‘orror … Colin begins again, again pauses. Sorry, horror. Where are your aitches? Mum always used to say. He has a huge teasing grin on his face. Then he whispers something to Tittie-tottie. Laughter. You don’t believe me? Valeria stands up. I’m counting. Cinquantuno, cinquanta, you don’t believe me but I’m going to take my top off, quarantanove. Whoo-oo-oo-ooh! Vikram Griffiths shouts on a rising note. But still obviously morose. Nobody, I suddenly tell myself, sitting on the floor observing the Indian Welshman, pretends to enjoy themselves more than the sullen, the morose, the defeated. Our respective ages were definitely the crucial factor in our affair. I see that now. Quarantasei. The girl untucks herself. Clearly tipsy. Quarantacinque. Age was the colour of our affair, you might say. Quarantatre. Nobody, I tell myself, throws themselves into life more determinedly than the terminally ill. Clearly drunk. How on earth could I have been so blind as to envy Vikram taking two girls under his mac and then singing Men of Harlech of all things? Men of Harlech! With those ridiculous sideburns. To end up the evening in a drunken embrace with a woman renowned only for her many economically advantageous affairs with women older than herself, and most notably with the appalling Professoressa Bertelli, who gave her her job. A man obliged to keep a dog in order to have someone or something around who will not betray him. Trentacinque. Perhaps age is the key to everything, I tell myself, drinking my whisky. The Avvocato Malerba shifts Plottie on his knees to get a better view around the tropical tree. Sixty if he’s a day. Trentadue. From the carpet below I’m looking up at a solid young butt in jeans and at bitten fingers beginning on bottom blouse buttons. Perhaps none of us are truly ourselves, it occurs to me, but only ourselves at a certain age. Whoo-oo-oo-ooh! shouts Vikram. The dog looks up from his genitalia. We have no identity apart from our age. And now it occurs to me that all day Vikram Griffiths has never been anything but morose. That all day what 1 took for cheerfulness, for high spirits, was just a vain attempt to defend himself from his melancholy. I see this now. A depression perhaps even greater than my own. Otherwise why would he trail around with a shaggy dog, with a whisky flask? Am I going to listen at the doors or not? They must be fucking. Ventinove. Heike the Dike shakes her head. Pessimo gusto, she says, with her heavy German accent, but watching. You imagine somebody is happy, 1 tell myself, and instead they are choking with despair. You imagine somebody wants to seduce you and instead they want to tell you about their father’s cancer. You imagine somebody finds complete fulfilment in you and instead they’re completing a mosaic of friendship with someone else. Ventiquattro. This kind of thing doesn’t happen with dogs, I reflect. Ventidue. For example, it would not be beyond her, it comes to me (how fertile my mind is when everything is going wrong), first to fuck Georg, now, cordially as ever, in the room with the Modigliani reproduction, and then (penti) to fuck Heike, if fuck is the appropriate word, equally cordially, in the room with the Gustav Klimt reproduction. And why not? Why shouldn’t people do these things?. Why shouldn’t my daughter do just whatever she wants? It’s her eighteenth birthday tomorrow. Today. Why shouldn’t she read trash? And why couldn’t 1 just have gone to sleep without thinking about all this? Quindici. Or just got drunk without thinking about all this? Tredici. Georg’s woman, after all, is crippled with muscular dystrophy. Undid. It’s quite reasonable for him to want to shag around. Not much point if you’ve got a bra on, Plottie says, wriggling on the knees of a sixty-year-old who prefers Spinoza to Nietzsche. The mother of his child, as he always describes her. Horror is Berlusconi becoming president for life, says Committed-moderate-left-tottie. Why do 1 hate the word committed? But the peppy Valeria is making that beautiful gesture women have of arching their backs to enable their hands to get up to the bra fastener, so that their tits, and 1 remember remarking on this to her and getting her to do it over and over in front of the mirror of some hotel or other, so that their tits are pushed forward and upward, foregrounded a modern grammarian might say, at precisely the moment nakedness is promised, the sudden give when the fastener is released more dramatic and more exciting than if you had undone it for her. Nope, otto. She raises the tone of her voice. The accent is Roman. All this abundance of beauty, 1 tell myself, watching Peppy-tottie pull her bra out through a sleeve, is somehow more present to me now than it ever was, and more unavailable. Sei, cinque. Nothing could better convince me, Colin gloats at the now bra-less girl, that what fragments of innocence remain to this fallen child must be preserved at all costs. I’m afraid I really cannot reveal the end of this joke. Plottie has started to croon strip music. What a prick you are, Heike says in her Austrian accent. I’d never forgive myself, Colin gloats. And will somebody please get that disgusting beast out of here! Tittie-tottie tries to cover his eyes. A skirmish. Though her own must be altogether more impressive. Quattro, tre. Peppy has a curious grin on her face, there’s a gleam in her eyes. As if removing her shirt were an act of terrorism. I'll do it, she shrieks. You don’t believe me, but I will do it. Whoo-oo-OO-OH! Thus Vikram Griffiths. Morose. Promptly echoed by his lyric hound.

