Europa

CHAPTER TEN

Plato did not believe in the realm of pure forms. That much is clear from any reading of The Republic. Nobody saw more plainly than he that the world was a place of change and betrayal, and if he chose to deny that place any ultimate reality and spoke insistently of an ideal, more real realm beyond, it was perhaps his way of expressing his outrage, expressing a mental space, a place of yearning that is in all of us. For things to be still. Like my wife, like the foreign lectors at the University of Milan, like the visionary architects of our United Europe, he longed for the world to declare its final form and be still, or at least for all motion to be neutralized in repetition, in ritual, as the rigidly ordered world of his philosopher-kings must reflect the eternal harmony of the cosmos. He longed for each man to assume his definitive station, forever, each role to be exactly defined and assigned, forever, authority imposed, balance achieved, justice done. Thus Europe. Thus our final home. Our permanent job. The end of conflict. The end of poverty. The end of history The shape of an apple, defined. The ingredients of an ice-cream, defined. Pure form. Ultimate solidarity in a world where perfected technique will remove all suffering. All wrongs righted. By the effective agency of the Petitions Committee …

The entrance to the European Parliament in Strasbourg presents a row of flags commanding a large area of green below and offering a tangent to the curve of a concrete structure behind, which, despite its imposing scale and the monumentality conferred by wide expanses of paving and long flights of shallow steps, might well have drawn its inspiration from a study of the Chambersee Service Station. There is a flaunting of technical know-how in such a building, of mechanical savoir faire. A fan of radiating external buttresses supports the whole. Tall panels of glass reveal curves and floors within, ramps and stairs, and, more in general, that combination of polished wood, stone and stuccoed mural which expresses at once power and luxury and ideals. For the themes are those of fraternity, of peace among all men, and the building is circular, of course, so that no nation should feel they have been pushed into a corner, so that the parliamentary hall itself should not display the harsh geometry of the rectangle with its symbolic freight of opposites, its hints, as the Italians like to say, of muro contro muro.

The students milled on the grey esplanade taking photographs of each other and of the flags twitched by a damp breeze. It had stopped raining but clouds were constantly forming and breaking in a liquid sky and the light was shattered everywhere by steaming puddles and gleams and sudden sunshine stabbing in the shadows of concrete and glass. The Parliament is isolated from the rest of the town, as well it might be, set apart on an artificial mound in its own abstract space, and the flags, I noticed, through a haze of bromazepam, as the students photographed each other, joking and laughing and standing on one leg, embracing and pulling faces, were studiously arranged in the random abstraction of alphabetical order, this to avoid, one presumes, any offence of hierarchy. And staring at their bright colours — the Belgian flag, the Danish flag, the German flag (Deutschland), the Irish flag (Eire), the Greek flag (Ellas), the Spanish flag (España), the French flag, the Dutch flag (Holland), the Italian flag, the Luxembourg (ish?) flag, the Portuguese flag, the Union Jack (UK) — it occurred to me how notoriously difficult it is to arrange objects in space without generating meaning. Without causing offence. Since all meaning, so-called, causes offence to somebody, I reflected. As my wife always objected to my objecting to her keeping all the wedding photos so prominently displayed along the piano-top. As I threw a tantrum when I saw she had inserted The Age of the Courtesan alongside all the books we had read together: Chateaubriand and Sophocles and the Satyricon of Petronius. The arrangement of the flags outside this Parliament building must be entirely meaningless, I told myself. Otherwise it would give offence. Or rather, any meaning here expressed must lie in the absence of meaning, in the absence of any hierarchy in the relation of these flags the one to the other. Here arrangement must point away from arrangement, I thought through a fog of bromazepam, must point to that ideal of perfect indistinction and equality which can only come, perhaps, in the absence of any real relationship, only exist for people, countries, thousands of miles apart. Or with death, I told myself. The indistinction of death. The cemetery is the only level playing-field, I told myself. Where Chateaubriand and Robespierre and Eulogius Schneider are equal at last. And I recall now, sitting as I am at present in this not unattractive space which forms the Meditation Room, so-called, of the European Parliament, that it was looking at the flags, or rather the arrangement of the flags, with the Avvocato Malerba getting himself photographed, by Plottie, in double-breasted suit and European tie, then returning the compliment (close enough to get all the signatures on her plaster-cast braced against a flagpole), and with a general atmosphere amongst students and lectors alike of self-congratulation, and also of awe, as of pilgrims newly arrived at a shrine, it was milling about the esplanade in the damp breeze as we waited for entry passes to be made up so that we could penetrate this shrine, this sanctum, as supplicants, and present our petition to those appointed to set right whatever wrongs had been done to us, that I observed that there was no Welsh flag, for of course Wiles does not constitute a nation-state, and I set off to find Vikram Griffiths and to mention this fact to him, in jest. That there was no Welsh flag. That he wasn’t properly represented, didn’t even turn up, as the Scottish and Irish did, as decorative elements, trophies really, within the British flag, the Union Jack, which anyway Europeans notoriously refer to as English. How could he sing, Freedom in the flag is flying, when there wasn’t one? Not to mention the absence of Empire. I looked for Vikram, thinking this was the kind of provocative if banal reflection that might elicit some wit and sparks from a man who claimed to have been the first, perhaps the only, non-white to have been a card-carrying member of Plaid Cymru. Might cheer him up. In the way that old enmities can be heartening, galvanizing, as I myself in my bromazepam haze had felt galvanized earlier this morning seeing the numbers 4/5 on the cheap flap-down calendar in the hotel reception, galvanized (so far as the bromazepam would allow) and somewhat ridiculous for having ever given any importance to something that could hardly be more significant than the arrangement of the flags outside the European Parliament, or indeed any mere arrangement of numbers and letters. But I couldn’t find Vikram Griffiths.

The passes appeared. We were shuffled into a long queue in an antechamber with the group in front of us on wheelchairs, paraplegic, and before them a crocodile of schoolchildren come to observe the workings of the Parliament, which today would be debating, a slip of paper said, the standardization of religious education across the Community, and above all the vexed question of treatment of minority religious groupings, especially where these coincided with marked ethnic distinctions. Unless an emergency debate were to be tabled on the total collapse of the Italian Lira (not to mention the Greek Drachma) following the decision of the German Bundesbank, apparently a sovereign institution and thus outside the jurisdiction of the Community and even the German government, so they say, not to lower its interest rates. Or equally an emergency debate might be tabled on the conflict over Community Policy towards Yugoslavia, ex-Yugoslavia, in conflict, in chaos. In particular, huge numbers of children were being killed there. Our queue shuffled behind jerking wheelchairs where disabled people of different, perhaps differing, nationalities kept each other company in pidgin English and in front of them four French teachers tried, but not very hard, to stop twenty ten-year-olds from shrieking. Where was Vikram? I wondered. And what was I going to say in my speech, which according to my watch was only twenty minutes away now? I had prepared nothing.’! had thought of nothing. Then in the crush between security doors where only four people could go at once (closing one door before another could be opened), Sneaky-tottie took my arm, as she had done the day before while climbing the stairs of the Chambersee Service Station, or when offering me the refuge of her umbrella under blowing rain, took it, that is, with remarkable confidence and intimacy, as if we had been great friends for years, and remarked with a flush on her face (as though after sex almost), that it really was exhilarating to feel oneself at the heart of Europe and to see that Europe wasn’t just an idea but a concrete entity. My first reaction to this, between the two security doors, and apart from some quip to reverse the positive connotations of ‘concrete’, might normally have been to reflect that the existence of this parliamentary building on French soil, doubling up as it does for a similar’ parliamentary building on Belgian soil (so that once every month twelve articulated lorries, meeting Community Requirements of course, have to set out from Brussels to Strasbourg bringing with them heaps of documents and archives which then have to be trucked back only a week later when the Parliament returns from Strasbourg to Brussels, while at the same time five-hundred-plus rooms, of a certain standard and quality, have to be kept available in both cities for five-hundred-plus MEPs, so-called, not to mention their secretaries and interpreters, and of course two staffs of menials have to be kept in permanent and generous public employ to service these structures, so reminiscent, though on an infinitely larger scale, of the Chambersee Service Station, this in order to enhance the prestige of one founder member, France, a favour granted once upon a time in return for the concession to another founder member, Germany, of a greater number of Parliamentary seats than might otherwise have been allotted) — the existence, I might normally have said, in response to the innocent and ingenuous Sneaky-tottie, of this parliamentary building hardly inspired enthusiasm in the European ideal. Yet I did not react like this, but merely squeezed the young girl’s arm benignly and sexlessly. Her cheeks were so full of colour and excitement. Just as I did not react as I might have reacted when finding, a few moments later in a glossily marbled area where we had been told to assemble around the secretary of a Welsh MEP beneath an announcement in more languages than one would care to count, that she was explaining to Doris Rohr and Heike the Dike and Luis and a small group of students that in the formation of a constitution for a United Europe, such as the one she was drawing up in the hope of a year’s scholarship in Brussels (and it crossed my mind that she was saying this because of the presence of the Welsh MEP’s rather attractive blonde secretary, who might prove a useful contact), the key issue was the establishment of those mechanisms which would regulate a genuinely pooled sovereignty. The expression pooled sovereignty immediately reminded me of that other execrable but intimately related expression she had once favoured, negotiable identity, and then of the time when, on noticing a considerable puddle on the bed of a fourth-floor room in Pensione Porta Genova after an afternoon’s epic exertions, I remarked, laughing and embracing her, that that was the only sort of pooled sovereignty that meant anything to me. I was reminded of these things, as I say, on entering the foyer of the European Parliament, and I was irritated, as always, by the shallowness of it all, by her criminal forgetfulness of those moments that had been intense, by the fact that the world had not chosen to stand still at what had appeared to me to be its only moment of true harmony, of equilibrio interiore. I was scandalized, I suppose, like Plato, like my wife, by how much and how callously the world could change. Waterwords, I suddenly thought, in a haze of bromazepam, in the impressive foyer of the European Parliament, remembering a poem from somewhere. Kallimachos, perhaps. Meleager. I couldn’t remember. “Oaths such as these, waterwords! Thus some ancient poet, jilted; thus my extraordinary memory, despite the bromazepam. So that it occurred to me, for example, that I might well remark that on the matter of pooled sovereignty the last word had been spoken some two thousand five hundred years ago by Thucydides in his description of the Athenian alliance. Again that memory, as if all drawn to the surface, pus-like, by a single sore, everything I have ever known brought to focus by a single rancour. Yes, The weaker states — I might quote Thucydides on the subject of pooled sovereignty — because of the general desire to make profits, were content to tolerate being governed by the stronger, while those who won superior power by acquiring capital resources brought the smaller cities under their control I might have quoted that, and not inappropriately it seemed to me on a morning when the currency markets are still in turmoil, as the radio would have it, over the sovereign decisions of the German Bundesbank, a morning when for some dealers the Italian Lira has to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. But I did not. And the reason, I’m aware now, sitting here in the Meditation Room, so-called, hunched forward in what to a casual observer might be supposed to be an attitude of prayer (and what is prayer if not an attitude?), the reason that I did not quote Thucydides, or Meleager, or anybody else, in the foyer of the European Parliament, nor object in any way to her reflections on how a new constitution must contribute towards the construction of. a European identity, was perhaps partly because I did not believe she would recognize such a quotation, recognize I mean that it had passed between us before, in the days when she always agreed with me, when I always agreed with her, and perhaps partly because, in the daze, the haze, not entirely unpleasant, of last night’s bromazepam, still happily smothering any responsible anxiety I might otherwise feel relative to my total impreparation for the two speeches I was supposed to give, one in only twenty minutes’ time, I now found that I couldn’t care less. I could not care less what she or Sneaky-tottie or anybody else said about Europe. Whether true or false. And for a moment it even occurred to me that I might join in. Why not? That I might myself remark on the need to use a constitution to reinforce those characteristics we Europeans, north south east west, do doubtless have in common, to wit our belief in reason, our belief in progress, our belief in technique as the tool of reason for the promotion of progress, not to mention our post-Christian obsession with charity, with self-sacrificial love (showing solidarity to a man the mother of whose child was in hospital with an incurable disease), our respect for animals, ancient poets and dying languages, our undoubted vocation to solve the problems of the entire world, the planet, the cosmos (substituting ourselves for the loving God we have lost), our unslakeable thirst for the imagined gratitude of those nations (and animals) we shall save — all these creditable characteristics might usefully be reinforced, I could have said, perhaps interrupting Doris Rohr, who was now airing that stale piety about Germans feeling safer from themselves in a United Europe, by a constitution of immense sophistication that took into account at every point the need to make decisions collectively, across nations, across religions, across classes, across economic categories, industries, regions, and then across those even deeper divides that separate the old and the young, the sick and the well, that make the old incomprehensible to the young and vice versa, the sick incomprehensible to the well and vice versa, right down to that deepest divide of all that keeps men and their women, women and their men, in a state of total and mutual and irretrievable incomprehension. Collective decision-making was the key, I might have said announced proclaimed in the foyer of the European Parliament, and I was suddenly amused to think that should I choose to, I myself, Jeremiah Jerry, as people have frequently called me, could make the bold proposal to use a new European constitution to engage every element of society across the entire continent, wherever its borders might eventually be established, in the decision-making process and thus simultaneously and necessarily to render, which is surely the European ideal par excellence, every aspect of life political, and hence, with patient planning and negotiation, soluble, from cross-border immigration to the size of a condom and the quality of a mushroom and the strength of a perfume. As problems in a relationship could also always be solved, dissolved, she said, if only two people were sincere and thus had all the facts before them to manipulate. But I insisted, on that particular evening, that there had been no problem before she had decided to be sincere. Before she so gratuitously told me of her infidelity. The problem was her sincerity — why on earth had she told me? (why had I told my wife?) — her gratuitous sincerity relative to the generosity, so-called, of her friendship towards a man who sent her flowers and phoned insistently, the mother of whose child was dying, slowly, of muscular dystrophy. Her sincerity was mere bragging, I told her that evening. And again this was a time when I hit her, no, when she asked me to hit her. Bragging about her sexual escapades, bragging about her sensitivity towards this sufferer, bragging about her confessional vocation. If it makes you feel better, go ahead and hit me, she said. She was naked. Go on, she insisted. She screamed. Hit me! She said it in French. Frappe-moi! And when I hit her it was always across the face, the facade. Her generosity! No, when I hit her it was across the mouth, the mouthpiece. How was this kind of sincerity going to help us solve anything? I shouted. I hit her where the words came. The waterwords. I felt desperately ugly, desperately stupid. And breathing deeply, there in the impressive foyer of the European Parliament, breathing out long and slow as if one could simply exhale one’s angst with a lungful of air, I almost choked out laughing to think that I was perhaps about to make this bold political statement, in favour of the most comprehensive constitution the world has ever seen. Was I going to make it? After all, and this came home to me with some force, gazing around the smooth surfaces of wood and marble and brushed metal laminates, after all, You have nothing against Europe. So you told yourself, with some surprise. You have nothing at all against Europe. It was a surprise for me to realize that. Or such projects in general. You have nothing against the fantasy utopias of Black Spells Magic, or the ecology movement, or happy monogamous marriages, or even the United Colours of Benetton. You just happen not to believe in them. Not to be able to believe in them. It’s a detail! A joke. It wouldn’t get in anybody else’s way. And for a moment I allowed myself to imagine how I might say what I had just thought of saying and how she might feel grateful to me for making such a contribution, for applying my intellect, such as it is, to the not inconsiderable problem of a constitution for a United Europe, and how she might say, with a bright, intelligent smile, that if I didn’t mind she would rather like to introduce my central concept of, what shall we call it? permanent pan-factional compromise, into her preamble, the preamble to the constitution she hoped would win her the prize of a year’s scholarship in Brussels. This she would say loudly in the presence of the Welsh MEP’s secretary, who might be useful, if only in bringing her to the attention of the Welsh MEP, who was Vice-president of the influential Petitions Committee. She might even, I told myself, should I actually say what I had thought of saying, and should she then be in a position to get a word in edgeways — the Avvocato Malerba having this minute taken it upon himself to hold forth to all the young students, only two of whom were boys, on the principles that had inspired the original architects of the Community (of whom not the least important, he insisted, was the Italian Alcide De Gasperi) and namely, above all, the desire to eliminate forever the threat of armed conflict between our nations, of violence between one European and another, he claimed, which would always be civil war, the Avvocato Malerba said, family violence, he insisted, fratricide, as in Bosnia at this very moment, while the Welsh MEP’s secretary (herself from Yorkshire it seemed, a county not without a certain vocation for civil war) was now suggesting that we might follow her towards the left hemisphere of the building — yes, had she been able to get a word in edgeways in all this group confusion and the general fervour of solidarity that had invaded our coach party upon entering the indubitably impressive, not to say lush, atmosphere of the European Parliament (and if anybody was capable of getting a word in edgeways it was her), she might have wanted to thank me, I mean for my idealistic formulation, had I formulated it, and bestowed a smile on me, one of her quick French pouty smiles, a smile which would doubtless have reminded me of so much. But I didn’t say it, I did not propose the notion of permanent pan-factional compromise, just as I didn’t quote Thucydides. And more than anything else perhaps, my reason for remaining silent, as all the girls now chattered about Europe and we proceeded up a gracefully curved staircase, was that I was looking forVikram Griffiths. Not because I wanted to remark to him on the absence of the Welsh flag, which in fact I had now forgotten, but simply because I was suddenly intrigued, surprised, disconcerted by his absence, and perhaps because I had begun to nurse a vague fantasy that at the very moment I was to stand up to address the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament I might, with nothing in my head, feign some kind of illness, or even collapse, mental or physical, and, perhaps gasping for breath, choking, invite my colleague Dr Griffiths, doubtless better prepared than myself, to speak in my place.

