A Fool's Alphabet

  YARMOUTH

  ENGLAND 1991

  ON HIS WAY to Norwich, just before the Suffolk village of Yoxford, or thereabouts, Pietro drove past a sign for Satis House. He wondered if this was the original of Miss Havisham’s dusty mansion, now restored or perhaps reinvented, complete with cobwebbed wedding cake, as a Dickens museum. Round the next corner, at the gateway to the drive was a sign reading ‘Satis House Malaysian Restaurant’. He didn’t pause to look, but as he drove on began to think idly about the book. The marshes and their convict hulks: backdrops to scenes that had lived static and unchanged in his mind like shapes in a night landscape that are momentarily revealed by lightning. Essex, Suffolk . . . this was not country he knew well, but hadn’t the passages about the sea in David Copperfield been set in Yarmouth? Presumably the place where David had lived as a boy could not have been far from here if he was able to take the stagecoach up to the Peggottys’ boat on the sands.

  Finding his interest quicken, he followed a signpost for Southwold, the town his AA road map suggested would be large enough to have a bookshop. He passed a newsagent and stopped the car to buy a paper (‘Soviet Union to cease existence’), which he tucked under his arm. The assistant directed him to a shop halfway up the main street on the left where he found what he wanted. It was a fat modern paperback, edited with notes for students. On the second page of the text it announced clearly: ‘I was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or “there by” as they say in Scotland.’ After the word ‘Blunderstone’ was a small number 2, indicating a note. The editor disclosed that Dickens had written to a friend: ‘I saw the name “Blunderstone” on a direction-post between it and Yarmouth, and took it from the said direction-post for the book.’ The note added: ‘Dickens was immensely careful in his use of names, whether for people or for places’, and went on to give examples.

  Pietro could not find a Blunderstone on his map, though just north of Lowestoft, on the road to Yarmouth, there was a Blundeston. It seemed too close to be a coincidence. Yet if this was the right place, why had the notes, which insisted on Dickens’s precision, made no reference to the fact that he, or perhaps subsequent local authorities, had changed the village’s name?

  As he emerged from the clotted one-way system of Lowestoft, he saw a sign for Blundeston, and, after a mile or so of flat green fields, he found himself outside a large prison. He turned the car round and headed towards a group of houses. There was a curiously shaped church, lumpish and off-centre, with a circular Saxon tower.

  The ridiculous nature of his search suddenly struck him. How was he to establish whether or not this was the village in which a fictional character was supposed to have lived? He pulled up by a low brick building – a sheep shelter, perhaps – sited on a grassy triangle at the crossroads, and walked over to the church. To his surprise he found a notice in the porch that said this was the church used by Dickens in his book; postcards and souvenirs could be obtained from the bungalow next door.

  Armed with a green souvenir towel he walked down the lane to the house identified by the bungalow owner as the Rookery in the book, now called the Old Rectory. It was set back from the road. Fixed to the gate was a metal plaque with the words ‘I live here’ above a picture of an Alsatian. Another notice said, ‘Please shut the gate’. He could see a caravan and some beehives next to an outhouse. There was a slight smell, even outside, of cats.

  And yet the house was the Rookery, without any doubt. It was perfect in shape and size, in its position on the flat fields, with Mrs Copperfield’s bedroom at the front and the boy’s overlooking the churchyard where first his father, then his mother had been buried. For minutes he stood gazing at the front door, picturing the child being taught to read by Peggotty, his nurse, and then the interruption of his contented life by the arrival of the Murdstones.

  In this house had been played out the scenes that had lived in his own mind as both the most peculiar yet most representative of childhood, with its passions and bereavements that are never surpassed by adult grief. Although he had not read the book until he was thirty, what had happened here was as real as anything that had happened to him.

  The wind was blowing a thin drizzle from the fields that led down to the prison. Pietro returned to his car and began to move off. His eye was caught by a pub called the Plough, a white-washed coaching inn with leaded lights in black-framed windows. A notice told him that ‘Barkis (the carrier) . . . started from here’. And then a little down the road was the hedgerow from which Peggotty had erupted with a parcel for the boy as he was taken off in the stagecoach, away from here, to a distant place.

  What uneasy feelings he must have had towards the village and the house. Imprisoned by Murdstone, who had by then married and impregnated his mother, yet anxious to return when banished on Barkis’s coach to an unknown destination. His mother had stood and waved goodbye to him, the new baby in her arms the final proof to David of how she had been violated and he had been supplanted. Perhaps it was not to a place that he wished to return, but to a time.

  In his car, Pietro was free, pressing the accelerator and moving away between the hedgerows back to the Yarmouth Road. Freedom of movement was the blessing he had. You could not revisit the past, but as an adult you could drive away from the present.

  Twice in the previous six months he had come close to trouble. At a party given by his parents-in-law in Antwerp to mark their fortieth wedding anniversary, he had found himself in conversation with a widow of about forty-five. Though not really, not now, much older than he was, she had seemed in her propriety to belong to a different generation; she spoke to him as though he were a boy who had just left school. She had blonde hair held back off her face with brown combs, and eyes which had a competent, friendly sparkle. He was told that she was an inspired cook and immaculate housekeeper. She wore a tight-fitting and shiny blue dress that sent confusing signals. All the women had spent time and money on their clothes; the party seemed to have a much greater significance to these normally sober people than a similar function would have had in London. Yet this woman’s manner suggested something more than social joie de vivre.

