A Fool's Alphabet

  ‘Come here, mister. I want to tell you something.’ Francesca was sitting on a stile. ‘Come here and sit on my knee.’ Pietro looked up into her face. Her cheeks were pink from the air but her dark eyes didn’t have their usual sparkle. ‘Your mama’s going into the hospital tomorrow for a tiny operation. I’m going to be out again in three days’ time. It’s nothing at all serious, just a thing lots of women have. But I want you to be a good boy while I’m away.’

  Pietro could hardly believe she was serious. Nothing could express his horror of that big alien building with its doctors and death and strangers in a huge room. The thought of his mother in such a place was unbearable, and he began to cry, as she had guessed he would.

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s a tiny operation. I promise you. My little boy, would I lie to you, would I?’

  Pietro didn’t know what to say. He saw that he had been silly and that his mother was telling the truth, but it was too late to stop crying now.

  They held hands as they walked down the hill back towards the village. When he got in from work Raymond Russell gave Pietro a talk in the sitting room, saying he would have to learn to cook and be like a wife to him while his mother was away. Pietro went along with the idea, though they both knew Mrs Graham would come and do the work. His father wasn’t good at moments like these and tended to assign people roles in the hope that some sort of discipline would do the trick.

  ‘Come on, Ginger,’ said Mrs Graham, who had already moved in, ‘time you were in bed.’ His father called him ‘Pietro’ or ‘old man’, his mother called him ‘mister’ or ‘my little boy’. It was only Mrs Graham who sometimes called him ‘Ginger’. His hair still had some red in it but was more noticeable for being stiff and unruly. He didn’t mind being called Ginger, however, because it meant Mrs Graham was in a good mood with him.

  When he came back from school the next day he was told that his mother had gone to hospital. He went and had a talk with his father, thinking he wouldn’t know how to pass the time without his wife. Russell was smoking a cigarette and looking through some reference books. He seemed quite cheerful. Mrs Graham had cooked the tea and sent Pietro off to have a bath afterwards. Everyone seemed so normal that he forgot to worry.

  The next day at school the football team was announced for the annual fixture against the local rivals. Pietro and Stephen Brown were both in it. Football was only allowed under supervision in the afternoons. During the morning break between lessons they went and played their own game in a neighbouring field. One gang had possession of a large fallen tree. A second, smaller gang based itself on the rooted stump and tried to push the members of the bigger gang off the trunk without losing control of their own camp.

  That afternoon Pietro went round to Stephen’s house for tea. He was aware dimly that Mrs Brown was trying to be very nice to him. Later on, Stephen’s father, who was a policeman, rode up on his bike. The dynamo used to falter on the hill leading to his house, so the light was always feeble in the darkness. He was very jolly that afternoon and let Pietro try on his policeman’s helmet. He had a cup of tea with the rest of them while the laundry hung on wooden clothes-horses and washing-lines around the kitchen.

  Two days later, just as she had promised, Francesca returned from hospital. Pietro was sitting at the kitchen table with Mrs Graham, sick with excitement. When he heard the familiar rumble of the Humber Hawk in the road outside, he leapt from his chair. He felt Mrs Graham’s hand on his shoulder. ‘Remember what your father said. She may be weak.’ Pietro tried hard to restrain himself as he ran down to the garden gate. He was partly successful, arriving against his mother’s ribs with the subdued thump he might have reserved for a not very important football tackle. His eyes scanned her face to see if she was still the same. To his shame he heard himself say something like, ‘Don’t ever go away again.’

  Things returned to normal. After some days of rest Francesca was up and about again, moving round the house with her hair escaping from her scarf. She had taken to wearing slacks with small slits at the ankle, like Doris Day, and her husband had given her, as a get-well present, a pink plastic transistor radio from America. There wasn’t much change in her day except after lunch when Mrs Graham would sometimes order her up to bed for a rest. She went reluctantly, clutching the radio beneath her arm.

  After he had come back from school Pietro would sometimes insist on reading to his mother. He read in a halting, loud voice, like an East European trade unionist determined to deliver in English a fraternal greeting to delegates. Eventually, to put an end to the agony of the slowly moving forefinger and the harsh, plosive delivery, Francesca would have to read to him instead. He would go and stand by her chair and try to read with her. Then if he was tired, he would rest his head on her shoulder so that her hair trailed across his cheek, enfolding his head, and in these moments Francesca felt a deep tranquillity.

  At the weekends Pietro sometimes went out with his father in the Humber and urged him to drive it faster. He said there was a boy at school called Jeremy Wingate, who was the best footballer, and his father had a car that could go a hundred miles an hour. His father smiled patiently and explained about speed limits and fuel conservation. He didn’t talk much. He smoked a good deal and gave off a generally obliging air.

  The countryside they drove through didn’t have the evergreens of Surrey or the ragged beauty of the north with its drystone walls and open countryside. The grass was light green, and sometimes the trees looked ashen, greyish against the hills. The land wasn’t farmed heavily and there were no fields of yellow corn or fat cattle. There were discoloured sheep and regular, anaemic crops. The earth had a certain character, however; it had a dry, ancient feel, as though it had been there, unregarded, for a long time.

  One morning at school there was a development on the tree trunk. For the first time ever the small gang from the stump took control of the entire fallen tree. Half a dozen small boys, Pietro among them, stood on it taunting the others. During the skirmish that followed a fat boy with glasses, called Nicholas Worrall, fell from the trunk and tore the sleeve off his shirt. He also lost the skin from the bridge of his nose. The bell rang before the main gang could regain control and the boys went back into the school.