Where’s Vikram? I asked as the actually extremely pleasant Yorkshire blonde secretary of the Welsh MEP was telling Colin that one referred to the European Parliament building, designed as it was, in terms of its right hemisphere and its left hemisphere. Oh, just like the old brain, Colin says, the old noddle, and he started to make jokes about the left hemisphere controlling what the right side of Europe was doing and the right the left, and then quipping, as he put an arm round Tittie-tottie’s waist (and now we were straggling along a curving third-floor corridor padded with green and plastered with posters announcing worthy concerns and complex directives) about this perhaps being why his left hand never knew what his right was up to. Or where it was up. Ho, ho. Biblical, he added, wiping the smile off his face. How’s that for a range of reference?

Where’s Vikram? I repeated.

Not quite, MEP-secretary-tottie said.

What?

The blonde secretary glanced at Colin with that wry humour of the woman, the quietly beautiful woman, who knows all men are pigs, but is somehow resigned to charming them anyway. It was when giving alms that the right was supposed not to know what the left was doing.

I wasn’t doing anyone no ‘arm, Colin laughed, pinching Tittie-tottie, who jumped and giggled.

Then when I asked once again, Where was Vikram, perhaps a little louder this time, Barnaby remarked that most probably he had gone on ahead to the office of the Welsh MEP with whom he had been in correspondence about this trip for some months and who had been instrumental in setting up our crucial encounter with the Petitions Committee, upon which, far more than on the meetings with the London Times and the Italian Euro MPs, it seemed our future careers must hang. I asked the experimental Irish novelist how his child’s throat was and he said, Better thanks, when he’d phoned his wife this morning the antibiotics had begun to take effect, the fever had come down. Had anybody phoned to find out if Georg had got back, I asked then, had he taken the plane or the train or what, but at the same time Dimitra was saying that this was just typical of Griffiths, he’d been voted out as representative but all the same couldn’t stop himself from meddling in the affair, sneaking off like this before anybody else to get a first word in with this Welsh MEP who was Vice-president of the Committee and of course in league with Griffiths because they both came from Wales. It was against the spirit, Dimitra said, and she quickened her pace along the padded corridor, of yesterday evening’s democratic vote.

But Vikram was not in the Welsh MEP’s office. Only the Welsh MEP was in his office, a small, lean, wiry figure with oversize head who did not immediately appreciate who we were. Professionally affable, he sprang to his feet and shook three or four hands vigorously over the polished desk, earnestly demonstrating his goodwill, but perplexed, not knowing who we were, his big head nodding eagerly. Until: Ah, but where’s our young man, he demanded, suddenly realizing. What’s his name, Griffith, Griffiths. Vic Griffiths. The representative? Who wrote in Welsh. There are one or two things still to clear up.

Vic Griffiths!

The leading members of the group were annoyed. Dimitra was annoyed. She was annoyed. Heike was annoyed. By Vikram’s absence, by the notion of his presence elsewhere. By our apparent inability to speak to the Welsh MEP without him. What had been discussed in this correspondence? Did anybody know? In Welsh! But I was thinking of that change of name. How it spoke worlds. Of subtlety and insecurity. Of subtlety bred of insecurity. Unless he had merely been staging a surprise. There was a senseless milling on the office carpet. Vikram loved such surprises. The shock of his foreignness. Why wasn’t he here? There was a loss of direction. Questions flew. Had any of the students seen Dr Griffiths? Or his dog. On the coach? Outside the building? Yes, he would have been savouring the moment when he introduced himself to the Welsh MEP, I thought. Savouring the disbelief. An Indian who spoke Welsh. People turned away from the MEP to talk. In Italian. They had not seen him. Or his dog. Unless he was afraid, it suddenly occurred to me. He had suddenly lost his nerve. Luis went to the door to look down the corridor. Afraid the colour of his skin might ruin things. The lectors huddled together. Might upset this influential man who imagined him pure-bred Welsh. They were nervous. Could he have gone to talk to some other member of the Committee, Dimitra wondered, or some member of the press, and all at once Doris Rohr and Dimitra and even Luis and Barnaby Hilson and above all she became immensely concerned that Vikram might in some way be queering our pitch, might be off speaking to others. Vikram who had dreamed up this whole mad trip himself, researched it, organized it, believed in it, in an attempt to defend the job, call it that, that paid the rent, paid the lawyers who represented him in various private actions, not least the custody case for his seven-year-old son, Vikram was now suspected of ruining the whole thing, with his over-enthusiasm, his lack of restraint, his love of conspiracy. Whereas I wondered if there were any telling, with our charismatic leader, whether pride in his hybrid destiny, or fear, was uppermost. Was he subject to sudden losses of nerve? Had anybody noticed if Dr Griffiths was drunk this morning? someone asked. Had anybody spoken to Dr Griffiths at all? He was ruining everything. First the shouting match, Heike said, with the hotel proprietor, in the early hours, and now this. Doris said, Because he was voted out, no doubt. Immediately there was a hum of indignation with the lectors standing at the front, crowded about the Honourable Owen Rhys’s desk, and the students behind spilling out into the curved corridor of the outer left hemisphere of the European Parliament, in Strasbourg, France, all asking each other when they had last seen Vikram Griffiths.

But this was hardly important, Dimitra now suggested to MEP Rhys in her execrable Greek English. Surely the important thing now was to be on time for our appointment with the no doubt busy Petitions Committee, and get our case across to them. This with the implication: Before Vikram has time to do untold damage; though it was clear from the Honourable Rhys’s polite confusion that he had been rather looking forward to meeting his fellow-Welshman, He still hadn’t registered the name Vikram. Unless, Colin laughed, there’s a young lady missing likewise! Know what I mean? But I was suddenly struck, at that moment, by my sense of distance from it all. Not that he wanted to suggest that Vic Griffiths, he grinned, was notorious, nudge, nudge, but such an eventuality would offer a hint of an explanation, would it not? A soupçon, Colin laughed. Why do you feel so distant sometimes, I asked myself, even at moments of drama, and I heard Heike whisper to Luis that Vikram had made a pass at at least half the women in the group yesterday evening, her lesbian self included. Especially at moments of drama. I was a million miles away In vain! she laughed. He went to bed with his tail between his legs. Like his dog.

The situation, as students and lectors, having only just arrived in this decidedly executive office, began counting each other to see if one of their number could be imagined to be having sex with another, must have been disconcerting for the Welsh MEP. Marooned behind two metres of polished vice-presidential wood, he must now be aware that the person he had been corresponding with, in Welsh, and to whom he had granted the favour of an audience with the powerful Petitions Committee of the European Community, was actually considered a liability, a drunk and a rake by many of his fellow-petitioners. So that I became distinctly aware, even from the immense distance from which I suddenly found myself obliged to observe events, that the matter should be taken in hand, at once, and that I, as official representative, should immediately step forward to introduce myself to the Welsh MEP as Jeremy Marlowe, the recently elected spokesman of the University of Milan’s Foreign Lectors’ delegation, and on shaking hands vigorously should engage the man, who was doing his best to be pleasant, though no doubt he had matters more pressing on his plate, in some discussion as to the desirable length of the speech I should give and the desirable tone to adopt with the Committee of which he was so fortunately, for ourselves, and no doubt deservedly, Vice-president. But I did not step forward. Just as previously I hadn’t spoken out either for or against the Euro-chat in the foyer. And the reason I didn’t was perhaps the bromazepam again and perhaps an intense bewilderment, partially due to the immense sense of distance I was experiencing (so reminiscent of the distance I felt between myself and my wife in recent years), but above all to the fact that at this very moment I heard Doris Rohr suggest that perhaps in the end it had been Vikram who was the spy. Perhaps Vikram had always been in league with the authorities to make us look ridiculous. We would claim too much, we would be seen to be greedy, the Petitions Committee would turn down an appeal which the University and Vikram already knew to be legally inadmissible, and they would fire us all. Thus Doris Rohr, muttering, to no one in particular, at just the moment when I should have stepped forward and spoken sensibly to the Honourable, the Right Honourable, is that how they call them here? Owen Rhys. Pure-bred Welsh. Two girls began to shout that Valeria was missing. Valeria being last night’s Peppy-tottie. They couldn’t find her. Where was she? Colin began to laugh. Didn’t want to say I told you so. Perhaps Vikram was the spy, Doris Rohr repeated rather louder. Valeria, who’d flashed her tits. Nothing new under the bum, Colin laughed. But how could Vikram be the spy? I thought. How could anyone even imagine Vikram was the spy? The Welsh MEP had at last been engaged by the Avvocato Malerba in a discussion as to the exact executive powers of the Petitions Committee and in particular the relative areas of jurisdiction of national and Community law. All the same, he must have been aware of a general tittering and muttering vis-a-vis the absence of Vic Griffiths and now Peppy-tottie. He shot a nervous glance at his secretary, who was examining her watch with studied unconcern. You are the official representative, you should take the situation in hand, I told myself, but vaguely, distantly, through a haze of bromazepam. It was irresponsible of you to take so much bromazepam, I told myself. And then to get up at six in the morning and take so much again. It was one thing taking bromazepam at two-thirty a.m., I told myself, to get to sleep, but quite another to get up at six in the morning and take so much again. The secretary pointed at her watch. Totally irresponsible, I told myself. It would have been better not to have slept at all. Or at least not to have slept after six. Doris Rohr was saying something to Barnaby Hilson and Luis, along the lines of her having always thought him schizophrenic. Presumably Vikram. These people, I told myself, though aware that really I should be taking the situation in hand, that really I was behaving irresponsibly, these people, who only yesterday evening were laughing and drinking and joking with Vikram Griffiths, and even following his rolling gait and his dog through the rain in search of a place to get drunk, many of them showing, despite the problems vis-a-vis his electability as our official representative, a genuine affection for him, even joining in his singing of The Green Green Grass of Home and Men of Harlech, these people are now suspecting him of every possible villainy and betrayal. And mental illness. This was irritating. And yet Vikram’s behaviour was irritating too. I began to suspect him myself. Could it be that he had proposed me, knowing I would be hopeless and that he would disappear at the last moment leaving all of us to the fate we had amply deserved when we had voted him out? There was something schizophrenic about him. My colleagues were right. Even if his Indian Welshness gave every excuse. Betrayal is the norm, I told myself. None of us had the guts to get stuck in politically like Vikram Griffiths did. But perhaps he had lapses. Mental illness is the norm. Not even she had the guts, so-called. Vikram Griffiths, I thought, was perhaps the only one who was willing to expose himself, to throw himself into things, heart and soul. Because crazy. But likewise equally capable, again because crazy, of stabbing us in the back. Or perhaps because not so crazy. He’d called himself Vic Griffiths, after all. And while I did nothing, said nothing, the Welsh MEP was clearly embarrassed by the fact that he knew less about Community law than the Avvocato Malerba did. Much less. The Avvocato Malerba, in dapper suit and Euro-flag tie, was leaning across the desk now speaking in the most extraordinarily clipped and intimidating Italian tones, explaining the complications of Italian labour law in the public sector. If there is one thing Italians love, I thought, it is complications. Could the Petitions Committee, the Avvocato Malerba asked, really be expected to appreciate these nuances? He preferred Spinoza to Nietzsche, I thought. It explained so much. And perhaps Plaster-cast-tottie to both. The blonde secretary explained to some students where the bathrooms were. Colin pulled out a packet of cigarettes, then realized he would have to put them away again. Quite a girl, he was laughing. I take my hat and scarf off. And still nothing clear had been said about my speech, due to take place now in five minutes’ time. Our whole expedition, I thought, is foundering ‘on this animosity between Vikram Griffiths and the others, this dis-orientation brought about by his absence, the absence of the person who arranged everything, the absence of the only appropriate, despite the shock of his colour, interlocutor for the Honourable Owen Rhys, MEP and Vice-president of the powerful Petitions Committee. Or perhaps it’s just that he hasn’t been able to enter the Parliament building because of his dog, I thought. I suddenly thought. For of course he would be looking forward to the moment when the Honourable Owen Rhys saw the colour of his skin as he greeted the man in Welsh. What warmth and handshaking! Ridiculous to imagine him afraid. As official representative, I thought, you are unfortunately too full of bromazepam to take matters in hand. The whole thing was going to pieces because of a dog. A mongrel. A man’s excessive concern for his dog. And although I had never cared even minimally about saving our jobs, and indeed on more than one occasion had expressed the ardent desire to be fired, to have the decision, that is, whether to stay or to go taken peremptorily out of my hands, I now experienced — perhaps it was the bromazepam fading, perhaps that was the problem — a sense of impending disaster, even disgrace, at the thought that everything was going to go wrong and that this would be my, together with the dog’s, fault. But perhaps this was inevitable really, I thought, on the fourth of the fifth for a forty-five-year-old man who lived at 45 Porta Ticinese and whose ex-girl-friend’s ex-phone number began with 045. I began to look for the numbers in the room, in the Vice-president’s office. Certainly everything had gone wrong during that disastrous conversation with my daughter yesterday. Whose birthday it is, I now remembered. Today. I must phone her. But there were no numbers in the Welsh MEP’s office, aside from a list of dates indicating when the canteen would be closed for renovation. Not the fourth of the fifth, as it happened. I must phone her as soon as I have a free moment, I thought. Above all, everything had gone wrong inside my head from the first moment I set foot on that coach. It was a terrible mistake, I told myself, for you to come on this trip. You knew that. And yet more than ever now, wondering when I would be able to phone my daughter, and what on earth I would say to the Committee, and again whether anything at all of any seriousness was going to pass between her and myself, whether anything would be allowed to happen, that is, as Barnaby Hilson had so curiously put it, on this farcical trip, I was aware that this was a mistake I was born to make. This was me. This is the kind of thing you do, I told myself. You come on a farcical trip that you don’t for one moment believe in, you get yourself voted into a position of power for all the wrong reasons, and then you let everybody down quite miserably. Very nice. I thought: If only Georg were here. Yes, I remember now, sitting head bowed in the Meditation Room of the European Parliament, this obvious and anodyne surrogate for a chapel, embarrassing reminder of our old yearning for some kind of metaphysic, but amorphous, shapeless, to avoid the old contentions, no altar, no cross — I remember very clearly that I began to wish Georg was here. My rival. Georg would have taken matters in hand. Georg has an immense composure, I thought, which he has earned somehow, probably through the business with the mother of his child, her sad illness. In fact, it would be wonderful if Georg could be here now in the Meditation Room with me. It would be a great comfort. There is a strange decency about Georg, I suddenly thought. Despite The Age of the Courtesan. I feel ludicrously close to Georg now, here in the Meditation Room, there in the Welsh MEP’s office, as I felt ludicrously close to Vikram Griffiths when we stood together at the front of the coach and I told him, he told me, that he didn’t give a tinker’s shite for Europe if they didn’t give him what he wanted. Vikram Griffiths was honest. He had no fine words. Or rather, he had them, of course he did, when he needed them, but recognized them for exactly what they were: words. He recognized that he manipulated words. That he charmed and seduced people. Whereas she was now saying to Dimitra how typical this was. As soon as he lost his leading role, he lost interest. What a prima donna! He didn’t give a damn about the group, just stayed at the hotel to sleep with whichever scrubber would sleep with him. She said this in Italian, otherwise how would she have communicated with the Greek Dimitra, her French Italian with its overaccented Ys and underaccented Ts, but I remember it in English, as I remember everything in English in the end, films, books, horror stories, in that great dubbing process my mind must be. And I remember thinking: These two women are so indignant that they are even forgetting to ingratiate themselves with the Welsh MEP, Owen Rhys, upon whose goodwill so much depends. Unless now they were here they were suddenly nervous. Maybe you should go forward, Barnaby Hilson whispered in my ear, and introduce yourself. Don’t you think? You’re the official representative. But already the Yorkshire secretary, the demure, amused and I’m beginning to find extremely attractive blonde MEP secretary, was herding us out of the office, to meet our tight schedule. Nice tits, Colin was laughing. Not in your league though. This to Tittie-tottie. Incredible nobody missed them on the coach, I thought.

