A Fool's Alphabet (33 page)

‘No. Where was that?'

‘I'm not sure. It was somewhere hot. I suppose it must have been that time we went to Ibiza. It was quite late in the evening and I brought the subject up. The conversation didn't last long. I was only about sixteen and I remember feeling shocked. I thought that when you were grown up you
suddenly became calm and magisterial and well balanced. Something you said made me realise this wasn't so. I could see you felt the same raw, childlike emotions I did. It was depressing.'

‘I don't remember. I expect you're right, though. I don't think people ever grow up in the way you've described.'

Pietro cleared the tea things away into the kitchen. He felt saddened by what his father had said, but relieved that in some way he had confided in him. When he got back into the sitting room he found his father examining the bookshelves.

‘Did you ever get the full set of that encyclopaedia or whatever it was?' he said. ‘You know, the one you were always chasing after?'

‘The dictionary. Yes, I advertised in a magazine and I got a reply from someone in Edinburgh. The trouble was that most people only wanted to get rid of a whole set. It was a tricky way of going about it, getting one volume at a time.'

‘But now you've got the lot?'

‘Oh yes, I got “V to Z” years ago. I'm all set up now.'

Raymond Russell sat back in his chair again by the fire with the book he had taken from the shelf and gave a long, rattling cough.

Pietro had met Hannah at an age when it was already impossible for them to catch up on all the details of each other's past lives. One of the first things he had done with Laura, when they were both twenty-two, was to exchange information about everything they had done, everywhere they had been before they met, so from then on it was like growing up together. Pietro had had a good memory for years and seasons, but by the time Hannah burst into the upstairs room of the flat in Ghent he had already begun to lose it. At the age of forty he quite enjoyed the sensation that there were pockets of his past that he could keep private. He wished he had forgotten less, but there were still incidents and people who arrived for no reason in his mind and brought memories
that gave him pleasure. Hannah's understanding of his past life therefore came in small packages, in stories and episodes he described; there were long periods and short interludes that had never come to light.

He had been reluctant to tell her about what had happened in Quezaltenango and afterwards, feeling that it represented some sort of self-indulgence of which he was not proud.

However, she seemed to guess. When Pietro's father died there had been an awkward party after the cremation at which friends, relatives and a few of Mr Russell's former colleagues came to drink wine and eat sausage rolls. Back in London Pietro cried for his father.

‘He was a very kind man,' he said to Hannah as he sat on the sofa. ‘He was very good to me all my life and I owe him a great debt for his tolerance.'

What he said struck Hannah as formal and reserved. She pressed Pietro on his feelings, but it seemed he had nothing to add. Under her gentle questioning, however, he did reveal a little more of earlier episodes. Unsettled by his grief, he was more expansive than usual.

‘And what did this Doctor Simon say?'

‘Nothing. She never said anything.'

‘But did you find out what the matter was?'

‘Not really. I think I couldn't understand why anyone should love me. I had a peculiar idea of what constituted a nice person and of what other people expected.'

‘You didn't think you were worth loving?'

‘No. I just wished I had been more attractive. I wished I had been nicer.'

Hannah flushed. ‘Life is not about being nice!'

‘No, but –'

‘It's about negotiating your peace with the world, on whatever terms you can.'

‘Darling!'

‘I'm serious,' said Hannah.

‘I know. I know you are. But I was young. I also felt that the trouble I was having made me even more unworthy. It's
like the way shyness is said to be a kind of pride. This turbulence, these symptoms seemed to me like an extreme form of self-regard.'

‘And therefore a mortal sin?'

‘Maybe.'

‘Anyway,' said Hannah. ‘You no longer feel this? You can see how you could be lovable now?'

‘Oh yes. Not because I think I'm worthy or unusual, but because I now see that one can be lovable anyway, that it's not these things that decide it.'

Hannah still seemed a little on her dignity.

‘And what about you, my love?' said Pietro. ‘Could anyone love you?'

