‘And why did you come back?’
‘I told you. Because this is where I am from.’
After lunch Pietro took the photographs of Mr de Silva seated at his desk, apparently examining the economic problems of Sri Lanka. When the photographs were later developed he noticed that the shelf behind contained a complete set of Wisden’s cricket almanac.
Before Pietro left, Mr de Silva told him about the Tamil people and their difficulties with the Sinhalese. ‘Who the bloody hell do we think we are?’ he said. ‘Who are we but people who came from India some thousands of years ago? Nobody can deny you the right to live where you choose. It’s better if it’s the same place as your ancestors, but sometimes history isn’t kind and people can’t be too damn choosy. As long as you don’t forget your manners you should be made welcome.’
When Pietro said goodbye he took various messages of good will, including one to the Lord Chief Justice. ‘It’s not impossible,’ said Pietro. ‘I might have to take a picture of him one day.’ They shook hands and surveyed the tropical fertility that tumbled away from the edge of Mr de Silva’s garden. ‘It is the most beautiful island on earth,’ said Mr de Silva, answering the question Pietro had been asking himself. ‘If only it had the Inns of Court!’ They both laughed as Pietro loaded his camera bag into the back of the car. On the way back he took two films of pictures trying to capture something of the landscape.
The following night he sat by the pool in Colombo, drinking a glass of arrack, the local spirit, diluted with Coca-Cola. Mr de Silva had seemed to him to be the prisoner of another country’s culture. ‘Prisoner’ was perhaps the wrong word for a man who seemed so happy in his condition. A willing captive, perhaps; or some other more colloquial phrase which Mr de Silva himself would have been able to produce. Even in de Silva’s historical contentment there was a trace of sadness, Pietro thought. A man cannot have everything.
It was very late when a porter on his routine round shone his torch about the edges of the courtyard. Pietro, who was gazing up at the hot stars, asked him about the bandicoot and the man settled down to explain the habits of the creature and in what way, precisely, such a beast could be considered ‘friend to man’. They drank some whisky that Pietro fetched from his room, and the local man went into detail about the eating habits of the bandicoot’s close relation, something which was apparently called a ‘hotampoor’. He, it appeared from the porter’s excited narrative, was a redneck country cousin of the bandicoot. He lived off eggs and chickens and made a nuisance of himself to farmers and smallholders. The streetwise bandicoot, by contrast, lived only in the city where he liked nothing more than killing snakes. But more than this, his particularly prized meal was the one poisonous snake in Sri Lanka. They drank a toast to the bandicoot, truly friend to man, then refilled their glasses, the porter because he had seldom tasted whisky before. Pietro because he was anxious about lying down to sleep.
DORKING
ENGLAND 1963
RAYMOND RUSSELL’S FLAT was in a mansion block off Baker Street. It had large, elegant rooms kept at a stifling temperature by the furnace in the basement of the block. None of the apartments had their own heating controls, and the previous tenants, a thin-blooded old couple, had sealed the windows in the sitting room. There were long corridors with mauve carpets leading from the front door. The proportions stifled noise. Laughter was swallowed in the vacuum of the airless spaces and silence could never be driven back more than an inch or two before it seeped in again like the warmed air from the boiling radiators behind the curtains.
Russell had been transferred, at his own request, by the Civil Service. His steady record and occasional ability to solve problems that had perplexed his superiors had been appreciated. In the evenings he had begun to cultivate a new hobby. A planning application he had been supervising in Swindon turned on the addition to a listed building of something the owner described as a penthouse. Russell was familiar with the word only from American films and, like the rest of his department, was unclear exactly what it was. According to the applicant, a penthouse was another name for a top floor, usually with a good view and a built-in cocktail bar. Some discussion followed, and Russell called in at the library on the way back from work and looked the word up in the full Oxford English Dictionary. He was surprised and oddly interested to see that it had nothing to do with houses – or pents, for that matter – at all. It was a corruption of the French word appentis, from the Latin appendicium, meaning an appendage. At the next meeting of the committee he told them this and asked if it didn’t shed a new light on the application. The feeling of the meeting was that it didn’t, but Russell’s interest was kindled. He bought a couple of secondhand books on the subject of etymology and put an advertisement in the local paper asking if anyone wanted to sell a complete second-hand set of the twelve-volume Oxford English Dictionary. He had no replies, so set about tracking it down bit by bit at jumble sales and auctions. After five years and various forays in his car, sometimes as far away as Nottingham, he had all the volumes except ‘V to Z’.
Studying them brought a slight but noticeable change to Raymond Russell. He became briefer, even briefer, in his speech. If he knew the root of a word and used it in a way that was close to that root, he thought he had expressed himself unimprovably. It didn’t matter if no one else was aware of that meaning or if it wasn’t the most current one; Russell went for the oldest and purest instance in the book. ‘I’ve got this chronic pain in my leg where this boy kicked me during the match yesterday,’ complained Pietro. ‘If you received the injury yesterday, it can’t be chronic,’ said his father, not with spite or irritation, but with calm satisfaction as he seemed to feel the word and its true meaning fall upon each other like blissfully congruent triangles. ‘What?’ said Pietro.
Raymond Russell frequently tried to interest Pietro in his hobbies because Pietro seemed to have none of his own. The boy seemed withdrawn, and his father could not think what else to talk to him about.
He came back one day from a disappointing search in the Charing Cross Road for the missing volume of the dictionary.
‘I think I shall have to advertise again,’ he told Pietro, as he hung up his coat in the hall.
‘Why is this one so important?’
‘Because it’s the one I haven’t got. Once I’ve got “V to Z” I’ll have the whole set.’
Pietro followed his father into the sitting room. He seemed to make an effort to carry on the conversation, as though for his father’s sake. ‘Do you think it’s rarer than the others because it’s near the end of the alphabet and fewer people bought it?’
‘It doesn’t matter where it comes in the alphabet. I won’t be fixed up until I’ve got it.’
Pietro said, ‘Is it towards the end of the alphabet because it’s less important?’
‘No. The order of the letters is just random. It could equally start RJN, I suppose.’
‘And who decided the order?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Raymond Russell, delighted with Pietro’s apparent interest. ‘But do you remember learning your ABC at school?’ Pietro nodded. ‘I can still remember the day I mastered it at the village school,’ his father went on. ‘I went through all the pictures on the wall from apple to zebra and the teacher said to me, “Now you’ve got the whole world at your feet.”’
Pietro was staring out of the window. His father was not sure if he was listening. He said cheerily, ‘Do you know the Fool’s Alphabet?’
‘What’s that?’
‘A for ’orses, B for mutton, C for yourself, D for dumb, E for brick, F for vescence, G for police, H for ’imself, I for Novello, J for oranges, K for restaurant, L for leather, M for sis, N for a penny, O for the wings of a dove, P for comfort, Q for a ticket, R for mo, S for Williams, T for two, U for me, V for la France, W for money, X for breakfast, Y for mistr – er, husband, Z for breezes.’
Pietro smiled. ‘It’s good. But why is it the fool’s alphabet? It sounds quite clever to me
.’
‘It’s just a phrase,’ said his father. ‘It’s called that because it’s funny, not because it’s stupid. It’s like saying the Beginner’s Alphabet, or One Man’s Alphabet. Anyone can have his own version.’
‘I see,’ said Pietro, and resumed his long stare from the window.
‘When we were in North Africa during the war, a chap in my platoon called Padgett, who’d never been out of Yorkshire before, he noticed what funny names the places had. He said he wanted to spend a night in a place beginning with every letter of the alphabet before he died.’
‘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.