A Fool's Alphabet (34 page)

Pietro knew he could no longer pretend that their meetings were innocent lunch breaks, or work-related conferences that happened to continue after hours: he was entranced by her catalogues of dance records and by her modest evasions. She was annoyingly pretty, too, out in the light; her eyelashes flickered or dropped, according to whether she was enthusing or retreating. It also occurred to him that, although she had given nothing away, she would not be so eager an accomplice in their meetings if she were not drawn in some way to him.

He finished his meeting in Norwich at four o'clock, a low time in a provincial town. Afternoon shoppers in the streets wove between each other on the pavements or queued for the car parks of the giant supermarkets. It was early December and the windows were already full of Christmas trees and tinsel, the edges of the glass sprayed with mock snow that looked like shaving foam. Tins of biscuits showed Victorian coaches on which the caped driver lashed prancing horses down a muddied road; Stilton cheeses, pots of ginger, electronic games and plastic machine guns were piled beneath plump golden stars that replicated the forgotten sky of Roman-occupied Palestine.

He had missed many years of this ritual, which had not changed since he had been born. In Cardiff, Worcester, Newbury, whichever way the compass had pointed from his parents' house, the people had kept it up. Through different governments, through wars and strikes, through brief and uncomfortable bursts of prosperity, the annual reflex had persisted. The old people had kept coming with single shopping bags, still wearing the clothes old people had worn when he was a boy, though these slow creatures taking single coins from their purses were those his boyish eyes had seen as mothers in their capable middle age and fathers only just feeling the press of their stomach at the waistband of their working suits. Now they had unthinkingly adopted the posture and habits of their parents before them, and of all the old English people in the towns and villages who had sprouted in the individual brilliance of their lives, then joined the generality of the old and dead, leaving the world no different after all.

Pietro had for a long time felt surprised that people kept to the same routines. When he left Backley and, correspondingly, he thought, his childhood, he had unreasonably felt that Christmas trees and the automatic rituals would cease. He had occasionally seen them from a distance and thought them exhausted and pointless. Now as he moved his car down the thronged street and out of town, he felt
reconciled to what he saw, as though a great loop that joined him to his childhood had been completed, and the intervals of exile and effort were forgotten. The repeated years of custom he had missed did not now seem pointless to him, but welcome; his own children would inherit something he had done little to preserve, and for which he was therefore thankful.

He had intended to drive back to London the shortest way, through Thetford and Newmarket, but Hannah was not expecting him till late. Encouraged by the success of his trip to Blundeston, he decided to make the short detour east to Yarmouth, a town he had never visited before.

The approach was forbidding, as the road took a long sweep through an industrial zone that the flat, sandy landscape did nothing to conceal. The recommended route seemed designed to keep people from entering the town itself, which Pietro imagined dimly to be full of fishermen's cottages and people cooking bloaters for tea.

Eventually he found his way to the sea front, several miles of guest houses on one side, and the sound of immeasurable water on the other. He stopped the car and walked along the front until he found a way down on to the sand. It was dark by now, and the wind that came in from the sea had a sharp, penetrating sting.

Pulling his jacket around him, Pietro trod awkwardly over the packed sand that was driven into dunes, whose tumid, grassy shapes were visible at regular intervals. There were no upturned boats, however, no fires emitting cheerful smoke from metal chimneys.

He looked out towards the sea, an element whose impersonal horror was never truly told, even in descriptions of storms. The grey waves sucked and heaved with a pointless energy, their motions not majestic but an overpowering demonstration, covering two-thirds of the world for twenty-four hours of the day, of the random and futile movements of atomic matter. It was not only futile, it was inescapable: the waves that rolled over Yarmouth Sands were joined to
those he had seen from his window in Los Angeles, to the water by the coast road in Colombo and the currents of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

He sat down on the edge of a dune, hearing the water roll. He remembered coming to the chapter in
David Copperfield
that described the storm off Yarmouth. A ship from Spain or Portugal – some warning note had been struck in those names – was heaving off the coast and breaking up in the waves. The sea appeared to be trying to disgorge it. An old fisherman had come to knock on David's door to tell him there was a body on the beach. He went down and found it was that of his disgraced friend Steerforth – ‘I saw him lying with his head upon his arm as I had often seen him lie at school.' By this time the book had been shaking in his hands.