Hannah crossed the room to light the fire, bending down on her long, elegant legs. Her head was turned away from Pietro, the hair cut boyishly short, her slightly round, humorous face bent over the matches. There was a bump as the gas caught the flame and began to flicker round the counterfeit coals.

‘Perhaps,' she said, standing quite upright in front of the fireplace. ‘I don't really mind. If two people love each other then one must be the more dependent, the more giving. I don't mind if that one is me, only that you should not take advantage of it.'

ON HIS WAY
to Norwich, just before the Suffolk village of Yoxford, or thereabouts, Pietro drove past a sign for Satis House. He wondered if this was the original of Miss Havisham's dusty mansion, now restored or perhaps reinvented, complete with cobwebbed wedding cake, as a Dickens museum. Round the next corner, at the gateway to the drive was a sign reading ‘Satis House Malaysian Restaurant'. He didn't pause to look, but as he drove on began to think idly about the book. The marshes and their convict hulks: backdrops to scenes that had lived static and unchanged in his mind like shapes in a night landscape that are momentarily revealed by lightning. Essex, Suffolk . . . this was not country he knew well, but hadn't the passages about the sea in
David Copperfield
been set in Yarmouth? Presumably the place where David had lived as a boy could not have been far from here if he was able to take the stagecoach up to the Peggottys' boat on the sands.

Finding his interest quicken, he followed a signpost for Southwold, the town his AA road map suggested would be large enough to have a bookshop. He passed a newsagent and stopped the car to buy a paper (‘Soviet Union to cease existence'), which he tucked under his arm. The assistant directed him to a shop halfway up the main street on the left where he found what he wanted. It was a fat modern paperback, edited with notes for students. On the second page of the text it announced clearly: ‘I was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or “there by” as they say in
Scotland.' After the word ‘Blunderstone' was a small number 2, indicating a note. The editor disclosed that Dickens had written to a friend: ‘I saw the name “Blunderstone” on a direction-post between it and Yarmouth, and took it from the said direction-post for the book.' The note added: ‘Dickens was immensely careful in his use of names, whether for people or for places', and went on to give examples.

Pietro could not find a Blunderstone on his map, though just north of Lowestoft, on the road to Yarmouth, there was a Blundeston. It seemed too close to be a coincidence. Yet if this was the right place, why had the notes, which insisted on Dickens's precision, made no reference to the fact that he, or perhaps subsequent local authorities, had changed the village's name?

As he emerged from the clotted one-way system of Lowestoft, he saw a sign for Blundeston, and, after a mile or so of flat green fields, he found himself outside a large prison. He turned the car round and headed towards a group of houses. There was a curiously shaped church, lumpish and off-centre, with a circular Saxon tower.

The ridiculous nature of his search suddenly struck him. How was he to establish whether or not this was the village in which a fictional character was supposed to have lived? He pulled up by a low brick building – a sheep shelter, perhaps – sited on a grassy triangle at the crossroads, and walked over to the church. To his surprise he found a notice in the porch that said this was the church used by Dickens in his book; postcards and souvenirs could be obtained from the bungalow next door.

Armed with a green souvenir towel he walked down the lane to the house identified by the bungalow owner as the Rookery in the book, now called the Old Rectory. It was set back from the road. Fixed to the gate was a metal plaque with the words ‘I live here' above a picture of an Alsatian. Another notice said, ‘Please shut the gate'. He could see a caravan and some beehives next to an outhouse. There was a slight smell, even outside, of cats.

And yet the house was the Rookery, without any doubt. It was perfect in shape and size, in its position on the flat fields, with Mrs Copperfield's bedroom at the front and the boy's overlooking the churchyard where first his father, then his mother had been buried. For minutes he stood gazing at the front door, picturing the child being taught to read by Peggotty, his nurse, and then the interruption of his contented life by the arrival of the Murdstones.

