A Fool's Alphabet

  He kept driving until he could turn the car around so it pointed south, towards Mexico. He slammed one of Laura’s cassettes into the player.

  Watsonville. What happens in Watsonville? he had asked. Now he knew.

  XIANYANG

  CHINA

  IN THE FIRST flat he owned, off the Archway Road in north London, Pietro decorated the bedroom with Michelin yellow maps of France. He began by trying to make the edges line up, so that the wall would give a continuous picture, but decided after some fiddling with Sellotape and scissors that part of the charm of them lay in their random evocation of French life, so that it didn’t matter if the Pyrenees were next to Burgundy provided you could let your imagination roam the roads. They had been prepared with a care that bordered on patriotism, even in the fat red arteries leading into Rennes, the candid demarcation of the zones industrielles or the grim plain of Poitiers. In other areas you could almost sense the avenues of plane trees leading into the villages, you could tell what sort of bridge the road then crossed and guess at the scenery as a white track left a minor road deep in the Auvergne. Cow bells, hay rolled in circular bundles, the silence of la France profonde – a mythical place that existed in the minds of the inhabitants in all parts of the country, a place of atavistic feelings, fertility, a triumph of backwardness, where murders and lovemaking took place according to prehistoric ritual; whose inhabitants had drenched the earth with their blood at Verdun before returning to invisibility.

  The names on the map still held some alphabetic secret. Vichy had a hissing sound that suggested treachery. Vannes could only be a windy fishing port facing west.

  Among the things his grandfather had left him, was a trunk full of army souvenirs, including a trench map of the Somme. The red line with square crenellations that marked the German trenches ran in a tangle to the west of Beaumont Hamel. A little further west, the British front-line trench was marked by a thin blue line between two places they had christened Hawthorn Ridge and the Bowery. To the south and east were Thiepval and Thiepval Wood, where the red German trenches were so thick they cast a pink haze over the map. An officer’s writing noted that the map was correct to July 28 1916, well into the slaughter. The battle itself might have gone under the name of the Somme, whose muted bell-like sound had become impossible to disentangle from its associations, but in fact the British forces had fought beside the narrow river Ancre. The battle had been named by the French, whose smaller contingent was closer to the Somme. It was not even the Ancre which had the most deadly significance to the British; the men who found themselves killed in thousands, their bodies piled up, useless meat before breakfast, had died at Beaumont or Thiepval. There was no threat in those names, nothing of the cat’s howl of Auschwitz, or the grim, ferrous ring of Verdun. Beaumont and Thiepval were inconsequential villages in a part of France best known for sugar beet; their names were no more than a reasonable ordering of letters to represent an identity.

  Yet with what scared eyes must the private British soldier, on learning of his next destination, have scanned the letters of Thiepval. There was a suggestion of ‘cheval’, which by May 1916 he must have known had a friendly meaning, but after the firm capital T and the lightweight vowels, was there not an ominous downward lurch in the ‘v’? It was an unstable word, which changed its nature midway through. The ordering of the letters, the shape of the ABC, had carried a destiny for the British soldier as surely as the superstitious third light carried not the longed-for Blighty wound but death.

  The alphabet was the means by which a place became articulate. Without a name, it was no more than a collection of buildings or a natural landmark. But although places were given this access to articulacy, their single utterance was void of meaning. Even names whose derivation was clear, like Newtown, did not reveal the character of the place. A given arrangement of letters from the alphabet broke the silence, but meaning could be grasped only by some more patient human process.

  Raymond Russell’s interest in the derivation of words had led him over the years to enquire into how the words themselves were made. He had told Pietro that the letter A had first depicted an inverted ox’s head. The Phoenicians, he said, had seen how signs could represent not just an idea, but a sound, and had developed Egyptian pictures so that an ‘s’ was not only a snake but could indicate the noise made by one. Then the Greeks had taken the idea, and had presented a range of vowels and consonants whose function was not to depict objects but to replicate human sounds.

  Pietro sometimes thought about this when he looked at the maps on his wall. What puzzled him were the countries whose writing systems were different. While the Greek word for Athens could be transliterated as accurately as you wanted (Athens, his father assured him was not all that close, but that was through choice), in what way could English renderings of the places in China be appropriate? Not one letter had anything to do with a Chinese ideogram. In so far as scholars in both languages had developed a way of understanding one another, this did not matter. You could find your way to Peking: it was the same place, however you wrote it down. And yet with a completely different way of rendering their idea of the place, the Chinese did see it differently; their experience of it was not the same. In your alphabet was contained the limits of your perception.

  Raymond Russell, whose study of words was no more than a hobby, could not help on this point, and Pietro himself did not feel inclined to delve further. If he felt confused by the problems of maps and language he would return to the verifiable facts. There were rivers and roads, and cities made of brick and stone. Their physical reality overrode such questions. Even Quezaltenango. You could visit them, and there they were.

  Sometimes in Oxford, a few years earlier, when he had talked to Dr Simon, their conversations had become similarly abstract and, sometimes at least, confusing.

  ‘Since you never say anything,’ Pietro said one day, ‘but leave it all to me, I could have told you a completely different set of stories and you would have formed a completely different idea of me.’

  Dr Simon nodded, and smiled a little.

  ‘I mean,’ Pietro went on, ‘I told you about Laura, but I didn’t tell you about Gabriella, did I? I never told you about India or the week I spent in Rio.’