Halfway back around the left hemisphere, though on the second floor now, Sneaky-tottie again took my arm and this time began to marvel at my not being at all nervous. Are you going to quote them somebody? she asked seriously. Despite her youth, the strong chin gives an impression of strength. I just can’t believe Vikram letting us down like this, I told her. The bromazepam was fading. He’s the only one has all the facts in the end. He would have been useful.

It then appeared that on the podium there would be the Avvocato Malerba, Dimitra, the Honourable, perhaps Right Honourable, Owen Rhys, and then beside him myself with her on my other side. She was to prompt me if I ran into trouble. The bromazepam was more or less gone. In the audience there would be the Petitions Committee and the other lectors and the students.

We filed into an auditorium, a rather large auditorium with rising banks of blue upholstered seats, semicircular in three segments, shelving down to where the polished wood floor emerged like a last stretch of bright sand before the monstrous battleship of an apparently ebony conference table bristling with microphones. The Petitions Committee was late. We filed in and sat down, fussing with the arrangement of the places, each appropriately provided with notepad and pen, mineral-water bottle and sparkling glass upturned on white napkin. The Petitions Committee had got involved in another meeting. An emergency meeting apparently Looking up as I crossed the polished floor I saw that one upper wall of the amphitheatre was a glass panel with desks behind and head-phoned figures, mostly female, looking down at us. The interpreters, Owen Rhys told me. The nodding of the big head was clearly a default setting. Wonderfully skilled people, he nodded enthusiastically, and I thought: Your speech, which you haven’t planned or prepared at all, is to be translated instantly into seven or eight or nine languages for the benefit of the several and single members of the Petitions Committee, who quite rightly cannot be expected to be as proficient in English as in their native tongues. This was perfectly reasonable. But all at once, waiting for her to return from whatever she had suddenly gone to say to the blonde secretary at the back of the auditorium, I became extremely anxious at the thought of this sophisticated and expensive infrastructure being called upon to disseminate a speech which I knew would be worth absolutely nothing in any language. The world is full of fantastic infrastructures, I thought, quite inappropriately, full of extraordinary machinery — telephones faxes E-mail automatic translation radio TV satellites fibre-optic cables — all dedicated to transmitting propagating broadcasting speeches messages that are worth absolutely nothing. What will Philadelphia have to say to New York? I remembered someone having once said when some technological milestone was passed. The sort of quote you read in an encyclopaedia. Vikram Griffiths himself produced one of the most fatuous speeches, I thought, on a luxury coach equipped with an admirable PA system which made it perfectly possible for me, slightly right of centre on the back seat as we sped towards the heart of Europe, to hear every mispronounced, mistakenly inflected, hypocritical word of it. We are overwhelmed by the sophistication of the machinery that propagates our hypocrisy, I thought. Just as our ancient buildings are neutralized, nullified, by the sophisticated technology we have used to clean and illuminate them. The machinery encourages the hypocrisy, I thought. The drivel. Surely Vikram Griffiths would never have spoken such drivel if not into a microphone. Surely the people who speak on our radios and TVs would never utter the idiocies they do if they were not on the radio or TV, if they faced the funeral crowd Pericles faced when he said the last word that ever need be said about democracy and about those who have died in a just cause. What drivel was I myself about to produce, I wondered, into the microphone before me, to have dubbed and transformed into seven or eight or nine languages for the several and sundry members of the Petitions Committee, who still hadn’t arrived almost thirty minutes after the appointed time? Amazingly, both the Honourable Rhys and the Avvocato Malerba were showing great interest in Dimitra sandwiched between them, her Greek face a picture of bright cosmetic truculence as she explained to the Honourable Owen about the business of the spy. The spy! Then she arrived on the other side of me and whispered in my ear, lt’s to do with Bosnia.

What?

She sat down and I was shocked as always by the numbing effect of her presence, her perfume. Looking away to avoid eye contact, I caught sight of Peppy-tottie among the chattering students. What on earth was I going to say?

Their emergency meeting is to do with Bosnia, she said.

Could Vikram be back? I wondered, determinedly looking away. To save me. Clearly they weren’t shagging if Peppy-tottie was around. My eyes scanned the auditorium. Faking a collapse would be no problem at all, I thought. With her beside me it would be no problem at all to appear to be struck down by some kind of stroke or seizure. On the contrary. Then call on Dr Griffiths. Let him do the speech. No, the notion, I suddenly realized, overwhelmed by the effect of her presence, of your calmly asking her for a little guidance, a little help with the opening words of your address, is perfectly crazy. You’re not even able to talk to her, to sit next to her. So why on earth did you set up this situation where she was to prompt you, to answer your questions? The only question you will ever be able to ask her, I told myself, is Why? Why? And if she asks you, Why what? God knows what damage you may do. Not a trace of the bromazepam left, I thought. Perhaps that was the problem. If she asks you, Why what? God knows what may happen. You should have taken more bromazepam, I thought. Trembling, I turned my glass over and filled it with water.

So it’s fair enough their being late, she was saying. Then she actually leaned across the table and made an announcement into her microphone. The Petitions Committee were late because they were hearing somebody addressing them on Bosnia. Our sufferings could hardly be compared with those of the children of Bosnia, she said into the microphone to the chattering students on the Euro-blue seats of the auditorium. So we were perfectly happy to wait. Looking all around, I was aware that the Honourable Rhys didn’t even lift his head as she made this announcement, so busy was he with Dimitra s spy. Clearly the emergency meeting was not something he had felt duty-bound to attend. And if Vikram Griffiths wasn’t shagging Peppy-tottie, where was he? I wondered. Outside with his dog? The hotel proprietor wouldn’t have the creature. The coach driver likewise. Certainly there was no trace of him here. But now she was saying to me that sometimes she felt ashamed.

What?

All the suffering going on there, she was saying. She had a slim black dress on that turned her cleavage to cream. It’s so outrageous we haven’t done anything to stop it. The perfume was L’Air du Temps, It makes me feel ashamed, she said. Ashamed of my material wealth. My comforts, my easy life. You know. Her ear-rings were the golden scorpions of her birth-sign. Ashamed of being European. You know what I mean? For some reason she was proud of her birth-sign. As she was proud of being French. People are dying, she said, and we’re worried about the conditions of our contract. The golden creatures had ruby eyes. People are dying, she insisted, and we’re sitting here worrying about our terms of employment. Thus the woman, I thought, determinedly looking away, but still picking up a familiar rattle of bracelets as she pushed back her hair, with whom you had the most intense relationship of all your life. People are suffering, she was saying. It makes you wonder how many of us really have a proper perspective on life. And she said this, it occurs to me now, sitting here in the Meditation Room, so-called, perhaps twenty-four hours afterwards, my body assuming that attitude frequently referred to as an attitude of prayer, though this is not a place of worship, head bowed, hands clasped together, though I am not a believer — she said this as if I myself, as official representative of the lectors’ union, had been somehow responsible for stirring the inappropriate rancours of the threatened but always comfortable lectors, as if she were the only person in the world with the sensibility to appreciate that our suffering, or perhaps she meant my own suffering, was as nothing to that of the unfortunate children of Bosnia.

Really we live pretty well She wears pink lipstick when she dresses in black. I mean in comparison with those kids being slaughtered and starved every day. You know. And she never fails, which is something I love, to have the fingernails match. I love that. While our institutions — I love that feminine attention to detail, to their own sense of themselves as objects of beauty — are doing nothing but cast about for a fig-leaf to drape over the shame of their selfish nonintervention. It’s outrageous. We go into the Gulf when it’s a question of keeping our cars running. But do we bother about the children of Sarajevo? Not at all. It makes me so ashamed.

Thus her speech, and probably there was more of it, in French no doubt, though recalled now, by myself, here in the Meditation Room, after all that has happened, in English, following a process not unlike that which my own speech was about to undergo at the hands of seven or eight or nine interpreters. And I recalled that during the Gulf War we drove out into the hills above Como once and made love in her husbands BMW Series 7.

Maybe you should make some statement to that effect, at the beginning, she said. I mean, to make it clear that we’re aware that our own sufferings are nowhere near on the same level. You know. And then it would set the right tone. Because we mustn’t come across as shrill or …

I had turned to look straight at her. I had turned against my will. I was looking into her eyes. I said how pointless it was to make comparisons.

What?

You can’t compare suffering with suffering, I said. Then I realized I was back in the territory of the phone-call to my daughter. Philosophical niceties. It was dangerous to be looking in her eyes. To cover my tracks, I casually remarked that Vikram Griffiths, for example, was totally obsessed by the fear of losing his job and being unable to meet his commitments, to maintain his child. He was desperately afraid of losing this key card in the custody case with his manic-depressive first wife. His superior ability to support the child. Vikram could think of nothing else, I said. Vikram was a haunted soul. I had seen that clearly enough yesterday evening. All his high spirits were just so much desperation. To tear his mind away.

But surely you can’t…

II faut cultiver notre jardín, I said.

But when I see those children on television, she began, and think how we …

I reached under the table, gripped her leg at mid-thigh and dug the nails in fiercely. Her cry was immediate, but immediately stifled. The others were chattering about the spy. Our eyes met. I said there was no discrete unit of measure as far as suffering was concerned.

You’re sick, she said.

I hate you.

She laughed her French laugh, of old, tossed her hair. Oh come on, I was only talking about Bosnia.

Precisely, I said. Only.

What do you mean, precisely? Only?

Work it out.

You’re shaking, she said.

Then she said I must swallow my pride and go and see someone. She put her hand over mine still on her thigh. And what she meant was an analyst.You’ve got to make this speech any moment now, she said. For Christ’s sake think about that. Think about other people instead of yourself for a change. Our jobs are at stake. Jerry, please. Grow up!

Things should never be compared, I said. It wasn’t me had started talking about Bosnia. One lost all sense of things when one compared them, I said. They had to be savoured one by one. And you could only really savour the things that were yours, not other people’s. You had to savour them for what they were. Who’s looking after Stephanie while you’re away? I asked.

