A Fool's Alphabet

  The party didn’t grow any bigger or more ragged at the edges, but as people danced it seemed to intensify, so that by the time Harry and Martha left all the guests were either laughing or shouting. By the doorway a red-faced Englishman was pushing a young American angrily in the chest.

  Relieved that the wedding and his part in it were over, Pietro agreed to go on with half a dozen people to a club. He sat back in the taxi driven by an ancient cabbie on the dual carriageway of Park Avenue, heading downtown. The name was clear. OLSEN.

  At three in the morning he found himself being regaled by a black cloakroom attendant about the merits of a man who had invented twenty different uses for the peanut. Because he was black, it was argued, he had never had the recognition he deserved; you never heard about him at all. The cloakroom attendant kept calling him sir as he politely put his case against the way American history had been written.

  The temperature had taken one of its sudden freefall drops, losing what felt like ten or fifteen degrees in a couple of hours. Now alone, for a reason to do with someone needing to take the cab onwards, Pietro stood on the deserted sidewalk of Fifth Avenue. All around were the strong buildings of commerce and display; between them were the stark crenellations of St Patrick’s Cathedral, white and clear against the night sky.

  He looked up for the number of the cross-street, caught for a moment in this cold balance.

  OXFORD

  ENGLAND 1976

  IT WAS ALWAYS Start the Week with Richard Baker on the radio when Pietro drove up the Woodstock Road for his weekly 9.30 appointment at Dr Simon’s. When you were off to talk about what had gone wrong with your life, it made you feel doubly isolated to hear others celebrating their successful and coherent world. With skin still slightly tanned from his months working the ski lift, Pietro had reached the nadir.

  A theatre director was discussing new themes she had discovered in Othello as he drove through the north Oxford streets. Polstead Road, Rawlinson Road – he presumed they were occupied by married dons with large families who played and grew in those sturdy brick houses with their damp gardens and rocketing values. If you got married, did your college pay for you to live in one of them? he wondered. It would certainly be a powerful incentive to get away from the quiet colleges which, for all their beauty and historic dignity, had a trace of Brockwood about them.

  Pietro’s contact with the university was confined to a couple of research students he had met at a party, and a girl reading classics, though she called it something else. How the colleges functioned was therefore a matter of unhampered conjecture for him.

  He was working at a school in Oxford where he had a job somewhere between laboratory assistant and apprentice teacher. It had been arranged for him by Mr Maxwell, the young English teacher who had taken the pupils of the US Collegiate School to les Houches and now taught at an Oxford private school. Pietro had met him by chance in London shortly after his return from the Dolomites. Mr Maxwell, who had been half in love with Laura Heasman himself, had always liked Pietro and now, seeing him thin and troubled, had helped him find a job. Oxford would not have been his first choice of places to live, and the pay was poor, but Pietro was grateful for the chance and had worked hard.

  Dr Simon stood back politely from her front door and showed Pietro through into a tiled hall off which her consulting room opened. Even though Pietro knew the way he didn’t think he ought to go in first, so he waited while Dr Simon closed the front door and came down the hall. Then they would stand on the threshold of the consulting room urging each other in.

  Sometimes at nine-thirty on a Monday morning Pietro didn’t feel too bad. He sat down in the big chintz armchair and looked over at Dr Simon, who peered back with an expression of interested compassion through her tortoiseshell spectacles. Pietro would make conversation for a while, asking after Dr Simon and her husband, and whether she’d seen some interesting item in the papers or on television. Dr Simon answered briefly, politely, but with the unmistakable suggestion that something more urgent was preoccupying Pietro and that his conversational excursions were just a ruse to keep the subject bottled up.

