Europa (11 page)

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.

Ah, yes, the ambiguity of the Euro-shag! Vikram nods his sideburns, apparently pleased to be called a Celt, while on the screen a curiously sexless Robin Williams expounds to his eager class on the theme of
living one's life to the full
. I might just have to toss the old sou'wester at someone else's door then, he laughs. And then he says
her
name. He might shag
her
, he says.

Go for it, I immediately tell him.

Y'see, what I fancy there, he says, in his interminable search for intimacy, his low voice that is never low enough (and there is a positive gale of whisky on his breath), what I fancy about that, is the razzled, last-orders look, y'know, the mauve lipstick and the skirts and stockings and shoes. The gear. Very French.

Give her hell, I tell him. My voice is flat. Quickly I say: By the way, I hope you've got it all organized for tomorrow? I mean, who we meet, what we say? The great campaign. Treaty of Strasbourg.

Right enough, he laughs. Then amazingly, and with that awesome remorselessness with which things can go wrong sometimes (as when, at billiards, the white shoots
unerringly
off three cushions into the centre pocket, doesn't creep or slither down like the balls you've aimed, but slams straight home, as if nothing could be more meant, at some metaphysical level, than the unfortunate coincidence) - amazingly Vikram Griffiths announces, Oh yes, when it comes to campaigns,
fuckin'  Napoleon Bonyfarts got nothing on this boyo
. This boyo just rolls on from one war to the next. I'd've stuck the old Duke's mercenaries right back in their Wellington boots.

And Vikram goes on then, after the brief interruption of a feminine cheer when Robin Williams invites his students to tear pages out of the books they or their parents have paid good money for, to explain the details: the Welsh MEP who will meet us and prepare us for our meeting with the Petitions Commission; then the presentation itself; then …

But I'm lost, I'm suspended between the chattering video screen and Vikram ‘s now earnest Welsh rhythms in a world where, quite apart from the subsiding ripples of pain that fanned out from the word ‘razzled', and the vaguer, deeper disquiet generated by the fact that
people don't know about us
, to the extent that this man can merrily talk about having a poke at the woman who has meant most to me in my life, apart from all that I'm suddenly riveted by the recollection of the last time Napoleon Bonaparte crossed my path, a recollection of such absurd and tangled complexity, such abject consequence, that I find it remarkable that my mind can hold it all together as a single entity, a single feeling, can say to itself, Ah, the
Napoleon thing
. For this anecdote, this little - no, not little, this 
personal
- horror story, which I immediately understand I am doomed to go picking over for at least the next hour, like a ghoul over his own carrion, is the kind of improbable agglomeration of negative material that would seem to crave just one nice international word to sum it up and get it out of the way as soon as possible; the way there are convenient words like
Inquisition
or
holocaust
or 
pogrom
which sum up whole epics of human awfulness so that they can be got out of the way with the greatest rapidity, buried forever in the immense sludge of world wide buzz^words and brand names - global warming and Gor-Tex, Coca-Cola and ethnic cleansing - or rather perhaps, assuming we have a certain
level of culture
, as the Italians like to say, we may exhume such words from time to time in well-written novels, serious films, to enjoy the pang, to check that it's still there, to feel good that it
is
still there, as so we should, then to push them even deeper in the shit once again (in fact it's rather unusual, now I come to think of it, that neither
Black Spells Magic
nor
Dead Poets Society
has aired the holocaust as yet, seen fit to set its compass by that convenient lodestone of human cruelty).

Oh for just one word for my Napoleonic anecdote! To be able to say, Chaeronea, the Terror, or Waterloo, and never to have to retell the story at all, never to have to think of it or through it at all. I hate 
having
to think of things,
having
to go over things. The tyranny of memory But in the meantime, I suddenly tell myself, how remarkable, isn't it, that while listening to Vikram Griffiths, now saying that it's important the girlies are properly shown around the Parliament and hence able to feel that they have
taken part
, that they didn't come allthis way for nothing, and while observing Doris Rohr, with whom I have no particular axe to grind, trying to find the space between one seat and the next to cross her thick legs in those kind of loose, too sharply creased woollen trousers (maroon) that in semiotic terms at least would surely permit her to use the men's lavatory, how remarkable that while taking all this in, and at the same time allowing once again the complex misery triggered, absurdly, by the name Napoleon to explode in your mind, you are nevertheless still able to
marvel
at the extraordinariness of a brain that can do all this
at once
, a brain that can be totally obsessed and yet totally conscious of everything that is not obsession, locked into a tremendous, perhaps
unforgivable 
alienation, yet aware too of a change in the hum of the coach, a change that must be the result of switching from a smooth road surface to a rough, with some of the American college boys in this pretentious and unlikely film being punished now for having left the school premises to read their Wordsworth and Whitman in the more romantic surroundings of that underground cave, perhaps grotto is the word, and Vikram doing his whisky-inspired imitation of a plummy Queen's English to say: After which ceremony we are graciously invited to a jolly luncheon with the correspondent of the London
Times
. So that there is always Self, I tell myself, taking up pretty well the whole of the picture, but equally invariably there is always that little Brahminic bird sitting on one corner of the frame observing Self, observing everything around Self, and saying, To what end, to what end? And did you remember to pay the phone bill?

