A Fool's Alphabet (20 page)

He paused for a moment, and Pietro, who had been half
listening, as though to a radio playing in another room, blinked and thought of a question. ‘It must have been terrible,' he said. ‘Did you –'

‘Terrible? It wasn't terrible at all. We were having the time of our lives. The marching was a bit tough, I suppose. I hadn't worn boots for two or three years, and these places in France they all seemed to have cobbled streets. It was hard on the feet and that's where the regulars scored over us. But we didn't make a big fuss. Every little place you went through there would be crowds of French people cheering you on and the girls asking for souvenirs. They wanted your cap badge or your buttons or something like that. By the time we got to Amiens there were chaps in our unit could barely keep their uniforms done up, they just had bits of twine instead of buttons.

‘The officers were good, though. They let us have beer to drink, if you had the money. I remember sitting by a big corn field. It was harvest time and one or two men had said they'd help. It was hot work, I can tell you, and I don't know what they got in return, though I can have a pretty good guess, knowing Tom Swarbrick, who was a handsome fellow. There was a big lorry pulled in across the road from the Army and Navy stores, and I'd seen another one from Selfridges. They'd all come to help transport the kit, but it made it feel like a big outing.

‘It was so hot that night that we didn't bother with the bivvy. We slept out under the stars. I was with Swarbrick and Simpson and a chap called Reynolds and we all agreed this was the best thing we'd seen yet. We had a smoke and plenty of tea to drink and apart from a few blisters we were as happy as sandboys.

‘Then it must have been the next day I think we got on the train. That wasn't quite so good. Some bright spark had had the idea that if you could transport all the kit and all the horses in animal trucks, you could do the same with the men. The officers were allowed in proper carriages, first class I shouldn't wonder, but we all went standing up in these
cattle wagons. It was pretty ripe in there, I don't mind telling you. But we didn't care, because we thought we were just going to give these Germans a lesson. Our spirits were that high. And the journey wasn't all that long anyway. We got a bit of a rest the other end, then we had a talk from the company commander. He said we had to get a move on then. We were to go up to the left flank of the French and so stretch their line out. They were already fighting, you see. We had to head for this place in Belgium pretty sharpish. What we didn't know was the Germans had made the same plan, like a rendezvous.

‘It was a nice town when we got there. We sat in the square and the rations were dished out to us. You just got a tin, didn't know what was in it. I had a tin of herring and some bread. I should think it had been in the stores since the Crimea but we were so hungry it didn't matter. Then the people from the town, they started giving us bunches of fruit, then someone else came along with some loaves still hot from the baker's, and cheese and bits of ham. All we needed was some beer, and lo and behold a barkeeper said we could have a big jug of that too. We ate all this stuff just sitting on the cobbles in the shade. You didn't want to sit in the sun, not after marching with all that kit.'

Pietro, who found his interest had lifted a little at the mention of food, said, ‘So you quite liked the town then?'

‘Oh yes, it was grand.'

‘But what about the . . . you know, the battlefield? That must have been awful.'

‘Not really. It was like I was used to it, to tell the truth. You've seen the mines round here, haven't you? It was like that.'

‘But what about the trenches?'

‘We didn't have trenches there, not like the ones we had later on. No, we tried to dig a bit, but we were fighting in a town really, in a what do you call it, a built-up area. The artillery couldn't get their field of fire because the place was full of slagheaps. If it wasn't slagheaps, it was railway cuttings
and little villages all along the side of the canal. And in the morning you could see all the miners clocking on for work, just like a shift in one of the Nottingham coalfields. They waved at us as they went into the pits. Funny people, the Belgians. The first thing we heard was that a cavalry officer had met some Germans on the road and had gone chasing after them with his section. He'd run his man through and come back with blood on his sword. You wouldn't think we'd be killing with machine guns and howitzers in a few months. The French army we'd seen in Amiens were wearing scarlet trousers. They'd just gone off across the fields to the south of us and walked into it.

