by Tim Parks
It could be her, he says in his execrable Brummie Italian that makes the students smile. His moustache is the kind airmen used to wear. It could be her, the spy. She’s after that scholarship business they’re giving away, in’t she? He switches to English. And old man Ermani’s something to do with that. She’s in with Ermani.
There. He said her name. Because this is the kind of person Colin is, I reflect, the kind of person who immediately names names of colleagues, speculating without a moment’s hesitation on their betrayal, and also of course he is the person I sometimes spend whole evenings with, talking tottie over glasses of beer and billiards, talking nipple-hue and pubic-definition over cigarettes burning in ashtrays, because one of the things that has come out of all this, this debacle, this retreat from Moscow, is that ! have no self-respect. You have no self-respect, I tell myself, the way you talk about sex and women now, with Colin, And when I think of who I was, what I was, at thirty, at thirty-five, and of the airs I put on, discussing matters social, political and moral in appropriate tones of earnestness and concern, and then of what under those airs was really in my mind, that groping after something darker, that strange waiting as if for life to begin, or end, or begin to end, in an explosion of denial of all one imagined one had been, if I think of that then I have to laugh, a long and mirthless laugh, and in the billiard hall with Colin we discuss our most recent conquests and what we have done with them, and we refer to them by some easily distinguishable characteristic, as for example where they live or what they do or what they’re like, so that they might be called Bologna-tottie, for example, or Opera-tottie, or in one case Psycho-tottie or even Armpit-tottie, because it is forbidden to mention their names, since this would suggest involvement and respect, which are taboo for those of us who have decided that boorishness is our only hope, that sex is purely physiological, with the result that the only thing I cannot, I must not, I do not, and I will not tell Colin, is how everything I do with them, with these women I find, or who find me, from time to time - and particularly most recently with one I call Opera-tottie - how everything I do with them is an attempt to make them repeat what I did with her and she with me those halcyon days of three years ago, and I’m talking of course about the fourth floor of the Hotel Racine in Rheims where we did everything and said we would love each other forever. Yes, yes, we went that far, and the curious thing was how we both really meant it and knew it meant nothing. All this must be taboo between Colin and myself, indeed is the difference between Colin and myself, is what is left of my self-respect.
At least we could ask her straight up, Colin says determinedly. I mean, ask her if she told him anything.
Vikram Griffiths has his fingers behind his neck, rubbing up and down intently. Dimitra turns to look up the aisle to check that she is still in her place, and I’m struck by how completely unpleasant I find Dimitra, unpleasant in her busy busyness, the denim jeans, denim jacket, and in a sort of righteous truculence that glowers even under the brightest Greek smile and lipstick. What would it be like to fuck Dimitra? Daffy-dog has his wet nose in her crotch now. And why do you always ask yourself this question even of a woman you find so unpleasant? As if you were under orders somehow. As if in this controlled environment you had no control at all.
Then with that extraordinary smoothness he has, Georg says, lightly, that all this is distasteful and that it is a mistake to start naming names. What sort of example are we setting for the students who have come to support us and who want to see us united and helping each other, and showing group spirit, not fighting amongst ourselves? If there’s a spy, then let him or her be, there’s only so much harm they can do. Isn’t there? We have nothing to hide.
Georg is right, or at least extremely persuasive, and above all pacato, as the Italians would add, which is as much as to say even and reasonable and calm, such admirable qualities. As she too was pacata, I remember, when saying almost the same thing to me: what did it or could it matter if there had been a betrayal, so long as we were so happy together? What difference did it make, what harm could it do? she demanded. Why should she tell me who it was? Why should I care to know the name? So that it wasn’t so much the fact that she confessed, quite unnecessarily, what had happened that bewildered me, as that she didn’t see it as a confession, she didn’t perceive it as a problem. She was principally mine, she said, as I well knew, it was only - and really she was just trying to explain, not to apologize - only that there had been all those times, hadn’t there, when she hadn’t been able to see me because I was married and had a child and had insisted for so long on keeping up appearances so that inevitably …
She said these words to me in French, but I recall them now, and have recalled them if once a thousand times, in English, suggesting how quickly one makes things one’s own, how everything that is said to you is as much your hearing of it as their saying. For indeed everything she said to me she said in French, or Italian, and ninety per cent of it I remember in English (though I believe it is what she said that I remember).
But what galls me now is that perhaps she was right about this. Perhaps she was right and had I behaved differently, one way or the other, I could at least have had something, or perhaps everything, I wanted, if only I had known or decided what that was (unless it was the not knowing that I wanted, the delirium of the impossible decision?). Yes, had I left home immediately our affair began, I could surely have had her, and had I let things ride a bit more and not been so intense and jealous, then I could still perhaps be married, even happily married, or at least pleasantly, and still be seeing my mistress too, and fucking her and telling her I loved her and cared for nobody else, and perhaps occasionally fucking others too just for good measure and generally living a life of perfectly manageable hypocrisy to the benefit of everyone, and one thinks particularly here of my eighteen-year-old daughter whose coming-of-age party will be held tomorrow in my no doubt much censured absence.