In this house had been played out the scenes that had lived in his own mind as both the most peculiar yet most representative of childhood, with its passions and bereavements that are never surpassed by adult grief. Although he had not read the book until he was thirty, what had happened here was as real as anything that had happened to him.

The wind was blowing a thin drizzle from the fields that led down to the prison. Pietro returned to his car and began to move off. His eye was caught by a pub called the Plough, a white-washed coaching inn with leaded lights in black-framed windows. A notice told him that ‘Barkis (the carrier) . . . started from here'. And then a little down the road was the hedgerow from which Peggotty had erupted with a parcel for the boy as he was taken off in the stagecoach, away from here, to a distant place.

What uneasy feelings he must have had towards the village and the house. Imprisoned by Murdstone, who had by then married and impregnated his mother, yet anxious to return when banished on Barkis's coach to an unknown destination. His mother had stood and waved goodbye to him, the new baby in her arms the final proof to David of how she had been violated and he had been supplanted. Perhaps it was not to a place that he wished to return, but to a time.

In his car, Pietro was free, pressing the accelerator and moving away between the hedgerows back to the Yarmouth Road. Freedom of movement was the blessing he had. You could not revisit the past, but as an adult you could drive away from the present.

Twice in the previous six months he had come close to trouble. At a party given by his parents-in-law in Antwerp to mark their fortieth wedding anniversary, he had found himself in conversation with a widow of about forty-five. Though not really, not now, much older than he was, she had seemed in her propriety to belong to a different generation; she spoke to him as though he were a boy who had just left school. She had blonde hair held back off her face with brown combs, and eyes which had a competent, friendly sparkle. He was told that she was an inspired cook and immaculate housekeeper. She wore a tight-fitting and shiny blue dress that sent confusing signals. All the women had spent time and money on their clothes; the party seemed to have a much greater significance to these normally sober people than a similar function would have had in London. Yet this woman's manner suggested something more than social
joie de vivre
.

Hannah had become absorbed in hostly duties; the children were asleep at a neighbour's house: alone and on foreign soil, Pietro found himself slipping into some old, instinctive pattern of behaviour. When the woman invited him upstairs to view the painting she had given Hannah's parents as a present, he followed eagerly, feeling not guilt or furtiveness, but something more like bravado. Her seduction, attempted in a spare room where the coats were piled on the bed, was disarmingly direct. It did not speak of loneliness or a need to be loved; it was a frank invitation to sex, so free of all the complicating factors that had helped to keep him faithful that Pietro would have found it impossible to resist, had it not been for the sound of footsteps running up the stairs. In the preliminary grappling, her tight blue dress had ridden up, and now she had to slide it down quickly, which caused it to catch on her white underwear, a momentary indignity which seemed to linger on into the embarrassment of neutral conversation and false friendliness that followed the entry of the third guest, a fat Dutch psychologist who had come looking for his coat.

The other problem had been less dramatic, but had troubled him for longer. He had developed an interest, which now threatened to become an obsession, in a young woman he had met at the photographic laboratory in Waterloo. She had dark hair that curled inward at her shoulder, where it brushed her white coat. She smiled when she saw him, an uncertain and ambiguous expression that intrigued him. His conversation with her ran on predictable lines. He asked her about her work, commented on the weather, and she replied in a slightly timid voice. Once they went to lunch in an Italian restaurant nearby. Though she was not exactly evasive, he found out little about her. When they returned to the laboratory there was a powerful charge in the air between them. As he eventually picked up his coat to leave, she looked up from the darkroom with a stricken expression.

Stephanie, her name turned out to be. There were more lunches, conversations, drinks after work. Her father had been a railway signalman. She had been brought up in Clapham. She had two brothers and both her parents were dead. She loved dancing and American pop music, though she admitted to this sheepishly, as though worried about his response. Beneath her white coat she turned out to be a dramatically fashionable dresser. She told him about the things she wore – who had designed them or whose clothes she wished she could afford. She asked him about photography, about lenses and subjects and light. He explained some of the techniques he used to get the right texture in his prints.