Then just as she arrives at uno, I announce: Fear is the first time you can’t come the second time. Horror is the second time you can’t come the first time. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the joke. So called.

Peppy stops. For Christ’s sake! Colin says. Spoil-sport! You miserable bastard, Jerry! Thus Vikram. Peppy waits. What did you say? she asks. Because the girls don’t understand. Haven’t understood. WHAT! There’s a chorus. They’re too young to understand. WHAT!!! And the same goes, it occurs to me, for my encounter with Sneaky-tottie earlier on. Didn’t understand. I drain my whisky as Peppy-tottie hesitates, holding on to the one last button of her blouse. And what I am thinking, as everybody shouts and groans and hisses at me, is that this joke says nothing other than that horror is gasping after lost intensity, that horror is a terrible awareness that the best is past. Too soon, Picasso’s lovers are gasping after lost intensity. That much is obvious. The whole Western world, I tell myself, as the room is in uproar, is obsessed with remaining young — thus my immediate thoughts, as Peppy-tottie sits down, groaning, the joke having now been laboriously explained, by Heike the Dike! The whole Western world has attached its identity to falling in love over and over again, marrying over and over again, coming over and over again. Men! Heike shakes her head. As if we were immortal! We are driving ourselves mad — thus my reflections as Colin hurls an empty pack of fags at me, as Vikram Griffiths roars, Let’s see the tits anyway! — with our love-making and ogling and orgasms, first, second and third. We are driving ourselves insane. Any girl who wants a good result in her exams, roars Vikram Griffiths, shows her tits now! The Avvocato Malerba is going crazy, I reflect, pouring more whisky. Vikram Griffiths is going crazy. I am going completely crazy. This coach trip, how could one conclude otherwise, this Shag Wagon, is entirely emblematic of a phenomenon general all over the Western world, I tell myself. We are behaving entirely inappropriately. Peppy-tottie hesitates. At least dogs are spared this, I reflect. I’ll do it if someone else does, she says. Perhaps this is the difference between animals and ourselves. And while everybody is yelling, Yes! and Plottie gets up on her plaster-cast pulling off her sweater, gyrating, awkwardly, on her plaster-cast — and her breasts are big — it occurs to me, draining for the second time what is a whole glass of whisky, that the bother of coming a second time is unimaginable now. Who would I ever make that effort with now? To come a second time! Who could I care that much about now, once I had vented or failed to vent my rage? Once I had defined my trap again. Dogs just fuck once, I reflect, then retire replete to the hearthrug. Plottie has got the old hands up her back. She’s smiling at me: She’s swaying her hips over the plaster-cast. I would never be able to come a second time with her, I tell myself. But I will cadge a second fag, though. At forty-five surely, thus the thoughts crossing my mind as the noise level rises, as Plottie’s breasts spring loose in a tight T-shirt, one should have reached the point where one is free from anxieties about coming once or twice. Or three times. Or four. At least at forty-five one might achieve a dog’s serenity over such matters. She extracts her bra from a sleeve. The dark hair of unshaved armpits. That’s always a wonderful gesture. Unless it’s precisely at forty-five, even at forty-three … Then I remember that Georg is forty-three … I’m on my feet. Of course. Georg. Georg is coming a second time. Now. At forty-three. He said he was forty-three. Not the end of the world. She was thinking of Georg. Just as Peppy releases the last button, I’m on my feet. In the roaring, the whoops, the shouts of More! of Nice! of Belle! of Brava! I’m heading for the corridor. I’m already listening at the first