A Fool's Alphabet (29 page)

‘We'd better have a look round the square,' he said when he rejoined the others. He felt that if he refused to accept there was any sort of crisis then none would develop. Hannah looked alarmed already. She grabbed her bag from beside her chair and looked at him accusingly.

‘I'll help,' said Harry. He turned to Martha. ‘You stay and look after the boys.'

They went up the alley into the square, an open area of yellowish stone with arched cloisters at one side and a cathedral or solid church visible on another. Two people were eating ice cream under a red parasol with the sound of music from a tired radio in the background; an old man moved through the exit at one corner. Otherwise the heat had
completely emptied the area. Its blank, well-preserved walls yielded nothing to their searching eyes.

Hannah looked at Pietro imploringly.

‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘She can't have gone far.' Why not? he asked himself. ‘Let's spread out. You go that way. Harry, you go that way, and I'll go through there.'

He went down a narrow street with baskets full of lavender for sale. He began to call Mary's name.

Now that he was alone, without the need to be calm, he felt the tightening of panic. He was surprised by how quickly he became unable to control the feeling. The concern he felt on her behalf was more acute than anything he had ever felt for himself.

He asked the owner of a shop if he had seen a small girl with fair hair. The man shook his head. ‘Je suis désolé, monsieur.'

Désolé
, desolate. No, no, it was he who was desolate. The tension had given an unreal quality to the surroundings. What only a few minutes before had seemed a charmed holiday town was quite changed. The luminous green cross in the chemist's, the red pole on the tabac, the spindly white writing on the glass window of the food shop, were no longer small auguries of pleasure but signs of a suddenly comfortless world.

He remembered that he had not agreed where or when to rejoin the others. What if Hannah had already found Mary and his search, and his anguish, were unnecessary? By now he had emerged from the small network of back streets out on to the main circular road that ringed the town. It was flanked on either side by cafés and shops. Round it drove the inessential traffic of a Sunday afternoon – buzzing two-stroke mopeds, laden Citroën Deux Chevaux with their roofs rolled back, family cars with heavy bumpers and sleepy children in the back, light open-backed delivery trucks with fizzy drinks or barrels of butane.

Pietro began to swear and pray, cursing his bad luck, refusing yet to believe that this should happen to him, but asking
also to be spared. Part of him knew that only by confronting what was going on could he deal with it; part of him just turned away. In the heightened clarity with which he saw his surroundings and in the way that the passage of time had slowed, he was aware that his existence was pitched at some unwanted new level of intensity.

He saw Mary's face clearly in his mind and he saw the whole of her short life squeezed before his eyes, from the moment her head had emerged into the world, blue and bloody, face down on to the white hospital mat between Hannah's legs. He remembered the soaring of his heart when the midwife turned her over and he had finally let go of his emotions, sobbing on to Hannah's shoulder. Mary had barely yet lived except as an extension of him and Hannah, the subject of their speculation, their love and their impatience. They had constructed a character for her in their teasing but she had not yet developed her own, except as something, someone in whose safety all his happiness now lay. From the moment she had finally appeared, whole and breathing, he had seen her as an independent being, had known that no love or influence he might try to exert could finally change her; and he had respected, admired almost, that serene quality of otherness that was visible even in her baby's cries, had wondered at the innocent confidence with which she had confronted the world, another being, another attempt, undaunted, unworn-down, oblivious to the millions who had preceded her.

He found he was running through the hot Provençal town: rue Gambetta, Place de la République, names that would never be the same again. His pain was making him so mad that he wanted it to be over one way or the other, even if it meant the worst.

He paused by the edge of the road, watching the heavy traffic. He decided to seek comfort in Hannah, not to be alone, and turned back towards the centre of the town. At the end of a narrow street, just before the place became a pedestrian zone, he saw a small group of people gathered
next to a lorry. He ran towards them and saw that they were looking over the body of a girl which lay on the pavement. Pushing them aside he bent down over her. It was Mary. ‘C'est ma fils,' he said, wrongly. ‘She's mine.' He was so relieved to see her that in some way he was not frightened by her stillness. He picked up Mary's body and kissed her face.