  There was an immediate row about Nicholas Worrall’s shirt and bloodied nose. The teachers wanted to know who was responsible. Pietro, said somebody. Pietro, silently proud of his part in repelling invaders, didn’t deny it, but assumed the others would also claim their part in victory. None of them came forward. In a swift change of mood, Pietro was wrong-footed. From having been one of the heroes of the moment, he suddenly became the object of remarks like ‘Typical Pietro’ and ‘Pietro does it again’. The headmaster took him outside and lectured him on respect for property and violence towards other boys. The punishment was that Pietro was dropped from the football team for the match on Friday.

  Incredulous, he returned to class, where, by an effort of will, he prevented himself from crying. When the bus dropped him off and he ran up the lane that afternoon he could no longer keep his indignation inside him. He found his mother in the garden and hurled himself against her. At first she laughed as he tried unsuccessfully to explain his distress. His voice came in broken whoops and explosions of compressed air.

  Francesca stopped smiling and soothed him till he could tell her the story of his great injustice. From the narrative that came out, back to front, still broken up by sobs and indignation, she eventually pieced together what had happened.

  Then she folded him in her arms and laid his head against her shoulder. ‘My little boy,’ she said, ‘my little boy.’ She talked to him and stroked his head until at last he was calm. When he had stopped sobbing and allowed himself to be soothed by his mother’s words of reassurance, he gradually came to see that there was nothing she could do to set right what had gone wrong. She could offer only comfort; she was not, after all, omnipotent.

  COLOMBO

  SRI LANKA 1980

 
PIETRO RUSSELL WAS the only passenger to leave the plane when it stopped at Colombo on its way from Hong Kong to the Middle East. Hong Kong to Colombo is a strange trip to make. A few Chinese businessmen might reluctantly leave the Crown colony and inspect some business project in upcountry Sri Lanka to see if it is worth the investment of a few million dollars. Or some unusually adventurous Sinhalese businessman might be returning after an attempt to raise capital in Hong Kong for a scheme in his native island. But these things are rare, and when Pietro came down the steps of the Boeing 747, there was only him to feel the heavy night air that blew in from the palm trees round the airport.

  It was a luxurious sensation. He was the only man to offer a passport to the smiling immigration clerk, the only man to see his suitcases carried in by the equally smiling porter. There was none of the usual feeling of displacement. There was hardly anyone there at all.

  Pietro wondered how the thin porter could carry his heavy cases outside to the taxi and tipped him an amount which in Hong Kong might have passed for normal but which in Colombo seemed to render the porter speechless. Soon the taxi driver was telling him how the Sri Lankan cricket team was as good as any in the world. He drove a Morris Oxford in a high gear in the middle of the road, turning round frequently to emphasise his claims for the skill of Gehan Mendis or Ravi Ratnayake. He used the horn to move the night-time bicyclists and bullock carts, but never touched the brakes. His style of driving, one-geared, one-paced, was like that of a New York cab driver on Fifth Avenue when he gets a good run of lights late at night, though his conversation, not being a paranoid creole from behind bulletproof glass, was more enjoyable.

  The night was exotically warm. The air was soft, though occasionally there would come a blast like that from an air extractor in the kitchen of an Indian restaurant. Pietro lay back against the seat, unable to help out further on the problem of the island’s shortage of quick bowlers. He watched the palm trees and wooden roadside shacks trail out behind them.

  He had booked a hotel on the south side of town that had been recommended to him as cheap but reliably clean. The rooms were ranged round a courtyard in the middle of which was an elderly swimming pool. A soft-footed room-boy in an orange tunic carried his cases into a large, bare room in which an air-conditioning unit rumbled against the wall. The light was dim and the furniture old. The floors were tiled. No rumour of corporate chain identity, of plastic-sealed lavatory seats or built-in radios had penetrated the hotel. A mosquito coil sat on the windowsill waiting for a match.

  The room-boy sat down and stared at Pietro as he unpacked. He asked him about the country he came from, if he was married, and how many brothers and sisters he had. Pietro piled his clothes into a 1950s walnut chest of drawers that might have come from a Bexhill boarding house. When he came back from the bathroom, the room-boy was still sitting on the chair. By now he had stopped talking and seemed to want only to stare at Pietro’s European face and rough mousy hair.

  It was one o’clock in the morning and Pietro wanted to sleep. He gave the boy some money. Unlike the porters in Hong Kong, the boy didn’t at once inspect it, then disappear swiftly in the hope of making more. He smiled his thanks without looking down at his hand. By the time Pietro managed to ease him out of the room the boy was still unaware of how much was in his palm.

  Pietro placed his large camera bag on the table by the air conditioner. From a side pocket in the case he pulled out a number of prints made at different times: The top one was about eight years old. It showed a young, fair-haired woman with brown eyes and a bright vermilion sweater. The picture had been taken somewhere in the United States, perhaps New England. The tail-end of a station wagon was visible to one side bearing a Vermont registration number. Half a woolly dog disappeared from the other side of the imitation-leather frame. Composition had at that stage been low on Pietro’s list of priorities. He had learned a good deal in the meantime – about the girl in the picture and about photography. At the time he had been anxious just to catch her likeness.

  He took a sleeping pill – two, nocte, the pharmacist’s instructions read, for benefit of Latin speakers – and lit the mosquito coil. He turned his transistor radio to the World Service and lay back under the sheet. A few minutes later he felt the sleeping pill reach out and gently uncouple the connections in his brain.

  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 t
hing 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.’