A Fool's Alphabet

  Raymond Russell didn’t ask Pietro about Brockwood, and Pietro didn’t tell him. Russell was happy to accept the good word of other parents. One thing did arouse his interest, however, and that was the bill. The school announced that it was putting up its fees the following year, and he had a close look at what was charged.

  That first night of his fourth term, as Pietro fell asleep in the hated Surrey countryside, his father came across an entry in the bill for ‘Piano tuition: £25’. It was too much.

  EVANSTON

  ILLINOIS USA 1985

  PIETRO SAT IN the rosy darkness of a restaurant on the edge of Chicago looking at a photograph he had pulled from his wallet. It showed a two-year-old girl, Mary Francesca, with a shy, determined smile and a disregard for danger that made her parents despair.

  ‘That your kid?’ It was an English voice. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I heard you speak to the waiter. It was strange to hear another English voice out here.’

  Pietro looked up from his solitary reverie. Sometimes alone in a foreign country he felt overpowered by the place. In London he barely noticed the pavements and buildings because he impressed his own will on them. Leicester Square was merely a connection between him and his destination; by hurrying through it, thinking only of where he was going, he was oblivious of it and could not have described it to a stranger. Some cinemas certainly; souvenirs on trays, clockwork tumbling puppies with nylon fur, plastic London bobbies’ helmets and Union Jacks; a few trees and benches; a smell of onions and a sticky feeling underfoot from wet leaves, abandoned fast-food cartons and a suspicion of dog. But he could have given no architectural detail or description of shape and colour; no history or analysis of purpose. He had not noticed that from the first storey upward the buildings were still quite dignified. Like most places in London it was to him only a connection between other tube stations, an inconvenience between his starting point and the place where his real life awaited him in the greeting of work or friends.

  Abroad it was the opposite. His eyes would drain each shop sign or building feature of its unintended significance; he was so anxious to orientate himself that he would take from each café, street or apartment block a weight of history and meaning that would have amazed its indifferent owners. The more alone he was, the more receptive, sometimes morbidly so, he became to the signals of place. It was possible for him to be overwhelmed, so that it was not he who printed himself on the place, but the place which subsumed him in its greater identity.

  The presence of someone he knew could halt this process by restoring his perspective. Through his affectionate dealings with other people, he could resume an equilibrium that left him still animated by the sense of where he was, but not overpowered by it. When he was abroad alone, and starting to lose himself, he longed for the sound of his name spoken by someone who knew him. The conversation of the waiter or shopkeeper was better than silence, but was no substitute for the greeting of a friend, of a human voice whose inflexion carried the knowledge of his identity. In a simple greeting such a voice could convey a reassurance that he was valued or familiar in a proper scale of things.

  When he looked up at the sound of the English voice, he was therefore inclined to talk. He saw a man in his early forties, dark, with thick glasses. He wore a soft flannel suit and glowed with self-confidence.

  ‘My name’s Paul Coleman. Are you from London?’

  Pietro pushed back a chair in invitation and poured some wine. ‘Yes. I’m here on business in Chicago. A friend of mine has relations here in Evanston who’ve lent me their house. They’re back next week. And you?’

  ‘Business, business. Always business.’ Coleman smiled, his narrow eyes sparkling behind the glasses. He had thick, wavy dark hair and a swarthy skin.

  ‘Pork belly futures?’

  ‘There are other things in Chicago. Been out on the lake?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘What’s your line of business?’

  ‘I have a company in London. We deal in photographic equipment,’ said Pietro. ‘My real interest is colour origination and printing.’

  ‘Picture books, part works, that kind of thing?’

  ‘Yes.’ Pietro wished Coleman would stop smiling when he spoke. It made him feel nervous. He steered the subject on to families and found that Coleman lived in Hertfordshire. He spoke of his wife and of his daughters. He was generous with information and frank about himself, but seemed to be engaged in something tactical. Pietro couldn’t say what.