‘Le camion . . .' muttered someone.

Pietro felt consoling hands on his shoulders. He held Mary close to him, burying his face in her neck, as he had often done before. Her body did not feel broken or limp. A nervous shiver ran along the lids of her closed eyes. He kissed her cheek and murmured her name several times. He felt her arms reach out for him. Her eyes opened.

He held Mary to him tightly, the tears of relief running from his squeezed eyes. He was shocked by how quickly he had adjusted to the idea of her death and then to her regiven life.

‘Are you all right?' he said. ‘Does it hurt?' He looked down at her and gently tested her thin arms and legs to see if the bones were broken. There was a long graze over her left shoulder and down the side of her back. Where her dress was torn he could see a purple swelling at the side of the ribs.

‘No, it doesn't hurt.' She shook her head. She looked dazed.

Pietro thanked the people who had gathered round and set off quickly with Mary in his arms so he could find and reassure Hannah as soon as possible.

When he got back to the restaurant, Martha was sitting with the children. He left Mary cradled on Martha's lap and went running off to find Hannah.

He saw her wandering distracted at the end of the street with the lavender baskets. He shouted and waved and ran to her with his arms held up in the air. ‘It's all right! It's all right!' he called, as he drew closer.

‘What happened?' said Hannah.

‘She was knocked down by a lorry. But she's all right. Well, she looks all right. We must take her to a hospital and have her examined.'

Hannah seemed too frozen to show her relief. ‘That girl. What are we going to do with her? I would die if something happened to her, I would just
die
.' She gripped Pietro's arms. ‘Do you know, I feel angry with her. I feel really, blindly angry. I want to beat her until she screams, until she understands.'

‘There now, it's all right.' Pietro folded his arms round her shoulders and pulled her to him.

IT WAS SLASHING
with rain when they emerged from the terminal at Belgrade airport.

‘Where's this car, then?' said Coleman, holding his raincoat over his head.

‘Must be over there, where the Hertz sign is,' said Pietro. ‘Let's run.'

‘Jesus,' said Coleman, as they pulled out of the airport complex. ‘What a country.'

The car crawled through the suburbs of Belgrade where withering bursts of rain rebounded from the pavements and obscured the grey tower blocks that ringed the city. Coleman struggled with the heating control in an effort to force hot air on to the windscreen, which was clouded by their breath.

‘How far is this bloody place?' he said, as a dry blast came into their eyes. He lit a cigarette.

‘It's no distance at all,' said Pietro. ‘You want to look out for signs to Sarajevo.'

Pietro had begun to tire of Coleman and his company. He felt as though he had lost some freedom of his own and gone backwards in his life to a position of submission and servility. For the sake of Hannah and their two children he had decided to stick with it for the duration of the contract, though there were days when his body would barely carry him down to the tube station to take the train to work.

Coleman's offices were in Clerkenwell in a Victorian building that had been modernised in the Sixties. Five other
companies shared the building and could never agree on what renovations needed to be done. The central heating came on during the first week in October and could not be adjusted until April without bonuses to the maintenance staff who otherwise refused to go into the basement and wrestle with the pre-war boiler that grumbled and muttered, fatly swathed in lagging, for a humid six months. The substantial plumbing was visible as it climbed the walls that flanked the stairwell, with its metal banisters and steel-tipped linoleum steps. Two lifts operated from beside the front door, though their tendency to jam a few feet beneath each floor or to sink like a miner's cage discouraged people from using them.

A yellow reception desk, dense with styrofoam coffee cups, was manned by a chain-smoking commissionaire called Bob. Visitors were offered a book and a ballpoint pen attached to the spine by string and wound round so many times with Sellotape that it was fatter than Bob's orange finger that stabbed the page under ‘Name', ‘Time In' or ‘Company'.

