Tim Parks - Europa

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

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

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

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

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