If you cultivated your own garden at all, she said, you’d know that she was going to Suzanne after school and then sleeping with her grandparents. Suzanne’s so wonderful, she added. You’re so lucky to have such a lovely daughter. I can’t understand why you don’t see each other more often.

Thus the woman for whom I left my wife.

I see her more often than you do, she said.

It’s her birthday today, I said. I was totally in love with her again. Jealous beyond all comparison.

I know, she said, I gave her a present. Then I asked her what she had given and discovered she had given my daughter underwear. All girls of that age love nice underwear, she said. They love to fantasize themselves. You know? But all I knew was that she was wearing stockings and suspender belt. Her tottie-gear. I’d felt them. She said: Suzanne’s got such a stunning body. She asked, What did you give her?

I leafed through the three typed pages of the notes she and Georg and Dimitra had put together for the speech I was about to deliver. Then my hand clasped her thigh again. The finger-nails cut right through the silk. They sank into the skin. This time she didn’t cry out. The door swung and the Petitions Committee filed in. She gasped, Jerry! And thinking about this now, sitting here in the Meditation Room, when really I should be thinking of other things, and most particularly when I should be asking myself whether there wasn’t something I might have done to prevent what was perhaps already happening, it occurs to me how completely she had freed herself from me. To the extent that she could allow herself to play with my violence, my ineptitude. Though at least I hadn’t asked her whether there was anything between her and Suzanne. To the extent that later that day she would even be able to suggest we spend one more night together, for old time’s sake. When I withdrew my hand, she held on to a finger for a moment.

The Committee filed in. People in their fifties and sixties, men in suits and spectacles, one with a limp, then a token woman of sober elegance. Talking amongst themselves in fragments of various Indo-European languages, they ambled to their seats on the front row, where one took a light-hearted swipe at a fly. Perhaps with a sheaf of papers from Bosnia. The tall man limping was intent on a plastic cup which steamed. Thus the Petitions Committee. Thus my perception of the Petitions Committee, brimming with unpleasant emotions, deprived of all bromazepam, still casting about for Vikram Griffiths, hoping for a saviour.

The Vice-president, who hadn’t seen fit, or hadn’t been able (because of us?) to attend the emergency meeting on Bosnia, now stood up and introduced us. We were foreign-language lectors from the University of Milan. We were representing both the European lectors at our own university and those at universities all over Italy. It was our contention, the Honourable Owen Rhys said blandly, head nodding with ritual conviction, that, contrary to articles 7 and 48 of the Treaty of Rome, we were being treated differently from Italian citizens. Unfairly, that is. Our case would be presented briefly by Dr Jeremy Marlowe, a British lector who had taught English at the University for over twelve years. After which we would be submitting an official and thoroughly documented petition signed by more than four hundred lectors presently working in various regions of Italy.

It was at this point that it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen the petition itself. Not since I signed it. Who has the petition? I whispered to her as I stood up to speak. The look on her face, her French face, her razzled face Vikram Griffiths had said, but handsome, was one of alarm. And she actually said, Oo la la! As when once she imagined she heard her husband’s car arriving while we were making love in his second or third or fourth house up in the mountains. Above Selva di Val Gardena. But it was only the technician come to prepare the swimming-pool for summer. Now things were far more serious. She closed her eyes theatrically, as one receiving appalling news. From Sarajevo perhaps. From Bihac. Vikram has it, she said. Vikram had the petition itself, the papers and signatures. Then, as I pulled and pushed at my microphone, she was walking round behind me to whisper to Dimitra, who swiftly vacated her seat, so that as I began to speak the Greek woman was already striding swiftly, unpleasantly somehow, up the aisle between two banks of seats with chattering students.

Ladies and gentlemen, I said. Members of the Committee. I spoke softly, shakily, wondering what I would say, but the microphone carried my voice right around the auditorium, magnifying its tremors and nerves, while three or four of those in the front row adjusted their headsets the better to pick up their translations. From the back, on her feet, Heike the Dike smiled with great warmth, great encouragement. Likewise Sneaky-tottie. The door banged and Dimitra had gone. In search of our petition.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have just left a meeting where you have discussed the grave and worsening situation in Bosnia. I coughed. I looked down and looked up. We can hardly claim that our poor problems today can in any way compare with those.

Beneath the desk, I felt a hand lightly caress my thigh as she returned to her seat. I breathed deeply, waiting for the words.

No, it would be ridiculous to draw comparisons, I said, between ourselves and that war-torn population. On the other hand, one can hardly ignore the fact that the situation that I shall now briefly describe to you is nothing other than an infinitely milder form of the same thing: the desire by one group, one majority ethnic group, language group, to deny full rights and privileges of citizenships European citizenship, to another group.

Thus the drivel the microphone drew from me, the interpreters above were interpreting for me. There were knitted brows on the bowed head of the token woman member of the European Petitions Committee as one hand pressed an earpiece of her headset and the other scribbled on a slip of headed paper. Barnaby Hilson nodded approval. And sitting here in the Meditation Room it is perfectly clear to me now that one need only open one’s mouth in a public situation and the words will come. You will do what is asked of you. Bromazepam or no bromazepam. Orthodoxy is in the air. That is the truth. In the patterns of speech. The inertia of what you hear around you every day will take you through. Will write your speeches and your books. Will even explain to your wife why you’re leaving her. Why hadn’t I understood this before? Why had I worried so much about everything I said? Why had I fought so hard, stupidly criticizing the book my daughter gave me (swim with the tide, she had told me), stubbornly refusing to accept that her gesture of friendship to Georg was indeed a gesture of human friendship? After all, she did come back to me. Why hadn’t I simply said what was required of me? The words that are in the air. The water-words. Some comment on us all belonging to the human race. Under the table she touched my leg again.

Then one says, I went on, more confidently now, seeing sombre faces nodding in agreement, one says, ‘an infinitely milder form’, but the truth is that discrimination, however apparently mild in comparison, is always discrimination, and always ugly, especially when perpetrated along ethnic lines. One population keeping another out. One population denying another the equal right to a job. The loss of one’s livelihood, I said to the sombre faces of the Petitions Committee, the loss of one’s vocation — for this is what I am here to talk about — can cause immense suffering, mental and physical, even in situations of apparent well-being, even when the victims do not risk hunger and violence. The woman in particular, I noticed, was taking notes. One of our members, for example, I said, had to return urgently to Milan in the early hours of this morning because the mother of his child had suffered another disabling crisis in her ongoing muscular dystrophy. You can see, I said, how the loss of financial security in such a case could prove disastrous. Not to mention the humiliation, I said, for a man in his forties who loses his ability to care for those close to him. The Committee listened. Another member confessed to me this morning, I invented, that he had not slept for weeks because he was anxious about losing his job, a job he has held and faithfully performed for more than ten years. The only job he really wished to do, he told me. Perversely, I was beginning to enjoy this. The only job he honestly felt he was suitable for, I insisted. I was beginning to feel powerful. His concern being, that since he was living in a foreign country, supporting a family in that country, a family made up of Italians it must be said, it would be far more difficult for him than for a local national to find another form of employment. If not impossible. I paused. I’m referring to one of our group who should have been presenting our case here now, in my place, to the person indeed who organized our petition to the European Parliament, but who in the end felt too nervous even to be present, so much is at stake.

The job of the Committee is to hear about people suffering, I thought. One must impress upon the Petitions Committee that people are suffering. And then identify a guilty perpetrator of that suffering. This was what was in the air, I thought. Not unlike Black Spells Magic.

Let us go on to consider, then,! proceeded, marvelling at how easy it all was, the simple though sly injustice that is being perpetrated at our expense, the subtle discrimination that the Italian state is operating to the benefit of Italian citizens and the detriment of those from other areas of the Community, a Community that the Italian government is always and so hypocritically the first to uphold, as it is likewise always and so destructively the first to flout.

There was silence in the audience now, and, I could sense, genuine admiration, not only on the faces of Sneaky and Plottie, but likewise on those of Luis, whose Spanish pesetas were worth more lire with every moment that passed, and Barnaby Hilson too, and Doris Rohr, who had probably never been more convinced than now that she was a victim of racism. And I remember, here, now, in the Meditation Room, how, as I went on to describe the way we were subject to rules relative to the termination of our employment which no Italian in the state sector was subject to, singled out, that is, for an entirely different and harsher treatment than any other state employee, I remember being overtaken by a sort of exhilaration, a sort of restrained hilarity, as if drunk and dazzled by the facility, the credibility, the power of these words that, though true, in the sense of factually accurate, I nevertheless did not believe in at all, could not believe in, and would never have sunk to speaking save into a microphone and on behalf of my feckless colleagues. Drunk too, and spurred on by her frequent, light touches of my leg. Her approbation. Her encouragement. Was it all about to start again? Was it? I was so excited. Then I had just reached the whole delicate question of salary, entirely convinced that I would have no problem at all in making it appear that we lived a life of extreme poverty, and even toying, at the back of my mind, with the idea that I might conclude by quoting, if only to satisfy Sneaky-tottie, Pericles when he says: As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it: the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it. Yes, I was seriously considering winding up with this remark, however ludicrously inappropriate, in order to explain, to justify, as it were, our extraordinary and dramatic decision to come to Strasbourg, to present our grievance to the highest authority, insisting, I suddenly realized I might then add, on those principles of liberté, égalité and fratenité which more than any other lay at the heart of Europe — and certainly everybody was going to say, for I could feel this, what a talented public speaker I was and why had I never offered to be representative in the past? — I was just about to launch into this preposterous conclusion when Dimitra came rushing back into the auditorium.

Dimitra banged through the double doors, almost knocking over the Welsh MEP’s secretary. Distraught and tight-lipped, she raced down the shallow steps of banked seats, skipping and stumbling, until finally she threw herself against the battleship table at the front.

Ine fovero, she screamed, her voice only half amplified in the directional mikes. Aftoktónisse. O trelos! Aftoktónisse, O theotrelosl

Sobbing for breath, her big breasts pressed and heaving against the desk, Dimitra shouted these words, and ‘others, two or three or four times, apparently not understanding why we didn’t understand, until the tall, lean member of the Petitions Committee in the front row hurriedly pulled off his headset and in a heavily accented English demanded, Who has hanged himself? Where?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Vikram Griffiths lived alone in a dilapidated third-floor apartment in Via Pastrengo. But roomy. Thus I describe to myself my colleague, my acquaintance, sitting here with my bag beside me in the Meditation Room of the European Parliament. He did not die with the lectors’ petition pinned to his tweed jacket as this morning’s European claimed. Nor was the petition signed by more than a thousand names. Pastrengo was a battle, as I recall. Another Napoleonic triumph. Unless that was Marengo. Or both. When I phoned his wife — I think both — she asked was this what the British called a practical joke?

But to say he lived alone is to give the wrong impression. Everybody on the coach returning from Parliament to hotel was eager to rehearse, in lower voices than before, though the driver had not forgotten to turn the radio on, their memories of Vikram Griffiths. And for most these focused around the time they had rejected, or in one or two cases accepted, a pass from him. For the men it was a question of recalling times they’d got blind drunk and he had told his life-story before they fell asleep on his floor. Only two men said Vikram made passes at men as well as women. It is inexplicable, I thought, travelling back to the hotel on the coach, how strong my desire for Georg is. How much I wish that he were here. He made a pass at me last night, she said. Most of the women remembered he went quite brutally for the hand up the skirt. And they laughed about it, as if it were a minor and indeed endearing misdemeanour. He’d had a couple of drinks, one student explained. But when had he not had a couple of drinks? And she said, If only I had accepted, last night, perhaps none of this would have happened. She had tears in her eyes, speaking to four or five people, and her accent was more French than ever. The Ys, the Ts. Why on earth didn’t I accept? she said. Because you were fucking Georg, most probably, I thought, before he was called away to the mother of his child. A cordial fuck, I thought. How can I wish so hard that he were here? But I do. I like Georg, it occurs to me now. We were good friends after all, she was saying. What difference would it have made? I should have gone to bed with him, she said, apparently with real remorse at a generous deed undone. Then she said we must make a collection for Vikram’s widow and his orphaned child. We must make a collection. Though the two were not connected. She wanted to find a hat or something there and then and make a collection, in the coach on the way back from the Parliament only a couple of hours after the body had been found. It would be important for her to see she had our solidarity, she said, even though they were engaged in acrimonious separation proceedings, even though the second wife had apparently testified on behalf of the first in their bitter child-custody battle. And she actually began collecting money, holding out a small plastic bag of the variety they put cheese and sliced meats in at. the supermarket. She began to go up and down the aisle of the coach as it drove around the Strasbourg ring road to our remote and cheap hotel with its cheap reproductions of modern masterpieces. Goya’s Executions perhaps. You could see into her cleavage when she bent over. Guernica even. She knew it. Her black dress was quite short above her slim knees. The poor woman will be frantic, she said. Her heels dug the purple carpet of the aisle. It’s the least we can do, she said, bending over Colin with her plastic bag. Everybody was eager to give, as befits people who have lost a friend and leader. But nobody had any currency. What with the collapse of the Lira, the decisions of the Bundesbank. Better to wait till we’re back at the University, Barnaby Hilson said. A student asked where the dog was. We should start a fund, the Irish novelist said. Certainly the creature wasn’t in the coach. Doris Rohr promised to give generously, though she was apparently the only female lector Vikram Griffiths had never made a pass at. He seemed so full of fun last night, Plaster-cast-tottie said. Sitting beside her, the Avvocato Malerba said there were special rules for setting up funds of this kind and he would be glad to sort out the legal side.

