A Fool's Alphabet (19 page)

Pietro was awoken by the sound of thunder, rolling in from behind the mountains. He sat up and looked over to where Laura was lying. She stretched her arms in the air and yawned. Fat drops of rain began to pierce the canopy of trees.

‘Shit,' said Steve.

Jesse stood up and stubbed out her cigarette beneath her bare heel. ‘I'm going for a swim,' she said, and peeled down her denim shorts. She stood naked in front of the others, like a witch doctor or a guardian spirit. She had bony hips and a big tuft of brown pubic hair. ‘Come on, you guys,' she called out and started laughing. ‘Shit,' said Steve, ‘I'm going back to the car.'

Laura Heasman stood up, and with her back to Pietro and Steve, undid the waistband of her skirt. She dropped it to her ankles, revealing a pair of white underpants. Then she
pulled off her shirt and unhooked her bra. Finally she peeled the white pants slowly down her legs, kicked them away with her foot and ran after Jesse into the water. Pietro's head was blowing fuses, as though the pathways in his brain had been incorrectly wired and now the rain was getting in. He began to pull and tear at his clothes, his hands snagging on the buttons and the zips. At last he was down to his underpants. He paused for a moment, then whipped them off and sprinted for the lake, not feeling the pine needles, sticks and small stones that scored the soles of his feet.

The rain pelted on to the surface of the lake so it looked like a grey milkshake. Jesse, who swam like an eel, wriggled and dived some way ahead. Laura was standing waist-high in the water shouting to her and laughing. Pietro put down his head and drove forward in a big Australian crawl. He turned round and looked back towards the shore. There was no sign of Steve.

Laura laughed and splashed water at him. They both swam on to where Jesse was plunging up and down and banging her chest like a Red Indian. Laura dived and caught her legs under the water. They both disappeared. Pietro saw two white backsides periodically appear above the water, then vanish again, until both girls emerged spluttering. ‘Let's get him,' said Jesse, and Pietro felt her slippery body winding round his legs while Laura heaved herself on to his shoulders from behind. The thunder rumbled above them as though someone were shifting trunks in a giant lumber room. Jesse called out and danced in the water.

When they were exhausted, Laura headed for the shore. Pietro and Jesse swam along behind. It was still raining hard as they emerged on to the muddy land. Laura shook her head like a dog, and Pietro smoothed back his hair with both hands. ‘OK,' said Jesse, ‘catch me then!' And she ran off through the woods. Laura looked after her, started for a moment, then stopped. Then she began to walk along by the side of the lake and Pietro watched the swing of her hips and legs and the white divide of her buttocks. When she
reached the wooden hut she turned and called out, ‘Come in here and dry off.' Pietro went with deliberate steps up into the cabin. Laura stood in front of him, and he was overwhelmed by the sight of this girl, whom he loved, holding out her arms to him. But he made no mistakes. He kissed her on the lips and felt them part and the hot flutter of her tongue inside his mouth. He took her head between his hands and stroked the enflamed golden hair he had gazed at for so long. It was wet and flat against her head, but it felt beautiful under his square hands. He dropped to his knees so he could touch the legs that had tormented him, all the way from the ankle to the hip, stroking and holding them both. The perfection of their shape was as he had known it would be. Then he stood up and held her tightly in his arms. She squeezed him in return, pulled back her head and smiled at him, allowing the full force of her eyes to beam into his narrowed, concentrating gaze. Still he kept his head. Her hand trailed down his stomach and she seemed to give a small sigh of pleasure as she tugged at him. He put his hand on hers and she knelt on the floor of the hut, which was made from rough wooden boards. Then she lay back on the floor, circled his neck with her hands and pulled him on to her. When he entered her he felt the last icy drops of lake water give way to something scalding hot and smooth. Gradually, fearful of splinters, he manœuvred both their bodies into place and closed his eyes.

To make love to an American girl was to occupy some of that endless country for himself. He inhaled the smell of her body, and from somewhere unknown the words Pasadena Rose Parade formed in his mind.

