Europa by Tim Parks Page B

at the end I would return home unscathed, though perhaps with a fresh tottie or two to place on the old back-burner, as Colin puts it, one or two new phone numbers to inscribe in the old 
carnet
. I would have been near her - this was my idea - for three days, and nothing out of the ordinary would have passed between us,
nothing would have happened
, and this in itself would be the beginning of the happy ending I hoped for.
    But I wasn’t ready for it. And had I been ready, it would never have occurred to me to do it, I wouldn’t have needed it. Had I been
ready
, I would have appreciated that this was not what I hoped for at all, this prosaic, sensibly cheerful fellow seeing through the world with a sort of mild, devil may-care indulgence. I would have known that what I hoped for, what I still hope for, against all the good sense in the world, was, is, some impossible turning back of the clock, not so much a softening on her part, but on mine, on mine, since
she
has never forbidden me to speak to her, she has never said it was impossible. On the contrary, the last time we met she said she hoped one day it might be possible again, she said one day I might see things as she did.
    But most of all, as it turns out, I wasn’t ready for the train of thought that begins now as Vikram Griffiths, who despite the film has been walking up and down the aisle, his mongrel trotting at his heel, continuing his never-ending parleyings with all and sundry, perhaps in search of the notorious spy — as Vikram Griffiths leans over me, his breath full of whisky, his clothes of dog, and, nodding to the video screen, suddenly pale as the coach shoots out of the tunnel into a world of white mist and drizzle amid the great looming shapes the Alps are, frozen in the contortion of that last orogeny, majestic and broken - leans over, clears his throat and says low, so as not to be heard by Doris, What do you think, boyo?
    This business about a meeting this evening?
    No. The shagplan, man! He grins, fingers in his dark sideburns. The film! he explains. Don’t tell me you hadn’t realized why I chose it? Fuckin’ toss in itself of course, but gets the girlies in the right old mood, you know. Love thy teacher. Thy Teachers. 
Carp
the old
diem
. Can’t get more fuckin’ appropriate than that, can you? Without writing ‘shag me’ up all over the screen.
    My Welsh colleague with the Indian skin puts his arm round my shoulder with what is now an extraordinary assumption of complicity, an avuncular matiness, as if to force me to declare myself in some way. The dog thrusts his snout between the seat and the underside of my knee.
    Can you? he insists.
    At random I agree, I laugh half-heartedly, I ask, Got anything lined up?
    But he’s already saying, I don’t mind yours either. Lovely little girlie. And he nods back to Nicoletta.
    Who I now realize I have forgotten. Astonishingly, in the space of only ten minutes of having her sitting behind me rather than in front, I have forgotten about Nicoletta, her little glow-coloured purse and sweet gratefulness,
clean forgotten
, as they say the way I am so often forgetting the names of my tottie, so that sometimes someone you supposedly
made love to
only a day or so before, Bologna-tottie for example, will call you on the phone and you simply cannot remember the name. Or worse still, you can’t remember which of two or three names. You know it’s Bologna-tottie, but you can’t remember whether Bologna-tottie is Francesca or Marta or Valeria, and for a moment you’re desperately flustered, searching for the name, before recalling with a sigh of relief that so long as you don’t care, it is perfectly possible to carry on not only a conversation but an entire relationship, or
avventura
 as
she
always used to call them, without ever using the caress a woman’s name is. Except that this in turn only reminds you that
her
name on the