  Often this wasn’t true, and after the opening exchange there would be a long silence. Dr Simon never spoke. It was one of the few things about which she was dogmatic. Although she occasionally asked a question, she would never break a silence. Pietro watched the minute hand of the walnut-cased clock move through two, three, four minutes at a time. To begin with he would laugh and Dr Simon would smile wanly back; then he grew used to the silences and was not embarrassed by them. Usually they made him feel sad, or at any rate introspective and this, presumably, was what Dr Simon wanted. Pietro stared every week at the same two book titles on the shelf: A Textbook of Pathology by J. M. Sykes, twelfth edition. Sexual Deviation by Barnes and Miller. He looked for hours at the fat, battered red spine of the former and the shiny jacket of the latter.

  It had been easy to begin with. He had arrived in a state of rigid fear. Dr Simon asked a couple of questions about his family and his life. At the fourth question she asked, Pietro suddenly began to cry. Such successes were harder to come by in the ensuing months as Pietro opened up what was in his mind for the doctor’s inspection. He was honest because he was desperate. Sometimes he had to wind himself up to make some particularly shaming admission, but Dr Simon always took it in her stride. If he had told her he was an arsonist, a pederast, a cannibal, Dr Simon would merely have nodded and tried to find out why. Sometimes Pietro grew tired of talking about himself, of looking again and again into the same areas of experience.

  ‘Couldn’t we talk about someone else?’ he said. ‘I’m so bored with this character.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because you don’t yet fully know him,’ Dr Simon returned. These bleak responses discouraged frivolity, and in the end Pietro was grateful for them because he knew one of them had to keep at it.

  ‘I think we ought to go back to the day in California,’ said Dr Simon in one of her rare moments of intervention.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Pietro, ‘the fateful day. We’ve been over it before, haven’t we? But I suppose I could tell you again.’

  ‘You could tell me how you felt.’

  This was one of Dr Simon’s favourite lines. She made Pietro feel that his stories were all narrative with no emotion. The only solution was for him to go back and reverse the process: strip out the structure and coherence of the event and tell the story with colourful and inconsequential stress on his response. To his own ear he then sounded like a débutante on her return from holiday, but it seemed to be what Dr Simon wanted.

  ‘I knew it was doomed. She was far above my station. I suppose I shouldn’t have tried. But I did. I was very young. I thought you could have everything. I didn’t see how I could not try really. I never expected to be successful, but then when the first hints came my way of course I redoubled my efforts. Quite late on I remember still thinking that she was far too rarefied for me.’

  ‘Yes, you always say this, but you can never explain in what way.’

  ‘Too beautiful. Too exotic. Too clever. I can’t think why she ever went out with me at all.’

  ‘What do you imagine she might have wanted or needed from you?’

  ‘I suppose she felt sorry for me or something. And there wasn’t anyone else around at that time. I can’t imagine.’

  ‘You ought to try.’

  ‘Try what?’

  ‘To imagine. Someone like Laura wouldn’t enter into a love affair with a man unless she felt some emotional need or pleasure.’

  ‘Well.’ Pietro scratched his head. ‘I suppose she did like me. We did get on well. We laughed at things. I was quite good fun – especially then, when I was so happy. It probably made me seem more interesting than I really was, just because I was so happy and alive all the time.’

  ‘What were your feelings when you first began to go out with her?’

  ‘Gratitude.’ Pietro laughed. ‘And incomprehension. And, I suppose
, a dull certainty that it couldn’t last.’

  ‘You keep on the same line all the time. It must have occurred to you to wonder why she chose you of all the men she knew and what you must have meant to her.’

  ‘I find it very mysterious. I see what you mean – no woman would just enter into a passionate affair for no reason, unless there was something in it for her, as it were. But what that something was I’ve no idea. I couldn’t begin to guess.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what you must do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that something was you.’

  Sometimes when Dr Simon completed these balletic turns of thought Pietro thought she was just a phoney who wanted to frame a nice paradox. He usually gave a snort of laughter or derision when they came out. Often, however, he found when he thought about them during the week that, hackneyed as they seemed, there was some particle of truth in them. The trouble was that they always turned on a contradiction, so they became predictable: the things he had thought about least were the most important; the days when he had felt nothing were the most significant; the people who made him most angry were the ones he truly loved, and so on.

