Home Thoughts

Julia has left home. She has gone to Italy. She has left her lover, her job, her flat, the closely-knit group of friends who meant so much to her. Why? And the motley group of ex-pats she finds in Verona, the Oxbridge brigade, the revolutionary Scot, the cool Canadian, the feminist Flossy – why do they find it so impossible to return home, as if their very identities depend somehow on this thousand-mile displacement? Centred around a love story full of twists, turns and revelations, Home Thoughts explores a world of lost directions, wavering commitments and misplaced ambitions as Julia’s adventurous departure confronts her more mercilessly than ever with the problem of what on earth she is to do with her life.

About the Author

Tim Park’s novels include Tongues of Flame, which won the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask Awards, Loving Roger, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Cara Massimina and Mimi’s Ghost. His non-fiction work includes the bestselling Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and Adultery & Other Diversions. His ninth novel Europa was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize. His most recent novel is the acclaimed, Destiny. Tim Parks lives in Italy.

Home Thoughts

Tim Parks

Part One

OLD ACQUAINTANCE AND NEW

IF SANDRO WASN’T married, as he had let her know, casually (too casually perhaps? or rather, promisingly casually), then Julia might quite like to marry him. Amongst others. On a mellow October morning she wrote this letter to her ex-flatmate in London.

Dear Diana,

I’m in my room here. It’s awful. The furniture looks like it’s been carved out of used coffins. The bed is like sleeping in the bottom of a boat, crosswise. Would you believe the street is called Via Disciplina! It’s narrow and the buildings are high, so that the sun only manages to slip through my window for a few minutes every day. It slides in like a bright knife and stabs a drab madonna on the wall.

(Julia felt self-conscious writing this first letter to her close friend Diana who worked in the East European Department of the World Service of the BBC and had translated a book of Czech poetry. The sun did not slide in like a blade. It was a great wedge of dust-swirled white light which never quite reached the grim madonna with baby Jesus raising one plump hand in precocious blessing.)

Still, I was determined to find a place in the centre. You go out to the suburbs here and you may as well be in Hemel Hempstead. Really.

So, what’s cooking on the social side? Well, there’s a rather sexy-looking Italo-Canadian I met at the assistants’ get-together party. Name of Sandro. My age, more or less, big soft brown eyes and a really cool transatlantic voice. So he’ll be candidate number one. Who knows, I may make motherhood yet before the great axe falls. Keep you posted.

I wonder if I’m going to miss London life. I suppose it’s inevitable. So many things are. I do hope it’s not all going to be a silly mistake, or that I’ll just mope and be lonely. I didn’t realize how adventurous I was being till I actually got here and sat down in my room.

Don’t forget to make me pay my part of the last phone and electricity bills. My mum can draw a cheque for you on my account.

More soon. Big hug.

JULIA.

PS. See, I didn’t mention you-know-who. . . .

Dear Lenny, (she wrote then to you-know-who)

I miss you so much, I really do. If you knew. Can’t you change your mind? I’ve been thinking of you all the time. It’s terrifying how clearly I see you. Your carroty hair, your freckled nose. The way you close one eye in the sunshine. The smell of that ancient tweed jacket. How will I ever forget?

Lenny, it would be so easy if you came out here, a fait accompli. I know I promised not to hark on about it, but couldn’t you? Couldn’t you just this once take a big plunge, Lenny?

I love you always. You know I do.

Your own JULIA.

Dear Mum, (she wrote in tiny print on a postcard)

I’ve found a nice little room here and am very cosily settled in. The teaching starts Monday, but for the moment I’m enjoying just soaking it all up. Diana’ll probably be asking you for a cheque for some bills. Don’t worry I’ll pay you back. Give my love to Mike when you see him. Love. JULIA. PS. Am wearing the sweater. Thanks a mil. J.

Alan explained that he had invited one of the new lettori to dinner. Or rather a lettrice. ‘She seemed very lonely.’

Elaine rolled blue eyes. Was it possible that with both the kids, not to mention HER, Alan was still inviting people to dinner?

Alan had a big, square, patriarchal face with magnificently thick eyebrows and hair that bristled up in a stiff virile brush. His wife was small and slim.