No, to say that he lived alone, I reflect, sitting in the tiny Meditation Room of the European Parliament with its thick blue carpet, its disturbing plexiglass mural backlit with neon, its odd white lectern — to say that he lived alone would be as misleading as to say that his first wife was a psychopath. Though he himself liked to use these words. I live alone, he would say, my first wife is a psychopath. He liked their drama. Vikram Griffiths was addicted to drama, I reflect, as he was addicted to drink. And to public meetings. He was addicted, perhaps, to the nervous coercive fervour of drink-inspired drama. His second wife was a witch, he said. And I reflect that it wasn’t so much a good decision, on my part, not to return to Milan on the coach with the others, as a necessary decision. An imperative. You could not have returned on the coach to Milan with the others, I tell myself. It was impossible. You simply could not have climbed up the steps of that modern coach and worked your way down the purple aisle between the blood-red seats to the back. You would have vomited. Barnaby Hilson playing Irish laments on his tin whistle. Or Men of Harlech perhaps. Colin recalling what an extraordinary tottie-man Vikram was. At some point you would have vomited. But then by the same token, I reflect, you could not have not come on this trip in the first place. That too was impossible. To climb on the coach and set out for Strasbourg was an imperative, I reflect, just as now not to climb on the coach for the return to Milan is an imperative. So there was no merit in my obeying this more recent imperative, I tell myself, in my deciding that I would die, that something inside me would die, if I stepped on that coach for the return journey to Milan, to the University, to the Vikram Griffiths Memorial Fund, if I had to listen to Barnaby Hilson’s Irish laments, on a variety of tin whistles, and perhaps some sad cross-reference to the narrative astuteness of the suicide in Dead Poets Society, Or to a further discussion of the spy. The spy! Vikram Griffiths didn’t live alone, I thought, there on the coach driving back to the hotel for another night with Picasso’s lovers. And he certainly didn’t kill himself because Robin Williams had urged him to carpe diem but his parents wouldn’t let him go to drama school. I should never have made that ridiculous speech, I thought. I made a perfectly ridiculous, sublimely hypocritical speech to the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament, a speech worthy of the very best drama school, and I even felt proud of myself, I remembered, and powerful, and on for it, and this precisely as Vikram Griffiths was knotting two ties round his thick neck. Beneath his stubborn chin. Vikram Griffiths carped the diem every day, I thought. He didn’t live alone. Almost every day he brought someone back to his dilapidated, unheated apartment rented to him by the husband of an ex-mistress (in her late fifties) who couldn’t afford to renovate. Quite apart from the parentheses of his marriages, the safer company of his dog. It was, it is, a beautiful apartment. It has ancient oak beams and the remnants of frescoes, but at the last stage of dilapidation, as only apartments in Milan can be. The only time I visited him there, I remember, after the first wife, before the second, we were drinking beer on sofa cushions and after about half an-hour a tiny girl he had made no mention of emerged from the bathroom in a robe too long for her. A tiny girlie. Plus the grandmother he boasted paid him to shag her. Money helps you get it up, he boasted, when he’d had a lot to drink. But when had he not had a lot to drink? Though on every issue bar women he was political correctness itself. He was the revolution permanente in person, Vikram Griffiths. He would have agreed with her about the children of Bosnia, I thought. And here in the Meditation Room beside my packed bag it occurs to me that his decision to kill himself wasn’t a decision, perhaps, but, like mine, an imperative. For some reason he had to kill himself, as for some reason I knew that I could not step on that coach and face the journey back to Italy, beside Doris Rohr, or Sneaky-tot-tie, or beside Colin saying perhaps that Vikram Griffiths should be remembered not just as a tottie-man but as a tottie-master. There is no merit in choosing to do something, if the decision is imposed upon you, I tell myself. No merit at all. But on the other hand it is ridiculous at the point I’m at to be worrying about merit. To be constantly judging what I do. Why on earth should I care about accruing merit? After making a speech like that. But now I recall that she also said, She couldn’t help herself. He phoned so often, she said, and sent so many flowers, how could I refuse? She also claimed the excuse of the imperative. Perhaps there is merit, thee, it occurs to me, in the kind of imperatives we impose upon ourselves. But it is ridiculous to hear yourself talking about merit after abandoning your wife and daughter, I tell myself. The Greeks, I reflect, understood these things better than us. Only the gods can be causes. Thus Priam to Helen at the Scaean Gate as Troy fell. Only the gods. Unless it’s a question of health, perhaps. Your decision not to go back on the coach, I tell myself, should perhaps be seen as a more healthy decision than hers to sleep with a man just because he insisted so much, than Helen’s to run off with Paris, than Vikram Griffiths’ decision to knot two ties around his thick neck beneath his theatrical sideburns. A more healthy imperative. But how can someone who lives in your state of mind talk about health! Someone whose head is a constant fizz of contradictions. It’s laughable. You promised not to make comparisons, I remind myself. Comparisons are pernicious, you said. Helen of Troy and Vikram Griffiths! As the coach pulled into the parking-lot of the hotel, I asked Doris Rohr how old exactly Vikram was. She didn’t know, but Dimitra in the seat behind said, Forty-five.

Vikram Griffiths didn’t live alone. And the numbers were not for me, I thought. Four five. I saw the numbers, but they were for him. Omens were ever deceitful, I thought. The oracles were always a mockery He told me his life-story one August Bank Holiday, I mean the Italian holiday, Ferragosto, when he came to dinner. That I can use the expression ‘came to dinner’ indicates that this was the period when I was still with my wife. He brought his little boy, apparently abandoned earlier on in the day in the entrance to his dilapidated palazzo by his, as he put it, psychopathic ex-wife, always plunged into the most extreme of depressions by the hot August weather. The boy was about four and disturbingly silent, hugging a fluffy puppy-dog. Perhaps I could at least go to dinner with my wife when I return to Milan, I reflect. The wife was furious about the dog, it seemed, a birthday gift from Vikram. He chuckled. But perhaps I won’t return. We spoke on the phone for some reason and he said his present wife was with relatives, he had nothing in the fridge and all the restaurants closed for Ferragosto. Fucking Italy. Fucking hot, he said. We laughed. For a bloke brought up in Merthyr Tydfil. It annoyed him his wife felt she had to visit her parents, he said. I invited him to dinner. He said his mother had died only hours after childbirth and he had always felt guilty. This was in Coventry, where his father had gone to work. She called him Vikram, after her brother, then haemorrhaged and died. Father took him back to Wales. He knew he wasn’t guilty, but he had always felt he was. That was a strange state of mind. He felt he bore the mark of Cain, he said, he laughed, and this had to be explained to my wife and to Suzanne, who, being good Catholics, know nothing of the Bible. My wife was visibly embarrassed. He meant his colour, of course. She served the meal she always served when we had guests, an excellent risotto ai funghi, and she wouldn't let him smoke. Martino, the son, kept getting up to look on the balcony where my wife had banished the puppy, to stop him dirtying. But that meant closing the big french window. The creature rubbed its nose against the glass. The heat was suffocating. It had been his evangelical aunt, Vikram said, told him he bore the mark of Cain. Always with that nervous tic of clearing his throat, drawing in catarrh. His sainted aunt, he laughed. Suzanne gave Martino a Magicube to play with. That is to say, his father’s younger sister. My wife said people could join the dog on the balcony if they wanted to smoke. Dilys still lived with her parents, his grandparents, and it was she who brought him up, Welsh as Welsh, they spoke Welsh, always telling him he bore the mark of Cain. A miserable, plain woman, Vikram laughed. He had thick brown forearms on the table. She was terrified that no one would marry her, he said, she was always in church. And the turning-point in his life had been, he said, when in his early teens Dilys raped him. My wife almost choked up her risotto, appalled of course for what Suzanne was hearing. She makes no attempt to check up on the lesbian literature she reads, I reflect, three or four years on, but she was appalled then at Vikram’s confession of a coercive incestuous relationship practised by a woman upon a man. Vikram was by now deep into the second of the four bottles of wine he had brought and he admitted he had only realized this, brought it to consciousness that is, with the help of analysis. Only with the help of analysis, he said, had it dawned on him that his problems began in his incestuous relationship with his religious aunt who always used to say he bore the mark of Cain. Martino took his Magicube to the balcony door to gaze at the dog, but by now Suzanne was totally concentrated on Vikram’s story. At this point then Vikram felt guilty not only for his mother’s death but likewise for what had happened with his aunt. Since she claimed he had seduced her. For a while she came to his bed every night. This when he was thirteen or fourteen. As he talked on, I also became embarrassed. Like my wife. She cried and made love, he said. I was wishing I had never invited him. How can you respond, I asked myself, to people who start telling you this sort of thing in front of your then fifteen-year-old daughter, your propriety-obsessed wife and a four-year-old boy who may or may not understand everything? Certainly the child was muttering things under his breath through the glass to the dog. But then it was Ferragosto, in Milan, and the weather suffocating. She was good at making love, he said. The dog whined and scratched. The heat was unbearable. Vikram wore a loose T-shirt, the neck open on a froth of black chest hair, cotton shorts above thick knees. I found it impossible, I remember, to meet his eyes. I kept looking down at my risotto, wishing I hadn’t invited him. Even if one did feel sorry for him, I thought, it was surely wrong of him to start telling us these things. But then embarrassed as I was, I was also amused by my wife’s embarrassment, by her over-protectiveness towards my daughter, who must be exposed to the world, I thought, like the rest of us. Thus my laisser-faire attitude, before I began imagining lesbian relationships with her. Before analysis, Vikram Griffiths said — we protect people from what we’re scared of ourselves, I reflect — before analysis he had always imagined that the most important conditioning factor in his life had been the death of his fiancee in his first postgrad year at Cardiff. It was at this point that I remembered I was supposed to call her at eight-thirty. I was supposed to make a phone-call. He had been climbing with his fiancee in the north. Above Dolgellau. The days when one had fiancees, he laughed. His throaty laugh. Such a romantic word. The days when one climbed mountains in mist and rain. How could I leave the room to make that call? I thought. It was almost nine already. The days of Plaid Cymru. And what if she called when I didn’t? If she called here? He was the only card-carrying member of ‘coloured extraction', as they used to say. He shook his head. How could I answer in the sitting room with all the others right there in the kitchen? Anyway she had fallen, Vikram said, and smashed her skull. Suzanne let out a little cry. When he had got down to the rocks her brains were all over the shop. Literally. My wife fussed with some tiramisu. But then the autopsy said there had been signs of a struggle before her falling. Opening the third bottle, Vikram Griffiths was earnest and very nervous. Later I learnt he tells everybody this story as soon as he gets the chance. The autopsy said there were signs she had been pushed, he said. Clearly he was suffering. It was a hard story for him to tell. Clearly he was enjoying his performance. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t meet his eye. He dominated the table entirely. If I didn’t call her we wouldn’t be able to establish where to meet in Rheims, since she departed early tomorrow, and I was to join her two days later. They said I had killed her because she was pregnant, Vikram said. He spoke in Italian with his strong Welsh accent. Again my wife was appalled. How could anyone just come to dinner and tell us this? On Ferragosto of all days. A national holiday. Suzanne was fascinated. Martino concentrated on his puzzle now, as if the background were no more than television. It was almost nine and still no breath of air had come to relieve the August heat. The door to the balcony being closed against the dog. When I didn’t even know she was pregnant, Vikram protested. Of course later, he smiled, I realized that the whole thing had to do with the political situation. You know. The nationalist years. He sucked in catarrh. We were supporting the boyos burning second homes. Suzanne asked him questions. An iron foundry was working to rule, he said, the authorities were out to discredit him, they had paid some doctor. My wife fanned herself vigorously with a table mat. All over the papers, he laughed bitterly, but they never actually charged me. The heat was suffocating. If there’d really been signs of a struggle they would have charged me, Vikram insisted. He personally had never burnt anything. I said I had to go to the toilet and, walking instead to the bedroom, risked calling from there, but her number was engaged. I tried twice. It was what the analyst called a confirming experience, Vikram Griffiths was telling Suzanne on my return, and it occurs to me now that Vikram would have shagged my daughter if he’d had half a chance. The girl in his apartment that day, the young girlie, could well have been a schoolgirl. They were fascinated by his foreignness. Then I realized my wife might have realized I hadn’t flushed. Officially I’d been to the toilet, but there’d been no sound of flushing. In the sense, he explained, that it confirmed a paranoia he was unaware of having developed out of earlier traumas he had yet to come to terms with: his mother’s death, Father’s absence — back in England again — his aunt’s saying he bore the mark of Cain, especially after the incest. It confirmed his unconscious belief that the world was against him. Thus Vikram Griffiths at dinner Ferragosto in my house, explaining himself most authoritatively (this, ultimately, was why he had left the UK, he said, plus his disillusionment with Plaid Cymru), while I worried away at a phone-call and an unflushed loo I hadn’t pissed in. He felt hopelessly guilty, he said. He had tried to take his life on a number of occasions. Even after he realized it was all a set-up. Even though he knew he was not guilty and that people were merely getting at him because of his political involvement, and perhaps because of his colour. They let you become a member of the group because it was good for their image, their credentials, but they didn’t really want you. Still, he was proud that his son had his same features, he said. Proud as hell. Vikram sat across the table from myself and Suzanne and poured his heart out, fragile with alcohol, tiramisu on his dark lips, while my wife cleared the dishes and his son beside him, who didn’t resemble him at all, battled on with the Magicube, the dog forgotten. He had got all sides, but two to come out. In response to Suzanne, Vikram was talking about guilt. He had loved the girl, his fiancee. She fell entirely by accident, he insisted. He was twenty-three. He didn’t know she was pregnant, yet he felt terribly responsible, terribly guilty. He sat across the table staring at us triumphantly in thirty-five-degree heat and swallowed down another glass of something red. Wales had been crushed by the English, he said. It was nothing more than a holiday resort. But at that time, as I’ve said, I was at the height of my affair with her. I was reading the Greeks again. I was soon to depart for Rheims. I was euphoric, omnipotent, despite these minor problems with the phone. I knew I’d get through the next time I tried. And I knew there was no such thing as guilt or responsibility. I didn’t feel the least bit guilty for betraying my wife. So I began to explain this vision to Vikram Griffiths, the Greek vision. That only the gods can be causes. Guilt was an invention, I said. Likewise political responsibility. Feelings of guilt were solipsistic, I insisted, quite harshly perhaps. It was arrogant, imagining you had more freedom of action than you had. Really you were in the hands of the gods. Thus my spiel, at that time, based on all that had been said and read in bed with her. Suzanne had never heard me talk like this. My wife seemed weary with the whole evening. She fanned herself with a table mat. It was all very well talking about the Greeks, Vikram said, but he had two thousand years of Christianity and English domination to deal with. And most of all he had to deal with his father, who had more or less abandoned him with his grandparents, and his aunt, who had raped him and then made him go to the Congregationalists to pray for forgiveness. He felt hellishly guilty, even when he knew he wasn’t. He wasn’t guilty for anything of all that had happened. But he felt he was. Suzanne agreed with him. She often felt guilty. No, he felt damned, he said. That was the point. Feeling guilty when you weren’t was a way of being damned. In the end I just stood up and made my call directly from the sitting room, counting on my wife not to listen. She was so inattentive to everything I did. How could I ever have imagined she would notice I hadn’t flushed? And sitting here in the Meditation Room now, remembering that dinner when Vikram Griffiths told his life-story, and above all remembering how he claimed he bore the mark of Cain, how he felt guilty for his mother’s death, his aunt’s incest, his pregnant fiancee’s death, then his first wife’s manic depressions, his present wife’s abortions — remembering that evening, it occurs to me what an extraordinary intimacy there was between us at the table that night. And so much tension in the air. We really came together somehow that evening. It was extraordinarily intense: the silent young boy over his Magicube; the puppy scratching at the french window; my wife preparing the dinner she always prepared, generous but grim; Suzanne’s eagerness as she rushed forward to meet life, lapping up Griffiths’ tragedies, like the students on the coach lapping up sad love-songs; myself euphoric, blind, stupidly philosophizing, stupidly quoting, wildly confident, as I made my phone-call, my tottie-call as Colin calls them, planned this week away at the very acme of our affair, the high point of my entire life. Go to the Hotel Racine, she said. lt's a five-minute cab-ride from the station. She said it in French, no doubt, though I remember it in English. All the drivers know it, she said. Yes, there was an extraordinary intimacy, I tell myself, between us all that evening. And an impossible distance. Just as on this coach trip to Strasbourg. Between lectors and students. Men and women. Myself and Sneaky. Vikram and Georg. People and dogs. We live in great intimacy, great closeness to each other, and we are worlds apart, I tell myself. She was worlds apart from me that evening she told me to go to the Hotel Racine. The mosaic of friendship with Georg was already establishing its pattern, already circling in on the cock-piece. He phoned so often, she said. Perhaps it was Georg she was on the phone to when I called from the bedroom. Twice. I wish he were here now. The condition we live in is one of intimacy and distance, I tell myself. Intensity and incoherence. No wonder people believe in spies.

