Where’s Vikram? I asked as the actually extremely pleasant Yorkshire blonde secretary of the Welsh MEP was telling Colin that one referred to the European Parliament building, designed as it was, in terms of its right hemisphere and its left hemisphere. Oh, just like the old brain, Colin says, the old noddle, and he started to make jokes about the left hemisphere controlling what the right side of Europe was doing and the right the left, and then quipping, as he put an arm round Tittie-tottie’s waist (and now we were straggling along a curving third-floor corridor padded with green and plastered with posters announcing worthy concerns and complex directives) about this perhaps being why his left hand never knew what his right was up to. Or where it was up. Ho, ho. Biblical, he added, wiping the smile off his face. How’s that for a range of reference?
Where’s Vikram? I repeated.
Not quite, MEP-secretary-tottie said.
What?
The blonde secretary glanced at Colin with that wry humour of the woman, the quietly beautiful woman, who knows all men are pigs, but is somehow resigned to charming them anyway. It was when giving alms that the right was supposed not to know what the left was doing.
I wasn’t doing anyone no ‘arm, Colin laughed, pinching Tittie-tottie, who jumped and giggled.
Then when I asked once again, Where was Vikram, perhaps a little louder this time, Barnaby remarked that most probably he had gone on ahead to the office of the Welsh MEP with whom he had been in correspondence about this trip for some months and who had been instrumental in setting up our crucial encounter with the Petitions Committee, upon which, far more than on the meetings with the London Times and the Italian Euro MPs, it seemed our future careers must hang. I asked the experimental Irish novelist how his child’s throat was and he said, Better thanks, when he’d phoned his wife this morning the antibiotics had begun to take effect, the fever had come down. Had anybody phoned to find out if Georg had got back, I asked then, had he taken the plane or the train or what, but at the same time Dimitra was saying that this was just typical of Griffiths, he’d been voted out as representative but all the same couldn’t stop himself from meddling in the affair, sneaking off like this before anybody else to get a first word in with this Welsh MEP who was Vice-president of the Committee and of course in league with Griffiths because they both came from Wales. It was against the spirit, Dimitra said, and she quickened her pace along the padded corridor, of yesterday evening’s democratic vote.
But Vikram was not in the Welsh MEP’s office. Only the Welsh MEP was in his office, a small, lean, wiry figure with oversize head who did not immediately appreciate who we were. Professionally affable, he sprang to his feet and shook three or four hands vigorously over the polished desk, earnestly demonstrating his goodwill, but perplexed, not knowing who we were, his big head nodding eagerly. Unticlass="underline" Ah, but where’s our young man, he demanded, suddenly realizing. What’s his name, Griffith, Griffiths. Vic Griffiths. The representative? Who wrote in Welsh. There are one or two things still to clear up.
Vic Griffiths!