door. Georg is forty-three. Why wasn’t that obvious? Can’t hear anything for the shouts of, Everybody, come on, everybody take your tops off. But how could she mix me up with Georg? Colin goading Tittie-tottie to join in. He wasn’t at my level, she said, as if that was supposed to be reassuring. Can’t hear anything at the second door. Nothing. Nor at the third. Do I want to hear anything? Then the French proprietor rounding the bottom of the stairs. Furious. Slippers slapping. I turn to him. In his dressing-gown. Que faites-vous? Silence! On veut dormir! His shout is a whisper, pushing past me along the corridor to crush the rowdiness. Then a door closing. Turn back. To find, suddenly, here’s Georg striding along the corridor with his black executive’s weekend bag. Georg, from nowhere, in the corridor. Hurrying, hurriedly dressed, unkempt. Georg! Crisis at home. Thus his explanation. Urgent phone-call. None of his normal pacato. Got to rush. Thus his muttered words. Drowned in a dog’s bark. Serious. Crisis. The proprietor and Vikram shouting. Georg shouting. The dog. None of his normal cool. Got to call a taxi. Got to get to the station, to the airport. To Milan. The mother of his child! Which leaves me at two-thirty a.m. the fourth of the fifth stranded along the corridor of a cheap hotel in the heart of Europe, inappropriately dressed, inappropriately occupied. Drunk. Sick. This is faithfulness, I tell myself. Rushing off at two-thirty in the morning, interrupting second orgasm because the mother of your child has phoned, or her mother, this is faithfulness. Thus my immediate thoughts. Nothing to do with sex, I tell myself. Could I have stayed with my wife? Shagged around and stayed with my wife? Georg is more faithful than I am! How I envy his caring enough to rush off. But which room did he come out of? Wait to see if she emerges? Thus my reaction. My unforgivable reaction. Which room did he come out of? If only I hadn’t been distracted by the French proprietor, now hissing and raving at Griffiths. The dog baring his teeth. Wait? The dog growling. The others dispersing to bed. Defending his master. The others escaping the French proprietor, and Vikram Griffiths starting Men of Harlech, mockingly. How you bravely live for glory. Then fiddling for my key, the sound of a door opening further back. Almost manage not to turn. But, out slips a figure. As they brave the arrow’s shower. Woman’s figure. Girl’s pretty figure. Pretty white night-dress, pretty brown hair. Though your men are sick and tying, Vikram sings. Pouty lips. Veronica. The one he was angling for in the coach. And your loved ones sad and crying. But did he really come out of that door? Thus my uncertainty, my envy. Freedom in the flag is flying. Giggling at her door. Gazing back along the corridor to the lobby. Final show-down with the proprietor, the dispersal. Calling to Plottie. The girl is. Giggles. Vikram Griffiths still humming, All the nation with you weeping. Pulling her in. Plottie allowing the others to shag? Freedom will not die! The Indian Welshman slams his door. And in my own room the lights flit less often across the great modern masterpiece, across the lovers stranded in their nostalgia for intensity. That’s why it’s on the beach, of course, with the sea now behind them. I see that now. Such a calm, flat sea. A dead sea. What good fun, says the Avvocato Malerba coming in, closing the door behind him. What a great evening. Terrible news about Georg, says the Avvocato Malerba, shaking his head. Is he the spy? He collects information to discredit us, to tell them Vikram Griffiths offered good exam results for any girl who’d show her tits. Aren’t young women such fun, announces the Avvocato Malerba, finally loosening his pompous tie. Blue background, little rings of yellow stars. Europe. Tomorrow. The Petitions Committee. In the bathroom I shake out six tablets of bromazepam and fill the plastic toothglass with tap water.