  ‘I’d suggest going to a bar,’ said Coleman, ‘but this is the one town in America you can’t, because there aren’t any. It’s the home of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founders of Prohibition. Right here in Evanston. But they let you drink in restaurants, so I suggest we have another bottle of wine.’

  By the time they left the restaurant Pietro felt that he had revealed more than he had at first intended, but it didn’t seem to matter. He walked the streets in a happy glow as he searched for the house he had been lent: along the lake front with its spacious mansions and their commanding views, then back into the ordered rows of houses beneath the soft glow of the street lamps, their big cars pulled up off the street, the tended lawns and the occasional smudge of curtained light. To the east was the pleasant oak-lined stretch of Lake Shore Drive, to the west the raised interchanges of the Kennedy Expressway. You could be happy here, he thought – big city, small town, whatever you wanted it to be.

  I am going to die, he thought. It seemed a shameful response to the news of impending parenthood. He lay flat on his back, with the sound of Hannah asleep beside him, staring into the darkness. He felt as though his body was shaking with the closeness of death. He heard the rattle in his lungs as he breathed, and regretted each cigarette that might have contributed. He felt the delicate tissue of his flesh and imagined the blood vessels starting to swell and seize, their fantastic intricacy unregarded by him until it was too late. He pictured the big organs of his body, the liver, the kidney, things he had treated with disdain, beginning to buckle and rot. More than anything he felt the pressure of darkness, a fear of being turned off like a light.

  This was not what he had expected to feel when Hannah had emerged from the bathroom that morning bearing a flat plastic tube about the length of a thermometer, in which were cut two small windows. Across the dead centre of each one were two firm blue lines.

  She passed the tube to him without comment.

  ‘What does this mean?’ he said.

  ‘It’s positive. I’m definitely pregnant.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you have it confirmed by a doctor?’

  ‘I could, but the doctors can’t tell any more accurately than these tests.’

  After the celebrations and the hasty planning about who should be told and where they should live, he felt only like death. It was as if he had never previously thought himself subject to termination; as though he believed that when death came he would be unavailable, too young, or somewhere else at the time.

  He looked down at Hannah’s brown hair against the blue cotton pillowcase. She seemed by contrast invigorated; not dying but reanimated.

  He got out of bed and walked into the sitting room of their London flat. He lit a cigarette – a suicidal gesture – and pulled back the curtain. There was a drone of traffic from the arterial road going north, then a car starting and revving angrily a few streets away. The driver kept his foot down on the accelerator, pumping and pumping the stationary car for three or four minutes before he clutchlessly engaged first gear and moved off. There was a whistle of Victorian plumbing behind the plastered walls and then the half-silence of the city night again.

  Lately involved either in dealing with cash flow and share ownership or with the equally abstract and delicate negotiation of his marriage, he was surprised by the primitive fear that held him. This was the same puzzled terror with which savages had looked down at the corpses of their friends or mates. Now here was he, a sentient man in a European world of complex
futures and medical research, and he had never even contemplated death.

  He turned his mind to Hannah and the invisible embryo inside her that represented some fatal intertwining of genetic codes, even now locked into a determined course.

  Then he felt an equally primitive emotion, one of fierce protectiveness towards this invisible fusion and its mother, something the least threat might have provoked to violence. Then his own fear of death began to wane.

  Pietro went out with Coleman in his boat. He was intrigued by him and his strange accent, which stumbled on easy consonants, as though he had some East European past. Everything else about him was overpoweringly British, in idiom and reference.

  He wondered what his best friend Harry Freeman would make of him. At the age of thirty-three Harry was already on his third successful career and had an enviable ability to sum people up on first meeting them. He and his wife Martha returned to the house in Evanston the following week. It belonged to some cousins of Martha’s who had taken a year out. Coleman invited them all over to his place for dinner. Pietro explained that Hannah would just have arrived from London, but Coleman insisted she should come too.