  After a while he could hear Dr Simon coming and would head her off before she had time to articulate the smart paradox. Dr Simon, irritatingly, wasn’t irritated; she nodded and smiled as if to suggest that now Pietro was thinking in the right way. ‘He who would save his life must lose it,’ she once bafflingly added.

  ‘How does it feel,’ Pietro said one day after a long silence, ‘to have a box of tissues as the principal tool of your trade?’

  They looked at the item in question, a pack of man-size, or more accurately, handkerchief-size, Kleenex on the table between them.

  ‘They’re not the principal tool, they’re –’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I was being flippant.’

  The box was regularly emptied and replaced, and Pietro wondered what it must be like to sit and listen while people pulled out of themselves their concealed miseries. He thought of the stories that had been told in this north Oxford room where poor overstrained students had brought their tensions on the point of snapping; where middle-European wives of dons came with their long tales of Hungarian fathers, abuse, disappointment, betrayal; where local Oxford people with no university connection tried to learn the academic art of applying rigorous examination to their feelings; and where others, poisoned by illness, had feebly tried to find words for the indescribable assaults of schizophrenia.

  He sometimes thought his own problems must seem trifling to Dr Simon, who quickly replied that it was how they felt to Pietro that mattered.

  They felt bad. He had a sensation of being removed from the world by a veil or gauze, so that nothing around him seemed real. It was as though he had taken a drug which had a mild hallucinatory effect. In some circumstances it might have been almost pleasant; but when there seemed no end to it, it became a matter of panic. His nerves, stretched by unhappiness, caught hold of the panic and set him in a vicious circle in which fear of unreality and fear of fear chased each other round. To these he was able to add also the more straightforward symptoms of agoraphobia, sleeplessness and – unsurprisingly, in view of the rest of it – depression. There were other sensations his body experienced as though they were physically induced but which Dr Simon assured him sprang from the same causes. The doctor’s name for the group of symptoms, ranging from vague unease to uncontrolled panic, was a phrase which struck Pietro as ridiculously genteel – ‘unwanted feelings’.

  It was in the hope of shifting these feelings that Pietro had gone to see Dr Simon. He had hoped it would be simple: a prescription, a trip to the chemist, and a couple of weeks off work. He hadn’t expected they would spend so much time talking about his childhood, his parents, his girlfriends and so on.

  Six months later they were still at it.

  ‘I want you to think about something today,’ said Dr Simon, polishing her glasses in a large oculist’s cloth.

  Pietro was glad not to have to find the subject for the monologue himself for a change. ‘Fine,’ he said.

  ‘When you see a woman that you greatly admire and think of as what you call “above your station”, how do you imagine she sees herself and the question of finding for herself a partner or companion?’

  Pietro thought for a long time. ‘I suppose I feel envious in that she seems to be above the competition and the compromise – she doesn’t have to fight with the rest of us. She can have what she wants.’

  Dr Simon said nothing. She looked a little quizzical.

  ‘I know that can’t be literally true, of course. No woman can actually say, “I’ll have him or him or him”, when the “him” might be spoken for. But I envy them.’

  ‘Yet there’s no reason to suppose they’re happier.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  There was a pause. Pietro said, ‘Perhaps their beauty is in a way its own reward.’

  ‘You think beauty is a form of goodness?’ Dr Simon’s scepticism had an abrasive edge.

  ‘I know what you mean. It sounds ridiculous. It can’t be true because all people are helpless, they’re all just human. And you mustn’t think I loved Laura only for the way she looked. It’s just that I can’t express her true qualities.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘What else do you value in these women?’ said Dr Simon.

  ‘Gentleness, I think, before anything else. And modesty.’

  ‘Was Laura gentle?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. She was wild, but she was gentle towards other people. And she had an innocence of nature. Even if she was doing something quite outrageous.’

