A Fool's Alphabet

  The second man – not Wilfred – had an Italian-sounding name and he had a wild look in his eyes. He was thin and looked quite young.

  ‘What sort of way is this to behave, Wilfred?’ I said. ‘You know very well my uncle’s ill. And do you know what time it is?’

  Wilfred shook his head slowly. He looked very pale. The two girls on the sofa were sitting close together. Kitty was gripping the other one’s arm, though whether this was to stop herself laughing or because she was frightened of me I couldn’t say. Wilfred made a broad gesture with his arm from me towards his friend, as if he were trying to introduce us. Then he tried to speak, gagged, and brushed past me on his way to the bathroom from where we could hear the sound of retching.

  The other man stood up and walked towards me. He said with great charm – rather theatrical in fact: ‘My friend is lucky to have such a charming neighbour.’

  ‘Landlady,’ I snapped back.

  I was rude, and I thought he would be offended, but the drink seemed to have given him some sort of fluency.

  ‘I should have guessed, I can see that you’re wearing your rent collector’s gown.’

  ‘My uncle is very ill and you have woken him up with your noise and your singing. It’s very unfair to a sick man.’

  Wilfred’s friend came and stood close to me. He took my hand and looked into my eyes. His own, though sparkling with all the effort of his charm, were very sad. ‘I would be pleased to be nursed by someone like you,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t mind what kind of sickness I had.’

  One of the girls sniggered.

  I was feeling slightly at a loss because I hadn’t managed to provoke any apology. I pulled my hand away. The awful truth was that I felt suddenly aroused. The young man’s eyes followed me and I pulled the dressing gown more tightly across me.

  ‘Will you please go to bed now?’ I said loudly, trying to regain my composure.

  ‘Stay and dance,’ he said. ‘Wilfred was going to find a record. He said he had some champagne as well.’

  ‘This is not a time for dancing,’ I said, looking across at the two girls on the sofa. I had meant to show my contempt for them all, but the man seemed to think I was indicating that it was only the girls’ presence that was a problem.

  ‘I can get rid of them,’ he hissed.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Now please be quiet, all of you, or I shall call the police. I think you had all better go and let Wilfred get some sleep. Come on, now. All of you!’

  The two girls, rather to my surprise, stood up and gathered their bags and coats.

  The man stood closer to me. ‘Don’t change from your man’s clothes. You look beautiful,’ he said.

  I suppose he must have been very drunk to have spoken like that, and yet he seemed quite calm. At that moment Wilfred reappeared from the bathroom. He was sweating a little on the upper lip, but looked better than before.

  ‘We’re leaving, Wilfred,’ said the other man. ‘Thank you for your hospitality.’ The girls went past me and he took my hand again in the doorway. Then I did something which I still don’t understand. I said: ‘My name is Hannah van Duren.’ I was on the verge of saying ‘You can come and see me’, but I could tell from his eyes that he understood. He kissed my hand, and began to go unevenly down the stairs, two or three at a time.

  I heard his voice coming up the stairwell. ‘And be wearing your tweed suit,’ he was calling, ‘and your bow tie.’

  The next day I felt ashamed of myself. I’d never behaved like that before towards a man. But not that ashamed. After all, I’d only told him my name. During the morning I stayed indoors with my uncle, hoping he would call. The telephone was silent. About midday there was a ring at the door, but it was only the postman.

  After lunch I had to go out and do some shopping. I got the caretaker’s daughter to come and sit in our flat while I was out. I went to the market and then to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription for my uncle. All the time I was turning over the events of the night before in my mind. My boyfriend had left Antwerp for a job in Paris about a year before. I was glad. We had begun to irritate each other. Although he was a kind man, and of course I was fond of him, I no longer felt passionate about him. He was confused by me in return. I think he was secretly pleased that we now just kept in touch by letter. He told me I was staid and middle-aged, but I wasn’t. The truth was that I no longer found him romantic.