  Pietro went to pick her up from the airport. She was five months pregnant and had found the flight uncomfortable. She was also worried about Mary, whom she had left with a friend in London. However, it was the first time for a year that she and Pietro had been away together, and her spirits quickly lifted after she had telephoned London and been reassured that Mary was all right. ‘To be honest,’ she told Pietro, with a glint in her eye, ‘it’s not Mary I’m worried about. I feel sorry for Jane having to look after her.’

  They drove past the stately campus of Northwestern University and got to Coleman’s house at seven-thirty, as instructed. It was large and imposing, with two huge oak trees either side of the damp front lawn. They could see the wire cage of a tennis court behind one side of the substantial building.

  Harry and Martha were already being given drinks in the front room with its fat, pink-upholstered sofas. Two girls, aged about eight and ten, opened the door to Pietro and Hannah. Both wore dresses with sashes at the waist and black patent leather sandals.

  Coleman gave them large drinks and sat them down in front of a glass-topped table that held small bowls of nuts and pretzels. His wife had reddish-brown curly hair. She was tall and had a baffled air that was increased by some defect in her eye which made her focusing uncertain. Coleman called her Pet or Petal, so they weren’t sure if she had another Christian name.

  She sat Martha, Harry’s wife, next to her and talked to her about children. Martha had a leaping vitality of movement and speech which was reined in by East Coast manners. Occasionally she would throw her head to one side and smile at the whole room, as though the single conversation couldn’t contain her delight. Her legs were drawn up neatly beneath a beige wool dress as she sat sideways on the edge of the sofa.

  They went through sliding doors into a heavily carpeted dining room. Rows of cutlery flanked the place mats on the teak table. Coleman moved around with a bottle of wine while an unsmiling Spanish woman in a blue pinafore brought in a tray of food.

  ‘Now I want to talk to you guys about a little proposition,’ said Coleman.

  ‘Not now, Paul,’ said Mrs Coleman in a dull voice.

  ‘Ah, come on, I’m just going to float a little idea. Just so they can think about it. They can hammer out the details later.’ When he talked about business, Coleman’s stumbling consonants became smoother as his voice took on an American burr.

  Pietro looked at Hannah, who was sitting opposite him. She glanced sideways at the melon that was being served to her and gave a momentary and conspiratorial grimace. Hannah’s habitually stern expression could be altered by the smallest dilation of her eyes into a look of pity or flirtation or suppressed humour. She reached up to take the proffered serving spoons.

  ‘. . . and with Pietro’s visual experience and know-how, with your publishing experience, Harry, I think it would be a cinch. We’d be looking at a modest turnover to begin with: not more than half a million in the first year, but after that . . .’ Coleman pursed his lips and shrugged suggestively.

  ‘We’d probably get a grant,’ said Pietro.

  ‘Christ, they’re falling over themselves to give you money,’ said Coleman.

  ‘That’s enough now,’ said Mrs Coleman. ‘You can finish later.’

  She couldn’t have timed the interruption better if she had planned it with her husband. Pietro looked at Harry and could see him rubbing at his chin with the first two fingers of his left hand. It meant he was interested.

  ‘I want to know how you all met each other,’ Mrs Coleman went on.

  ‘We’ll talk later,’ Coleman said to Pietro.

  ‘Are you from these parts?’ Mrs Coleman said to Martha.

  ‘Oh no. I’m from New York. At least, I was raised in Boston, but I was working in New York when I met Harry. But I keep in touch with my cousins. We’re a close family. When Harry mentioned Pietro was going to Chicago, it seemed a good idea he should go see them.’

  Martha’s voice had the softness of an expensive education; even when she was exuberant there was a degree of consideration in her tone. As she began to talk about her childhood, prompted by her hostess’s questions, Pietro noticed how Coleman stopped eating to watch her. His eyes fixed on her with an avaricious stare. Martha’s face glowed with the recollection of school and college, or summers at Cape Cod or travelling with friends. Harry had met her on vacation in Jerusalem. She was working for a law firm on Park Avenue.

