Tim Parks - Europa

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

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

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

This business about a meeting this evening?

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

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

Can you? he insists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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