  I hurried around the shops and I don’t know what I bought. I got it all wrong, as far as I remember, so it was difficult to cook dinner that night. I’d bought prawns to go with beef, or something like that. I was excited. Do you know Ghent? It’s a boring place. Bourgeois. The word could have been made for it. Not like Antwerp, which I like. But that afternoon I thought it looked magical, it was quite different. You know how it is when you see things suddenly in a different light, in a new light, as though you were a traveller who has just arrived.

  I didn’t stop to ask myself why I was so excited, or what it was about this man – a man whom I’d in any case only seen for a few minutes. Maybe it was just that physical thing. You can never underestimate that – though it felt like something much more. I wanted to take his head in my hands and hold his poor ragged hair against my chest. But I didn’t feel sorry for him. Well, a little bit maybe. I felt more in awe of him, really.

  When I got back to the block I hurried through the hall because I didn’t want to be detained by the caretaker who always wanted to talk for hours. But it was no use: he was waiting beside the lift with his horrible dog. ‘There’s some flowers for you,’ he said, in a way that was supposed to make me feel guilty. But I didn’t. I just said, ‘Good. Where are they?’ ‘Which ones do you mean?’ he said. ‘Which ones do you mean?’ I said. He was always playing silly games like this. ‘Well, there’s been three lots, haven’t there?’

  I took the lift up to the apartment and found my uncle in his dressing gown, walking up and down in the hall. He wasn’t supposed to be out of bed, and I told him he’d catch a chill. He was muttering about flowers. There were three bunches on the table in the hall.

  ‘These ones came first,’ he said, picking up some yellow roses. ‘Then when I was going off to sleep again, the girl came up with this bunch of – whatever they are, irises. And then just before you got in, the bell rang and it was the boy from the florist’s shop who brought this huge bunch here. There was a note.’

  My uncle looked perturbed. He couldn’t make out what was going on. Often he could go for a month with no one ringing the bell at all. He looked at me over his glasses a bit crossly, and I told him to get back to bed. I pretended I was annoyed with him. I opened the note, which said: ‘I am sorry about last night. Please come down to the street at 9 p.m. I will ring the bell.’ The handwriting was rather spluttery. All three bunches were from Pietro.

  I didn’t want him to be too sorry. I went downstairs again to ask the girl if she would come and keep an eye on my uncle. I knew it would be all right with him, because he went to sleep straight after dinner, which he liked at about seven anyway. Then I thought about what I would wear. I supposed I should wear something very feminine, so it wouldn’t look as though I was just playing his game. So I looked through the clothes I had, and there was a black dress which I could wear. Then I thought maybe he would only take me to a bar for a drink and I would feel overdressed. I spent along time in my room. Perhaps I should continue the game and borrow one of my uncle’s tweed jackets. Then suddenly I wondered if it was wise to go out at all with this man I hardly knew. I went upstairs to speak to Wilfred, to ask him about his friend, but he wasn’t there. In the end I settled on a black skirt and a white top, with a spotted bow tie of my uncle’s. It was very loose, and I had to tie it myself, or try to.

  I went running down to the street when the bell rang. He was standing in the doorway, trying to keep out of the rain, with the collar of his mac turned up. He took my hand and said something about the bow tie, and I was glad because it showed he wasn??
?t going to spend the evening apologising. He rushed me over to a car on the other side of the street and said he was going to take me to see the city. He sounded a bit unconvinced, as though he wasn’t sure that there was much of Ghent to see. But in Belgium there is always a square or two, and the façades of the big buildings are often gilded, which looks good in the rain. The city is built on various waterways with bridges. There is an old castle, a huge cathedral and some lovely guild houses. He pretended he was navigating, and I let him know where to go without puncturing that illusion. He was very kind. He laughed at his own driving, though not as much as he laughed at the Belgian driving.

  I loved showing him around. It made me look at the place properly and appreciate it. It also made me think about the life I lived there as I looked at it through his eyes. We got into a big brasserie in the end, with bright lights and wooden stalls. It was all right. He was drenched, because he’d held his mac up for me when we ran over from the car. He pushed his hand through his hair a lot to begin with, but then he seemed to give up. He offered me a cigarette and I began to look at him properly for the first time. I just liked his face. I don’t know why. You wouldn’t say Pietro’s really handsome, I suppose, but it was a kind face. I liked his narrow eyes and he had a lovely mouth which moved in a very seductive way when he talked. But he was frightened. I could tell that almost straight away. He wasn’t at peace with himself.