Julia came and talked too loudly and too long all evening. She heard herself talking too long and too loudly. She made mental notes and criticized herself, but she didn’t stop. She had come to Italy, she was saying, because she had been with a man who liked being with her, yes, but was too obsessed with his adolescent fantasies of nymphets and vamps to guarantee her any happiness or security, though he was of course now begging her to come back; because men always wanted to have their cake and gobble up every last crumb of it too.

‘Good for you,’ said Flossy, who was likewise well-built. She spoke through a thick cold and had tissues tucked under her sleeve.

Elaine, whose body, despite two pregnancies, conformed exactly to the unhappy Lenny’s supposed fantasies, smiled slyly at Alan over the bald head of a baby she was holding.

To which Julia came back sharply that Alan obviously didn’t understand women in love.

Elaine’s smile, framed in hennaed curls, took on a told-you-so schoolgirl’s dimpling. Julia didn’t know that in his time Alan had written three plays for the radio, two of which had been broadcast, and all of them about women in love and based on his ex-girlfriend who had tried to kill him when he left her.

‘That may be’ – Alan had the competitor’s weakness of picking up any glove of challenge that landed at his feet (even if perhaps it had been dropped there by accident) – ‘but London is a big place, I mean. . . .’

‘Right, but you try finding a place to live. Leave your flat in London and you may as well go to Timbuktu. You know they’ve started advertising houses in Scotland in the Standard right next to the local flats-to-let section. The desperation factor. Bungalow in Renfrewshire, same price as a year’s rent in Kensington.

‘Not to mention finding a reasonable job,’ Julia went on (had she taken a breath? It seemed not). Alan and Elaine, who owned a one-bedroom flat in Hampstead which they rented out through an agency on company let, couldn’t have got a word in edgeways had they wanted to. And all three listeners now had the impression that Julia had been living and perhaps even working with her man of the adolescent fantasies, and had thus had to give up everything to get away and punish him. But this was not the case: because Lenny lived with his wife and two children in a three-bedroom so-called luxury flat the Fortis Green side of East Finchley High Road.

‘A woman’ – who but Julia? – ‘okay university degree’ – two-one from Bristol – ‘two languages, dynamic as any man, eager, efficient, etc; what happens? You go to the interview, if they’re interviewing women at all, and the first thing they ask is when you plan to have children. You say you’re not planning them, the last thing you want is kids, you’re not even married, and they don’t believe you, they. . . .’

Elaine was complacently tracing out the line of tiny Margaret’s sticky-out ears.

Only Flossy was in wholehearted agreement and would have told her own lifestory here had Julia allowed herself to be interrupted, had she herself not been stifling another sneeze.

‘They even make snide remarks about not having to be married to be pregnant, Christ, there should be some drug to bring on menopause early and a certificate to go with it: “We hereby guarantee that Julia Helen Delaforce, although capable of giving men pleasure in all the normal and many abnormal ways, is henceforth to be considered one hundred percent infertile, in that. . . .”’

They sat round a painted wooden table in the kitchen chaos the Bexleys always lived in. Alan accepted the now broader told-you-so smile on his wife’s face, though it was rather annoying how she radiated this silly, happy girl’s complacency, as if everything that happened and got said was a trick she’d won at his expense. His own opinions on feminism, which had to do with its being a false consciousness and a wilful determination to feel aggrieved (though he wouldn’t deny that life could be pretty unfair to the fairer sex) were too complicated to bear dinner-time explanation to two such fiery souls as Julia and his younger sister Flossy. He mixed wine and Ferrarelle.

Towards eleven-thirty Julia said, as if at last throwing the conversation open to all:

One hand balancing Margaret to burp on his shoulder, Alan was at that moment twiddling urgently through the short-wave dial of an ancient Grundig on the window sill; until, amidst science-fiction whistles and bursts of static, a voice broke into this untidy Italian kitchen and with a curious sing-song formality announced: ‘Oldham nil, Crystal Palace (pause) nil.’

‘Oh shit,’ said Flossy, sneezing into her handkerchief, ‘we’ve missed the first division.’

Elaine asked Julia if she could cook, because next weekend they were going to have an apple-crumble competition. Another friend had brought some all-spice back from England. Alan was an ace apple-crumble man. Elaine rather liked Julia, though she couldn’t have said why, perhaps because she was the only other person she had met in Italy who smoked roll-ups.