When the mental anguish that had started in Guatemala had receded, two years later, Pietro had rashly prided himself on having found solutions. He saw the episode as an isolated illness caused by – by grief, by drink, or stress, what did it matter? – that his strength of mind had overcome. He had no wish to see it as connected with a longer passage of events. But then the symptoms had resurfaced some years later, and he had known that the causes were deeper. He had understood, bitterly, that any sense of grand enlightenment was always likely to be misleading.

He must go back to Hannah. It was in the stillness she offered, the static point of her love, that he had found his destination. He recognised how much he loved her only after they had been apart. When they were reunited he saw her anew each time, as he had seen her for the first time in the apartment in Ghent, through the haze of his unhappiness. The sweetness of her nature was apparent in her face. It welcomed him unquestioningly every time, dismissing his faults, his moods, his failures, in her guileless smile, which he saw as evidence of her dedication to their shared life. She seemed to have no suspicions of him, she held no grudges; her view of him and of herself, though not a complicated
one, seemed based on infinite determination. He kept expecting it to falter, for her to see the truth of his unworthy soul, but the steady glare of her love did not weaken, and he felt it helped him somehow to be worthy of her.

How traitorous his memory was. How he had forgotten the agony of the mental crisis he had gone through. In his sick mind each minute had been filled with enough sensations for a day, so two years of illness had seemed unbearably long. If he was not careful, he found he could pretend it had not really happened. But, he thought, you needed to have a clear recollection of the details of unhappiness if you were to recognise and value what saved you from it. Other less dramatic episodes of loneliness and discontent had almost disappeared from his memory. Sometimes he felt that in the course of his life he had learned nothing. He determined that from that moment on he would never again forget what he owed to Hannah.

Yet it was not just for the sake of his own salvation that he would turn away from the sea ahead of him. He had created a need for himself in his children. Perhaps this was a harsh way of defining their dependency; he had done no more than any other man who had reproduced. But it was in fact only he who could properly calm Mary when she awoke at night, dreaming of being crushed. Although Hannah was more important to them than he was, there was a role for him too with Anton and James, whose echoing cries of welcome greeted the sound of his key in the lock. And what hidden part of him had been revealed by them? What low need had been released, then satisfied, so that now he felt redefined and augmented?

He tasted the Yarmouth wind on his face. In the gas station at the junction of Sunset Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway the attendant would be listening to his radio in the cabin, watching the ocean sparkle as the sun rose above the hills behind him. In Lyndonville, Jack the yard man would be deep in mid-morning snowdrifts, hacking out another car. In New York City Laura was in a meeting, the roofs of cabs
on Fifth Avenue visible from the window through which the light enflamed her hair. It was raining in the foothills of the Caserta Mountains, on the farm and the orchard. It was that time in Rome when the cobbled streets were lit only by the neon of shop signs before the lights came on, so that it looked more than ever like a film set, the flower sellers at the junctions of the via Frattina making their last sales, a sinister glow on the doorways in the narrow via della Lupa. In Hong Kong there was an hour's uncommercial sleep and stillness, a truce on the rock. The sun had left the mountain in les Houches, and all the children were gathered in.

Pietro stood up and began walking back to his car. He did not cry or feel moved at the thought of the terrifying sea and the unmade journeys it contained. He put from his mind the thought of the Italian shore and his mother, young Italian girl denied the world. He opened the car door and repositioned himself in front of its familiar gadgetry. He switched on the radio and sank the key into the ignition: particular objects in an appointed place, like a knot of wood in the plank of a cabin floor . . .

