You should have a slug of this, boyo, Vikram Griffiths said, turning from trying to bribe the driver to take us into town in the evening of his own initiative without referring the time and expense to the coach company. You look terrible, he said, What’s up? So, lying with the instinctive fluency that years of betrayal engender (and if one is lying one owes it to the world to do it well), I said the combination of the coach’s movement and trying to watch Robin Williams seize the day had given me the most atrocious headache, and I told Vikram Griffiths, this feckless fragment of Empire (as he himself once described himself), this genius of broken marriages, bizarre manners and interminable good causes, this man who came to my house just once, his dog only a puppy then, and frightened my wife with his life story — told him that I had come to the front of the coach to speak to him because I had heard, in the Chambersee Service Station, Dimitra and Georg and her agreeing that he, Vikram, would have to be replaced, because incapable of putting a presentable face, I said (partly inventing, partly quoting), to our claims; he would make us look ridiculous, I said they had said, with his unkempt baldness, his bushy sideburns and wild gestures. Nobody sensible had sideburns like that, they said. Nobody drank like that! And of course I would have passed these observations on to him a half an hour earlier, I explained, I lied, when he spoke to me at my seat, except that the appalling Doris Rohr had been beside me then, Doris Rohr who inevitably, in her constant dread that we would overstep the mark, was doubtless on their (Dimitra’s) side and would have passed on my remarks (to him) to them. But the long and the short of the matter was, I insisted (partly inventing, partly not), that they were frantic; they were frantic, I said (frantic myself), and in particular they were frantic because he had started drinking in the Chambersee Service Station at only ten-thirty in the morning and getting the students to drink too, and nobody knew, I said they’d said, what state he would be in tomorrow, and people were rumouring that it had to do with the custody battle over his child, his son, which he had engaged in, they said, because of his ex-wife’s, first ex-wife’s worsening depressive state, but was nevertheless losing, partly because of his difficult separation from his second wife, which the court could hardly ignore, and so they felt it important, I finished, in a state of total self-loathing, staring past Vikram’s mottled baldness at the great sweep of windscreen collecting filth and spray from a French truck ahead, important to replace him with someone more apparently reasonable, someone who would guarantee respectability for our cause.
Then to his fair question, after a slug from his flask, why was I on his side over this matter, I who had never shown any interest in any side in this affair, let alone his, I who had even been heard to speak of wanting to be fired, I replied, no doubt rather distractedly, since actually I wasn’t thinking about the lectors’ grievance or our mission to Europe or Vikram Griffiths at all, nothing could have been further from my mind, but simply and miserably and exclusively about her and about Napoleon and the taste of his cunty triumph (so that if I was talking now, and in detail, about the lectors’ crisis and above all about the problem of our proper representation it was only in the forlorn hope that this would help me to stop thinking about what I couldn’t help but think about, stop myself from doing something irremediable, as if I hadn’t already done so much that is irremediable, surely that is the problem, that is why I am behaving in this quite absurd fashion, speaking so urgently of a subject that does not even minimally interest me) — yes, to his fair question, vis-a-vis my suspect allegiance, I replied that I hated it when people stabbed other people in the back. Yes, I hated that, I said, and at the same time was telling myself: You have done so much that is irremediable, and here you are now trying to stop yourself doing something else. Irremediable. That’s simple enough, surely. Even reasonable. Then the fact was, I said, because it seemed important to go on speaking, that I liked the way he,Vikram, treated the whole thing as a battle. Yes, he was willing to get his hands dirty, I said, at random, he didn’t whine, I invented, about rights as everybody else did, he didn’t believe that we really deserved the salary and conditions of work we were demanding, no, he just used all these complicated laws about Europe to see if they could be manipulated in our favour in the particular dire situation we were in back at the University. Quite irremediable, I told myself, remembering the blood at the corner of her mouth. Which was more honest, I said, taking a third and very long slug from his whisky flask. Yes, altogether he was more honest. And what I meant now was more honest than her, who always used to try to explain everything she did in terms of human rights and the need for experience and discovery of her inner being and her vraie sympathie pour les autres and never never never in terms of appetite and selfishness and stupidity. Since quite plainly, I told myself, the reason she doesn’t want Vikram to be representative has nothing to do with his ability or presentability or anything of the kind, and everything to do with her eagerness to grab the job herself as part of the PR operation involved in furthering her, as she sees it, career in Europe, which I too would have been invited to share in, I can’t help thinking, if only I hadn’t lost control of myself, as she always put it. You lost control, I told myself, as Vikram’s dog found something to lick from the side of my shoe. You did things that were irremediable. The dog licked earnestly. Someone must have spilt something on my shoe. Yes, we could have gone away to Brussels together. I can see that now. I watched the dog’s pink tongue against the leather of my shoe. And I could hear her saying the words: Let’s go away to Brussels, Jerry Let’s go away. Except that you lost control of yourself.