Julia said truthfully she couldn’t cook to save her life. Walking home along the narrow Via Disciplina it occurred to her that she hadn’t remembered to ask about Sandro. Because she was fed up to the back teeth with married men, and somehow precisely the way he’d told her like that had had her suspecting the contrary.

Every time Julia left company she always experienced a vague sense of shame, which was stronger or weaker in relation to the amount of alcohol she had drunk. And this was another thing she was fed up with. Unless, it came to her, finding herself mirrored a moment in the bright black panes of her bedroom, unless what she was really fed up with deep down, beneath all the other failures and disappointments, was simply herself. It was not, to be precise, her body that distressed her, though God knows she’d been short-changed there. No, she was quite simply sick to death with the feeling, the consciousness, the every waking day moment of Julia Helen Delaforce.

In which case she’d got off to a bad start spending the whole evening griping. (Lenny was a Palace man. Diana cooked apple crumbles when she invited her BBC friends.)

At 3 a.m., having calmed down Robert after one of his nightly squalls, Alan stopped a moment in the sitting-room to scribble:

Not feeling especially sleepy, he picked up Corriere della Sera and re-read the Juventus–Verona day-before coverage. Was nobody going to catch Juventus? If only Verona had kept Fanna. Reading, chewing a knuckle, he felt vaguely guilty and returned to his notebook. He stood over it. He put pencil against paper and waited. But the truth was that Alan Bexley felt oddly incapable of writing these days. Perhaps because it was seven years since his ex-girlfriend had tried to kill him.

Sandro was ten minutes late for a lesson he would leave five minutes early. Fifty students faced him. He climbed onto the dais and grinned.

‘Right then,’ he said, ‘gerund uses with prepositions,’ and he gave out a page number in Thomson and Martinet. (There was no other word but gorgeous for the girl in the third row. Let’s hope she’s one of the eager, questions-after-lessons kind.)

Before lunch he knocked discreetly at the notorious Professoressa Bertelli’s door. The professoressa was an ill-kept paranoid woman in her late fifties.

Sandro, whose face was usually grins and radiant self-satisfaction, found a worried, diligent tone to ask if she had any ideas how he might improve his techniques and rapport with the students. He felt he wasn’t getting the best out of them, nor they from him.

A few minutes later Professoressa Bertelli invited Sandro to lunch and over tortellini followed by veal chops (because they stayed, as residents will, with the tourist menu) she told him in a hushed voice about the conspiracy there was against her in the department and this disturbing business of them putting powder in her eyes. If he knew of a faith-healer. . . . But the mafia always got there first. The church that is.

Sandro, who had been forewarned, was understanding, his conversation banal and soothing. He said that having to work with others at this kind of intellectual level could prove very trying. There were pressures and responsibilities and questions of personal integrity which naturally created areas of conflict.

‘The Vatican,’ Professoressa Bertelli said belligerently, and then she said that Professor Errico was a mean, corrupt bastard, if he would excuse her language, and a slacker into the bargain.

Accepting a splash of grappa and feeling his way more carefully than ever, Sandro remarked that the only shame was that the job wasn’t offered on a permanent contract, because then one could give just that little bit more. There would be that feeling of total commitment.

And he said he was happy though that they had got to know each other. The thing was to nip misunderstandings in the bud.

Professoressa Bertelli was a big old woman with a heavily lined grim face where watery eyes swam suspiciously at the bottom of deep sockets. When she smiled, though – and this was rare – she would have a perfectly wholesome, even maternal expression, despite the decades of spinsterhood and deepening paranoia. She smiled now.

‘Of course, we do very occasionally give someone a permanent research post,’ she said, telling Sandro what he already knew, ‘if all three professors are convinced that we have an exceptional candidate on our hands.’

With the meal finished, her mouth chewed slackly on nothing. She picked up a toothpick.

While she spoke, Sandro gave her the flattery of his soft brown eyes. Which obliged him to watch her. She powdered heavily and wore expensive frames. Her nose was a trifle shapeless, puffy, the mouth wide, even a little gross now as she stretched the lips to stab at a molar. But her shoulders were broad and well made and the breasts surprisingly high on her chest. What would it be like to go to bed with someone so old? Perverse, but interesting. The few times he’d seen older women naked in films, he had always been intrigued by the startling youthfulness of their bodies against the wrinkling age of faces and hands. Unless it was just the actresses they used of course, or they were playing around with the photography.