He drove along the front, searching for the London signs.

THE ALBUM SLEEVE
lay on the bed. It was of the drug-store surrealist school. Planets turned in Technicolor space adorned by fauns and muscular warriors with bearskin loincloths. Nymphs with low-cut bodices welcomed sunsets on purple seas.

Pietro clamped the headphones tighter over his ears as the music swelled, electric organ rolling under the guitar, which screeched and rose in anguished progression, like some simulated ecstasy. The singer's voice spewed words of torture and yearning which nevertheless, boosted by the volume of the music, seemed to Pietro to proclaim something vital. He felt inflamed by them; they aroused desires in him he could not name; they gave a shape to his frustration. At the same time, the riding cymbals, splashing over the repeating rhythm of the bass guitar, also gave some exhilarating vent to the feelings trapped in him by age and circumstance.

The windows in his bedroom werelocked and the curtains drawn. Outside, the sun shone unregarded on the back wall of the mansion block; in the closed bedroom Pietro had begun to sweat into the scarlet T-shirt which he pulled from the waistband of his jeans.

There was a knock on the door and his father stuck his head round the corner. Pietro peeled off the headphones with an embarrassed wrench. His father looked round the room and at the drawn curtains but made no comment. He said he had made a pot of tea and invited Pietro to come and
have a cup in the sitting room. Pietro smiled his acceptance.

Raymond Russell wanted to know what his son's plans were. ‘The world is your oyster,' he said. ‘I wish I was your age again.'

‘I know, I know.' Pietro lowered his head and smiled. He had never really understood the expression. Was the world fishy, expensive, or just small?

‘You don't have to decide irrevocably,' said his father, lighting one of the small cigars he had taken up in place of his pipe.

‘Well, I think I do really. Supposing I get a degree all right next year. I'll have to get a job then, and I'll have to find somewhere to live.'

‘Then you must decide what you want to do.'

Pietro sighed. It was warm in the flat; the air was thick and undisturbed.

‘That should be a privilege,' said Russell.

‘I understand.'

‘I envy you. I just don't want you to get it wrong. And where are you going to go this summer?'

‘I'm going to Italy.'

The word caused a small
frisson
between them.

‘I'm going to the north. Up to the lakes. I'll have saved enough from working.'

Raymond Russell was not listening. He was staring through Pietro. ‘Which lake?'

‘I thought I'd start at Como and then see what happened.'

Pietro watched his father through the smoke of the cigar. The carriage clock on the mantelpiece ticked audibly. It had a glass base through which you could see its endlessly rotating mechanism.

‘Your mother and I went up to the lakes once. It must have been the year before you were born. It was the first time she had been back to Italy since we were married. She said she had always wanted to go up to the lakes for a holiday. A friend of her family lived in Milan and he lent us his car – a funny old thing. Very unreliable.'

Pietro felt a twinge of embarrassment as his father attempted to touch on some personal memory.

‘We drove out of Milan, I remember. We had a little hotel booked in Como, but somehow we took the wrong turning. Your mother was not much of a navigator, I'm afraid. We ended up in Bergamo. It was getting dark and I didn't like the sound of the engine at all. We asked someone the way. It can't have been very difficult because Como was the next big town on the main road, as far as I remember. But your mother was cross with me because she thought I'd criticised her for not finding the way, so she didn't listen properly when she was given the instructions. The long and the short of it was that we took the wrong road out of Bergamo. At about eight o'clock we ended up in a little village – I can't remember what it was called – and the car was overheating. I said we ought to stop for the night, and your mother agreed. What was that village called? Wait a minute, I'm going to see if I can find it in the atlas.'

Mr Russell crossed the sitting room to the shelf that held his reference books. He returned to his chair with a selection of atlases and opened an old blue book on his lap. Pietro watched as he hoisted his glasses further up his nose and stubbed his cigar out in the bronze ashtray, which habit enabled him to find without raising his eye from the page.