A Fool's Alphabet (6 page)

He took breakfast beneath a roughly constructed porch by the pool. By daylight he could see the broken tiles on the inner roofs and the rough masonry of the hotel walls. He also saw a rat which was the size of a small dog. It was strolling along the flowerbed beyond the pool. A waiter told him not to worry. ‘Is bandicoot, sir. Friend to man.' It was hard to see how a giant rat could be friend to man, but Pietro trusted the local knowledge. The boiled egg he had ordered arrived after forty-five minutes, and he ate it with a wary eye on the flowerbed.

Later that morning he drove up into the hills in a Japanese car he had hired in Colombo. As the road snaked through the tea plantations small children tried to sell him flowers. While the car took the gradual ascent round the edge of the hill the children ran up the escarpment and were ready at
the next corner. Finally he stopped and took the photograph of a small girl. She handed him a ready-written piece of paper with her name and address on it. He promised to send her a print.

The man he was due to meet lived in an old plantation house near Kandy. It had a veranda with wickerwork chairs and a gloomy sitting room in which an electric fan, suspended from the ceiling, turned with an unoiled click at each grudging rotation.

Mr de Silva was a small, bald man in his fifties with a round face and tortoiseshell glasses.

‘Will you take beer?' he asked Pietro.

‘Thank you.' Pietro stretched out his legs on the veranda and clasped the beer bottle. It was marginally below room temperature. Mr de Silva filled his own glass with gin and water.

Pietro explained that he had come to take pictures to accompany a newspaper article. Mr de Silva knew this; the journalist had already done the interview, which was to form part of a series on new politicians of the Third World. Pietro said he would like to take some shots that would show his subject looking urgent, or wise, or leaderly.

Mr de Silva nodded. ‘Tell me about this newspaper. Is it as good as the old
Times
? By God, that was a paper. The “Thunderer”. I used to read it for the law reports.'

It turned out that Mr de Silva had once been a barrister in London. He asked Pietro for news of his contemporaries, many of whom were now judges. He was on first-name terms with most of the law lords.

‘And Simpson's in the Strand. You could have a good blow-out there. Not that I could often afford it in those days.'

Pietro brought him up to date with Lyons Corner Houses, the Boat Race, various West End theatres, and, so far as he could, the results of the county cricket competition. He asked him about Sri Lankan politics.

Mr de Silva grinned, his jaw falling to reveal discoloured teeth. ‘It's not an occupation for a gentleman. I like to think
I've done my bit, but I only do it from a sense of duty. I am what W. B. Yeats called “a smiling public man”. I don't think your journalist chappie really understood that. It isn't like Westminster, you know.'

Pietro fiddled with some film and a light meter. ‘We'll be having lunch in a minute,' said Mr de Silva. ‘Leave your box of tricks over there till later.'

A woman servant placed various dishes on the table beneath the electric fan. Mr de Silva drank another gin and water and smoked a thin cigar. Towards the end of lunch he became confidential.

‘I loved that country, you know. To me it was wonderful to have travelled from the other side of the world and taken dinner in the Inns of Court. I felt sorry for my compatriots who were resentful. Eventually I had to return because I thought it was my duty. I think a part of me is still there, though. Just by St Paul's, where David Copperfield worked in Doctor's Commons. No, not there. I left my heart in the Middle Temple garden.' He laughed. ‘That's a pretty rum thing to say, isn't it?' He spooned some boiled rice and vegetable curry on to his plate as he spoke.

Pietro smiled. He watched the drip of condensation run down the side of the beer bottle and listened to the grinding of the fan.

He said, ‘Do you feel in some way bound or restricted by England and its culture?'

‘Not bound. Enriched.'

‘Don't you feel that it stopped you developing and enjoying the culture of your own people?'

Mr de Silva laughed. ‘Our civilisation is connected with yours. It is not subservient. This is a matter of history and there is no point in denying it. I don't feel my people are diminished by this. What is remarkable really is how little has changed in this island. When you look at us here, do you think to yourself: this is just like Guildford? Or Sheffield?'