‘Really, I’ve been taking up so much of your time, Professoressa Bertelli.’

Later and no poorer he stood on the Roman Bridge in dazzling autumn sunshine. The air was clear glass. The surrounding scene would have been a 3D postcard but for the traffic: cream and ochre palazzi climbing above the Roman Theatre to Castel San Pietro on his left, the bell-towers and fancy battlements of the city to his right, with the river taking a great sweep over white shingle between. One problem, Sandro thought, assessing his new job, would be how to spend one’s free time. Seeing as there was so much of it. And he decided to attend an evening course he had seen advertised at the university which introduced you to the world’s greatest philosophers.

Nov 10

Beeb, Shepherd’s Bush

Dear Julia,

Thank heaven there’s the BBC address so at least we can write. I miss you too. I was over at Diana’s with the production crew on Sunday and everybody was asking after you. Needless to say we all think you’ve been a bit crazy going off so suddenly, leaving a good job, not to mention the nice situation with Diana – and in Kensington too. I know I must seem rather a blind alley in emotional terms, but maybe the problem is the way you think relationships should have so much direction and finality about them. You’re so dramatic. You never want to swim with the tide. It always has to be Shangri-la rather than Shepherd’s Bush. I mean, I don’t want to sound mercenary, but you do realize that coming over to Italy for me would mean turning down £20,000 a year (another well-deserved raise last week) not to mention abandoning a wife, two children and five years of mortgage payments. Whereas if you came back we could see each other as often as you like, within the limits of the decent and reasonable (which you must admit aren’t too awfully limiting). In fact, at Diana’s we all agreed to write you letters asking you to come back, so you’ll be getting a lot of post soon. Everybody loves you, even if you always insisted on thinking otherwise, and the school’d be bound to find a way to take you on again, with your experience. So think it over.

What else? Diana’s got yet another new boyfriend. Stuart. Doubtless she told you. She does seem to have something of a fixation for these banking/insurance types (the dreaded Ronnie!), which is odd considering her background and that avantgarde guff she translates. Awfully argumentative bloke. He took us all on (me, Sally, Rob, Barry and Kat), saying the media should be run on market principles and from what he’d heard from Diana the Beeb could reduce its labour costs by 30% without the public ever noticing. Can you imagine translating Czech poetry on market principles? But everybody was too kind to say it. Anyway, he’s the first bloke I ever met who not only admitted to voting Thatcher last time, but said he would next too. What hope the nation!

Diana lapped it up with that big, ever-hopeful ever-happy beam she always has; sometimes I think she finds these guys just to annoy us. But then the food is always so scrumptious and she must be the only person in London on less than fifty grand who has a rooftop terrace. (It was warm enough to have at least our aperitivos (!) outside and Barry said if he had a terrace like that he’d never dream of going to Italy – yes, Barry and Kat are together again – take note.)

Well, it’s 11 and I guess I’d better be getting a move-on. We’ve got a tough schedule today. The old pre-Christmas interview-the-tramps crap. We’re supposed to follow a couple of old winos around for a month and see how mean everybody is to them. Probably turn into a pub crawl. Look, give me your phone number as soon as you’ve got one and I’ll give you a bell. Licensing fees are up so a couple of calls isn’t going to break the bank. And do come back Julia. You’re such a London person, I can’t really imagine you surviving anywhere else. I know you think I’m a casual bastard, and I am. But life’ll show you I’m right in the end. Plunge-taking is not what it’s about. Getting by more like.

I love you too, Julia. I really do. Green eyes.

LENNY.

PS. I forgot to mention the best bit: Sally and this Stuart had a really (but really) wild argument at the Grenadier when he said he couldn’t give a damn if Sadler’s Wells closed (you must have heard about that). She started shouting at him and walked out and Barry and Kat had to run and get her back. You see what you’re missing! Love again. L.

November 30th

Via Disciplina

Dear Diana,

Everybody’s written telling me to come back but you! (Even Barry! I didn’t know he could write!). Yet funnily enough you’re the only person I can feel bothered to write to myself. Anyway, as far as coming back’s concerned – no way! The truth is, I think I’ve finally found the good life here. The job is outrageously easy. 8 hours straightforward language teaching and 4 hours ‘ricevimento’ when you’re supposed to deal with your students’ problems, only they hardly ever turn up, so you just end up chatting to whoever’s around. For which I get the magnificent sum of one million, two hundred thousand lire a month (I’m a millionaire as of yesterday!). If your maths aren’t up to it, it all works out about a hundred quid plus a week, which is really okay here, so long as you don’t have expensive tastes – and when did I have time to develop those at Christ Church?