After dinner Suzanne sat at his feet with the puppy on the balcony while he proceeded with the sad story of his first marriage, then his second, already in difficulty, and my wife, perhaps having trouble following his Welsh accent, his mistakes, whether of stress or inflection, or both, in almost every Italian word he spoke, very kindly played by the now open french window with the silent Martino. She found an old Lego set of Suzanne’s and they began to build a house together. It was one of those sets — and it’s a surprise to me now that I recall this — with pink and primrose bricks and kitchen appliances and sunshades to set out on the terrace. White deck-chairs. Small figures to sit on them who never move, never change. Thinking of Rheims, I accepted a cigarette too. Vikram showed Suzanne a photo he kept of his first fiancee. The only photo he would ever keep of anyone, he said. He was on the whisky now and very near to being out of his head. The puppy buried its nose in Suzanne’s jeans. He’d got it off a friend for Martino’s birthday, he said, but the first wife refused to keep it. We’ve got to beat those bastards at the University, he told me. I was in the deck-chair opposite. They’re determined to fire us. I laughed, euphoric, pulling on my cigarette, thinking of Rheims. It is from this collision of intimacy and distance, I reflect, that our collective dreams arise. Love affairs, families, Europe. We construct them in the dream of overcoming distances. We imagine we have overcome distances. Through these dreams. We have constructed something. An equilibrio. But she was already receiving flowers from him when she told me to meet her in the Hotel Racine. The words were waterwords. Frasi di letto. The Lira has almost disappeared overnight. We’ve got to give them hell on every possible front, Vikram was saying. He had the dog on his own lap now and was ruffling its ears. Suzanne laughed and said Dad actually wanted to be fired. Oh, your father’s a queer one, Vikram joked, ruffling the puppy’s ears. He’s a double agent, your father is. By this point almost all the conversation was between these two, while I smoked and watched my wife building a dream house with the young Martino, surprised to see how attractive she could be sometimes, and how kind, a big, kind body down on her knees with a little boy. Vikram was saying that he’d married his first wife because he felt he could help her get over her depressions, then his present wife because she had been pregnant, though she had then got an abortion immediately after they were married. And now again, last month. He couldn’t understand why she had got an abortion. Nor why she insisted on visiting her parents every weekend and holiday. I’ll have to keep the dog if Paola can’t stand it, he said. I love dogs. Mart can see it at my place. Then in response to Suzanne, he said that apart from the fact that this pregnancy reminded him of his first fiancee, he was against abortion. It’s called Dafydd, he laughed, turning the puppy upside down, after the Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. He’d always had a dog as a child. He cleared his throat. Though not an anti-abortionist, of course. He told these stories to everybody, I later discovered. Word for word. Not all of them were true. Now where shall we put the bathroom? I heard my wife saying very gently. Yes, beside the bedrooms, of course. Who said you hadn’t got a tongue in your mouth, Martino? You’re quite a chatterbox. Between the children’s bedroom and the parents’? A very good idea. Her father is a newspaper editor, Vikram laughed. The first wife’s. The puppy yowled when he pulled an ear too hard. You should never get pregnant by accident, Vikram Griffiths told my daughter very earnestly, you should always use contraceptives, he insisted. And remembering this now, I can’t help but reflect on the remarkable intimacy that was developing between these two, Vikram Griffiths and my daughter, perhaps precisely because of the enormous distance between them. Do we love each other because of the distance between us, the foreignness? Of age and nationality? Of colour? Is it the combination of intimacy and distance that generates such intensity, such longing? Vikram Griffiths would have shagged my young daughter senseless if he’d got half the chance, I tell myself. She’d have been in a bathrobe in his dilapidated apartment, while he spoke on the phone to some other tottie, or to his analyst. Vikram talked a lot about anal sex and about having women piss on him, Colin once told me. In his mouth, apparently. On his pursed lips. He liked women to piss on his lips. Speckled that evening with tiramisu. Yesterday with spittle. Which reminds me of Opera-tottie, of the unanswered message on my answering machine, of Rheims hopelessly revisited. Where are the loving couples? I ask myself in the Meditation Room, so-called, of this important international institution. Where are the happily monogamous marriages, where the flourishing families, where Europe? To be invented, I tell myself. And I appreciate that I invented that speech because of her, to please her. I invented the unlikely image of a Jeremy Marlowe polemically engaged in the question of human rights. I was still imagining we might get together again somehow, over the lectors' crisis, over Europe. We would make love again. It’s unforgivable the way I just can’t leave be, I reflect. At one in the morning Vikram staggered to his feet and drove himself and his young child home. With the puppy-dog. In bed, my wife and I made love and laughed.

I invented the speech to please her. Encouraged by the touch of her hand on my leg. Perhaps if allowed to go on I would have introduced the concept of permanent pan-factional compromise. If allowed to go on speaking to the influential Petitions Committee of the European Parliament, and I was certainly planning to go on, I might have discovered some rhetoric to suggest that the whole process of European integration hung on the resolution of the lectors’ crisis at the University of Milan, or on my relationship with her. A test case, I could have said. A test case in the application of the collective will to establish a new and more ‘acceptable reality. Then Dimitra came. O trelos aftoktonisse! It never occurred to her she was speaking the wrong language. Aftoktonisse! Someone had to go and recognize the body. I volunteered. I was still in the buzz of my new authoritative role, my new success. She had always wanted me to realize my potential, to become the man she felt I had been born to be. Were we together again? We walked back around the left hemisphere, hurried along by an official in traditional dark suit, the Welsh MEPs Yorkshire blonde secretary quietly padding beside. On the first floor a small crowd had formed by one of the toilets. A doctor held her back. Only one, he said. It’s upsetting. So she and Nicoletta and Luis and Barnaby Hilson stood outside talking to journalists while I went in. And it occurs to me now how bizarre Vikram Griffiths’ decision was. I would have imagined a man who enjoyed his suffering so much was proof against suicide, a man who had moulded his identity around an accident of birth that made him a minority of one, around his eloquent articulation of the world’s endless conspiracy against him, who told his sad life-story with such relish, who discovered himself in his struggles, against the University, against his women, against the English, against God, luring everybody else into embattled complicity, for and against; a man who said, We’ve got to get the bastards, Jerry boyo, we’ve got to take our case to Europe. Full of energy, full of determination. In the Shag Wagon! A man safe in the knowledge of the just cause, and likewise of his insatiable appetite for trouble and for women. He should have been proof against suicide, I thought. Unless suicide was the ultimate mise-en-scene for his kind of theatre. Suicide was the one way he could become our representative again, and emblematically forever, centre^stage in the European Parliament.

They had taken him out of the cubicle and laid him out on the tiled floor. The face was almost black. The tongue stuck out of the thick lips covered in spittle. The ties he had used were one plain blue, the other striped. The petition was not pinned to his jacket. He wasn’t wearing his jacket. But some sheets of paper were stuffed in the front pocket of his trousers, damp with urine. It was Vikram Griffiths, I said. The doctor pulled out the papers — they were damp — perhaps expecting a note. Instead I saw my signature. And hers and Georg’s. Afraid I would vomit, I asked if that was enough and hurried out, to find her briefing the journalists. And what she was doing was repeating the exact words from my speech: that here was a man who hadn’t slept for weeks because threatened with firing, his salary reduced, a problematic child-custody case to fight. In a foreign country. This was the person who had had the courage and vision to bring our case to Europe, she said. Our only hope must be that the death would not be in vain, that this suicide, in the heart of Europe, would finally draw attention to the urgency of our position. A fat man with long hair and indeterminate accent asked me for a statement, but I had gone to the phone. And it occurs to me here now, gripping my packed bag in the Meditation Room, that there is nothing worse than hearing someone else repeat one’s words, exactly the same. One’s waterwords. One’s frasi di letto. Did I want to be together with her again? I was infatuated. It took me five minutes to get the number from directory enquiries. I remembered her surname was Cenci. I hope this isn’t what you English call a practical joke, she said. I only had five francs to explain. There will have to be an autopsy. She wasn’t sure if she would come. She hated him, she said. As the final pips went I heard a man’s voice shouting in the background.

I explained I’d called his wife. She had come over to the booth. You’re a fine man, Jerry, she said. Perhaps we are back together, I thought. Certainly she was deeply moved. She spoke emotionally. Her eyes had tears. But suddenly I was thinking how odd it was that we all had just the one child. You know, I told her. We all have one, just the one child, then something goes wrong. Vikram, Georg, you, me. Just one. Martino, Tilman, Stephanie, Suzanne. Then something goes wrong, I said. It seems impossible to have more than one child these days, I told her. I had never thought of this before. She attempted to embrace me, but we had to talk bureaucracy to the doctors and round up the students to get back to the hotel. I must phone my daughter, I thought.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The thing that most terrified the Greeks was that they would be deceived by the gods. They would receive a message. A dream, an oracle. Attack now, Agamemnon. Clearly it was a message. Clearly it came from the gods. But it was the wrong message. It led to defeat. Or they would be invaded by a passion. Phaedra’s for Hippolytus. Clearly it was an invasion. Clearly it came from outside, from the gods. But it was the wrong passion. It led to madness. To suicide. As whole nations can be led to madness and suicide sometimes, on the back of the wrong dream, the wrong passion. Thus Bosnia. Thus Fascism. And sitting here in the Meditation Room, reflecting on what happened in the aftermath of Vikram Griffiths’ suicide, reflecting above all on what finally took place between myself and her on our second night in the heart of Europe, I’m overwhelmed by the conviction that my passion for her was always and ever the wrong passion. For two-and-a-half years I lived in a state of total delusion. My senses deceived me, my emotions, my intellect. They deceived me. How can I explain such a thing? Such an extraordinary mistake. It took Descartes to deduce that God would not wish to deceive us. The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would never wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since.

I came to the European Parliament again this morning to hand in the petition, now re-typed, though still with pages of urine-stained signatures. With nothing to do, I then stumbled across this Meditation Room, this pseudo-chapel, this distant echo of a dead if not quite buried religion whose corpse, like some petrified Atlas, still upholds the ideals on which Europe is built. Though it would be bad taste to mention the word Christianity, as it would be bad taste to have a platform that looked like an altar. One still finds chapels, or pseudo-chapels, in the most unlikely places, I thought, on realizing what the stylized sign must refer to — in conference centres, ships, airports — as one still finds oneself afraid in the dark. The Meditation Room is a small space with a blue carpet and soft cushioned benches along two walls. The neon-lit mural along one side resembles nothing more, I thought, entering the room and sitting down on a wall-bench, than some kind of bacterium enormously enlarged beneath a microscope. There are dark-coloured blotches and tangled threads. Some kind of virus. There are no windows in the Meditation Room. I have been here three hours. Ten minutes ago a young man in jeans came in and wiped down the mural, dusted the strange block of perspex and white plastic in the centre. I asked him how often the place was used, but he didn’t understand my English and I couldn’t be bothered to repeat the question in French. I find it very difficult to speak French these days. The only thing one can meditate on in this Meditation Room, I thought, watching the young man use a sponge on a stick to wipe down the neon-lit mural which shifts from blue to orange to yellow in webs and shadows above bars of neon behind, the only thing one might properly meditate on here, I vaguely thought, is the disappearance of religious art, or perhaps the pressing problem of standardizing religious instruction in schools across the continent. No, the only thing one can meditate on here, I thought, watching the young man flap his duster across the plastic surface — perhaps podium is the word — in the centre of the room, which I now notice has some electrical switches on it, is the disappearance of the cross, the crucifix, the disappearance of any image of the sacred that might genuinely focus the attention. The very amorphousness of this Meditation Room, I thought, this blue carpet, this atrocious neon-lit wall mural, somehow brings to mind the crucifix, more than its presence. We only savour something properly when it’s gone, I thought. Rather vaguely. In the Meditation Room. Our love. Our religion. And I remembered reading a book once that said how the Australian aborigines didn’t even appreciate that the land was sacred to them until it was taken away.

