A Fool's Alphabet (7 page)

‘And did he?'

‘I shouldn't think so. There weren't many XYZs in Yorkshire.'

Before the move to London there had been a period in which Raymond Russell wanted Pietro to go to boarding school. With the money from an uncle's legacy he thought he could afford the fees and he had investigated some possible places. He drove Pietro to Dorking, near which was a place whose soft, bucolic name – Brockwood, as it turned out, though it might have been Greenglades, Mossbank or something equally misleading – gave no hint of the crazed routine and discipline behind its ivied walls. Pietro watched his father depart, then sat in his cubicle until it was time for bed.

In the morning an adolescent boy with a quavering voice called out the passing of each minute to wake the others. Twelve past, thirteen past, fourteen past. Breakfast was at seven-thirty, served from a battered trough by a paroled lunatic with shaking hands. New boys scrubbed the tables, the cookers, the floors, and anything else that was greasy. There was PT in white vests with a retired but still vigorous sergeant major. The showers that followed were cold through some official negligence. The books were old and scribbled over. Latin primers had failed to inspire pupils to anything more than drawing phallic diagrams in the margin. The brittle measure of the first declension, the moody grandeur of the subjunctive slumbered on for ever undiscovered by generations of Brockwood boys. Small pieces of chalk, flicked by muscular men with hairy ears, came through the air like tracer fire. By the end of trigonometry, the rows of desks were dug in like a front-line trench at Ypres. The boys, with bulging thighs pressed into grey shorts, took interest only in
bodily functions, their dug-out world deep beneath a cloud of fart and morning breath, their talk of dicks and spots and spunk. Plastic dustbins with sliced loaves of white bread and margarine were manhandled up to the dormitories at mid-morning by the new boys. Six or eight slices went down each adolescent throat. Then came the scrubbing of the tables, removal of margarine from walls and floors by cold water and an unaired cloth that left more stench than it removed. Back in class was the tedium of physics which spawned competitions to see who could hold his breath longest. Light-headed and purple in the face, the boys staggered on to chemistry and the slim chance of making someone suck sulphuric acid through a pipette. There was a constant anguish at having failed to do the prep properly and of dreading the tests, which were incomprehensible. No boy dared ask the chemistry master, a Scottish cruiserweight with homoerotic leanings, to explain his indecipherable marks on the blackboard for fear of exciting his wrath, or worse. Lunch and the waiting at table, carrying the food from the metal troughs up to the senior boys, serving the whole table in turn, left no time for a new boy to eat, even if he could have stomached it. Then there was rugby and the twitch of the knotted string of the referee's whistle about the back of mottled thighs. The showers this time were optional, though still cold, and the afternoon dispatch of bread and margarine could be improved by chocolate or ice cream from the food shop. The shop, like everything else, had a name, coined with affection by some Victorian patriarch but used now in unthinking tradition. No boy would have found the name outdated. No boy had a view on anything.

Every morning was the struggle with books, each lesson requiring perhaps four or five, so that the boys walked invisible down the colonnades behind piles of textbooks and bursting briefcases lifted with both hands. It was good training for the runs, which culminated in a school race, six miles up and down hills, over the rifle ranges, through woods and, when their legs were buckling, across a broad lake and uphill
to the finishing line. The white-haired head of history liked to show how easy the course was by running it without a vest before breakfast. He could be seen one morning jogging up the front drive with shards of ice clinging to the snowy hair of his chest, and blood running down his abdomen where he had forged through the lake's ice.

Pietro had no idea what it was all about. At first he tried to like the place. He imagined what kind of man had first thought of the quaint names for things. Where had it all gone wrong? He saw that the older boys were bent only on self-preservation. He copied them and said nothing unless he was spoken to; he gave up trying to puzzle out the philosophy of the school and kept his thoughts to himself. The good thing was that he never had time on his own. Only briefly at night on the hard iron bedstead, which he grew used to after a time, did he think about the changes in his life. But he was too tired to stay awake for long. The evening drill of supervised work, some more chores for the younger boys and the humping of the final dustbin-load of bread and margarine left him exhausted.

