Europa by Tim Parks Page B

least pleasantly, and still be seeing my mistress too, and fucking her and telling her I loved her and cared for nobody else, and perhaps occasionally fucking others too just for good measure and generally living a life of
perfectly manageable hypocrisy
to the benefit of everyone, and one thinks particularly here of my eighteen-year-old daughter whose coming-of-age party will be held tomorrow in my no doubt much censured absence.
    She said my terrible problem was my mulish Anglo-Saxon Protestant absolutism, extremism, so mulishly absolute and so extreme that I was atheist without my atheism bringing me the slightest of benefits, so absolute and extreme that I attached such ludicrous pluses and minuses to words like 
sincerity
and
hypocrisy
, not understanding that those two ideas were never truly incarnate but in constant negotiation a fusion you could never separate out, and if only I would loosen up and become more
European
and appreciate that while it was important, supremely important, to have values and ideals, it was a halfwit’s mistake to insist anybody live by them - as I myself hadn’t lived by them, had I? - then everything would be okay. Everything was okay, she said. Because nothing had really happened. Had it? She laughed and said not to worry, everything was okay,
nothing had really happened
, and I hit her, perhaps to show that something had happened, I hit her, hard, and that was the beginning of the end for me. The moment I hit her, I tell myself sitting here slightly right of centre on the long back seat of this coach, was the beginning of the end for me. Something shifted, something
had
happened. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Colin were not right that she is the spy, and I say this not because it would suit her personal interests, which of course it would in a way, but because she probably would not even bring the whole thing to consciousness unless someone challenged her about it, the way I challenged her earlier that fateful day, though only very casually, just wishing to be reassured, about the receipt from a café in Várese being between the pages of the book she had lent me, and even then, even when she brought it to consciousness, she wouldn’t really feel it was wrong talking to Ermani, as she never really felt it was wrong fucking Georg. She wouldn’t feel it was wrong telling him which lectors were in favour of what and which against, since Ermani is friendly to hex and went to school with her ex-husband and is helping her with her Euro-scholarship application, her essay on a constitution for the whole of Europe which should win her a year’s paid research, so called, in Brussels. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. After all, we’re talking about someone who throughout a long and, if it was nothing else, torrid adultery not only continued to go regularly to Sunday morning mass, but even to help at church functions and encourage her young daughter to participate in every way and to take her first communion in a beautiful lace-trimmed dress that
she
made herself and frequently showed me and discussed the details of, the lace, the trim mings. We laughed together, I remember, thinking how similar those trimmings were to the laciness of her underwear. She laughed her French laugh. So no, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she were the spy. But clearly Georg, who of course lives in Várese (and who,, she says, though she never actually told me the name,
insisted so much that what could she do?
phoning her every day like that and even sending her flowers), Georg is right that it would be a mistake to suggest to the students that we are divided, though of course he is saying this in front of the girls in the back and next-but-back seats and in rebuke, though
pacato
, of Vikram and Colin and Dimitirá, all seething, you can see, for drama and vendetta, all feeling personally injured by what has happened, the presence of this spy, the evidence of