A Fool's Alphabet (31 page)

He had never understood her. No one could have predicted that she would end up married to a lawyer, settled in domestic harmony. Could they? She had seemed so impulsive, so ignorant or contemptuous of the regulations and customs of people like her parents that he could only envisage her on the move and independent. He had been so dazzled by her looks that her character had always seemed to him in some way dominated by them; perhaps he had never really known her as an ordinary, vulnerable, venal human being at all.

Yet it was not quite as simple as saying that in his youthful
shallowness he had liked her only for the way she looked. He had loved her properly and truly; it was just that he could more easily locate what he loved in the glow of her eyes or the slant of her mouth than in some abstract excursion into what made up her personality. It was not a question of being superficial; if you had never felt that passion for another person's body and appearance, he thought, you had not fully loved.

He looked at the letter again and he felt his heart at last close over. He saw a life that bore no relation to his own. At one point the solitary orbits they tracked in space had overlapped, and the gravity of his tiny world had shifted. Now he saw only a woman he did not understand, still liked, but did not wish to see again. She was gone.

PARKING OR BREAKFAST.
You could have either but not both for the price of the hotel bedroom. They opted for breakfast and thought they'd take a chance on the hire car getting towed. The hotel was lower on Taylor Street than was desirable, and lower than Laura's credit card could have got them, but Pietro always insisted on paying. The room overlooked a patch of waste ground and the backs of other buildings. A gnarled palm tree grew up between the fire escapes.

After they had unpacked Laura said, ‘I'm going for a walk now. I won't belong.'

‘Sure,' said Pietro. ‘See you later.'

When she had gone he realised that she couldn't really have said ‘I won't belong.'

The idea of her going for a walk on her own would once have seemed absurd, but the more independently she behaved the more he hung back. After she had been gone for a few minutes he decided to go for a walk himself. He went up to the top of Powell Street and right, down into Chinatown where the rubbish was piled high on the streets. In an American café he ordered a sandwich and an orange juice. He watched the people going past the window and thought how much he would have liked San Francisco in any other circumstances. It was bright and bold but also what people called ‘manageable'; to a European there was no difficulty in understanding it.

He supposed that at some point he had been too
passionate. It hadn't happened at once. Laura had been so loving to him, had given him so much encouragement that in the end he must have lost some elemental piece of self-control. Now it was too late. Both seemed afflicted by inertia. Laura particularly was listless: she couldn't concentrate on anything, she seemed to have lost her ability to take the best from her surroundings.

The next day they went to Haight Ashbury. The painted houses and tranquil streets leading down to green parks, just a bus ride from the city centre, could not have been more promising. To the young men and women of the Sixties the dream of revolution must have seemed so close that they could almost touch it.

‘You couldn't imagine a better place,' said Pietro. ‘If only it hadn't been for the drugs.'

‘I don't think they could have had much of a movement without drugs.'

‘Maybe. They could have gone a long way on Anchor steam beer, I would have thought.'

Laura would not be drawn. The elegance and the courtesy of the city had no effect on her; the trams toiled unregarded up the streets, while the dockside pleasure ground, its restaurants and music, seemed like a ten-cent trick under the indifferent breezes of the Bay.

Laura had to see a friend of her mother's, so Pietro spent the following morning on his own. After he had finished lunch he decided to go back to the hotel for a bath and a sleep. As he once more climbed Powell Street he found his legs beginning to ache. The tracks of the cable car began to rattle urgently with the impact of their invisible load. He decided to stop and wait for it; he was wearing thin-soled sneakers which gave no cushioning from the pavement.

He was overcome by tiredness. Next to a garage that proclaimed itself a Certified Smog Tester, he leant against a wall, resting his head on his arms. Then there was a silence into which there suddenly came from across the street the sound of a male voice singing opera in Italian. For two years
Pietro had heard no music but FM radio and car tapes, the continuous throb of pop music, the background of America. The tenor voice was as clear as ice, and in his mind there suddenly formed a picture of a track that joined two things: a broken-down barn at one end, and, at the other, a dense and slightly threatening wood. For almost twenty years he had barely given it a thought, and now he felt it pull with a vast, unaccountable force.