The school, oddly enough, was expensive and enjoyed a high reputation. Parents in the Dorking district spoke well of it, without really enquiring what went on there. The boys never described it to them and, in any case, would have had little with which to compare it. An unplanned conspiracy of ignorance thus kept the school's reputation intact, and allowed the Dorking parents to say things like, ‘It's not as smart as one of the famous public schools, of course, but it's jolly good in its way'; or, ‘They teach them to stand on their own two feet'.

When they went for runs in the surrounding district, Pietro looked with pity at the houses there. He wondered why any normal person would want to live near such a place; he felt sorry for the children whose lives were darkened by their parents' inexplicable decision to live in the shadow of the institution. Later in his life he drove through the leafy roads
of Colney Hatch and spent a day in the pleasant little town of Verdun. They were decent places in their way, but you wouldn't want to live near somewhere so blighted by association.

At the start of each term he would watch the boys arrive in old cars driven by their parents. They emerged from the Surrey woods, the sandy soil still on the wheels of their shooting-brakes. The women wore a cowed, defeated look, the fathers seemed embarrassed as they shook hands with their sons. The cars withdrew in procession through lines of rhododendrons and took slowly to the roads, through long forests of conifers and patches of land wired off by the Ministry of Defence. Then they dispersed, each to its minor road, which took it past numerous golf courses, through the occasional village with an unpatronised pub, then down the final sodden lanes with laurels and dripping evergreens back to an unheated house and the welcome of an ageing Labrador.

Take me away from this, Pietro prayed, as he once more fell back silently into the prescribed routine. Take me back to London, take me to Italy, but take me away from Dorking. He was sure his mother wouldn't have wanted him to be in such a place. The trouble was, she had never expressed an opinion. If only he had known how ill she was, he could have got her to tell his father what she wanted for him. When his father said, ‘Your mother's going into hospital again,' he thought it would be like the first time and she would be back in a few days' time. When he had been taken to see her after a week he thought it was odd how hard she hugged him when he left. He quickly rubbed the memory from his mind as he left the hospital, and turned his thoughts to the football game he would be playing that afternoon. Then a few days later he was taken to see her again and he thought she looked peculiar, rather yellow in the face. At the age of twelve he didn't often notice these things, or attach much importance to them: he could never understand how his mother was always saying to his father, ‘You look very well', or ‘You look awfully tired', when the old man always looked the same.

Then she was discharged from hospital anyway, so he assumed she was better. She spent the time in bed, it was true, but he remembered how Mrs Graham was always telling her to run along to bed after the first time she'd been in hospital. After another week he asked his father what the matter was. He said it was the same trouble as before – nothing serious, just a little thing lots of women have, but now she'd got a bit of a complication. He didn't sound upset. In fact the cancer had run out of control. Pietro went and sat on his mother's bed and talked to her after the shy doctor had been and gone. She wanted him to read to her.

‘I thought you hated it when I read to you,' he said.

‘That was when you were little, silly! Not now.'

So he read her some pages from the book by her bed and she fell asleep, her black hair splayed about the pillow, her face very pale. Pietro looked at her in puzzlement, his dark eyebrows knotting as he studied her slightly open mouth. Why was she so tired?

The following day when he returned from school Mrs Graham was looking very grim. ‘Don't go upstairs,' she said, as Pietro put his foot on the bottom step. ‘Come into the sitting room.'

He expected his father to be there, but in fact it was the doctor. He clasped his hands nervously and coughed a few times. ‘Now listen, Pietro. Your mother's not at all well, you know.'

He did it, for all the anguish it cost him, exactly as you are supposed to do it. He broke the news in stages, and, as he talked, Pietro seemed to see his mother grow iller by the second, until he knew how it was going to end.