The university situation is so classically ‘Italian’ you wouldn’t believe it. There are three professors in the faculty: one’s just plain mad – a woman around sixtyish who’s convinced everybody’s stealing her books and putting powder in her eyes and beaming ultrasonic whatevers at her desk (honestly!). She should be certified, not teaching. Then there’s Scudellotti, an effeminate ditherer, fiftyish, who just goes on and on and on in a sing-song appalling English that creases you up if you make the mistake of thinking about it; his line is that it’s impossible to get anything done because the other professor, Errico, will never agree with him and is only in the job for the money and doesn’t love literature like he does, etc. etc. Errico’s a gnome of a man who commutes from Milan and is always asking you to do translations for some agency he has; a bit of a shark, very Latin, and with a roving eye too, but not unpleasant. So the upshot is, Errico and Scudellotti are always trying to enlist Bertelli’s, that’s the woman’s, help so as to get a majority decision over the other, only she’s so out of her mind she thinks they’re really conspiring against her. I could go on but it would take forever to tell everything. Makes Christ Church politics seem pretty tame anyway. Only somehow it meant more there. This feels more like a soap opera, as if you could never really be a part of it. As if it wasn’t really happening even. Perhaps because it’s not my country. (I do hope there are advantages to not being able to take things seriously. Everybody was always saying I took things too much to heart.)

Apart from which I’ve found a couple of friends. There’s a girl called Flossy, younger than me, who teaches a few hours at the Oxford School and is quite a character. She used to be a member of Militant Tendency and spent almost a year with the Greenham women before coming out here. She’s living with her brother and his wife and kids at the moment, only it seems the brother doesn’t appreciate her that much (he’s a really pompous arsehole, the ‘you-just-need-a-man-(like me)’ type, thinks he’s a writer apparently – yawn – a normal ex-pat delusion). Anyway, we agreed we’d live together as soon as we can find a place big enough. My only worry is that she may be a bit too anti-men and turn them off coming to visit and so on, which is rather throwing out the baby with the bathwater, if you see what I mean (though who would deny that the bathwater is usually tepid and scummy and generally fit to be thrown out?).

So what do I do with all this time on my hands? Well, I spend a lot of mornings just mooching around the streets here. There are thousands of tiny cobbled back-alleys and always something new to look at, some shop tucked away somewhere, some curious piece of architecture. Would you believe there’s a hunchback goes round sharpening knives on a moped with a kind of rickety counter attached and a revolving whetstone geared up to the motor? Good for a horror film. Then I got myself a canary for company, everybody has them, and hung him in a cage by the window. I called him Napoleon because of the way he puffs out his chest. Maybe it was a mistake though because his whistling’s driving me bananas, and of course I’ll have to find somebody to look after him if I go away. I suppose, to be honest, I do feel a bit spare sometimes, but it’s bound to take a while to settle in. At least it’s a clean start, which was the intention. And no tube!!!

Oh, my tennis racket. Will you check if it’s still behind the sideboard, and if it is, can you see if there’s some safe way of posting it. I’ll need exercise in spring to prepare for the beaches! And one thing, Diana, for when you do write. Even if he does come over, please don’t mention L. I really want to make it a clean break. I don’t want to hear of him or from him ever again. (I’m working on this Sandro.)

Love – J.

PS. There seems no point in making you envy my weather every time I write. Take it as given.

December 4th

Kilburn

Dear Sissy,

Could you please write and tell Mumsicle to GET OFF MY BACK! She’s getting like the IMF. ‘I’ll only give you money if you do what I say, cut your hair, wear a tie (A TIE! – I had to go to my dictionary), keep the right company, don’t drink so much, etc. etc.’ (MUM = Money Under Menace.) She keeps coming round to the old pad here which is pretty hem-hem-barrassing and even offered to wash mine and Brünhilde’s clothes!!!! IF THERE’S ONE THING I HATE IT’S MARTYRS – not to mention the underlying insinuation (or does she want to examine for stains?). Mum seems to go backwards in time and is now cruising her way through an especially prudish patch of the 1880s.

