The phone rang for a longtime, so that I began to think I would just have to hold it there ringing for four or five minutes until the girl I was interested in, or imagined I might be interested in, or might be interested in me, came out of the loo, but finally my wife did answer and, on hearing my voice, immediately asked why on earth I was calling. Yes, my wife was her busy, peremptory self I could even hear the vacuum-cleaner booming in the background, which probably explained why she hadn’t heard the phone for so long. And I have to confess that I found this cheering, this business of the vacuum-cleaner, and her peremptoriness, and the fact that although it must have been perfectly obvious I was calling from a call-box she didn’t think to ask me where I was. I found it cheering because for about one second it gave me the passing and extremely rare sensation of having done the right thing — you did the right thing leaving her, I told myself — since I often feel that one of the reasons our marriage reached the sorry state it did was my wife’s obsessive use of the vacuum-cleaner, and not only of the vacuum-cleaner but of every cleaning implement, product and aid available to modern man, or rather invented by modern man for modern woman. Simply, the vacuum-cleaner was always on, nudging round my feet when I was trying to read on the sofa or to play draughts with Suzanne, clattering against the bedroom door when perhaps I was trying to sleep late on a Saturday. And this was nothing other, I believe, than one of my wife’s many ways of expressing her suffocating desire to ripristinare, as the Italians say, to be constantly returning things to their pristine state, or more particularly in my wife’s case, her desire to have everything remain exactly as it was the day we were married and moved into the new flat which I had made the terrible mistake (in this case absolutely formative, one of the grand structural mistakes of my life), the terrible, mistake of letting her parents buy for us and of living in ever since, or at least until about eighteen months ago, which means I was there nineteen years, nineteen years, and every year the shutters had to be re-varnished and the walls re-whitewashed and the window-frames re-sealed, and in our relationship too it was likewise understood that everything had to be freshly whitewashed and re-sealed, everything had to be kept in a perfectly mint emotional state, and in particular it was tacitly understood that we had to use the same love language, forever, the. same cooing little terms of endearment we had used during our courtship of twenty-one years before, terms that I have absolutely no intention of evoking here and now, although I can sense their presence as I sit turning over and over my thoughts in the third seat from the back of this powerful modern coach pounding across Europe, I can sense them lurking there below the surface of consciousness, below the modulations of this voice, below the vibrations of big tyres on smooth tarmac, they are present to me, hard dark rocks I would founder on if I went that way. One uses words, love words, I tell myself, for years and years, only to discover one morning that they mean nothing any more. Not only do they mean nothing, but they are dangerous. They are frightening. And yet my wife insisted on our using them. You haven’t called me this for ages, my wife would say, or, Why do you get so angry when I call you that? I refuse to evoke even one of them here and now. My wife insisted that we went on using these words far beyond the point of exasperation, words, as I said, that had meaning once but now meant only the meaning they had lost, the meaning all words always lose when you use them too much and find they mean nothing at all, not rocks then I suppose, but corpses, has-beens, different from the living, different from the never-alive, corals perhaps, sharp and dangerous, hundreds of thousands of sharp little dead creatures. Our love words.
Yes, we had to be forever in love, I remember now, my wife and I, so that one had the feeling of something that had solidified, terribly, an awful process of fossilization, a shell one had made for oneself, but that somehow wasn’t the right shape any more, wasn’t appropriate any more. Again it was a question of propriety, I tell myself, sitting beside Doris Rohr. And perhaps this was why she and Suzanne, our daughter, could never really get on together, because Suzanne would insist on growing up, on not staying the same, and hence was a constant reminder to us that we were not the same either, offering as she did that yardstick of age and of all its attendant transformations in the flesh which children must offer and parents must take note of.
I wanted to have a word with Suzanne, I said.
Her birthday’s tomorrow, my wife said drily.
I told my wife I was perfectly aware my daughter’s birthday was tomorrow, but even as! said this I would have liked to have added something to ease this studied and obvious unpleasantness, because it is unthinkable really that two people should live together for nigh on twenty years and then have nothing more than their mutual irritation to trade on the telephone, unthinkable, but apparently the norm, or almost (when things are not worse), and sitting here on the blood-red upholstery of this hideous modern coach, where six video screens have just been lowered in perfect simultaneity from wells fixed in strategic positions in the overhead luggage racks, and where Doris Rohr is offering me an expensive chocolate, her mauve nails turning the pages of Marie Claire, sitting here thinking of that phone-call to my wife conducted in the freezing entrance to the predictably and it has to be said depressingly designed Chambersee Service Station while watching for sneaky young Nicoletta to come out of the loo, and, from the corner of my eye then, seeing her come in from the coach and head off up the stairs to the cafeteria, perhaps the only woman on the trip to be wearing a skirt as depicted by the stylized sign, so that even from the phone-booth I could see the achingly slim calves black-stockinged above high heels scraping the stone steps like so many matches struck on sandpaper — sitting here in the coach, my mind prey, as it has been for so long, to every passing thought, but somehow not only the prey but the aggressor too, or a prey to its own aggression, self-consuming — sitting here in this parlous psychological state, it once again, I mean as a result of this phone-call, strikes home to me how much I have lost: my role as father and husband, the obviousness of my old life, the simplicity of being somebody’s husband, somebody’s father, the readiness of an explanation when required, being able to say, This is who I am and what I do. So that as the video two seats in front of me begins to glow and one or two people pull pink curtains against the rain outside to make the screen more vivid, it occurs to me that if I lose my job as well as everything else, this job that I always saw as a mere stepping-stone, a sensible way-station, an income to tide me over while I picked up my ticket to somewhere else (until, like my marriage, it became a desert island, a place of loathed and ultimately terrifying convenience), if I lose my job, I will have lost the last element in life, after wife and daughter and mistress, that gave me any sense of role and identity. And I begin to think, for the first time, that perhaps this trip was not a mistake after all. Perhaps it isn’t a mistake, I tell myself. Perhaps I should take it seriously and work hard at it alongside the others, lobbying Euro-MPs and talking to the press and generally making every reasonable and democratic effort to save this last attachment I have to the common-sense world of role and identity and usefulness and source of income — myself as paid language teacher at the University of Milan — You should take this trip seriously, I tell myself, very seriously, and stop pretending to be so superior to crazy Vikram with his drink and his dog and his victim politics, and dull Doris with her chocolates and magazines, and dour irritable Dimitra with her square-jawed determination to keep her place on the gravy train. You are arrogant, I tell myself. You are irretrievably arrogant. You are obsessed by the notion that you are somehow superior to every task you have been allotted and every person you have shared your life with. This has to stop, I told myself. You have to stop.