She said my terrible problem was my mulish Anglo-Saxon Protestant absolutism, extremism, so mulishly absolute and so extreme that I was atheist without my atheism bringing me the slightest of benefits, so absolute and extreme that I attached such ludicrous pluses and minuses to words like sincerity and hypocrisy, not understanding that those two ideas were never truly incarnate but in constant negotiation a fusion you could never separate out, and if only I would loosen up and become more European and appreciate that while it was important, supremely important, to have values and ideals, it was a halfwit’s mistake to insist anybody live by them - as I myself hadn’t lived by them, had I? - then everything would be okay. Everything was okay, she said. Because nothing had really happened. Had it? She laughed and said not to worry, everything was okay, nothing had really happened, and I hit her, perhaps to show that something had happened, I hit her, hard, and that was the beginning of the end for me. The moment I hit her, I tell myself sitting here slightly right of centre on the long back seat of this coach, was the beginning of the end for me. Something shifted, something had happened. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Colin were not right that she is the spy, and I say this not because it would suit her personal interests, which of course it would in a way, but because she probably would not even bring the whole thing to consciousness unless someone challenged her about it, the way I challenged her earlier that fateful day, though only very casually, just wishing to be reassured, about the receipt from a café in Várese being between the pages of the book she had lent me, and even then, even when she brought it to consciousness, she wouldn’t really feel it was wrong talking to Ermani, as she never really felt it was wrong fucking Georg. She wouldn’t feel it was wrong telling him which lectors were in favour of what and which against, since Ermani is friendly to hex and went to school with her ex-husband and is helping her with her Euro-scholarship application, her essay on a constitution for the whole of Europe which should win her a year’s paid research, so called, in Brussels. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. After all, we’re talking about som
eone who throughout a long and, if it was nothing else, torrid adultery not only continued to go regularly to Sunday morning mass, but even to help at church functions and encourage her young daughter to participate in every way and to take her first communion in a beautiful lace-trimmed dress that she made herself and frequently showed me and discussed the details of, the lace, the trim mings. We laughed together, I remember, thinking how similar those trimmings were to the laciness of her underwear. She laughed her French laugh. So no, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she were the spy. But clearly Georg, who of course lives in Várese (and who,, she says, though she never actually told me the name, insisted so much that what could she do? phoning her every day like that and even sending her flowers), Georg is right that it would be a mistake to suggest to the students that we are divided, though of course he is saying this in front of the girls in the back and next-but-back seats and in rebuke, though pacato, of Vikram and Colin and Dimitirá, all seething, you can see, for drama and vendetta, all feeling personally injured by what has happened, the presence of this spy, the evidence of this betrayal, and thus in many ways not unlike myself. You are not unlike your colleagues, I tell myself, however much you may choose to despise them. What did she mean, what could she do? How could she imagine you wouldn’t feel betrayed?
I say: Wouldn’t it be more logical for me to be the spy? Shouldn’t you perhaps be throwing me out of the coach?
The girl Vikram called Sneaky immediately smiles intensely at me, and just as her lips part and I think, Now she is going to speak to me, I see that she is not smiling at what I said at all, but mouthing the words of a song which has begun to come over the coach stereo in a low throb. It’s the song has made her smile at me, one of those songs one hears everywhere and pays absolutely no attention to, so that you only recognize the refrain as a kind of distracting bleep in the background noise. And the refrain is Sei un mito, sei un mito -You’re a myth, you’re a myth - meaning no more in Italian than ‘something wonderful’ on the lines one supposes of ’fabulous’ in English, which I always take as meaning ‘too good to be true’. Sei un mito. She mouths and smiles at me.
It would be much more logical for me to be the spy, I insist.
Why? Colin is chewing gum.
I’ve always thought our demands were over the top, you know that, and then I’ve never believed in Europe anyway. It’s a myth.
I say it with a coy smile on my face.
Vikram Griffiths laughs and the girl next to Sneaky, who can only be described as prettily made-up and entirely uninteresting, very belligerently asks why, why is Europe a myth, on the contrary a united Europe is our only hope for the future. Unity in Europe is our only hope for keeping the fascist nationalists out long-term, she says. Dimitra agrees. You have no sense of history, she tells me, still caressing the dog’s snout in her crotch. So I ask, jokingly, if others present are aware what the divorce rate is in marriages between people from different European countries, and when of course they don’t know, as why on earth should they, of what use are statistics to any of us? I tell them fifty per cent higher than an average of the average in ‘each of the countries concerned. Fifty per cent.
Vikram is looking at me with curious red eyes as if at some oddity he has just remembered never having properly explained to himself - my eager participation in this trip perhaps. He clears his throat and grins: You’re talking about yourself, Jerry boyo.
And about you, I tell him.
Twice fuckin’ over, Vikram laughs.
And me, Georg admits happily.