I did not tell the others why I had decided not to return to Milan on the coach. I said I would look after the red-tape to do with Vikram Griffiths’ corpse. I made the decision over dinner the evening after his suicide, but there seemed no point in telling the truth. There is generally no point and above all no merit in telling the truth, I reflect. It was pure madness. to speak like that to your daughter on the phone. It was madness to tell your wife the truth, to have her understand that that evening after Vikram had gone I was thinking, while we made love, of Rheims, to have her understand that we made love that night because of Rheims. That man’s perverse, she said, as we laughed and made love. It was madness for him to tell us all that, the first time I ever meet him. The perversities of the mind are best not discussed, I tell myself. It may even have been, it occurs to me, that your truthful observation to Vikram, in the coach, that he didn’t give a damn about Europe triggered some destructive train of thought which ended in his suicide. Who knows? Luis said we lectors should have dinner together on our own. We should take stock, he said. We should ask ourselves if we could have prevented it, if we were responsible. And in some sort of bistro in the suburbs — four small metal tables pushed together — it was Barnaby Hilson, the Irish novelist, who immediately said that we shouldn’t have just voted him out like that. There seemed to be general agreement. I was sitting next to her, she had chosen to sit next to me, everything was ambiguous between us, and next to Colin, who shook his head. Vikram was totally wrapped up in this Europe business, Colin said. He took some chewing-gum out of his mouth and folded it in a napkin. We were selfish not to see that. Not to see what a blow it would be. The Avvocato Malerba wasn’t there, I noticed, disappeared with Plottie presumably. The wine was red, in two carafes. As Dafydd the dog had likewise disappeared. Dimitra said, We should have looked for some kind of compromise. I mean, let Vikram speak and then Jerry. Jerry was brilliant, Heike said. People smiled at me, wanly. I filled my glass. The waitress brought lamb. But Dimitra said she was the one who had been most determined to get him out. It made her feel terribly guilty now. Perhaps he thought we did it because of his colour, she said. We all felt guilty, Luis said. We had all failed to notice that he was in real difficulty, Heike said. And sitting beside her, wondering at the way she and I seemed to be back together somehow, I felt this was true. You in particular spent the whole of last night obsessed with your own personal problems, I thought, while Vikram Griffiths was preparing to kill himself. Which amounts to criminal neglect, I told myself. It was criminal neglect really, Colin was saying. We laughed at him, Luis said, I spent the whole of yesterday thinking about the exchange rate. Doris Rohr confessed that she had always thought Vikram an insensitive, bullying person, she had never realized how much he must have been suffering. But then the opposite might perfectly well have been true, I reflected, vaguely aware that her leg was touching mine beneath the cramped bistro table. Vikram Griffiths, I reflected, might perfectly well have spent the whole of last night obsessed with his own personal problems while I planned my suicide. Nothing could have been more likely, I thought, now acutely aware of that leg. And even assuming you had understood, I told myself, and certainly you had an inkling, you did see how morose he was beneath the apparent razzle, even if you had understood, how could you be expected to help him with such a deep and long-established misery? How could Vikram Griffiths be expected to help you? And why shouldn’t Luis rejoice over the fact that the Lira has plummeted? It is in his interest. Really, in what way, I wondered, wondering if that leg were touching mine on purpose, is it incumbent on each of us to seek out another’s misery? Or was it just that the tables were cramped? Do I want anyone to seek out mine? Especially if we can’t really do anything to help. Every man is an island, I told myself, sitting at the cramped bistro table, keeping my elbows close to my body. That he is not entire unto himself does not make him part of the main. Terrible, Heike was saying, crushing breadcrumbs with her thumb, I sat on his knee and did nothing but make snide remarks all evening. That is the paradox, I thought, that one is not entire unto oneself, and yet-still not a piece of the continent, still not a part of the main. Psychiatry is the least successful of medical disciplines, I thought. Donne’s was a false dichotomy. Awful, Barnaby Hilson agreed. You could no more have saved Vikram Griffiths, I told myself, than he could have saved you. Heike said, I always thought of him as just a rampant hetero. You know? The others nodded and drank. Always trying to get his hand up your skirt. And looking up at the altar that is not an altar, here in the Meditation Room, thinking back on last night’s dinner, its chorus of mea culpas, then last night’s embraces, I am suddenly convinced that all this collective guilt with regard to Vikram Griffiths’ suicide, with regard to our not having noticed that Vikram Griffiths was suicidal, whatever that might mean, was quite ridiculous, was another piece of theatre, another opportunity for waterwords. One always waits for the bell to toll, it occurs to me, before reflecting that someone was a piece of the continent. When he was missing, Colin said ruefully, I thought he must be off a-shagging. Christ! he said. He clutched some hair in his hands. It is as likely, I reflect now, thinking that any cubic affair in the centre of a quasi-religious space must somehow imply an altar and that every altar implies a crucifix, or a firstborn child, or a fatted calf — it is as likely, I reflect, that Vikram Griffiths committed suicide because we voted him out or because I made some disparaging comment to him on the coach, as that the Son of God was put to death because Judas kissed him on the cheek, or because Pontius Pilate washed his hands. We should have tried to get him to stop drinking, Doris Rohr said, rather than just voting him out. The Son of God was looking to die, I reflect. As was Vikram Griffiths. Most probably the idea came to him — the European Parliament, his suicide — and then he just couldn’t get it out of his head. He felt destined. The point is, we excluded him, Barnaby said, rather than discussing things with him. Most of us are obsessed with the notion we have some destiny or other. We prefer calamity to routine. We should have put it to him frankly, the Irish novelist said. It is ridiculous, I reflect, the way the Bible invites us to share the guilt of Judas Iscariot and- Pontius Pilate, as if they were really responsible. Vikram always got off on referring to himself as damned, on claiming that he bore the mark of Cain. He had the idea, and then it just overwhelmed him. This sense of destiny. If it be your will, Father. He received a message, perhaps he dreamt it, or an intuition, this mise en scene, but the wrong message, the wrong intuition. And he just couldn’t escape it. Despite the excellent company his dog provided. The cup wouldn’t pass. True, we betray with kisses, I tell myself, true, we wash our hands, but that hardly makes us key players. If I kill myself this morning, I tell myself, here in the Meditation Room, so called, she would not be responsible. Not even after last night. Perhaps the problem, Luis said, very earnestly, was that we didn’t explain what we valued in him, and what we did not value. No, especially not after last night, I reflect. We gave him the impression we didn’t value him at all, Luis said. The prime movers are these intuitions, these passions, I tell myself, and for some reason I find this an immensely clarifying reflection. Even if it doesn’t quite solve anything. We pretty well washed our hands of him, Luis said. Dimitra hid her face in her hands and began to cry. She would keep the dog if it was found, she said. Then, sitting next to me, she said, Oh, if only I’d at least kissed him when he asked me to. For God’s sake! If I’d given him a bit of a cuddle. But this was the last straw. Her leg was definitely pressing against mine. I spoke more loudly than I need have:

You didn’t kiss him because you didn’t want to, I announced. You don’t have to have sex with people to stop them committing suicide. And then you didn’t kiss him because you spent most of the evening screwing Georg.

I had spoken rather more loudly than I need have. Perhaps it was the wine, perhaps the effect of having her knee against my thigh as she expressed remorse for not having cuddled Vikram Griffiths.

Were you screwing Georg because he would have committed suicide if you’d refused? I demanded, far more loudly than I need have. Because the mother of his child was dying again? The situation around the four small bistro tables was cramped and intimate.

Would you fuck me, I demanded, if you believed I would commit suicide if you didn’t? Colin said, Jerry, please.

Vikram was just one of life’s victims, I announced, setting down my knife and fork beside the lamb. He was a victim of circumstance and his own psychology. There will always be people like that, I said very loudly. None of us could have helped him, I said. I pushed my chair back. His analyst didn’t help him at all, I said. Just gave him fancy explanations for his state of mind. Vikram Griffiths was on another planet, I said. You all heard him tell his life-story. He was looking to be voted out, I told the party at the four small bistro tables. Otherwise why would he have been drinking so much at ten in the morning? Why did he need to trail his dog around everywhere? I stood up. It’s absurd our baring our hearts like this. Vikram was mad, I said. Likeable, but mad. I liked him, I said, but he was crazy. I walked out. And walking out I was acutely aware that I had been describing myself. You too, I thought, are in a vicious circle of psychology and circumstance. I had described myself perfectly. You too are beyond their help, I told myself. Vikram Griffiths’ death was your own future death, I thought. Perhaps. Perhaps he did kill his fiancee, I thought. After all, I could hardly believe I’d hit her sometimes. Vikram Griffiths was more likeable than myself, though. More the clown. More charismatic. And I told myself, You must change. If the world has changed, if she has changed, then you must change too. You must not go back on the coach, I told myself. That would be fatal. You must not go back to Milan with them.

She was calling my name. The night was blowy, but not raining. Dark. I was walking at random. She caught up with me. Her arms round me. Her cheek against mine. I wasn’t with Georg last night, she said. She started to kiss me. She would never have gone with Georg last night. I asked why not. Spend the night with me, she said, and I’ll explain. Please, she said. I thought: The Rheims routine. I’ll explain, she laughed. She insisted, Of course I wasn’t with Georg last night. How could you think that? I notice at least you’re admitting you have been with him, I said. This conversation in French perhaps, perhaps in Italian, though I remember it here in the Meditation Room in English. When we kiss, it is so wonderful, I thought, and yet my resistance is enormous. Why wouldn’t you go with him again? I said. After all, it’s none of my business. Or Vikram’s. However suicidal we may be. For old times’ sake, she said, spend the night with me. I’ll explain. Something’s happened. All this on some blowy suburban street in Strasbourg, France. Very little recollection of the surroundings. We can find another hotel, she said. You are not going back to Milan-on that coach, I told myself. She had a smart velvet jacket, the black dress, the soft glow of her neck and cleavage. I love a woman who loves to be a woman. To play the woman, I thought. I love the things that are dangerous about her. And there was the smell of her breath and the old old cocktail of scent and skin. For old times’ sake, Jerry, she said. Watching pornography, when the knickers come down, Colin invariably says, I can already see my bald spot. Please let’s not let it end so badly. She pulled me into a kiss again. And what he means is, between those legs. Rheims. Please. I can already see my bald spot, he says. He laughs. All whoring surfs on an undertow of melancholy, I thought. On memories of Rheims. We found another hotel. Exactly similar to our own. Small modern rooms with over-size beds. But spared the reproductions of the great painters of our time. Spared Picasso. Mass-produced. Spared Klimt. She showered. Tell me first, I demanded. Why are you doing this? Because I like you. It was you left me, she said. Retrospective jealousy is mad, she told me. Tell me about Georg, about something’s having happened, I said. Tell me first. I showered. She spoke again about not wanting it to end badly. Which were more words taken from myself. My phone-calls, my attempts to arrange happy valedictories that were really new beginnings. But everything is taken from somewhere else, I thought. Tell me, I demanded, between kisses. If you must, she said. It was you said something had happened, I said. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. She broke off. Pulling herself back to sit against the pillows, she fished for her handbag, lit a cigarette, looked at me down its narrow length, inhaled, exhaled. So theatrically, I thought. The big dark eyes. So naturally theatrical. Whereas I just don’t seem able. Except that speech perhaps. What a theatrical gesture it was on Vikram’s part, I thought, to hang himself in the European Parliament. He saw the mise en scene and then just couldn’t get it out of his mind. A sense of destiny IVe made a sensible decision, she said, leaning back on the pillows. I also took a cigarette, and here in the Meditation Room it occurs to me now that one sign of when things have truly changed, when I will have truly changed, will be when I stop taking other people’s cigarettes. For taking it I saw myself taking cigarettes on a thousand other occasions. From drinking companions, from tottie. Whereas before I met her I hadn’t smoked for years. I hadn’t smoked for years before we became lovers. Smoking reminds me of her, that’s the truth. Smoking reminds me of my addiction to her. I must stop taking cigarettes, I thought. She was naked against the pillows. I’ve decided to go back to my husband, she said. I want to have another child. Before it’s too late. It’s the sensible thing to do. Emotionally and economically. Sometimes I can’t understand why we ever split up.

You said you hated him, I reminded her. You said he was a dick. You said money took up too much space in his life for there to be any room for you. You laughed at him. You said he was crass, stupid. You said he had no culture whatsoever. You said the only reason you married him was because you were still young enough to be over-awed by fast cars and business suits. You said living with him was hell.

She said I had said much the same sort of things about my wife, but both of us knew deep down that! loved my wife and should never have left her. Especially having Suzanne. Suzanne’s so wonderful, she said. And I have Stephanie. It’s good for her to be with her father.

And that was the reason why you couldn’t have been with Georg last night? Because you’re back with your husband.

She nodded.

But you can with me?

