A Fool's Alphabet (4 page)

Raymond Russell was pleased with his son and didn't mind that Francesca wanted him to be a Catholic. His own version of Anglicanism was vague. Its central mood seemed to be one of apology. It was natural for it to defer to another brand of Christianity even if it mildly disapproved of some of its rituals. It would have been wrong and un-English for his religion to push itself forward or make its own claims. He assumed he would have his say when it came to the more material aspects of his son's education.

Soon after Pietro had learned to walk Francesca bought him a dressing gown that was several sizes too large and covered his feet from view. His tottering, erratic spurts about the room consequently looked as though they were propelled on hidden castors. He lacked concentration. When Francesca gave all her charm and skill to interest him in some highly coloured game, his eyes would glaze over and he would rush from the room to point with solemn interest at a milk bottle or a stone. When for the eighth time he ignored her warning about the steepness of the steps outside the kitchen door, she pretended to have no sympathy and told him that his bleeding lip would teach him a lesson. Then she picked him up and held him, seeing his blood on the front of her cotton shirt. For a moment he stopped wailing, but it was only so he could fill his lungs for a still greater effort. Francesca tried to believe that the lapse between the inhalation of breath and the final expulsion of the sob was not a true indicator of his distress.

The lightening of his solipsistic world came like a long-awaited dawn on a dark sea. First there was his evident love for his mother. Then there came a grudging but appreciable change of outlook in his other attitudes. He managed to listen to whole sentences uttered by his parents without tossing his head in impatience or frank disbelief. He formed an unprompted friendship with a surly boxer puppy that his
father had bought from a local farmer. He took a fierce interest in the lives of various animal characters in the comic strips his mother read to him. At last, when some large-eyed bear was separated from its family, Pietro shed his first tears on behalf of another.

Francesca was relieved by the evidence of altruism. There had been moments in the long night of his infancy when she wondered if her son would ever look beyond the immediate desires of his body. Now she felt ashamed of such doubts. She wasn't yet ready to proclaim him a genius or a saint, but she was content that he would be a good boy, like his father, and like her own father back in Rome.

The pain of Pietro's birth, however, had not been merely the price of motherhood. There were minor abnormalities in Francesca which persuaded the doctor to refer her to a specialist who in turn told her that she should not consider having other children for the time being. He said she should come and see him at intervals and he would tell her when it was safe for her to begin again. Russell was more disappointed than his wife by the news. He saw himself as the head of a family of three or four children at least.

Francesca herself, brought up in the idea of large and extended families, felt the strangeness of her intimacy with Pietro. With no one else in the house, he was her friend and the recipient of her confidences. When she taught him to speak she felt as though she were entering a private conspiracy with him. She taught him Italian words as well as English. When something upset or worried her she told him about it, even though she knew he could barely understand the words and would have no conception of the feelings. Gradually he became more interested in what she said. Most of his utterances were demands for information, for the names of animals and objects. He always wanted to know what things were for. There came the day, however, when he asked his first personal questions of her; when he wanted to know about some aspect of her life.

The days passed in a long helpless slide as the boy was two
or three or five years old. A new quality began to grow in him. It started with the way in which he mouthed the words he spoke. The first time he uttered a new word it was with a gentle awe that made it sound unspoken until that moment, as though his child's palate had just minted it. But it was not just the inexperience of the very young; although he was stern towards himself and others, there was also some gentleness in him, which showed in the way he spoke to animals or the puzzled manner in which he would hold a flower up for his mother's inspection and then put it back in its vase. He seemed impressed by the natural world, pointing in wordless wonder to the trees and hills near where they lived. There was often alarm in his voice when he first noticed something, particularly a new place, but he could be reassured by Francesca and would then become protective towards the thing he had seen. She thought of this gentleness as in some way connected to his Italian side. She told him he had her father's eyes and thought they were in some way the witness of his inheritance.

Though she was still almost a girl herself, Francesca felt the weight of adulthood when she looked at the unprotected innocence of the boy. It made her frightened when she thought of the masculinity he would rapidly and eagerly acquire. Then he would be taken away from her. Even in his innocence, which was really neither boy's nor girl's, only human, she was aware of the pattern of manhood waiting to emerge. When they talked and played together, Francesca felt strange in the protective role of her femininity towards his childish maleness. She held him in her arms and prayed, one thing: that her son would not, like her brother, die in war.

Raymond Russell hired a woman from the village to come and help his wife with the house. Mrs Graham was a large, uncompromising person who was used to being obeyed. She introduced a routine which had previously been lacking. Until then Francesca's start to the day had been three cups of coffee and a hurried breakfast with her husband before going to the garden gate and waving as his grey Humber
Hawk disappeared from view. Then she went to play the gramophone or the radio, tucked her hair up into a scarf and zipped round the house with a duster. There was no pattern or purpose to her cleaning until Mrs Graham insisted on doing different rooms properly on selected days.

Pietro by this time was at school, where he was frustrated by his inability to do things. He could see in his mind the pictures he wanted to paint and was disappointed by the blotches he produced on the paper. Once he poured the coloured water in his jam jar over the girl sitting next to him. The headmistress of the school said he was not a naughty boy but that he needed bringing out of himself. Francesca used to go to collect him before lunch and put him on a seat on the back of her bicycle. He told her there were Red Indians following them.