‘It was hazy in the morning, I remember. Tom Swarbrick said it was going to rain, but it soon cleared. We'd been pushed into a salient north of the town.'

‘What's a salient?' said Pietro.

‘A bit that sticks out. I remember that morning. We knew something was coming, but most of us didn't worry a bit. We knew we'd cop it in the salient if they did attack, but we thought we'd get the better of it. I remember the smell of burning coming off the canal. The engineers had set fire to all the barges in case the Germans used them as bridges to get across. They'd stuck charges on the proper bridges. When the firing began it was a relief. When you're stuck there under attack you don't know what's going on. We didn't discover till later they'd had six divisions to our two. All morning we just kept firing as we'd been trained. We got off so many rounds they thought we were using machine guns. And then we all had to stop because there was a group of Belgian schoolgirls on the bridge.'

‘Schoolgirls?'

‘Don't ask me how they'd got there, but we all had to stop while their mistress took them to safety. I'll never forget that sight. I used to think about it later in the war, when we'd been stuck underground in mud for weeks on end. I used to think of the way we all stopped firing.'

‘I thought it was supposed to have been a terrible battle.'

‘Well, it got very hot again. We were thirsty all the time and we were under fire for six hours in there.'

‘For six hours? That must have been awful.'

‘It was a bit unexpected.'

Pietro couldn't reconcile what he'd learned in history lessons with his grandfather's memory of the war. The old man looked down and poked at the sleeping dog with his foot.

‘To tell you the truth, it did get a bit rough towards the end of the day. The fire was very heavy and we had a job getting out of that salient. In the evening, when we'd pulled back, some of the lads were shaken. We didn't know the war was going to be like this. At night when we were digging into our new positions, the young captain I told you about, he came round to see us. I remember him saying something like, “Congratulations, gentlemen. You have just shaken hands with the twentieth century.” What was that supposed to mean? We hadn't a clue what he was talking about, but I did think of it again when we buried him two years later.'

‘So did you lose the battle?' said Pietro.

‘We withdrew, that's what it was called. We withdrew to new positions. But we lived to fight again. It was tough getting out of there, holding the bridges while they got the kit out. There were three VCs won on that first day, I think, chaps who hung on under the bridges, wiring them up, covering the retreat. It started to rain again that night. Simpson, I remember, he took his shirt off and let the rain get on his back where he'd got burned when he'd been digging. It made the ground slippery. It was hard to march on when you were carrying all that clobber. The countryside of Belgium looked pretty odd. It was as though it had snowed, there was so much white dust from the shelled houses. And I remember the smell of all those men who hadn't washed, not to mention the dead bodies in that heat, because there hadn't been time to bury them. But we weren't downhearted, not most of us. We'd shown that man for man we could take them on.'

‘And what happened to Simpson?'

‘He was killed at the Somme.'

‘Like the captain?'

‘Yes.'

‘And Reynolds?'

‘The next year.'

‘And your friend, Tom . . .'

‘Swarbrick? Passchendaele, towards the end.'

‘Didn't any of your friends make it all the way through?'

‘Not really. All the officers in our company were dead by Christmas. I got it in the leg from one of our own shells. Bloody artillery, the Drop 'em Shorts, we called them. I was out for a year and a half. They sent me back again though. To the Somme. I rejoined my old unit and some old man came up and shook my hand. I thought, “Who's this old bugger calling me by my first name?” And he said, “Don't you remember your old pal Tom?” It was Tom Swarbrick. He'd been somewhere called the White City. That's what they called it. They gave these places nicknames from England. I didn't recognise him.'

THE SPEECH HAD
been the difficult part. What to say about someone he had known for almost twenty years, and then how to say it. He took instructions from Harry. No smut, not too long, try to make it accessible to Americans as well as British, no jokes about being a goy. Then he sat down one Sunday afternoon with the sound of the six-month-old Mary occasionally penetrating the closed door of the sitting room. He could hear Hannah's solicitous footsteps going to calm the baby and turned his mind back to an earlier age.

