Tim Parks - Europa

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.