Otherwise all wellsy wellsy well, howbeit college exams and exhibition looming and dooming and glooming and sooning!

I hope and trust you’re getting on well enough with the dagoes on the further shore. I’m thinking of going to HAMERICA myself when I’ve finished here – the land of hop-on-ortunity – if only I can get the old meany-greeny-weeny-backs together (don’t tell Mumsicle – she’ll be trying to give me even more money to keep me – or perhaps that’s not such a bad idea . . .).

Lance and Trev think I should try modelling! Brünhilde is against. What do you think?! Can you imagine Mum seeing me towering in Y-FRONTS by the bus-stop at Tally Ho? S for sensational, n’est-ce-pas?

Love and stuff and nonsense.

MIKE.

Alan sat in front of a screen that glowed neon green. Despite ear-plugs he was aware that the babysitter was playing ‘Bash the Nasty Rabbit’ with Rob and that Flossy was teaching her Marble Polishing Machines Representative in the sitting-room. He distinctly heard, though the ear-plugs filtered off the background and made the voice seem immeasurably distant, a confident ‘No, I daaasn’t’ (at least they weren’t at the stage to be stumbling through her old copies of the Morning Star). Elaine would be out doing the shop in a thin windless rain. He imagined a slim figure struggling with an umbrella and two heavy plastic bags.

So what possible justification could he have for wasting time trying to write this trash that even his agent didn’t want to see any more? A half-hour and he had only a few lines. He read them, moving down a line at a time with the winking (mocking?) cursor.

‘Can boredom be a revelation? It may seem a contradiction in terms, but it certainly felt that way for me. Perhaps I mean revelation in the way illness is a revelation. There you are suddenly with a high temperature, a vicious pain beneath the ribcage. You vomit. And in the space of a few hours your whole life changes. You . . .’

If it changed though, you wouldn’t be bored any more, would you? Dying perhaps, but not bored. Was it really worth printing off this mulch? Maybe he should try thrillers, at least there was a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.

Alan picked up an airmail edition of Monday’s Guardian. What he needed was some more artistic company. Stimulation. Experimentally, just to see what it felt like, he opened a new file on the screen and started typing: ‘Dear Mr Waterman, I write with reference to your ad in the Guardian (Dec 9th) for the position of copywriter. . . .’

What was he doing in Italy in a dead-end job? And what was worse with a time limit attached that would cut him off at precisely the age he became more or less unemployable in the UK? He’d come out here to write (it was the ease of the job that had fooled him) and all they’d done instead was have children.

He had allowed his energies to be dissipated. He had lost his way in life. Friends back home were leaping up the career ladder and he was teaching lousy students where not to put adverbs, getting no useful experience and merely filling wastebins with this trash that no word processor could make saleable.

The phone rang. Alan felt an unmistakable sense of relief at being dragged away from himself.

In Flossy’s manically neat hand, the blackboard over the phone showed his duties for the day. WASH DISHES. BATHE ROB. PAY GAS BILL. They wanted the man to work of course, but they would never let you write the rota.

When she found it was Sandro she had buzzed in, Julia couldn’t help feeling the kind of self-satisfaction that comes from seeing how just a half-dozen pleasant smiles have had their desired effect. She was particularly gratified to think that only a few moments before she had put on the new grey wool dress that showed how, away from London parties and with all this bike-riding Flossy had got her into, her body was trimming down into some kind of decent shape. Diana-shape, she thought.

But Sandro’s usual grin was soured to a beaten-dog grimace this evening. The two clean rabbity teeth and the Harrison Ford set of self-satisfaction were not in evidence. In running-shoes, black cords, black sweater and swept-back black glossy hair he preferred a rickety chair at the table to the armchair she offered and, sitting forward with his hands tapping an urgent beat on his knees, might have been a young priest trying to make the impossible compromise between his duties and a modem image. He looked worried and awkward.

‘It’s cold up here I’m afraid. I bought one of those electric radiator things but they haven’t delivered yet. Can I get you something hot, or would you like wine?’