Francesca Russell loved her son and she loved her husband. He wasn't an exciting or romantic man and, though she was undemanding, even Francesca noticed that he had an aversion to parting with money. He also, however, had an extreme modesty of aspiration. He had twice rejected the offer of further promotion in the army; he was grateful to have come through the war alive. To have married such a woman and to be a father was as much as he asked. Once a colleague at work hinted that he was a lucky devil to have a glamorous young Italian wife. Russell didn't know how to respond. His admiration of Francesca was at odds with his belief that nothing he himself had won or achieved could be worth having. He looked flustered and confused, and none of his colleagues raised the subject again.

When her husband had gone to work Francesca sometimes used to turn on the radio in the sitting room. She listened to
Housewives' Choice
or any programme that played tuneful music. When Pietro was very small she sometimes danced with him, going down on her knees so she was on the same level. When the music stopped she would speak to him, her cheeks a little pink from the exertion, her breath hot on his face.

He liked this moment in particular, and it came to be one of his first clear memories. Her breath sometimes had a faint residual smell of roast coffee, sometimes of violets, but usually it was just warm air which he felt was all the better for having come from inside her. When she talked to him she would hold the front of his shirt in her hands and then bring her wrists together so he would be trussed. There was no reason he could ever see for his mother doing this, but it was a good sign in her, like the way she made him lift up his arms when she belted him into his macintosh.

Although Pietro felt a fierce attachment to his parents and the place in which he lived, he always kept in his mind the possibility of Italy as a long-term destination. Encouraged by stories his mother told him, he had visions of a village by the sea where he would one day arrive and be happy. His Italy was a figment of his mother's imagination. Pietro, who had no means of verifying what she told him, imagined a large country where the sun always shone, even though it was never too hot. People did very little work and he had an idea that they sang to each other instead of speaking. Everyone, he believed, drove a Maserati. In a geography lesson at school they had been given blank maps of the world and asked to name the countries they knew. Pietro wrote ‘Italy' diagonally across the continent of Africa because it looked the largest, most central and best shaped country. He was at first incredulous when told that Italy was only the jagged afterthought on the rim of Europe.

He loved the shapes of countries on the school globe and joined in the loud competitions to name the capitals. The relative sizes were perplexing. Britain seemed shamefully small compared to Africa or South America, to say nothing of Russia, which stretched on and on over the top of the world. But what happened there? You never seemed to hear of anything. Presumably boys like him went to school in these funny places and learned the same things. He could not help feeling a bit sorry for them, as though they had missed out on something. He tried to imagine what it would
be like if he had been born in Egypt or Uruguay or Australia. Then his father would be an Egyptian. And his mother . . . It was not possible to imagine this, because obviously he would be a different person if he had been born somewhere else. This seemed to him an important thing to understand.

Now that he was at a school with proper lessons he saw less of his mother. He turned his eye cautiously on his fellow pupils. Most of the lessons were organised as competitions, with the winners announced and given paper stars to stick against their names on the notice board. Pietro at once joined in, certain he could master this game by determination. His tongue stuck vertically from the corner of his mouth as he covered his exercise books in heavy black pencil. When he gave in his work he at last allowed his eyebrows to relax and resume their normal shape. He sat back, waiting for his due reward, and couldn't believe it when his name appeared towards the bottom of the class. He redoubled his concentration, but found that effort was no substitute for ability.

Once a year the school had a football match against a rival school ten miles further along the edge of the Downs. Although Pietro's school taught thrift and modesty it made an exception for the match. The chosen eleven boys were given coloured shirts with numbers, which they were allowed to keep. After the game the teams had a cooked tea which had become the subject of myth over the years. The boys competed through the winter for the honour of being chosen. Pietro practised with his friend Stephen Brown after school, kicking a football backwards and forwards, bouncing it off the wall at the back of the playground. They were too small for selection in the first year but had hopes for the second.

Pietro's parents also liked the area in which they had chosen to live. His father was pleased by its remoteness and by the fact that he had managed to buy the house for a reasonable price. Francesca was so absorbed in her son and in the world of her imagination that she barely noticed where she was. Sometimes she looked at the grey, stripped hill
through the fading light of a December afternoon and felt an ache in her muscles for the sun of Italy, but her temperament was so naturally high-spirited that she felt no real discontent. They made some friends in the district, though seeing them was always a planned and formal operation. There were cocktail parties where men, unsure of American fashion, made potent mixtures in chromium shakers, and women became light-headed and flirtatious. At one party Francesca was present in the kitchen when the host took a bottle of gin, drank a couple of inches straight from it, filled it up with grapefruit juice, shook it and served the result over small cubes of ice. Two people were sick in the garden.

One day when Pietro was on his school holidays Francesca suggested that in the afternoon they go for a walk to the old barn. They had macaroni cheese for lunch and Pietro looked at his mother suspiciously, wondering why she had not only given him his favourite food but was then taking him to the place he liked best.

Pietro stood outside the house watching his breath make trails in the air while Francesca went to fetch Rusty, the dog. The first time he had noticed the hot clouds people made with their mouths was when his mother had sung to him. They had been walking and he was complaining of being tired. She told him to carry on, because it was good for him. When he was almost asleep on his feet she took his hand and burst out laughing: ‘Your little hand's so cold.' When she realised what she had said, she laughed some more and began to sing, ‘Your little hand is frozen'. She had picked him up and carried him and he could feel the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. He thought the vapour clouds that trailed from her lips were something to do with singing.

He was too big to be carried now, though he hadn't lost his dislike of walking. The road up from the village was the road of all his childhood. There were houses at first, then only trees and fields. The trees were bareish and dark with angular branches. The earth was turned and often muddy. The colours were grey and watery green. At the top of the
road was a path through the wood which was so waterlogged that Pietro could sink deep enough to let the water in over the top of his boots.