Harry had been a good friend to him, that was for sure. He wanted to say so in public. On the other hand, he didn't want to put himself too much into the story. Tell them what sort of a person Harry was. Anecdotes. Stories that would interest Americans who hadn't met him but which would not bore English people who had known him all his life. The time they had been to India and Harry had suffered from, of all things, constipation. Something nobler. The time they had raised money for a London charity by swimming hundreds of lengths of an over-chlorinated pool in Highbury. Too self-admiring. Perhaps Harry would best come alive if he talked about his family. But he didn't like his mother, and his sister had run off with someone unsuitable, possibly even a photographer.

In the taxi from Kennedy airport he felt the shiny black cover of the seat beneath his left hand and the chrome of the door handle in his right. The bench was slippery and the driver
pressed on in the New York fashion, using only the steering wheel to pilot them, as though the speed had been preset at an unvariable level. His photograph stared villainously from his ID card beside the meter. GOMEZ.

The wind was funnelled down the cross-street outside his hotel, and Pietro pulled his jacket tight around him as he hauled his suitcase inside. In only a few moments on the pavement his legs felt frozen. Inside the lobby, the heated air at once began to make his scalp sizzle. Up in his room he hurriedly unpacked and prepared for bed. His fatigue had vanished, however, and he felt impelled to go out for a nightcap. Within a few minutes, he was sitting in a chair at the bar, watching a football game through watery eyes on the mounted television, his right hand wrapped round a prodigious shot of bourbon. I must ring Hannah, he thought. Mary had developed a virus which at the last moment had prevented Hannah from coming with him to New York. She would be waiting for his call.

‘Where's Barbara?'

‘Anyone seen Nancy? She was supposed to be here.'

‘The traffic's terrible on Lexington.'

‘Have you seen Harry, Pietro?'

‘A few minutes ago. He was in the aisle, or whatever.'

‘Now listen, everyone. My name is Michael. I'm in charge. I want you all to take the places indicated on the chart here.'

The master of ceremonies looked harassed. Two of the bridesmaids were missing and the other four would not stop talking. People surged up and down the steps of the synagogue, looking for each other, being introduced, attempting to find their places in the order of the procession.

‘You're walking in with Simon.'

‘Surely I'm with Elliot? Look, it says right here.'

‘He's right.' Elliot stepped forward. He was a neat American of about thirty-five who was one of the twenty people Pietro had been introduced to in the last quarter of an hour. Elliot had met a similar number of people from
England. The difference was that he remembered all their names and repeated them with ostentatious ease.

‘Richard's right. Pietro's with me,' he said. ‘Simon should be walking in with Jonathan.'

There was a shriek from one of the bridesmaids. ‘Nancy! How are you?'

A pretty, dark-haired girl came running up the steps in a navy-blue trench coat. ‘Jesus, the traffic,' she said between kisses. ‘I couldn't get a cab anywhere. Martha! You look fantastic!'

‘Now where's Allie gone? We can't start without her. Simon, did you see Allie?'

‘I thought she was with Nancy.'

‘Pietro, I want you to meet my great-aunt,' said Martha.

A minute woman who looked like a bird with a single orange plume on her head held out her hand, then lifted up her powdery face to be kissed.

‘Oh my,' she sighed, looking up at Pietro, ‘how you've grown.'

Baffled, Pietro turned back to resume his place. Behind them was a glass-fronted display case in which were two huge scrolls and an ancient book, open to reveal some sacred Hebrew texts.

The rehearsal eventually took place. They were to process in pairs up what Pietro thought of as the aisle, then take their places on either side of the bride and groom, ushers on one side, bridesmaids on the other. After the complications of arrival and introduction, the main business seemed quite straightforward. All Pietro had to do was walk up with a friend of Martha's called, almost certainly, Richard and come down again with Nancy on his arm. His participation in the service was limited to shouting ‘
Mazel tov
' when Harry broke the glass beneath his foot.