The leading members of the group were annoyed. Dimitra was annoyed. She was annoyed. Heike was annoyed. By Vikram’s absence, by the notion of his presence elsewhere. By our apparent inability to speak to the Welsh MEP without him. What had been discussed in this correspondence? Did anybody know? In Welsh! But I was thinking of that change of name. How it spoke worlds. Of subtlety and insecurity. Of subtlety bred of insecurity. Unless he had merely been staging a surprise. There was a senseless milling on the office carpet. Vikram loved such surprises. The shock of his foreignness. Why wasn’t he here? There was a loss of direction. Questions flew. Had any of the students seen Dr Griffiths? Or his dog. On the coach? Outside the building? Yes, he would have been savouring the moment when he introduced himself to the Welsh MEP, I thought. Savouring the disbelief. An Indian who spoke Welsh. People turned away from the MEP to talk. In Italian. They had not seen him. Or his dog. Unless he was afraid, it suddenly occurred to me. He had suddenly lost his nerve. Luis went to the door to look down the corridor. Afraid the colour of his skin might ruin things. The lectors huddled together. Might upset this influential man who imagined him pure-bred Welsh. They were nervous. Could he have gone to talk to some other member of the Committee, Dimitra wondered, or some member of the press, and all at once Doris Rohr and Dimitra and even Luis and Barnaby Hilson and above all she became immensely concerned that Vikram might in some way be queering our pitch, might be off speaking to others. Vikram who had dreamed up this whole mad trip himself, researched it, organized it, believed in it, in an attempt to defend the job, call it that, that paid the rent, paid the lawyers who represented him in various private actions, not least the custody case for his seven-year-old son, Vikram was now suspected of ruining the whole thing, with his over-enthusiasm, his lack of restraint, his love of conspiracy. Whereas I wondered if there were any telling, with our charismatic leader, whether pride in his hybrid destiny, or fear, was uppermost. Was he subject to sudden losses of nerve? Had anybody noticed if Dr Griffiths was drunk this morning? someone asked. Had anybody spoken to Dr Griffiths at all? He was ruining everything. First the shouting match, Heike said, with the hotel proprietor, in the early hours, and now this. Doris said, Because he was voted out, no doubt. Immediately there was a hum of indignation with the lectors standing at the front, crowded about the Honourable Owen Rhys’s desk, and the students behind spilling out into the curved corridor of the outer left hemisphere of the European Parliament, in Strasbourg, France, all asking each other when they had last seen Vikram Griffiths.
But this was hardly important, Dimitra now suggested to MEP Rhys in her execrable Greek English. Surely the important thing now was to be on time for our appointment with the no doubt busy Petitions Committee, and get our case across to them. This with the implication: Before Vikram has time to do untold damage; though it was clear from the Honourable Rhys’s polite confusion that he had been rather looking forward to meeting his fellow-Welshman, He still hadn’t registered the name Vikram. Unless, Colin laughed, there’s a young lady missing likewise! Know what I mean? But I was suddenly struck, at that moment, by my sense of distance from it all. Not that he wanted to suggest that Vic Griffiths, he grinned, was notorious, nudge, nudge, but such an eventuality would offer a hint of an explanation, would it not? A soupçon, Colin laughed. Why do you feel so distant sometimes, I asked myself, even at moments of drama, and I heard Heike whisper to Luis that Vikram had made a pass at at least half the women in the group yesterday evening, her lesbian self included. Especially at moments of drama. I was a million miles away In vain! she laughed. He went to bed with his tail between his legs. Like his dog.
The situation, as students and lectors, having only just arrived in this decidedly executive office, began counting each other to see if one of their number could be imagined to be having sex with another, must have been disconcerting for the Welsh MEP. Marooned behind two metres of polished vice-presidential wood, he must now be aware that the person he had been corresponding with, in Welsh, and to whom he had granted the favour of an audience with the powerful Petitions Committee of the European Community, was actually considered a liability, a drunk and a rake by many of his fellow-petitioners. So that I became distinctly aware, even from the immense distance from which I suddenly found myself obliged to observe events, that the matter should be taken in hand, at once, and that I, as official representative, should immediately step forward to introduce myself to the Welsh MEP as Jeremy Marlowe, the recently elected spokesman of the University of Milan’s Foreign Lectors’ delegation, and on shaking hands vigorously should engage the man, who was doing his best to be pleasant, though no doubt he had matters more pressing on his plate, in some discussion as to the desirable length of the speech I should give and the desirable tone to adopt with the Committee of which he was so fortunately, for ourselves, and no doubt deservedly, Vice-president. But I did not step forward. Just as previously I hadn’t spoken out either for or against the Euro-chat in the foyer. And the reason I didn’t was perhaps the bromazepam again and perhaps an intense bewilderment, partially due to the immense sense of distance I was experiencing (so reminiscent of the distance I felt between myself and my wife in recent years), but above all to the fact that at this very moment I heard Doris Rohr suggest that perhaps in the end