  We had dinner. He had mussels, I remember. He was struck by how many mussels people ate. He wanted them with mustard, because he’d seen someone in Mons or Charleroi or somewhere eating them like that. I told him it was very bourgeois, like talking about dogs and football. He said that was all right with him and he teased me a bit for what I ordered. I can’t remember what it was now. The truth was, he thought I was a really solid landlady, a bossy woman with just a bit of sparkle in her eye. I think that was what he wanted from me in some funny way. I didn’t mind.

  He had been doing business in the south and had been driving back to catch the ferry at Ostend when he decided to pull off the motorway. Apparently he had fallen in with Wilfred in some bar. So they’d drunk a lot, and Wilfred had introduced him to Belgian beer. There’s some stuff they pour in a glass bowl which is held up by a wooden stand. You have to grasp the wooden bit to drink it. It tastes like beer, but it’s as strong as wine.

  So the usual thing had happened. They’d drunk a lot of these, and then they’d met these two girls and Wilfred asked them back and so on. He told me all this in a very straightforward way. Then he asked me a lot about what I did, and about my family. He seemed fascinated that I spoke such good English. I explained all about the country and how people in the south spoke French and so on and he was very interested in all that.

  ‘Do you mean to say,’ he said, ‘that people in the same country have different names for the same places?’

  I said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  He seemed amazed, and I suppose it must seem peculiar to an outsider. It’s something we were brought up with, though even so I suppose we are a bit sensitive about it. I explained how every political party had a Flemish-speaking and a French-speaking wing, how the whole place was split in two in every way, except Brussels which was more like an island. I said that when we were at school our teacher had told us that in Yugoslavia they were even worse off. Half of them wrote in Greek letters because they followed the Greek Orthodox Church and half of them wrote like us. So it wasn’t just different names but different letters.

  He asked about my education, and when I told him he said something like, ‘Belgian schoolgirls. Belgian schoolgirls on a bridge. My grandfather would have liked that.’ I hadn’t a clue what he meant.

  I wanted to know about him. He told me all the jobs he’d had. Some of them were very strange. In America he’d worked as a garage mechanic and then he’d spent one summer on a chicken farm, catching them by their legs for vaccination. In Italy he said he’d worked a ski lift. He spent a whole winter there. But then he’d discovered photography. He explained to me how you develop and print pictures; he sounded quite entranced by it. All the time he was telling me these stories I was wondering why he’d never really settled on one thing. He told me he was settled now, that he’d got a little company in London and this was what he was going to do. But I looked at him then, and there was something wild in him, it seemed to me. I don’t know what it was – something that made him restless, that wouldn’t let him be. I wanted it to be all right for him. I felt he could still be caught just in time, but this was the last chance. So I held his hand across the table. He was moved by this, and I couldn’t believe he could be so soft after all the things he’d been telling me.

  I let him kiss me that night. I let him kiss me as much as he wanted. He had a beautiful soft mouth. He stayed for days and days in Ghent, and I never let him do more than kiss me. But I think I knew from that first evening we spent together that I wanted to marry him.

  HOUCHES, LES

  FRANCE 1967

  PIETRO GAZED AT his twenty-five-year-old face in the mirror of his small wood-lined room in the mountains. It was still the same wire-brush hair and his blue eyes looking rather sunk today, little lines of black beneath them. He had not shaved for three days and there was a spiky shadow on his upper lip and an irritation beneath his chin. His face was tanned a reddish, peasant brown, but the skin was tight back against the skull, and he was thin.