  Hannah had become absorbed in hostly duties; the children were asleep at a neighbour’s house: alone and on foreign soil, Pietro found himself slipping into some old, instinctive pattern of behaviour. When the woman invited him upstairs to view the painting she had given Hannah’s parents as a present, he followed eagerly, feeling not guilt or furtiveness, but something more like bravado. Her seduction, attempted in a spare room where the coats were piled on the bed, was disarmingly direct. It did not speak of loneliness or a need to be loved; it was a frank invitation to sex, so free of all the complicating factors that had helped to keep him faithful that Pietro would have found it impossible to resist, had it not been for the sound of footsteps running up the stairs. In the preliminary grappling, her tight blue dress had ridden up, and now she had to slide it down quickly, which caused it to catch on her white underwear, a momentary indignity which seemed to linger on into the embarrassment of neutral conversation and false friendliness that followed the entry of the third guest, a fat Dutch psychologist who had come looking for his coat.

  The other problem had been less dramatic, but had troubled him for longer. He had developed an interest, which now threatened to become an obsession, in a young woman he had met at the photographic laboratory in Waterloo. She had dark hair that curled inward at her shoulder, where it brushed her white coat. She smiled when she saw him, an uncertain and ambiguous expression that intrigued him. His conversation with her ran on predictable lines. He asked her about her work, commented on the weather, and she replied in a slightly timid voice. Once they went to lunch in an Italian restaurant nearby. Though she was not exactly evasive, he found out little about her. When they returned to the laboratory there was a powerful charge in the air between them. As he eventually picked up his coat to leave, she looked up from the darkroom with a stricken expression.

  Stephanie, her name turned out t
o be. There were more lunches, conversations, drinks after work. Her father had been a railway signalman. She had been brought up in Clapham. She had two brothers and both her parents were dead. She loved dancing and American pop music, though she admitted to this sheepishly, as though worried about his response. Beneath her white coat she turned out to be a dramatically fashionable dresser. She told him about the things she wore – who had designed them or whose clothes she wished she could afford. She asked him about photography, about lenses and subjects and light. He explained some of the techniques he used to get the right texture in his prints.

  Pietro knew he could no longer pretend that their meetings were innocent lunch breaks, or work-related conferences that happened to continue after hours: he was entranced by her catalogues of dance records and by her modest evasions. She was annoyingly pretty, too, out in the light; her eyelashes flickered or dropped, according to whether she was enthusing or retreating. It also occurred to him that, although she had given nothing away, she would not be so eager an accomplice in their meetings if she were not drawn in some way to him.

  He finished his meeting in Norwich at four o’clock, a low time in a provincial town. Afternoon shoppers in the streets wove between each other on the pavements or queued for the car parks of the giant supermarkets. It was early December and the windows were already full of Christmas trees and tinsel, the edges of the glass sprayed with mock snow that looked like shaving foam. Tins of biscuits showed Victorian coaches on which the caped driver lashed prancing horses down a muddied road; Stilton cheeses, pots of ginger, electronic games and plastic machine guns were piled beneath plump golden stars that replicated the forgotten sky of Roman-occupied Palestine.

  He had missed many years of this ritual, which had not changed since he had been born. In Cardiff, Worcester, Newbury, whichever way the compass had pointed from his parents’ house, the people had kept it up. Through different governments, through wars and strikes, through brief and uncomfortable bursts of prosperity, the annual reflex had persisted. The old people had kept coming with single shopping bags, still wearing the clothes old people had worn when he was a boy, though these slow creatures taking single coins from their purses were those his boyish eyes had seen as mothers in their capable middle age and fathers only just feeling the press of their stomach at the waistband of their working suits. Now they had unthinkingly adopted the posture and habits of their parents before them, and of all the old English people in the towns and villages who had sprouted in the individual brilliance of their lives, then joined the generality of the old and dead, leaving the world no different after all.

  Pietro had for a long time felt surprised that people kept to the same routines. When he left Backley and, correspondingly, he thought, his childhood, he had unreasonably felt that Christmas trees and the automatic rituals would cease. He had occasionally seen them from a distance and thought them exhausted and pointless. Now as he moved his car down the thronged street and out of town, he felt reconciled to what he saw, as though a great loop that joined him to his childhood had been completed, and the intervals of exile and effort were forgotten. The repeated years of custom he had missed did not now seem pointless to him, but welcome; his own children would inherit something he had done little to preserve, and for which he was therefore thankful.

  He had intended to drive back to London the shortest way, through Thetford and Newmarket, but Hannah was not expecting him till late. Encouraged by the success of his trip to Blundeston, he decided to make the short detour east to Yarmouth, a town he had never visited before.

  The approach was forbidding, as the road took a long sweep through an industrial zone that the flat, sandy landscape did nothing to conceal. The recommended route seemed designed to keep people from entering the town itself, which Pietro imagined dimly to be full of fishermen’s cottages and people cooking bloaters for tea.