Pietro smiled. ‘Of course not. But you speak very good English and –'

‘I was a barrister!'

‘I know. But everyone does, that's what I mean. No one in England speaks Sinhalese. I just feel how odd it is, when it could so easily have been the other way around. Suppose Sri Lanka, or Ceylon, had first stumbled on the steam engine, had built up its navy, had done the half-dozen things that were necessary. Then I might just as well have been brought up speaking Sinhalese as well as English.'

‘Exactly!' Mr de Silva laughed. ‘Now you've got it. It's a matter of chance. Pure chance. But there is also choice involved. We have chosen to keep and adapt certain things we learned from the British, but the choice was freely made. In some ways we should have kept more.'

‘And why did you come back?'

‘I told you. Because this is where I am from.'

After lunch Pietro took the photographs of Mr de Silva seated at his desk, apparently examining the economic problems of Sri Lanka. When the photographs were later developed he noticed that the shelf behind contained a complete set of Wisden's cricket almanac.

Before Pietro left, Mr de Silva told him about the Tamil people and their difficulties with the Sinhalese. ‘Who the bloody hell do we think we are?' he said. ‘Who are we but people who came from India some thousands of years ago? Nobody can deny you the right to live where you choose. It's better if it's the same place as your ancestors, but sometimes history isn't kind and people can't be too damn choosy. As long as you don't forget your manners you should be made welcome.'

When Pietro said goodbye he took various messages of good will, including one to the Lord Chief Justice. ‘It's not impossible,' said Pietro. ‘I might have to take a picture of him one day.' They shook hands and surveyed the tropical fertility that tumbled away from the edge of Mr de Silva's garden. ‘It is the most beautiful island on earth,' said Mr de Silva, answering the question Pietro had been asking himself. ‘If only it had the Inns of Court!' They both laughed as Pietro
loaded his camera bag into the back of the car. On the way back he took two films of pictures trying to capture something of the landscape.

The following night he sat by the pool in Colombo, drinking a glass of arrack, the local spirit, diluted with Coca-Cola. Mr de Silva had seemed to him to be the prisoner of another country's culture. ‘Prisoner' was perhaps the wrong word for a man who seemed so happy in his condition. A willing captive, perhaps; or some other more colloquial phrase which Mr de Silva himself would have been able to produce. Even in de Silva's historical contentment there was a trace of sadness, Pietro thought. A man cannot have everything.

It was very late when a porter on his routine round shone his torch about the edges of the courtyard. Pietro, who was gazing up at the hot stars, asked him about the bandicoot and the man settled down to explain the habits of the creature and in what way, precisely, such a beast could be considered ‘friend to man'. They drank some whisky that Pietro fetched from his room, and the local man went into detail about the eating habits of the bandicoot's close relation, something which was apparently called a ‘hotampoor'. He, it appeared from the porter's excited narrative, was a redneck country cousin of the bandicoot. He lived off eggs and chickens and made a nuisance of himself to farmers and smallholders. The streetwise bandicoot, by contrast, lived only in the city where he liked nothing more than killing snakes. But more than this, his particularly prized meal was the one poisonous snake in Sri Lanka. They drank a toast to the bandicoot, truly friend to man, then refilled their glasses, the porter because he had seldom tasted whisky before. Pietro because he was anxious about lying down to sleep.

RAYMOND RUSSELL'S FLAT
was in a mansion block off Baker Street. It had large, elegant rooms kept at a stifling temperature by the furnace in the basement of the block. None of the apartments had their own heating controls, and the previous tenants, a thin-blooded old couple, had sealed the windows in the sitting room. There were long corridors with mauve carpets leading from the front door. The proportions stifled noise. Laughter was swallowed in the vacuum of the airless spaces and silence could never be driven back more than an inch or two before it seeped in again like the warmed air from the boiling radiators behind the curtains.