  He pulled the cover over the bed and opened the window. The blast of Dolomite air tasted good. It was like the best detoxifying agent ever invented. He filled his sinuses with the rarefied icy gas and felt a shiver of health, despite himself. The fighter pilots training for the Mercury space programme used to cure their hangovers with draughts of oxygen in the morning as they stumbled to the plane. The trouble with the mountain air was that it was so effective Pietro was tempted to use it as a cure every day. He drank too much. After a day in the mountains he needed to warm himself though, and the people he had fallen in with – local men who worked with their hands – had big thirsts in the evening. Drinking as much as they did was the price he had to pay for their company.

  He dressed and made himself some coffee. He always felt good in the mountains. People said one resort was where all the smart people went, another was only for barbarians, but in Pietro’s experience this wasn’t true. There were extreme examples, certainly. In Gstaad, for instance, no one seemed to ski at all – perhaps because there was hardly any skiing to be done. He had stopped there in his car and seemed to be the only person who looked dressed for sport. People in fur coats with leather skin and vacant eyes stared at him curiously. Then again, he had been once to an Italian resort derided for being full of British trippers – the Blackpool of the slopes, they called it. If you put yourself in the Andy Capp bar at midnight then it was certainly true that you could tell you were not in Gstaad. But apart from these extremes, most mountain villages had more in common than they had apart. In all the resorts he had visited Pietro found he felt the same. His body felt clean and alert. His digestion changed on the day he arrived so that his saliva tasted different and he required different foods – dried ham, beef and cheese. Was it the drinking water that made this fundamental change, or was it the air?

  He worked on a ski lift halfway up the mountain. It was a job that was in the gift of the German-speaking South Tyrolean businessman who ran the village. A vicious cartel was operated by a family whose roots in the village long pre-dated the rise of Italian nationalism and who had never therefore bothered to learn more than a few words of the language. Their loyalty was first to the Tyrol and second to Austria. This was another way places could be deceptive, Pietro thought. On the map it said the village was in Italy, but it had about as much in common with Milan as it had with Okayama, Japan, or with Green Bay, Wisconsin.

  After three months working as a waiter in a big hotel he had fallen in one night in a bar with a man called Enrico, a muscular, battered forty-year-old with fingers like salamis. Enrico was
the Italian face of the German-speaking cartel; he was in charge of the main cable car from the village and the subsidiary lifts on the slope above. He talked to Pietro about Italy and Austria and he seemed to like the stories Pietro told about England. Pietro spoke a slightly accented and incomplete Italian; but then so did Enrico. He was impressed by Pietro’s knowledge of the mountain, which he had gained by skiing every day for three months when he could escape from his waiter’s duties. Now, towards the end of the season, Enrico had offered him a job looking after a sunless chair lift in a remote angle of the mountains. Pietro accepted at once. When he discovered how much the job paid he arranged to do some shifts as a barman at the hotel in the evenings as well.

  He took the cable car up as soon as it opened and reached his workplace by a number of different drag lifts. The skiing he did between them was all he managed until the end of the day when he was required to ski down slowly, making sure the pistes were empty. He had a radio for speaking to Enrico, or someone in the office back in the village, and for contacting the men with the bloodwagon.

  Once installed in his wooden cabin, he waited for the first skiers to arrive. His lift was not much used; it was a link into a system of three runs which were steep and often icy. He had a transistor radio in the cabin and a thermos of coffee. When skiers approached he slowed the mechanism of the lift. If he felt well disposed he held the seat so it wouldn’t smack them too hard behind the knees. He looked at their passes and nodded them through. He hardly ever spoke, even when people said something friendly to him. He felt alone in the mountain, he felt close to the rock and earth beneath the snow. He wanted very much to feel part of it, to feel something solid beneath his feet. There had been times in the last year when he had doubted the existence of any solid earth at all.

  The chairs gave soft, metallic bumps as the wheel at the end of the cable span them round and pointed them once more up the mountain. Apart from that, it was quiet. When Pietro felt the silence of the mountain coming on, he turned off the squawking transistor and tried to feel the massive peace of the world under his feet. The air was alive in the sunlight with tiny particles of ice. I am a poor boy, he thought, a wretched, ragged man with no significance. Let me find some security, some sense of what I am from these mountains and the tranquillity around me.