They ate dinner in a Chinese restaurant which had little in common with the one near Baker Street where, after his escape from Dorking, Pietro had first sampled soup that looked as though the waiter had blown his nose into it. Here a young man brought two plates of meat and lit a gas fire in the middle of the table, inviting them to cook their own food. Pietro drank quickly, searching to find an elusive lightness of spirit. Laura smiled stiffly over the chopsticks and the unappetising strips of raw chicken, beef and pork.

‘Hey, you know one thing I regret about Lyndonville,' said Pietro brightly. ‘We never did spend an afternoon in the Darling Inn apartments.'

‘It stopped being a hotel a while back. It's now an old people's residence.'

After dinner they went for a walk and Laura said, ‘Tell me about your mother.'

‘What about her?'

‘You always said you'd tell me about her properly one day.'

They had walked down to Fisherman's Wharf and had stopped for a moment between the amusement arcades. Seals were honking in the shallow water among the boats.

Pietro said, ‘I told you she died, didn't I?'

‘Yes. I'm sorry, Pietro. I don't know why I asked you that question. It's none of my business.'

‘That's all right. There isn't much to tell when someone dies. It's not an event, it's an absence.'

‘You weren't there with her?'

‘No, I was told by a doctor when I got back from school. I do remember, though, about a week later this woman called Mrs Graham, who used to look after the house, she took me on one side and described it to me.'

‘Why?'

‘I think she knew I felt excluded. It wasn't morbid. She sat me on the sofa and she held my hand.'

Pietro stopped, but Laura's expression was intent, urging him to carry on. He drew a deep breath. He found he could remember.

‘Mrs Graham said, “She was very bad during the night. I sat up with her until three and then I felt myself nodding off. When I woke up she was sitting up in bed. She said I was to go and get your father. Then she stopped me and she said, ‘I haven't been a good wife to him. Tell him I knew that.' Then when I was at the door she stopped me again and said, ‘Does my little boy know how ill I am?' And I said, ‘No, the doctor said best not to tell him.' And she said, ‘I want him to know I'm dying.' And I said, ‘Don't talk such nonsense about dying now.' And I sat back on the bed with her.”'

Pietro looked across to Laura's face. It was filled with concentration. It seemed he had her attention at last.

‘Shall I go on?'

‘Yes. Tell me exactly what happened.'

He scratched his head. His gaze swept the Bay, from bridge to bridge, over the shattered island. ‘I remember that Mrs Graham was squeezing my hand all the time and I was sitting there nodding. Then she said, “I sat there with her and she talked about Italy and about her parents. She might have been a little bit feverish, I think, because she was in pain. The doctor had given her these tablets but they made her very thirsty. She told me when she was a little girl in her village she dreamed of marrying a rich man from Rome and living in a villa with a garden and lots of children. And I said she hadn't done so bad, here in Backley with Mr Russell and with
you. And she began to cry a little bit and she said she knew that was true. She said it wasn't what she dreamed of, but she loved England because you were there in it.” Mrs Graham was squeezing my hand so hard now that it was hurting. Then she said, “I knew she was getting very low. She lay back against the pillows and she asked me for some more tablets and some water. And I gave them to her and then I went over to the window and I drew back the curtains and I remember it was just getting light. I was looking over that way up towards the hill. And when I sat back by her bed again she was gone.”' Pietro paused. ‘I don't think I realised till then, till Mrs Graham told me, that she was truly dead.'

‘I suppose that was good for you,' said Laura.

‘I think so. I think you're supposed to confront these things.'

Laura said, ‘I'm sorry. It must have been awful.'

There was silence. Laura looked down.

He said, ‘That's not what you really wanted to talk about, is it?'

Laura didn't answer, though her silence confirmed what he meant.

‘I think we should give it a bit longer,' said Pietro. ‘Let's finish the holiday at least.'