Russell had been transferred, at his own request, by the Civil Service. His steady record and occasional ability to solve problems that had perplexed his superiors had been appreciated. In the evenings he had begun to cultivate a new hobby. A planning application he had been supervising in Swindon turned on the addition to a listed building of something the owner described as a penthouse. Russell was familiar with the word only from American films and, like the rest of his department, was unclear exactly what it was. According to the applicant, a penthouse was another name for a top floor, usually with a good view and a built-in cocktail bar. Some discussion followed, and Russell called in at the library on the way back from work and looked the word up in the full Oxford English Dictionary. He was surprised and oddly interested to see that it had nothing to do with houses – or pents, for that matter – at all. It was a corruption of the French
word
appentis
, from the Latin
appendicium
, meaning an appendage. At the next meeting of the committee he told them this and asked if it didn't shed a new light on the application. The feeling of the meeting was that it didn't, but Russell's interest was kindled. He bought a couple of secondhand books on the subject of etymology and put an advertisement in the local paper asking if anyone wanted to sell a complete second-hand set of the twelve-volume Oxford English Dictionary. He had no replies, so set about tracking it down bit by bit at jumble sales and auctions. After five years and various forays in his car, sometimes as far away as Nottingham, he had all the volumes except ‘V to Z'.

Studying them brought a slight but noticeable change to Raymond Russell. He became briefer, even briefer, in his speech. If he knew the root of a word and used it in a way that was close to that root, he thought he had expressed himself unimprovably. It didn't matter if no one else was aware of that meaning or if it wasn't the most current one; Russell went for the oldest and purest instance in the book. ‘I've got this chronic pain in my leg where this boy kicked me during the match yesterday,' complained Pietro. ‘If you received the injury yesterday, it can't be chronic,' said his father, not with spite or irritation, but with calm satisfaction as he seemed to feel the word and its true meaning fall upon each other like blissfully congruent triangles. ‘What?' said Pietro.

Raymond Russell frequently tried to interest Pietro in his hobbies because Pietro seemed to have none of his own. The boy seemed withdrawn, and his father could not think what else to talk to him about.

He came back one day from a disappointing search in the Charing Cross Road for the missing volume of the dictionary.

‘I think I shall have to advertise again,' he told Pietro, as he hung up his coat in the hall.

‘Why is this one so important?'

‘Because it's the one I haven't got. Once I've got “V to Z” I'll have the whole set.'

Pietro followed his father into the sitting room. He seemed
to make an effort to carry on the conversation, as though for his father's sake. ‘Do you think it's rarer than the others because it's near the end of the alphabet and fewer people bought it?'

‘It doesn't matter where it comes in the alphabet. I won't be fixed up until I've got it.'

Pietro said, ‘Is it towards the end of the alphabet because it's less important?'

‘No. The order of the letters is just random. It could equally start RJN, I suppose.'

‘And who decided the order?'

‘I don't know,' said Raymond Russell, delighted with Pietro's apparent interest. ‘But do you remember learning your ABC at school?' Pietro nodded. ‘I can still remember the day I mastered it at the village school,' his father went on. ‘I went through all the pictures on the wall from apple to zebra and the teacher said to me, “Now you've got the whole world at your feet.”'

Pietro was staring out of the window. His father was not sure if he was listening. He said cheerily, ‘Do you know the Fool's Alphabet?'

‘What's that?'

‘A for 'orses, B for mutton, C for yourself, D for dumb, E for brick, F for vescence, G for police, H for 'imself, I for Novello, J for oranges, K for restaurant, L for leather, M for sis, N for a penny, O for the wings of a dove, P for comfort, Q for a ticket, R for mo, S for Williams, T for two, U for me, V for la France, W for money, X for breakfast, Y for mistr – er, husband, Z for breezes.'

Pietro smiled. ‘It's good. But why is it the
fool
's alphabet? It sounds quite clever to me.'

‘It's just a phrase,' said his father. ‘It's called that because it's funny, not because it's stupid. It's like saying the Beginner's Alphabet, or One Man's Alphabet. Anyone can have his own version.'

‘I see,' said Pietro, and resumed his long stare from the window.

‘When we were in North Africa during the war, a chap in my platoon called Padgett, who'd never been out of Yorkshire before, he noticed what funny names the places had. He said he wanted to spend a night in a place beginning with every letter of the alphabet before he died.'