‘There's a Mister . . .' Bob would pause, telephone to his shoulder, and swivel the book round so he could peer at the page curling under ballpoint pressure ‘. . . Smitt' or ‘Brawn' he would improbably deduce, ‘to see you, Mr Coleman . . . Right. Take a seat, please.'

Never having worked in an office before, Pietro was surprised by how little work was actually done. He arrived at 9.15, as requested, in time for the main meeting of the day at 9.30. Most of the secretaries and staff didn't get in before ten, and regarded the first hour as dead time, given over to traffic or television post-mortems or to speculation about the surprisingly numerous office romances. Coleman had about forty employees, though shared lavatories and canteens meant that gossip could draw on the staff of the other companies as well. Lunchtime saw the doors open and a flow of mostly young women erupt like starlings from the doorway, some to the park with their lunch in hand, some to the pubs and sandwich bars in neighbouring streets. The in-house canteen was serviced by a youngish man with greasy
hair and a concentrated growth of stubble on the edges of his chin. When he bent down to pick up a catering tin of marmalade or beans from the floor, the blue-check chef's trousers sank low enough to reveal the puckered white cleft of his buttocks. His manner varied between the abusive and the merely truculent, depending on what he imagined to be the status of the customer. The sandwich fillings lay in rectangular plastic containers, illuminated by a strip light behind the glass. The mashed sardine and tuna mayonnaise glistened with a bluish sheen; the ham looked reconstructed, the winking green eyes at the joint of lean and gristle acting as rivets. On the blackboard the hot dishes of the day were abbreviated: lamb and roast pots, chilli con c, B and b pudd. The canteen, however, was the place where the best information changed hands, and experienced employees still ventured in, but bought only sealed cartons of yoghurt or thick-skinned oranges.

Pietro's office overlooked the back of an old printing works with sooted brickwork and tangled fire escapes. On a winter's afternoon it was like the view that must have met the eyes of clerks and office workers in London for a hundred years or more, from the days when the railway cuttings were first violently driven through the uprooted houses of Camden Town. He didn't mind being part of this historic pattern and he liked the way that office life made someone else responsible for all decisions. But when the twilight of November afternoons rushed in so soon after lunch and the call of schoolchildren headed for the bus reached his third-floor window, he also wondered what had happened to his independent life. He thought of the long curve of the American Atlantic coast, the clustered towers of northern Italy and regretted that he was no longer free to go there. His life had become easier; the endless effort of his earlier years, always pushing back against the limits of what he could do, seemed, through chance or through circumstance, to be over.

After a heart-stopping encounter with the lift in his first week, Pietro always took the stairs. There was an office
etiquette, he quickly discovered, about who said hello to whom. Those who doubted the legitimacy of his project and thought it might lose money, or those who thought he was too old or too senior, ignored him. The others usually said something, varying from a grunt to the full cross-examination offered by Frank in Stores. Pietro tended to nod and smile at everyone he passed on the stairs, introducing their first name if he knew it. One or two seemed to be playing a longer and trickier game. Most unpredictable was Chris Mitre, who was head of the computer department. He was a sallow man who wore tight trousers and coloured shoes. At the approach of Pietro his face would set into a sneer of distaste which no amount of nodding and smiling from Pietro could shift, until approximately every tenth encounter. Then, just when Pietro had given up and was trying to look away, Mitre would stop and greet him by his name. Once he asked him and Hannah round to his house.

The person who had refined the war of greeting to its subtlest form was Sheila, Coleman's large secretary. Her telephone manner lacked the phrases ‘I'm afraid' or ‘if you like' with which the other secretaries smoothed their conversation. She could never be surprised into smiling or civility. When she burst into an office, without knocking, to deliver a message, or when she saw someone coming down the corridor, she had clearly had time to prepare a sullen expression or stare downwards. Occasionally, however, she might be startled as the lift door opened on two smiling colleagues. But her eyes flicked on and failed to register, her mouth turned down, her broad hips brushed past before either of the others had had time to do more than check an unwanted greeting.