Laura nodded dumbly, her eyes brimming with tears.

‘Don't cry, please,' said Pietro. He felt quite calm now that he had faced the subject.

‘I hate this,' said Laura. ‘I don't want this. I just . . .'

Her voice trailed off. She took his arm and they began to walk back towards the hotel.

Once in the room they talked about the travel arrangements and packing and paying the bill. Pietro felt as though he was bracing himself to be smacked in the solar plexus. That night he lay awake and listened for the soft sound of Laura sleeping. She was silent, and when the first light came through the curtains he saw her open eyes staring at the ceiling.

In the morning they trailed through the south of the city, and eventually swung up on to Route 101 towards San José.
The sun began to burn down in another day of smooth Californian weather. The local station on the car radio crowed in pleasure: ‘OK, folks, we're looking at temperatures of twenty-five degrees today in the Bay area and if you're down in Carmel it's really time to get down to the beach. We're predicting a midday high of twenty-six!'

‘I'm sorry I made you go through that story about your mother last night,' said Laura. ‘I guess I just wanted you to slow down a bit.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘You've been so frantic, making jokes all the time. I wanted you to be serious.'

Pietro nodded. He manœuvred the car out past a giant truck and into the fast lane.

After a while, Laura said, ‘Couldn't we stop for a swim? I'm so hot.'

‘We've only just started.'

‘But we don't have to get anywhere, do we?'

‘I suppose not. We've come back off the coast a bit now, though. We could take that road down to Santa Cruz.'

Down on Route I they saw signs to Watsonville and Castroville, the ‘artichoke capital of the world'.

‘Let's go down there,' said Laura. ‘Watsonville. I bet there's a beach there.'

Pietro turned the car off the freeway. ‘What happens in Watsonville?'

‘I've no idea. I never heard of it before.'

They drove through flat agricultural fields. Only an hour or so from San Francisco and the place looked impoverished.

‘What's that extraordinary smell?' said Laura.

‘I don't know.' Occasionally when carrying his armful of books along the colonnade to the nine o'clock lesson at Brockwood, Pietro would pass the ventilator shaft from the kitchen where the Brussels sprouts were already boiling hard for lunch. The aroma from the fields of Watsonville reminded him of it.

They were on the San Andreas Road when they came to
a Stop sign. To the right was Beach Road, to the left Thurwachter. There was no one else in sight as they headed for the beach. The sea was far colder than they had expected, and they ran back over the scraggy dunes to warm up afterwards. Laura took the picnic lunch she had prepared from the back of the car and laid it on the sand.

She looked at Pietro over the rug and smiled. Her hair was still damp at the tips. She wore a navy-blue top which was half open to reveal the white skin of her chest and neck. She had black earrings beneath the tumbling, errant hair. Nothing had changed in her.

Pietro drank some beer from the bottle: Michelob, said the inscription on the label. He fingered one of the sachets of artificial sweetener Laura had produced from her handbag. He looked up into her steady brown eyes.

‘I'm going to go now,' she said. ‘You take the car. Take it on where you want. I'll get my bag from the back.'

‘What'll you do?'

‘I'll get a ride back to San Francisco, then I'll see.'

‘Will you find your way?'

‘It can't be more than a mile back to the interstate.'

‘One day,' said Pietro, ‘you'll talk to me about this and I'll understand it.'

‘Yes,' said Laura, standing up. She touched his hand and went up towards the road. Pietro looked after her until she had disappeared from sight, then he looked down at the picnic on the rug. French's mustard, Hi-lo sweetener, Michelob beer. What was the point of it? What was the point of anything if you were on your own?

He sat for a long time looking over the sea. High above him an aeroplane was flying up from Los Angeles. From overhead, Watsonville was just a point among the brown hills with the little smudges of white made by the paths and roads that run along the crests. Low cloud obscured the ocean to the west; it began to sink down and cover the sea, like fog. Nearer to the shore, the water itself could be seen to sparkle. From the air the surface looked scaly and still;
it was stippled and drawn like black vinyl on a car seat cover.