  It was towards the end of his treatment, and Dr Simon looked pleased with the way Pietro was beginning to answer his own questions.

  ‘I could have been lying, couldn’t I?’ he said. ‘I could have made it all up. I haven’t, of course. But suppose I had told you different things. Even at the age of twenty-six I have a choice of things to relate. Would you have reached a different diagnosis?’

  Dr Simon raised an eyebrow.

  Pietro said, ‘I suppose you think I was bound to bring up only the most important things, that even if I’d tried to avoid them, the evasion itself would have been obvious, so we would have got there in the end.’

  Dr Simon still said nothing.

  Pietro, exhilarated by the knowledge that this would be one of his last visits, thought he would pursue the idea. ‘I don’t believe in your paradoxical view of things. I could honestly have given you a different story, without lying, just by choosing different things, and you’d never have been any the wiser.’

  At last Dr Simon was provoked, though it was to laughter. ‘There is no one grand pattern with neatly interlocking junctions, no one truth to a human personality,’ she said. ‘Another version would have been just as good.’

  The night before his fortieth birthday, Pietro lay in bed with Hannah, thinking fearfully of the onset of middle age. It was not exactly that he was frightened of hell or of the torment death might bring, more that he had become greedy to live; he did not want to let go, and he felt that he had reached this age without yet having started in earnest on anything he had meant to do.

  This little splinter of light without practice or meaning that made up one’s life on earth . . . Perhaps, he thought, shifting the weight of Hannah’s head against his chest, there was some par
allel world or place in which it would be more comprehensible.

  He half believed so, though he had never told Hannah, because his evidence came from a dream and it was a strict rule between them that they should never tell each other their dreams, just as they would not show holiday photographs to visitors. Some things did not translate. Secretly, however, and a little shamefully, Pietro believed that one, or possibly two, of the dreams he had had in his life were significant.

  He was walking along a road near Backley with his mother, aged twelve or thereabouts. With them was a child of about two – also his mother’s, and therefore his own younger brother. In the emotion he experienced towards the child, the overpowering mixture of love and pride, quite free from any complicating jealousy or ambivalence, he felt that all the conflicts of his life were resolved, washed clean away. He awoke in tears of joy.

  The second dream took place in a setting also drawn from his childhood, a room off a nursery school, perhaps the earliest place he could ever remember. In it, as an adult, he conducted a love affair of extraordinary physical passion. The woman was one he half recognised. She resembled someone he had known in London, but was not her. The ecstasy, the exaltation of sex, were extraordinary; but more memorable was the sense that this had actually happened, in a place or a time that were very close to the one in which he lived, removed only by the thinnest partition, which his unconscious mind, in the act of dreaming, had penetrated.

  In Hong Kong, when he had gazed into China, he had known that he would never visit it. Back at the hotel he studied maps of it, pored over this primitive and beautiful country that he had seen from the border. There was a town deep in the interior called Xianyang – or at least that was how it was rendered in English. He let it become in his mind the representation of all the places he would not go, and Xianyang was the name he gave in his mind to the place or the time in which the half-remembered love affair and the healing birth had happened.

  In the spring of 1980 Raymond Russell returned to Backley, to a small cottage near the house he had bought after the war. He had fallen ill with bronchitis and had retired from the Civil Service. Although he was only sixty-two his hair had gone white; he looked like his own father at the age of eighty. And like him he kept a dog, though his was a whippet called Murray.

  Pietro visited him frequently in the new cottage. He took down Mary, his father’s first grandchild, to see him there soon after her birth. Hannah also came down with him from time to time and was shown the nearby house in which Pietro had grown up.

  Alone with the old man one winter afternoon in front of the fire, Pietro found himself asking about Francesca. His father was more forthcoming than he had been before.

  ‘I was so worried about how it would affect you,’ he said. ‘I was frightened for what it might do to you. But you seemed to manage pretty well.’

  ‘I suppose I was good at concealing what I felt,’ said Pietro. ‘I looked to you for a clue, but you just carried on as before. I thought I ought to do the same.’

  Raymond Russell smiled. ‘That’s right. Soldier on. We made quite a good fist of it between us, I reckon.’

  Pietro poured some tea from a pot on the low table between them. ‘We never really talked about her, did we?’ he said.

  His father looked at him with weak eyes. ‘No, we didn’t. I meant to, you know. Often in the flat in the evenings I’d try to pluck up the courage. Somehow I couldn’t bear it. I wasn’t brave enough.’

  ‘Not brave enough? After the trenches at Anzio?’

  ‘Yes, it’s funny, isn’t it?’

  Pietro felt a complicity between them. ‘How different would your life have been if she’d lived?’

  ‘Aah . . .’ His father smiled. ‘I’ve asked myself that a thousand times. I should have loved it if she’d lived. I mean, when you’re married a while, if you’re happy, you forget a bit who the other person is. It’s just like there’s a mirror there all the time. What I miss is not having anyone to share things with. When you brought little Mary down here the first time I was very pleased to see her, but all the time I was thinking: what would she think, what would your mother say? We had so much fun together and now I’ve been alone so long. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have someone there you can just turn to all the time and laugh with. When I think of her now I see her as a young foreign girl, younger than you. The clothes I picture her wearing are from a different era. It all seems such a very long time ago.’

  Pietro looked at his father closely. He said, ‘We did talk about her once, when we were on holiday. Do you remember?’

  ‘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.’