He had the feeling he had sometimes had before when making love, though never as strongly as this, that he was in the right place; that this was the one spot on the turning globe that he was supposed to be. Although the nerve-endings of his body were crackling with delight, he felt a calmer sense of his proper location. Once, as he tried to contain the rising pleasure, he opened his eyes and found a wooden knot
in the floor gazing back at him from an inch or so away. Laura squirmed beneath him and called him some name, some soft, endearing name that, in his passion for her, he didn't register. He kissed her upturned face in which the brown eyes were closed as if in concentration, the wet lashes flat against her cheeks, and thanked whatever providence or deity had, against all the odds, allowed him this moment.

Steve looked at them suspiciously when they sauntered back to the car where he had been listening to the radio while it rained. When Jesse returned and got dressed she looked at Pietro with big, interrogative eyebrows.

For the next two weeks Pietro lived in a fever of desire. When he and Laura went for walks they could hardly wait until they were out of sight of the house before they would be kissing and fumbling at each other. As soon as Mrs Heasman left the house they were in each other's arms, in her bedroom, in his bedroom, on the veranda and once on a kitchen chair when they heard the sound of the car unexpectedly returning.

For the rest of the summer they were barely apart. They flew to Detroit and drove to the small town of Kalamazoo where Laura had a cousin called Cathy, who was at university. She had stayed on to do an extra course during the summer. She hated the place, with its stick-like telegraph poles on the bare streets, the campus on the hill with its bogus Tyrolean bar and big impersonal supermarket, closed for the vacation. Pietro spent an hour or so in a record shop on the main drag while Laura and her cousin talked family matters. He thought the place had an agreeable air.

One thing he couldn't puzzle out – one thing he could never puzzle out – was what the place meant. What was Kalamazoo? Why live there? He looked hard at the wooden porches on the weatherboard houses and thought of the subatomic particles that made them. At some stage they had taken on a physical form, at some early organic stage in the life of the tree, prefigured by their life as seed or sap. It took
an element of human will, though, to cut and saw and plane and build.

What worried Pietro was that he couldn't see at what point the geographical position of a place on the earth's surface influenced the character of the human activity that took place on it. Could you really say that it was only human beings who chose, by cutting trees and making bricks, to force something unnatural on a wilderness? The human will itself, which was the decisive factor, could hardly be called inorganic. It wasn't enough, he thought, to say that people built cities on the estuaries of rivers, or towns on trade routes or villages in the most secluded spots. Some relation, more than that of climate or finance, existed between a site and a people.

Meanwhile, he liked this middle America, the butt of satire and derision. He had been momentarily put out when he once heard Harry talking about what he called James Dean America – ‘all that drive-in diner and cherry-pie bullshit'. But he believed that what excited him about the country was more than nostalgia for 1950s film sets. Places like Duluth and Milwaukee were to him not just placid but inspiring. He supposed this was partly because he was moved by the thought of a migrant people inventing a nation and then imposing it on the mind of the world. In the ancient city of Rome they had been taught through books and films to accept the myth of small-time Milwaukee, a mockable, low-rolling town, not just for now, but as if the character and tradition of the place were as old as those of the Palatine Hill. This was a heroic feat of imaginative enforcement.

Yet he liked the places, too, not for some sort of mythic quality, but because they were calm and self-assured in their industrial or residential identity. It did not occur to him that his appreciation of them was coloured by his emotional condition. When he took the wheel of the hire car, he felt they couldn't come at him fast enough: Rockford, Madison, La Crosse, and on up to the airport at the twin towns of Minneapolis-St Paul.

THERE WERE TWO
reasons Pietro dreaded going to see his grandfather in Nottingham. The first was Bobby, a woolly-coated terrier who lay in front of the fire letting off staccato noises, the loudest of which made him stand up and sniff in an accusing way, as though someone else were responsible. The other reason was the old man's conversation, which ran along lines which were familiar and uninteresting to a sixteen-year-old boy. Later, when his grandfather was dead, he wished he had listened harder. At the time, the stories seemed all part of the atmosphere of dog and sealed windows and stifling gas fire.