Or so I thought. I thought psychology had established this business once and for all, this doing and observing oneself doing, and some very long time ago too. Until I challenged
her
about it. Until I said: But didn't you even feel bad doing that, wasn't there a small part of you watching as you did it, or, in this case, said it, a small part, detached, smiling wryly, sad?

And what I meant was, Will you offer me nothing I can cling on to, no small sop of remorse, of the variety I have always been willing to give to my wife, to help her, if only for my daughter's sake, to believe that I'm not all bad, to help her feel the past was not a farce? Our marriage was worth something?

And she said no. There were no small parts of herself that saw or did or said anything different from what the main part of her did or said or saw. Because she was
a happy, together, integrated person
, she insisted, in French, though I remember it in English. And just at this very moment, she went on in an inappropriately husky voice, just at this moment what she was seeing was me, what she was doing was lying there spread out naked like melted butter on fresh baguette, and what she wanted to say was, Make love to me! Why bring up that whole ridiculous story again now that
we've
got over it, now that we are back together and with nobody between us at last on one side or the other. And she said: Who cares how this came about? The fact is, it's what we wanted!

But I was holding a copy of a coffee-table book, entitled
The Age of the Courtesan
, and inside the lush front cover of this extremely lush and doubtless expensive exercise in historically aware prurience - as gifts of flowers also are never vulgar and always expensive, as telephone-calls from charming and assiduous suitors are always welcome and all the more so if they come long-distance and cost a great deal - inside the front cover, and in turquoise-blue fountain pen, someone had written, in Italian:
The taste of triumph - how can I forget?
And there were two tiny mistakes in the way this Italian was written, one of syntax and one of spelling, as if the whole thing had been spoken-written-thought in a foreign accent.

It's not, I said, and as Vikram lurches off up the aisle ruffling girls' hair as he goes, I find myself mouthing the words now towards her back, or rather towards that sliver of shoulder and freckled neck I can see as she sits entirely engrossed in the vicissitudes of the Dead Poets Society, quite oblivious, though occasionally passing some comment to her companion, who I can't see, but I believe it must be Luis, a Spanish teacher of quiet, reflective, unreproachable character, and what she's saying no doubt, as one of the romantic young Americans under the influence of the excellent Robin Williams now argues with his parents about wanting to become an actor rather than a lawyer, what she's saying is how good the dubbing is -
un vrai miracle de la communication
, I remember her telling me - No, it's not, I mouth - and I'm repeating the words by heart almost a year after the event -it's not that he gave you the book, or even that he wrote that in it. It's not that that upsets me.

She lies there on white sheets staring at me, so beautiful and beautifully, if only one could detach oneself.

Et alors?

It's that Í
said than
They were
my
words.

At first she didn't understand. I had to point to the dedication again. The taste of triumph. Then she didn't remember. She did not remember. Whereas I will say this of my wife, that though she was/is criminally inattentive, would not notice if you were sitting in front of the TV weeping or had an adulterer's grin all over your face as you washed the dishes, she did at least remember things, she would never forget a moment that had been precious. How else would she have known in what state things must be preserved?

She
, on the other hand, had
clean forgotten
. As I have clean forgotten Nicoletta. The kind of cleanliness which really is a blessing.

The name Napoleon? I said. Doesn't that mean anything to you? His letters to Josephine?

Because when I first managed to invent a fictitious conference and we spent three days together in her ex-husband's second or third or fourth house that she still had the keys to in the mountains above Bolzano - and this was the first time we had been away together, the first time we had actually spent the night together - there was no running water. The pump had been turned off, there was no running water, and though I spent hours at it I couldn't work out how to prime it. So she couldn't take her bidet. She couldn't soap and perfume herself as she so much liked to. And this worried her. She didn't want to be putrid, she said, when I went down on her, as I invariably would. I invariably go down on women. I can't understand men who don't. Life, Colin says, is a muff mountain.

So it was then, in her husband's somewhat twee ski and hunting retreat, surrounded by cuckoo clocks and stuffed birds and the like, that I told her what I was surprised that, as a Frenchwoman and indeed a student of the Revolution, she didn't already know - about Napoleon's letters, when, on return from military campaigns, he would command Josephine not to wash for at least three days before his arrival. He liked her gamey.