  Dinner moved slowly onwards. After the melon there was fish, prepared in some Spanish way that left the bones scattered hazardously through the tomato-coloured sauce, and then chicken in cream and mushrooms with very white boiled rice, a choice of lemon, coffee or raspberry mousse, cheese and biscuits and coffee from a thermos flask that doubled as a jug. Mrs Coleman pushed glass dishes of chocolates round the table. She seemed to have imported English cuisine to the Midwest.

  Afterwards in his study Coleman gave Pietro and Harry more details about his business plan. He wanted to produce a new series of street maps and guides, beginning with London, but going on to other large cities. They would be aimed principally at foreign visitors and would be in various languages.

  ‘Look at what there is at the moment,’ he said. ‘Dull maps printed on toilet paper. We start with new maps. We print in colour. We fill the books with historical information and help for tourists. Addresses, phone numbers, cinemas, museums and so on. It’s a market monopolised by one player at the moment. We can take them apart.’

  He had prepared a printed synopsis which he intended to show to potential investors. He told them he had a certain amount of capital of his own to put into the project; it would be one of several he was financing. Harry began to question him. Coleman poured brandy from a crystal decanter. Pietro listened. Coleman drained four glasses in ten minutes. The deal proposed by Coleman was more far-reaching for Pietro than it would be for Harry. For some reason it would involve his own company becoming nominally at least a subsidiary of Coleman’s, while he himself would have to work in Coleman’s office. ‘Tax advantages all round,’ Coleman said. He poured more brandy. His speech became slurred but his confidence was overpowering. He had finished in Chicago and was headed back to London. The evidence of his material success was all around him.

  FULHAM

  LONDON ENGLAND 1964

  PIETRO TOOK THE tube from Baker Street and got to his new school early. He wore his blazer and school tie and braced himself for some arcane initiation rite in which someone would hold his head down the lavatory or swab his private parts with red paint. He asked a matronly woman the way to the lower fifth classroom and went in, ready to keep low. A couple of girls aged about twenty-two were sitting on a desk, gossiping. They ignored him. A large American boy in sneakers and an open-neck shirt hurled his bag across the room and patted one of the girls familiarly on the backs
ide. Pietro, confused, asked him where the lower fifth classroom was. ‘Right here,’ said the American.

  By nine o’clock the class was assembled. Of the fourteen pupils there were only two others Pietro thought looked like schoolboys. A couple of Arab girls looked no more than sixteen, and the two Japanese were ageless; the rest, who were principally American, were not only physically large but had a loud self-confidence. They wore T-shirts with the names of towns that Pietro had never heard of or initials like UCLA. The teacher, a woman with an indeterminate European accent, treated them as if they were children. They responded with contempt. Pietro introduced himself to the only other normal-looking boy during the break between lessons. He was called Harry Freeman and Pietro liked him because he wore the school blazer and he looked uneasy. ‘Don’t believe half the stuff they say,’ he said. ‘Dave hasn’t really got a Harley Davidson, though I think he’s once ridden his brother’s.’ ‘What about that girl who said she’d done some modelling?’ ‘Yeah, I’m afraid that is true. Her sister was in this film with Steve McQueen.’ Pietro hardly knew what to tell his father when he returned that evening to the suffocating calm of the Baker Street flat.

  One thing he had to say for the school was that he didn’t have to scrub the floors or dish out the school food. At lunchtime most people disappeared to nearby shops or cafés. Harry and Pietro ate the sandwiches provided by the canteen and then went for a walk in the small park nearby. Harry gave him the lowdown. Weiner and Gupta, he said, had the academic side of things sewn up. Weiner was a tall, thin boy who could speak German and French; he also seemed to understand history and English and could write essays that were not just a semi-animated list of dates. Gupta, who was Indian, sometimes beat Weiner and sometimes came second. He had formidable concentration in all subjects, only occasionally turning round to give a reproving look to Gloria Katz and Laura Heasman, the two chattering girls in their twenties, who turned out to be fourteen.