‘She died this morning.' The doctor seemed so overwrought that Pietro wanted to assure him he knew it wasn't his fault. He tried to say something to that effect, but it came out as ‘Thank you'. What he wanted to know was why no one had told him. Then at least he might have said goodbye properly.

And as for Dorking, she would never have allowed it. It
occurred to him that perhaps his father had sent him there
because
his mother was dead. Perhaps he thought it would be better for him to live away from all the memories of her. This wasn't what Pietro himself thought at all. Surely now was the time for him to be with his father, and perhaps be a comfort to him. He knew Mrs Graham had moved in and did all the work, but she wasn't like his mother.

Raymond Russell didn't ask Pietro about Brockwood, and Pietro didn't tell him. Russell was happy to accept the good word of other parents. One thing did arouse his interest, however, and that was the bill. The school announced that it was putting up its fees the following year, and he had a close look at what was charged.

That first night of his fourth term, as Pietro fell asleep in the hated Surrey countryside, his father came across an entry in the bill for ‘Piano tuition: £25'. It was too much.

PIETRO SAT IN
the rosy darkness of a restaurant on the edge of Chicago looking at a photograph he had pulled from his wallet. It showed a two-year-old girl, Mary Francesca, with a shy, determined smile and a disregard for danger that made her parents despair.

‘That your kid?' It was an English voice. ‘I hope you don't mind. I heard you speak to the waiter. It was strange to hear another English voice out here.'

Pietro looked up from his solitary reverie. Sometimes alone in a foreign country he felt overpowered by the place. In London he barely noticed the pavements and buildings because he impressed his own will on them. Leicester Square was merely a connection between him and his destination; by hurrying through it, thinking only of where he was going, he was oblivious of it and could not have described it to a stranger. Some cinemas certainly; souvenirs on trays, clockwork tumbling puppies with nylon fur, plastic London bobbies' helmets and Union Jacks; a few trees and benches; a smell of onions and a sticky feeling underfoot from wet leaves, abandoned fast-food cartons and a suspicion of dog. But he could have given no architectural detail or description of shape and colour; no history or analysis of purpose. He had not noticed that from the first storey upward the buildings were still quite dignified. Like most places in London it was to him only a connection between other tube stations, an inconvenience between his starting point and the place where his real life awaited him in the greeting of work or friends.

Abroad it was the opposite. His eyes would drain each shop sign or building feature of its unintended significance; he was so anxious to orientate himself that he would take from each café, street or apartment block a weight of history and meaning that would have amazed its indifferent owners. The more alone he was, the more receptive, sometimes morbidly so, he became to the signals of place. It was possible for him to be overwhelmed, so that it was not he who printed himself on the place, but the place which subsumed him in its greater identity.

The presence of someone he knew could halt this process by restoring his perspective. Through his affectionate dealings with other people, he could resume an equilibrium that left him still animated by the sense of where he was, but not overpowered by it. When he was abroad alone, and starting to lose himself, he longed for the sound of his name spoken by someone who knew him. The conversation of the waiter or shopkeeper was better than silence, but was no substitute for the greeting of a friend, of a human voice whose inflexion carried the knowledge of his identity. In a simple greeting such a voice could convey a reassurance that he was valued or familiar in a proper scale of things.

When he looked up at the sound of the English voice, he was therefore inclined to talk. He saw a man in his early forties, dark, with thick glasses. He wore a soft flannel suit and glowed with self-confidence.

‘My name's Paul Coleman. Are you from London?'

Pietro pushed back a chair in invitation and poured some wine. ‘Yes. I'm here on business in Chicago. A friend of mine has relations here in Evanston who've lent me their house. They're back next week. And you?'

‘Business, business. Always business.' Coleman smiled, his narrow eyes sparkling behind the glasses. He had thick, wavy dark hair and a swarthy skin.

‘Pork belly futures?'

‘There are other things in Chicago. Been out on the lake?'