She poured wine and he thought the way she held her body so self-consciously, dressed so formally, might be in direct proportion to the way that same body left so much to be desired. (Perhaps the philosophy course was sharpening his mind. Nietzsche was his favourite so far: ‘Beyond Good and Evil’. A great shame he hadn’t had time for the stuff before.)

Julia sat herself cross-legged on the bed, only to find she had to push the new dress down harder than she expected in her lap. As usual she was aware of her mistake and as usual that painful awareness put her in a defensive throwaway mood. Rather abruptly she said: ‘How come you came to Italy anyway? I thought Canada was supposed to be so wonderful.’

Sandro’s grin returned, though ruefully: ‘Seems I’ll probably be on my way back there before very long. That’s why I came over.’ And he explained what had happened. He had a very earnest way of leaning forward when he spoke and giving the impression he was being perfectly frank about something people couldn’t usually be trusted to be frank about. The listener felt privileged. Julia was reminded of student days when she had always seemed to be sitting cross-legged on beds or cushions in makeshift rooms talking to the kind of men who preferred earnest talk to discos.

‘So the principle they’re bound to apply,’ he finished, ‘is the principle of last in, first out. Easy decision. No problem about serious criteria. And that means us. At the end of December.’

‘I know, we’ve both travelled a long way to be here; we’ve left good jobs; we’ve spent a lot of time and money finding places and getting set up. They can’t do it; but they will’ – Sandro finished even more earnestly and dramatically – ‘because this is Italy. They can do anything they want to you here. It’s chaos.’ He drummed a beat on his knees with a comb and the knee twitched up and down too. ‘We’ll be out on our asses without even the money for the flight home.’

Julia stared. Sandro’s announcement had done her the favour of allowing her to forget her self-consciousness. She lifted a forefinger to her mouth and tugged at the nail. The brightness of her green eyes in the alarmed pale face was quite suddenly and surprisingly rather attractive.

‘So what we’ve got to do is this: we’ve got to get to the professors and persuade them that the last-come-first-go deal is unfair and what’s more impractical for them. The job has a five-year limit, so if they have to cut, the people who should get the push are the ones nearest to the end, get me? Otherwise they’ll be having to recruit new people again in just a year or so. Whoever’s in their fourth or fifth year, out.’

Sandro pushed an urgent hand through glossy hair and his dark, almost black eyes took on a magnetic depth. More nervously, Julia curled her left hand over and behind her head to gather and then toss her hair so that it swung round and fell freshly washed on the front of her left shoulder. This brought out a stubborn sweep of jaw and neck to the right, as well as somehow drawing his attention to her breasts.

‘But we’ve got to do it without getting up the other lettori’s noses. Because we’ll need them if it comes to a strike. If you see what I mean. Nobody’s going to strike for no cuts if they think we’re just trying to shift the great axe onto their necks. We’ve got to play a careful political line with the professors and then maximum solidarity alongside the others.’

Julia said she wouldn’t know what to do if they fired her. For a moment she savoured her bewilderment as Sandro would be seeing it. Hard done by. Defenceless. But then she realized she was excited too. Destiny, perhaps, was telling her to go straight back to London, where she belonged. And to Lenny.

‘Well, until they actually tell us anything, we’ve got to go on teaching, not give any sign of being resigned, or even expecting it’ll be us to go.’

‘Only Scudellotti. There’s to be a big meeting tomorrow at twelve in the faculty. I thought I’d better catch you first.’

And then with a sudden change of plan, that might or might not have had to do with the moment she tossed her hair like that, so that it caught the light against powdery whitewash behind and let her neck show suddenly long and marbly down to a respectable cleavage, he asked if she wouldn’t like to go out and have a drink. ‘Before the battle starts.’

‘You didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge,’ he enquired, as they walked down flight after flight of stone steps.

‘It’s like a conspiracy. I mean, this constant crap about raising standards, as if they were the only ones capable of teaching at a high enough level. You can bet your life they’ll make sure none of them gets the push – Manwearing, Habershom, Bexley and that crowd. Scudellotti licks shit for the Cambridge crew.’

‘The whole of England,’ Julia said with a sudden conviction that surprised even herself, ‘is an Oxbridge conspiracy.’ Lenny for a start, she thought, with his May Balls and Downing Association dinners. ‘That’s one of the reasons I left actually.’

About the Book

About the Author

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Tim Parks

Part One

OLD ACQUAINTANCE AND NEW