So that in the space of a moment three men in early middle age have managed to tell a number of twenty-year-old girls that they are divorced and ergo available, though in Georg’s case this is something of a simplification. Rather than mentioning her own separation, Dimitra has got up to return to her seat. You are rather beginning to like Vikram Griffiths, I tell myself. Quite unexpectedly, you are beginning to like him.
Then Colin brags that he doesn’t know why we bothered getting hitched at all. He never has. He wriggles his moustache. Know the word ‘hitched’, love? he asks, turning to the girl with the long legs and quality jeans. Know it or not? Where is your English in the end? Don’t you girls study English? What’s going to happen to you at the exam, I don’t know.
This is Colin’s way
Let me teach you my favourite words, he insists. The girls giggle. Sneaky is still mouthing Sei un mito, and still, quite ingenuously, she smiles at me, bouncing on her seat, and her smiling again makes me ask, What are you going to do about such a young woman who will keep smiling at you like this from great brown eyes (a sort of bright vulnerability suggests contact lenses), who will keep bouncing on her chair and resting her long neck and strong chin on the crinkly white headrest cover — jet-black hair just trembled by the air from her ventilator - and then letting her head cock slowly to one side while the bright eyes hold yours. How am I to behave?
Cuddle, Colin says ominously Anybody know what ‘cuddle’ means?
He hams his Brummie accent, I tell myself, the way so many ex-pats ham their lost identity. The moustache is a pose. Yes, he hams this unpredictable matey belligerence, this curiously Midlands attitude. Colin is home away from home, I reflect, even if not the home you ever really liked.
‘Cuddle’ is p’rhaps my most favouritest word, Colin says. He overdoes it, pouting, twisting his chin from side to side in his collar. You know what ‘cuddle’ means, girls?
The girls, the two in front of me, the two each side of me and the one in front of Georg, all say no, they don’t know. What is the word again, please? Thus the girl with the swollen lips.
‘Cuddle!’
They shake their young heads.
I'll show you then, Colin says in his Brummie swagger, funny and frightening, and, grabbing the girl Vikram called Sneaky, who is closest, he pulls her to his chest. Then exactly as he makes that gesture, that coercive embrace, I feel a pang of jealousy, I feel that somehow this girl (who has been exchanging smiles) belongs to me, than which nothing could be further from the truth, of course, and sitting here slightly off-centre on the big back seat of this racing coach with the stocky Vikram Griffiths up against my knees winking his comedy-hall wink again, and gorgeous Georg laughing his cultured German laugh, and then Vikram shouting (now Dimitra’s gone), Ask ‘em if they know what ‘shag’ means, Colin boyo, give ‘em the direct method on that one! I wonder, Why, why this pang of real jealousy for a girl you met only half-an-hour ago, and young enough to be your daughter? Why are my emotions so inappropriate? I ask myself. Because it’s propriety that we’re talking about in the end. I must remember the word propriety. Why am I reading the slightest signs of complicity as if they were the hallmarks of a fairy tale in the making? What is this immense promise I am always imagining in every woman I meet, as if the girl and I were already in league in a refined and tender and emotionally sensitive way against the Colins and Vikrams and Georgs of this world, the boors the libertines the rakes. And I am reminded, instantly, and with an almost overwhelming sense of derision and loss of faith, of how we used to lie in her sheets Friday evenings feeling deeply in love and infinitely superior to those who just screwed around, and the irony must surely be that with all that happened afterwards, the complicity betrayed and the determination to beat her betrayal out of her, or out of me, yes, out of me perhaps, the irony must be, I tell myself, that I still feel superior, and my superiority lies in the violence of my reaction, which is ugly, in the depth of this obsession, which is crippling and exhausting. Yes, your superiority, I tell myself, if such it is, lies in the fact that all the women you’ve seen since, you’ve seen not for their own sakes but only in order to repeat every gesture and caress you enjoyed with her, which is unspeakably ugly. Your superiority actually lies in your self-derision, your rancour, your inability to stomach yourself, which is ugly and unhealthy So that in my superiority, if that is what it is, I am uglier and unhealthier still than Colin, who is now saying that his ne
xt favourite word is ‘squeeze’. ‘Sque-ee-eeze’, he repeats, drawing it out quite obscenely, rolling stale chewing-gum along his lips as he does so. Do they know what ‘squeeze’ means? But before they can say no and hence give him his chance to demonstrate I ask the young girl Sneaky what her real name is and she smiles. Nicoletta.
I’m Jerry, I tell her. Then at my prompting everybody on the back two rows of this coach announces their names, and so we have Margherita on Georg’s left by the window, and Bruna the heavily powdered girl between myself and Georg, and Veronica, tiny, generous lips, to my right, and in front, going from right to left, Maura, belligerent, politicized, and Nicoletta, whose friends call her Niki, and the other side of the corridor Monica of the long legs in quality jeans, and Graziano, a tall lean eager boy with acne and a copy of the communist, ex-communist, newspaper, Unitd.
