You said you hated him, I reminded her. You said he was a dick. You said money took up too much space in his life for there to be any room for you. You laughed at him. You said he was crass, stupid. You said he had no culture whatsoever. You said the only reason you married him was because you were still young enough to be over-awed by fast cars and business suits. You said living with him was hell.
She said I had said much the same sort of things about my wife, but both of us knew deep down that! loved my wife and should never have left her. Especially having Suzanne. Suzanne’s so wonderful, she said. And I have Stephanie. It’s good for her to be with her father.
And that was the reason why you couldn’t have been with Georg last night? Because you’re back with your husband.
She nodded.
But you can with me?
It’s different with you, Jerry
I put on my clothes and left. As I dressed she was saying, For Christ’s sake of course it was different with me. There was no need to go to bed with Georg again. Because that had just been fun. Just creature comfort. There had been no hard feelings. But she wanted to take this opportunity to sign off happily with me. I stubbed out my cigarette and found my socks. Don’t be such a baby, she shouted. Georg had loads of women, she said. She wanted to clear things up. You know I love you, she said. I want you, I don’t want things to be so unpleasant. And she wanted to tell me to go back to my wife. You really ought to go back to your wife, she said. We could still see each other if we felt like it. We could still go to bed even, occasionally. Why not? She’s fucking you to tell you to go back to your wife, I thought. I put on my shoes. Hit me, if you must, she shouted. She got up and tried to grab my arm.
Frappe-moi! I dressed and left. Nor would I go back to Milan on the coach with them. I found the stairs. Nor would I take any more cigarettes. I crossed the lobby, pushed through the swing doors and caught a taxi someone else had just got out of. It hadn’t meant anything, I thought. The words ‘in vain’ came to mind, sitting in the dark at traffic-lights. The taxi-driver drummed on his wheel. Who had used them? She did. About Vikram. She was going back to her husband, I thought in the back of the taxi. To her husband. All the words spoken over all those months, years of love-making had been entirely in vain. Thucydides and Benjamin Constant and Chateaubriand and Plato, all entirely in vain. My husband is so crass, she used to say, so ignorant. Rheims, in vain. Pensione Porta Genova, in vain. A thousand phone-calls. She was going back to her husband. As if nothing had ever happened. Somethings happened, she said. She was always telling me I had to make something happen in my life. I’ve taken a sensible decision. But what she meant was that nothing had happened, ever. Nothing has happened, she said immediately before I hit her the first time. That was the turning-point. What difference does it make if I went to bed with him? she said. Nothing has really happened. My mind darkened and I hit her. And the moment I hit her I was lost. Turn round, I told the taxi-driver. I’ll show her what it means to say something’s happened, I thought. Retournez. Go back. This morning in the foyer of the European Parliament, I bought a copy of Hie European. The headlines were deaths in Bosnia, the decisions of the Bundesbank, the collapse of the Lira, but on the inside pages it told how Indian Welshman Vikram Griffiths, feckless fragment of British Empire, hanged himself in the lavatories of this very building with a petition pinned to his tweed jacket. And it said: After this tragedy, the Italian Government will have to introduce measures to resolve the position of fifteen hundred European nationals who continue to live in conditions of the utmost precariousness. Assuming it does so, and assuming this brings to light the urgency of such cases in other countries, then perhaps this death will not have been entirely in vain. It was then, in a daze, with nothing in the world to do, that I saw the stylized plastic sign that indicated this Meditation Room, this pseudo-chapel, with its polished quiet, its indifferently dusted redundancy, as if waiting for someone to need it, perhaps with a copy of The European in his hand, perhaps with the words ‘in vain’ ringing in his mind, her words, her briefing, as I looked over Vikram Griffiths’ body on the tiled floor of the institutional toilet. The relationship that entirely changed, destroyed your life, was just a brief hiatus in hers, I thought in the taxi, a brief parenthesis in her marriage to a successful Italian businessman with a small factory producing picture mouldings, perhaps of the very variety that frame mass-produced reproductions of modern masterpieces in cheap hotels. She laughed when we read the Odyssey. I’d forgotten Helen went back to Menelaus, she said. That’s so bizarre, isn’t it? After ten years and all the deaths.