  Eventually he found his way to the sea front, several miles of guest houses on one side, and the sound of immeasurable water on the other. He stopped the car and walked along the front until he found a way down on to the sand. It was dark by now, and the wind that came in from the sea had a sharp, penetrating sting.

  Pulling his jacket around him, Pietro trod awkwardly over the packed sand that was driven into dunes, whose tumid, grassy shapes were visible at regular intervals. There were no upturned boats, however, no fires emitting cheerful smoke from metal chimneys.

  He looked out towards the sea, an element whose impersonal horror was never truly told, even in descriptions of storms. The grey waves sucked and heaved with a pointless energy, their motions not majestic but an overpowering demonstration, covering two-thirds of the world for twenty-four hours of the day, of the random and futile movements of atomic matter. It was not only futile, it was inescapable: the waves that rolled over Yarmouth Sands were joined to those he had seen from his window in Los Angeles, to the water by the coast road in Colombo and the currents of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  He sat down on the edge of a dune, hearing the water roll. He remembered coming to the chapter in David Copperfield that described the storm off Yarmouth. A ship from Spain or Portugal – some warning note had been struck in those names – was heaving off the coast and breaking up in the waves. The sea appeared to be trying to disgorge it. An old fisherman had come to knock on David’s door to tell him there was a body on the beach. He went down and found it was that of his disgraced friend Steerforth – ‘I saw him lying with his head upon his arm as I had often seen him lie at school.’ By this time the book had been shaking in his hands.

  When the mental anguish that had started in Guatemala had receded, two years later, Pietro had rashly prided himself on having found solutions. He saw the episode as an isolated illness caused by – by grief, by drink, or stress, what did it matter? – that his strength of mind had overcome. He had no wish to see it as connected with a longer passage of events. But then the symptoms had resurfaced some years later, and he had known that the causes were deeper. He had understood, bitterly, that any sense of grand enlightenment was always likely to be misleading.

  He must go back to Hannah. It was in the stillness she offered, the static point of her love, that he had found his destination. He recognised how much he loved her only after they had been apart. When they were reunited he saw her anew each time, as he had seen her for the first time in the apartment in Ghent, through the haze of his unhappiness. The sweetness of her nature was apparent in her face. It welcomed him unquestioningly every time, dismissing his faults, his moods, his failures, in her guileless smile, which he saw as evidence of her dedication to their shared life. She seemed to have no suspicions of him, she held no grudges; her view of him and of herself, though not a complicated one, seemed based on infinite determination. He kept expecting it to falter, for her to see the truth of his unworthy soul, but the steady glare of her love did not weaken, and he felt it helped him somehow to be worthy of her.

  How traitorous his memory was. How he had forgotten the agony of the mental crisis he had gone through. In his sick mind each minute had been filled with enough sensations for a day, so two years of illness had seemed unbearably long. If he was not careful, he found he could pretend it had not really happened. But, he thought, you needed to have a clear recollection of the details of unhappiness if you were to recognise and value what saved you from it. Other less dramatic episodes of loneliness and discontent had almost disappeared from his memory. Sometimes he felt that in the course of his life he had learned nothing. He determined that from that moment on he would never again forget what he owed to Hannah.

  Yet it was not just for the sake of his own salvation that he would turn away from the sea ahead of him. He had created a need for himself in his children. Perhaps this was a harsh way of defining their dependency; he had done no more than any other man who had reproduced. But it was in fact only he who could properly calm Mary when she awoke at night, dreaming of being crushed. Although Hannah was more important to them than he was, t
here was a role for him too with Anton and James, whose echoing cries of welcome greeted the sound of his key in the lock. And what hidden part of him had been revealed by them? What low need had been released, then satisfied, so that now he felt redefined and augmented?

  He tasted the Yarmouth wind on his face. In the gas station at the junction of Sunset Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway the attendant would be listening to his radio in the cabin, watching the ocean sparkle as the sun rose above the hills behind him. In Lyndonville, Jack the yard man would be deep in mid-morning snowdrifts, hacking out another car. In New York City Laura was in a meeting, the roofs of cabs on Fifth Avenue visible from the window through which the light enflamed her hair. It was raining in the foothills of the Caserta Mountains, on the farm and the orchard. It was that time in Rome when the cobbled streets were lit only by the neon of shop signs before the lights came on, so that it looked more than ever like a film set, the flower sellers at the junctions of the via Frattina making their last sales, a sinister glow on the doorways in the narrow via della Lupa. In Hong Kong there was an hour’s uncommercial sleep and stillness, a truce on the rock. The sun had left the mountain in les Houches, and all the children were gathered in.

  Pietro stood up and began walking back to his car. He did not cry or feel moved at the thought of the terrifying sea and the unmade journeys it contained. He put from his mind the thought of the Italian shore and his mother, young Italian girl denied the world. He opened the car door and repositioned himself in front of its familiar gadgetry. He switched on the radio and sank the key into the ignition: particular objects in an appointed place, like a knot of wood in the plank of a cabin floor . . .

  He drove along the front, searching for the London signs.

  ZANICA