‘And where is it this year?' said old Russell, settling ominously back in his chair.'

‘Ibiza,' said Pietro.

‘And where's that then?'

‘It's in the Mediterranean.' It sounded promising enough, with cheap food and wine and young English people. Girls.

‘Everyone goes abroad these days, don't they?'

‘I suppose so. It's become cheaper, hasn't it? And the weather. It always seems to rain in England.'

Pietro expected a homily on the virtues of the English seaside. He had been instructed by his father to spend the afternoon with the old man but was to be allowed out to go to the cinema on his own in the evening.

What his grandfather was in fact saying was, ‘Those places we went to every now and again on the east coast, like Skegness, they were bloody terrible. You were always so cold.
I couldn't wait to go abroad. That's why I joined up in the first place on the seven and five. It was the only way you could afford it, if someone else was paying.'

Pietro glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was a quarter past three. The other side of the river, at Trent Bridge, the test match was midway through the afternoon session. They would have tea at five in the hot little house, supervised by a friendly neighbour. He let his mind drift into neutral, as for a divinity lesson at school, and settled back to let his grandfather talk. He was not yet eighty; he had a full head of hair and no physical disability, but to Pietro he seemed to have lived in an era he had mentally filed under ‘history'. His conversation always looked to the past, and what he said therefore went unregarded.

‘. . . so of course it was a big excitement when you got the telegram, or when you heard in the pub or whatever you were doing. I packed up the shop there and then and told Watkins he'd have to look after it while I was away. And you can't say we weren't well looked after then, either. They gave you a warrant if I remember rightly in the post office, just a little ticket sort of thing, and you took that to the station and they gave you a free ride to your headquarters. It was full of reservists when we got there and some of the regulars didn't like it at all. But they had to put up with it, because without us there wouldn't have been an army at all.

‘It was a lovely summer, too. There was a bank holiday just about this time and some people were annoyed because they cancelled all the trains so they could move the troops, but most people didn't give a damn. It was better than a holiday really, there was such an air of celebration about the whole place. I must say some of the reservists weren't quite as fit as they should have been. Chap in our unit ran a pub and he'd got so fat they couldn't find the trousers to go on him. There was a bit of a scrum for food as well, but it was all pretty good-natured. Belgium was where we were going, though some of the men didn't know where Belgium was. Somehow we got down to Southampton. My God, there were
crowds there. The number of trains coming in, the people come to see us off, the docks were swarming with them. I watched some cavalry people trying to get their horses on board. The animals hated it, being winched up in the air like that. Some of them had heart attacks, some of them kicked their way out of the slings they were in.

‘We had a good party on board, too. Some fellow had got some wine and they didn't fuss about smoking. Later on they changed the orders about tobacco, because officially you weren't supposed to smoke when you were on duty. But they changed that temporarily. They didn't know it would go on for four years, though.

‘We felt proud of the way we could just sail across like that too. Tom Swarbrick said it was because we had the whole Channel cleared and they didn't dare come near us. It was wonderful when we arrived. Boulogne. It was the first time most of us had been to Europe, and I thought it was the best thing that had ever happened. There were banners out, there was a band on the quay. Most of the chaps in my unit, they couldn't believe their luck. We had to listen to a speech by the mayor. I couldn't understand a word, but there was a young captain with us – only about twenty, but he was very well educated, was killed on the Somme, poor fellow – and he translated. The mayor was saying how pleased he was to have the gallant British troops arrive, how amazed he was by the speed with which we'd got there and so on.

‘I think we were all a bit amazed, to tell the truth, but what we were surprised at was that we were on the same side as the French! It was the first time, and it took a bit of getting used to. There were plenty of men in our unit who said they'd rather be fighting against them, but I just thought it was a job and it didn't make much odds who the enemy were. We'd all had a message from the commander-in-chief, or some bigwig anyway, saying we weren't to fraternise with French women, if you see what I mean. That was easier said than done, because they were pretty friendly, I can tell you.'