Vikram Griffiths was braced between two front seats when I said what I said. He had both hands raised to grip the luggage rack, coalie sideburns bristling and eyes narrow behind the cheap lenses he goes back to the UK for, to Cardiff, to get on the National Health (as she always went back to Rheims to have her teeth fixed, and as Georg, it finally came out, goes regularly to Germany for the drugs the mother of his child needs, driving through Verona on the way). And seeing how greasy those NHS lenses were, and how red and watery and unhealthy Vikram’s poor eyes behind them, as his dog’s eyes likewise are red-rimmed and unhealthy, it vaguely crossed my mind, so far as anything could get across that minefield at such a moment, that my colleague would be upset by what I had just said — that he didn’t believe we deserved what we were asking — he would see it as an outrageous accusation, a cynical assault on his sincerity, his credentials — wasn’t he the champion of modern left-wing holier-than-thou (except where women were concerned) political thought? Yes, I told myself, you have spoken out of turn, carelessly, as you so often do, you have offended a man whose whisky you are drinking and who is clearly eager to make friends with you, in the end a charming man, a man who has overcome all kinds of disadvantages, who is dealing with all kinds of personal problems, you have insulted him blindly, at random, merely in order to drag your mind away from the vomit it will not be dragged from. You have offended him, I told myself, and now Vikram Griffiths is going to be outraged, or cold, or upset, as I have seen him be on other occasions. Of course he believes we deserve what werre asking for. Of course he believes in Europe. And instead he laughed, Vikram Griffiths laughed, happily and throatily, and clapped me on the shoulder and he said dead fucking right, if fucking Europe decided against us he would never mention fucking Europe again, he couldn’t give a tinker’s fucking shite for a United Europe run by the German fucking Bundesbank who raised and lowered their interest rates exactly as it suited them, plunging the currency markets into turmoil. Rather the Raj, he laughed, though he had never been south of Rome himself, of course. The German lectors were the only ones who never never wanted to strike, he said, they always toed the line, always, they had such a respect for authority, for law and order; Doris Rohr, for example, he said, was, he knew, doing library work for her professor despite the strike, she was putting in her regular hours, despite the strike, so she could claim the salary she didn’t need. He put two fingers to his nostrils and sucked at his catarrh. Krauts were like that. No, he wouldn’t be at all surprised, Vikram Griffiths said, and clearly he was half-drunk and they were right about his not being presentable, they were right, he wouldn’t be at all surprised if Doris wasn’t the spy, unless it was Heike the Dike, the Austrian lectress, or lecheress, though you had to take your hat off to dikes, he laughed, clapping me on the shoulder a second time, if only in the hope they’d let you watch someday, he giggled, though he couldn’t particularly care for the idea of seeing Professoressa Bertelli on the job, despite her seminal text on Sappho — ha ha — and no, the only thing about our job, boyo, he said, since we’re speaking of jobs, he laughed, and he was rubbing the whisky flask beside his mouth now in much the same way children will speak behind a hand so that everybody can see they've got a secret to tell, the only thing that made our cause just, as he saw it, though one could never say this out loud, was, why should we be fire-able when others, the Italian professors, were not, and why should people who did even less than we did get paid even more? We were the only ones in the faculty who did any teaching at all, Vikram Griffiths said, the only ones with any sense of duty. He himself worked far longer and far harder and far better and far more generously than any of the professors. He loved teaching, he said. He actually cared about his students' welfare. Though that was more than could be said for Doris Rohr, or Colin Mattheson, if we were going to call a spade a spade, he said. Anyway, it was a fucking battle, he finished. I was dead fucking right about that. To the death. If they wanted to fire Vikram Griffiths they’d have to walk over his dead fucking dusky body first. And Daffy’s too, right? He slipped a shabby shoe beneath the animal’s rump and lifted it up till it yowled. Dafydd ap Gwilym, renowned for his lyricism.