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.
Then in the queue with trays and a mill of people, I was just pointing Nicoletta to the small sign in six or seven languages that indicated that we could pay for our beverages in Swiss francs, French francs, Austrian schillings, Deutschmarks, sterling and, yes, amazingly, Italian lire, when the Avvocato Malerba, who was immediately in front of me in the queue, leaned towards us to say that although this was true it didn’t make sense to pay in lire because the exchange rate was so unfavourable. The exchange rate was about forty lire to the franc worse than you could get at the Bureau de Change downstairs (there had been a small blue plastic sign with a white stylized image of a stack of coins on a pile of banknotes, though of course they will never change coins, just as most girls never wear skirts) and this in-itself, the Avvocato Malerba went on, meaning the Bureau de Change exchange rate, was more than thirty lire worse than the exchange rate yesterday, for the simple reason that the Bundesbank had been expected to lower their Interest rates at a meeting yesterday evening, but then hadn’t done so, thus throwing, as it emerged from the morning paper and indeed from the chaos in the Bureau de Change downstairs (where they did not even want to see Italian lire), the European currency markets into complete turmoil. Yes, our dear Europe was in turmoil, announced the Avvocato Malerba. And he thus suggested, raising his voice now, because of the noise two loutish French schoolboys were making choosing a pastry, that we might take some Swiss francs from him, repaying him, if we insisted, in lire at the rate he had, with uncanny foresight, exchanged them at the day before, i.e. something to the tune, all told, taking into account the devaluation of the lira and the price-exploitation practised by the Chambersee Service Station cafeteria, of eighty lire to the franc more favourable.
This was my first encounter with the Avvocato Malerba, who I knew taught a course on Employment Legislation in the Law Faculty and had been encouraged to come along by Vikram to present the legal side of our case as lucidly as possible in the event of our having to talk to legal experts and above all in the event of our having to explain why, while it was perfectly normal to hire people on only a one- or two-year contract in the UK or France or Germany, in Italy, or at least in the public sector, this could only be considered as a case — of discrimination against foreign teaching staff. The Avvocato was a tall, dry-looking man, not far off retirement it seemed, but surprisingly boyish in manner when he began to talk, almost childishly animated you might say, and painfully eager to please, as witness this very generous offer, made in a stiltedly correct English, to save a little money for two people he had never met before.