It’s different with you, Jerry

I put on my clothes and left. As I dressed she was saying, For Christ’s sake of course it was different with me. There was no need to go to bed with Georg again. Because that had just been fun. Just creature comfort. There had been no hard feelings. But she wanted to take this opportunity to sign off happily with me. I stubbed out my cigarette and found my socks. Don’t be such a baby, she shouted. Georg had loads of women, she said. She wanted to clear things up. You know I love you, she said. I want you, I don’t want things to be so unpleasant. And she wanted to tell me to go back to my wife. You really ought to go back to your wife, she said. We could still see each other if we felt like it. We could still go to bed even, occasionally. Why not? She’s fucking you to tell you to go back to your wife, I thought. I put on my shoes. Hit me, if you must, she shouted. She got up and tried to grab my arm. Frappe-moi! I dressed and left. Nor would I go back to Milan on the coach with them. I found the stairs. Nor would I take any more cigarettes. I crossed the lobby, pushed through the swing doors and caught a taxi someone else had just got out of. It hadn’t meant anything, I thought. The words ‘in vain’ came to mind, sitting in the dark at traffic-lights. The taxi-driver drummed on his wheel. Who had used them? She did. About Vikram. She was going back to her husband, I thought in the back of the taxi. To her husband. All the words spoken over all those months, years of love-making had been entirely in vain. Thucydides and Benjamin Constant and Chateaubriand and Plato, all entirely in vain. My husband is so crass, she used to say, so ignorant. Rheims, in vain. Pensione Porta Genova, in vain. A thousand phone-calls. She was going back to her husband. As if nothing had ever happened. Somethings happened, she said. She was always telling me I had to make something happen in my life. I’ve taken a sensible decision. But what she meant was that nothing had happened, ever. Nothing has happened, she said immediately before I hit her the first time. That was the turning-point. What difference does it make if I went to bed with him? she said. Nothing has really happened. My mind darkened and I hit her. And the moment I hit her I was lost. Turn round, I told the taxi-driver. I’ll show her what it means to say something’s happened, I thought. Retournez. Go back. This morning in the foyer of the European Parliament, I bought a copy of Hie European. The headlines were deaths in Bosnia, the decisions of the Bundesbank, the collapse of the Lira, but on the inside pages it told how Indian Welshman Vikram Griffiths, feckless fragment of British Empire, hanged himself in the lavatories of this very building with a petition pinned to his tweed jacket. And it said: After this tragedy, the Italian Government will have to introduce measures to resolve the position of fifteen hundred European nationals who continue to live in conditions of the utmost precariousness. Assuming it does so, and assuming this brings to light the urgency of such cases in other countries, then perhaps this death will not have been entirely in vain. It was then, in a daze, with nothing in the world to do, that I saw the stylized plastic sign that indicated this Meditation Room, this pseudo-chapel, with its polished quiet, its indifferently dusted redundancy, as if waiting for someone to need it, perhaps with a copy of The European in his hand, perhaps with the words ‘in vain’ ringing in his mind, her words, her briefing, as I looked over Vikram Griffiths’ body on the tiled floor of the institutional toilet. The relationship that entirely changed, destroyed your life, was just a brief hiatus in hers, I thought in the taxi, a brief parenthesis in her marriage to a successful Italian businessman with a small factory producing picture mouldings, perhaps of the very variety that frame mass-produced reproductions of modern masterpieces in cheap hotels. She laughed when we read the Odyssey. I’d forgotten Helen went back to Menelaus, she said. That’s so bizarre, isn’t it? After ten years and all the deaths. As if nothing had happened at all. She laughed her very light, very French laugh. Retournez, I told the cab-driver. I’ll make something happen. Vikram Griffiths’ suicide has nothing at all to do with the lectors’ crisis, I thought, reading The European when I first stumbled into the Meditation Room. And it could not be in vain because all it was intended to do was to stop the voice in his head. No other results were intended. I will stop this somehow, I thought, as I stumbled back into the lobby of the hotel, having paid the driver fifty francs to bring me back to where I’d started. Making sure not to glance at the proprietor speaking on the telephone, I headed for the stairs, so as not to have to wait for the lift. Narrow stairs. I was aware that I could not remember which room it was. Which number. The proprietor had given the key to her. I had been in such a daze of scent and skin. I knew it was on the fourth floor. Four panting floors of narrow, carpeted stairs. I am doing something at last, I thought. I am doing something I don’t want to do. But did Vikram really want to kill himself? And sitting here in the Meditation Room, as I have been for three hours now, bowed forward in this attitude so close to prayer, without quite being prayer, as this place is so close to being a chapel, without quite achieving that, going over and over the events of the last two days, as if at some point I might ever be satisfied that they had been explained, going over and over these events, and in particular going over this moment when I started to run up the stairs to the fourth floor of that hotel, not even knowing the number of the room, but knowing that once there I would find it, the last red door on the right, and above all remembering how I told myself, You are doing something that you do not want to do, but madly determined just the same, as Vikram Griffiths perhaps had been madly determined to do something he would rather not have done, in the Meditation Room here with its quiet vocation, however anachronistic, for offering refuge (I could no more go back to the church than I could go back to my wife, I reflect), in the Meditation Room, remembering the charge up the second flight of stairs, the third, remembering the voice whispering, exulting, You are doing something you don’t want to do, it occurs to me now that half of philosophy hangs on this, on this wondering why we did what we did, why we did what we clearly did not mean to do. Myself, Vikram Griffiths. Why hadn’t I said okay two years ago, when she obviously did want to come back to me, when Georg proved not at her level in bed? Why didn’t I accept her offer last night of a return to my wife with continued affair? God knows it’s a scenario I have fantasized often enough. My home, my mistress. Everyone happy. I scrambled up the fourth flight. Had something chemical changed in me? Is that possible? That disillusionment brought about a chemical change in me, making it impossible for me to accept what she had done? Last door on the right, I told myself Responsibility is. a myth, I reflect, sitting here in the Meditation Room. Illusions lost, an enzyme slips. You find yourself charging up four flights of stairs in the heart of Europe, determined to do something you don’t want to do, determined to beat some sense into life. There is no alternative, I thought, perhaps as Vikram Griffiths did. But I had stopped in the corridor. The carpet was crimson. The impetus wavered. Perhaps another, deeper chemistry orders you to consider yourself responsible, I reflect, here in the Meditation Room. Perhaps this is what obsession means. Two chemistries at loggerheads. Two conflicting processes. A negative fizz of implacably opposed substances. Thus my mind, here in the Meditation Room, there in the crimson corridor of a hotel whose name I didn’t know, approaching a room whose number I didn’t know, overwhelmed by the notion that all had been in vain, that for her nothing had happened, as mythical figures go back to their husbands after ten years of atrocities and sit happily together at table, in Sparta, in Milan, welcoming guests and telling stories. I would make something happen. Thus my mind, bent on doing something I didn’t want to do, yet still aware that I would be responsible, that I would feel responsible. I would want to be responsible. We seek responsibility even where it is denied to us, I tell myself in the Meditation Room of the European Parliament. Why else the crucifix that somehow presides here despite its absence, why else the mea culpas over Vikram Griffiths, the endless pictures of Rwanda, the self-flagellation over Bosnia? We establish elaborate machineries as if we were responsible, I tell myself. Why else the European Community? Our mental processes are interminably engaged in weighing up our responsibilities. This is no bad thing, I thought. I started to walk along the corridor. I walked with one hand steadying myself against the wall. It is no bad thing to imagine oneself responsible. Yet when the mind darkens, I reflect, when the hand lifts, when the fever of that chemistry is upon us … My hand reached a door frame and I noticed the number. Forty-one. How could I not have fallen in love with her, invented my love for her? Forty-two. How could the structure of marriage hold? I began to walk more quickly. One might as well resist a flood, I told myself. Responsible or not. Forty-three. My dreams were all of seas and floods in that period, I reflect, I remember that. I attributed it to Jung. Ground giving under foot and animals tossed on the surf. People have the dreams they read about, I reflect. That fatuous period when I imagined myself an interesting subject for analysis. Forty-four. The European Community would be helpless against such a passion, I tell myself. When the mind darkens and the hand lifts it will be pointless to talk about negotiated identity and pooled sovereignty. We don’t plan to do what we do, I tell myself, here in the Meditation Room with no idea where I shall go when finally I get to my feet. When will I get to my feet? I have been here four hours. No political solution could have stopped Vikram Griffiths from killing himself, I reflect. I saw the room number was 45. What message could be clearer than that? Even if it was the wrong message. Vikram’s age a red herring. Our passion was always the wrong passion, I told myself. That’s clear now. The handle turned. All that remained was to end it. The door was unlocked, as I had left it. 45. Determinedly I pushed. She wasn’t there. I looked in the bathroom. There was nothing of hers in the room. But then we had brought nothing. I lay on the bed. She would come back. Ten minutes, half an hour. If she had checked out, the proprietor would never have allowed me to come up. An hour. At least there were no modern masterpieces in the room, Nietzsche went mad at forty-five, I thought. Whereas she was serenity itself. Our passion has left no mark on her. She has gone back to her husband. I could no more go back to my wife, I reflect, than I could go back to the church. Or live in the natural state, swinging from tree to tree. Footsteps approached along the corridor, I stiffened. She never left the church, throughout our long adultery. They slowed down. Perhaps she never really left her husband. They stopped. This was her. But it wasn’t her. There were keys in the door across the passage. Perhaps she wasn’t coming back, I thought. Suddenly I felt relieved. Perhaps she isn’t coming back. Suddenly, very slightly, the chemistry shifted. I should call my daughter, I thought. I felt a growing sense of relief. It’s her birthday. And I actually began to dial. Until it occurred to me that my daughter would be enjoying her eighteenth birthday party, a big party, taking place in my no doubt much-censured absence. And I did not want to spoil my daughter’s coming-of-age party with stories of suicide and unhappy passion. God knows how my voice would sound. Let Suzanne have a happy birthday party, I thought, wondering should I stay here, in this hotel room, or should I go? Wondering why I had come. Perhaps I should have made love to her and enjoyed it, I thought. Why do you never do the sensible, practical thing? Had she left and paid? In which case why had the proprietor allowed me to cross the lobby and set off up the stairs? Why was the room unlocked? I turned on the TV. The mind produces its own tranquillizing effect sometimes. I got into bed with the remote control. The mind decides when you’ve had enough. I found a football match. It grants a lull. Watch football, I told myself. You always loved football, and as always I began to root for the losing team. There were two beers in the small fridge. You swore you would never use physical violence, and then you hit her, I told myself, watching someone from my own team being sent off. Paris St Germain nil, Bayern Munich one. Yet what could have been more creditable than my good intentions? What could be nobler than the project of a United Europe, I thought, watching players exchange insults? Had she managed to leave without checking out? What more splendid than the dream of a perfect love? The referee was pushing someone in the chest. Even if you don’t believe in such things. I opened the second can of beer. Did I have enough to pay? Would they take my credit card? Was I creditworthy? You have no better religion to offer than Christianity, I thought. A man made the sign of the cross as he stood up to take a penalty. You would never wish for Rheims not to have been. The European Cup. Perhaps one should subscribe to such things, even in scepticism, I thought. We should enchant ourselves with such things. Thus Socrates, on myth. As I recall. We should enchant ourselves even in scepticism. And I remembered the students dancing together in the main square by the floodlit facade of the cathedral, singing Sei un mito, sei un mito, You’re a myth, you’re a myth. I saw Sneaky-Niki’s face. Tittie-tottie’s face. The extraordinary promise that men and women hold out for each other, I told myself, is the opportunity for inventing a myth together. For enchanting ourselves, reciprocally. All invented and all dissolved, I said out loud with remarkable equanimity, and remarkably I fell asleep in front of the television, to be woken eight hours later by the sound of jets over Bosnia. Perhaps three seconds passed, waking in this strange hotel room to the sound of the TV, three passable seconds, before the nightmare returned like a hammer, it returned like a flood, it returned like the roar of aero-engines sudden over the brow of a hill. It filled my whole mind. She has gone back to her husband. The whole thing, my whole life, was a farce from beginning to end.

You must phone your daughter, I thought, standing up quite suddenly from my seat in the Meditation Room. One sits down for hours, I reflect, and then inexplicably one stands up, without having decided to stand up. My time in the Meditation Room was over. The coach would be somewhere round Geneva by now. You were very lucky last night, I thought. Last night could have gone a great deal worse than it did. I phoned from the foyer of the Parliament. She answered immediately. I apologized for not having phoned on her birthday. Not to worry. She spoke in her childish English, which is so endearing. We missed you at the party. Something terrible happened, I said. And I explained that Vikram Griffiths had killed himself. Vikram Griffiths, I repeated. He hanged himself. You remember he came to dinner once, ages back. There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. I watched a franc slip by. Our phone-calls can be measured in any currency, I thought. It was a very long silence and, afraid somehow I might not be believed, I started to say how awful it was and how it had put it quite out of my mind that it was her birthday. I had forgotten to call. Everybody had been so upset. There were so many practical arrangements to make. Especially seeing that the wife didn’t want to come and handle it herself. They were divorcing, I explained. But now I realized that my daughter was speaking. I saw him last week, she said. She spoke in Italian. Her voice was choking with shock. Standing in the foyer of the European Parliament with its expensive polished woods and marbles, its news-stand, its messages of solidarity, I jammed the receiver to my ear. What? I often used to see him, she said. She could barely get the words out. Baby-sitting Stephanie. He used to drop by. With Dafydd. Or in the Tre Arche. She named a bar. I can’t believe it, she said. There was another long pause. She was fighting back tears. He was so funny. He always cheered me up. Oh, I can’t believe it, my daughter was weeping. This year’s been such shit, Papá! O Papa! I ran out of money. Suzanne, I said, but the line had gone. My daughter had been seeing Vikram Griffiths, I thought, leaning against a pillar of the European Parliament. I couldn’t believe it. There was only one reason why Vikram saw women. There is only one reason why I see women. Your daughter’s very beautiful, she said. She bought her underwear for her eighteenth birthday. The kind of underwear she removed herself to take a shower last night. Razzled though she may very well be. Her tottie-tackle. I shook my head in bewilderment. Papa! Suzanne hadn’t called to me like that since I left eighteen months ago. What shall I do, I asked myself, standing in the great foyer of the European Parliament? What shall I do, now I have decided not to go back on the coach with them, now I have decided not to return to my job? For I suddenly realized that I had decided not to return to my job. How do these decisions happen? I asked myself. I felt completely disorientated in the busy foyer of the European Parliament. I was leaving my job. Suzanne had been seeing Vikram Griffiths. Half philosophy hangs there, in the chemistry of decisions, I thought. She had gone back to her husband. In understanding volition. What shall I do? Wait for some enzyme to shift? For a moment I was seized by anxiety. Could it be I’d left my bromazepam in the hotel? I opened my bag, then and there on the polished wood floor of the busy foyer. Where? My clothes spilled out. Underwear, crumpled shirts. In my washbag? Yes. But did I need any? Make a phone-call first, I told myself. Phone Georg. I bought another phonecard at the news-stand, but Georg was out. His wife was better, the mother said. Crisis over. Opera-tottie was out. My wife’s phone was engaged now. Who was Suzanne calling to tell of her lover’s death? No, his suicide. I did need a bromazepam. At least it might be possible for us to talk now, I reflect. At least my daughter is definitely in life, up to her eyeballs. At least we don’t need to speak about Black Spells Magic and such-like silliness. Unscrewing the child-proof cap, I called the Welsh MEP’s Yorkshire secretary-tottie. Had she seen the petition? I’d brought it earlier. She had. I was staying behind to look after the red tape, I said. Perhaps she knew of a better hotel, cheap, central, near the main police station, the town hall? The death had to be registered. She’d look one up, she said. Call back in half-an-hour. But there was something else, I said, swallowing the bromazepam. Immediately I took it, I regretted having taken it. It’ll sound crazy, but I’d like to have a chat about the possibility of working for the Parliament. I find the whole thing so exciting. I waited. Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps we could eat together this evening. Seeing that I’m here. Amazingly, she said yes. Yorkshire-tottie and I like each other, I thought. We like each other. Sneaky-Niki would already be somewhere south of Geneva, I regretted taking the bromazepam. She would be safe and sound, watching a video perhaps. It wasn’t impossible, Yorkshire-tottie said, to find work in the European Parliament. I liked her accent. Particularly if you spoke a few languages and were willing to accept lousy conditions. Nobody will give you a permanent contract here, she laughed. Forget that stuff. I liked her laugh. Not to mention the pay! A lot of MEPs’ staff were taken on on an entirely temporary basis, she said, depending on how many people anybody needed at any one time. Your speech was very good, yesterday, she said. Very personal and professional at the same time, if you know what I mean. Owen noticed it. She meant the Honourable Owen Rhys. She laughed. Perhaps he could speak to somebody on the Petitions Committee. Perhaps you could spend the night with her, I thought. She was telling me to call back in half-an-hour for the name of the hotel. Perhaps the rest of your life. All invented, I thought, putting down the phone, and looking around the grand sweep of the foyer: the languages, the flags, the brave inscriptions, brave waterwords. Safe and sound on the way back to her husband, I thought. Beyond the glass and concrete, the flags flapped bravely in alphabetical order. Europe. As yesterday, the sky was a liquid drift of clouds and stabbing light, changing changing. Such a scandal. And a speck of dog was barking at the wind. One woman’s worth another, I thought. One man. Egalite. I wish I could speak to Georg now. I wish I could talk to Vikram. What had become of Dafydd? Of Welsh poetry? But tonight might be fun. Then it occurs to me I don’t even know her name. You don’t even know the name of the woman you are inventing, I told myself. Inventing your night with, your life with. I laughed. It’s quite a privilege to laugh out loud on your own in a public place. Not Christine again, I hope. Not Christine.