  ‘And modest?’

  ‘Yes, she was modest. I once asked her if she knew how beautiful she was. She said that sometimes she could look in the mirror and think she looked all right that day, but that was all. She had to admit something, I suppose.’

  ‘And all the women you’ve most admired or loved, do they have this thing in common?’

  ‘There is something. I don’t know what you’d call it. A femininity which is made of strength. Not just gentleness. Which is comforting as well as inflaming. Excuse me.’ He reached for the maligned box of tissues.

  ‘And yet you didn’t trust it.’

  ‘In Laura?’

  ‘You’ve used words like “doomed”.’

  ‘You’re trying to say it was a self-fulfilling prophecy?’

  ‘Those are your words,’ said Dr Simon and sat back in her chair.

  Damn it, thought Pietro. He felt that he had, in some way he did not understand, walked into a trap.

  ‘You’re well travelled for someone of your age, aren’t you?’ said Dr Simon one day.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pietro, happy to expound on something apparently neutral. ‘I’ve always liked it. Well, I mean I did until that episode I told you about – the thing that started all this off really.’

  ‘In Guatemala?’

  ‘Yes. Before then I’d always hoped that I would find somewhere I could feel was truly mine – somewhere I was supposed to be. I didn’t feel myself to be wholly English and I didn’t think of England as the right place.’

  ‘Yet you speak very warmly of the village you lived in as a child.’

  ‘But that was an episode. It ended when my mother died.’

  ‘And her death ended your affection for the place?’ Dr Simon’s voice was compassionate but sceptical.

  ‘Not completely. But it was over. The story was complete.’

  There was a silence. The clock ticked. After a minute, Dr Simon crossed her legs. Pietro looked down. The silence filled the room again. Pietro tried to feel what he was supposed to feel, but he couldn’t make the connections. Time, people, a place.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘I felt I would be nearer if I kept moving. If I was static I would be lost. But you don’t know what it’s like. I didn’t like that school I told you about. I didn’t feel comfortable in my father’s flat. Why sho
uld I?’

  ‘He’s your father.’

  ‘Yes, but, you know, it wasn’t right somehow. Anyway, I envied people, people like Harry, who’s Jewish so he might feel his allegiances were elsewhere, but he was perfect there in London. He was made for it. I’m half Italian anyway.’

  ‘Is that what makes you restless?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Pietro laughed. ‘I suppose it’s quite improbable, isn’t it?’

  Dr Simon gave one of her thin smiles and nodded very slightly.

  At Dr Simon’s suggestion, Pietro kept a note of the better interchanges in a book in his lodgings and looked back at them carefully. There were important things there, he was sure, if only he could puzzle them out.

  On other days he felt he had simply wasted his time. He drove slowly back down the Woodstock Road into Oxford and looked at the young students hurrying along the streets on their bicycles or walking along wrapped up in their scarves. Why did students and old people always wear scarves, he wondered. Some of the different colours proclaimed a college allegiance, others were just for show. Even the young people with glasses and piles of books, however, seemed to look quite part of the town. Perhaps because it belonged to no one, then it was impossible for anyone to feel excluded. Presumably the dons looked with distaste at the migrant undergraduates. They were not worth befriending since they would only be there for three years. Yet it must have been difficult for the students, he thought, to decide when they arrived whether they would colonise Oxford and make it theirs for a short time, or whether they would skim over it and acknowledge that history had dispossessed them. The choice was especially hard when ownership of the place presumably entailed knowing all the antique nicknames of the colleges and streets as well as knowing which society, bar or party was to be recommended or gone to at any time. The thought of trying to keep abreast of it all was exhausting. Pietro had been to the required functions in London, but it had hardly been the same. Outside the lecture halls and assembly rooms the identity of the place was dissipated in the commercial town; academic purity lasted only a few footsteps down the pavement of a London street.