A Fool's Alphabet (36 page)

It was not quite like that. He could almost picture it, but not quite.

There came another knock at the door and Pietro sprang up. There was no one there. From downstairs he heard his name called. No, that was impossible.

He heard a call. ‘Signore.' That was the sound he had heard. He was being summoned to dinner. The woman with the reddish hair in a bun, the owner, stepped out into the hallway and gestured to him to come down.

Pietro descended the stairs slowly. The room that opened off the hallway, where the woman had earlier gone to consult her husband, contained a mahogany table with a lacy white cloth and several heavy chairs. It was very ill-lit, but Pietro could make out some sort of serving hatch at one end, and a glass door. Seated at the head of the table was a man with grey hair, wearing a blue checked shirt. He was crumbling bread between his fingers.

The woman came through the glass door with a steaming china bowl in her hands. She gestured Pietro to a chair. He sat down, uneasy at not having been introduced to the man. The woman pushed her hair back into its bun and served two bowls of pasta, giving the first to her husband, then placing Pietro's in front of him. She said nothing, but poured a glass of water from a carafe. She left them.

Pietro looked towards the man and nodded. He said nothing, but bent his head to the bowl.

‘Is your wife not going to eat?' said Pietro.

The man did not reply.

‘And your daughter?'

Still he said nothing, but worked his fork around the bowl in front of him. Pietro did likewise, discovering he was hungry after his journey. The sound of their forks on the china was the only noise in the room.

When the woman came to take the plates away Pietro asked if she would not eat with them. She shook her head.

‘Don't talk to him,' she said, looking towards her husband. ‘He never talks to strangers. He only talks to me.'

‘I understand.'

Pietro looked around at the solid rustic furniture of the room. It seemed dusty and overlooked. Much of the wood was draped, as though they thought it better off concealed.

Pietro swallowed some water. He wondered if they would be offered wine. He glanced up towards his silent dining companion, who showed no interest in him. Eventually the woman returned with a flat dish on which were some pieces of meat in gravy. She also carried a bowl of salad.

Pietro again worked his way through it. When it was cleared and he had declined the offer of an orange, he asked the woman: ‘What about your daughter? Has she had dinner?'

‘My daughter?' The woman's voice was even.

‘Yes. She came to tell me I could come and eat with you.'

The woman looked at him in a way that seemed to suggest he was lying to her.

‘She's very pretty,' he went on, trying to placate her. ‘Beautiful blonde hair.'

The woman let out a strange sound, somewhere between a sigh and a smothered laugh. ‘Ah . . . Isabella. Yes.'

Pietro went up to his room as soon as he could. He took up his book and began to read again in the yellow light from the bedside lamp. Through the open window came the sound of cicadas and, closer now, the barking of the dog.

He tried to lose himself in the autobiography but found when he turned the page that he had taken nothing in. He would leave early in the morning and take the bus back to Bergamo, then on to Lecco. It would be good to meet some other people on their travels.

There was the sound of running footsteps on the landing outside and a young woman's raised voice. It sounded like the girl who had knocked on his door. Isabella. He opened the door gently and looked out. There was no sign of her,
though from the dining room downstairs he could hear two voices raised in anger.

Pietro went back into his room and undressed for bed. He folded his clothes on the chair and then, for some reason, placed the back of the chair under the door handle. He turned off the light and pulled up the sheet.

He knew his parents had been here. He closed his eyes and tried once more to imagine it.

His father had pulled up outside, saying, ‘This place may be able to help.' His mother, still a little put out by her inability to find the right road, had agreed quietly. They came into the bar. Francesca explained to the owner that they wanted to stay the night. She came upstairs to see the room. She had come in through the door, crossed to the window and looked out. She opened the wardrobe to see if there was space and turned back the bed to make sure the sheets were clean.

Then she went back and told her husband it was all right. They had asked for dinner but the owner had said it was too late. They ate some bread and salami which was brought to them by a sturdy young woman with red hair pushed up into a bun. She was still in her twenties then.

Francesca said she was tired and went ahead up the stairs to the room. She took off her dress and hung it up in the wardrobe. Her husband stretched and finished his wine downstairs. Then he climbed the stairs gently, feeling the treads beneath his feet. He pushed open the door and Francesca turned and smiled up at him. Then, then . . .

‘This place may be able to help,' said Russell. The car radiator was steaming. Francesca nodded, sulking a little at his impatience with her navigation.

Once inside, she asked the owner if they could stay the night. He said they had a room at the top of the stairs and handed her a key. Francesca ran upstairs, her spirits lifting at the thought of shelter. In the bar Russell asked if they could have something to eat. The owner shrugged and said
it was too late for dinner, but that he would send his daughter through with something in a minute. Russell drank a glass of red wine at the bar.

In the bedroom Francesca passed a quick eye over the furniture and the washbasin. It was simple but clean enough. She crossed to the window and opened it. There was a sound of cicadas from outside, and a single bark from a dog chained in the yard. She looked in the wardrobe and turned back the cover to check the sheets. Leaving the door open, she tripped down the stairs.

Russell took her over to a table on which a candle was stuck in a saucer. She smiled at him and he filled her glass with wine. He touched it with his own next to the candle flame.

From behind the bar a plump woman in her twenties with greasy red hair appeared with a loaf of bread and some slices of salami and olives. Francesca began to yawn before they had finished eating.

While Russell lit a cigarette and poured the rest of the bottle of wine into his glass, she kissed him on the forehead and went up to the room.

She took off her dress and hung it in the old, carved wardrobe. Then she sat on the bed and sorted through her night things in the case.

Russell finished the wine, stubbed out his cigarette and climbed the stairs, feeling the soft timber yield beneath his feet and the risen banister against his palm.

He pushed open the bedroom door and Francesca turned in mild alarm. Seeing it was him, she smiled, her head turned up towards him as though in question or surprise.

Then he looked at her and saw the narrow straps of ivory-coloured silk across her shoulders. He went and sat beside her on the bed, laying his head on her shoulder where the material cut into the white skin, pulled down by the weight of her body.

He peeled down the straps on either side, pulling gently down until her breasts were exposed, white with their
dark-brown nipples, moving slightly up and down where they had just been freed.

He looked up into the almost black eyes of this dark-haired girl. She laughed, a movement which caused her hair to lift and sway back from her white neck and throat. Her lips parted when he placed his own on top of them.

His hands reached down her body, fumbling with further straps and layers of underclothes until her own hand gently stopped him. She stood up, pulled down her clothes, undignified, like a child pulling down its drawers. Then she held his head against her abdomen. Her fingers ran gently over the indentation in his skin where the shrapnel had entered. He clasped at her legs, on one of which a stocking had escaped her quick undressing.

He lifted himself up and peeled off his clothes in swift, embarrassed movements. He did not relax until he was lying on top of her, feeling himself enter some reassuring warmth.

Then he was for a moment calm. He looked down at her shoulder, at the skin with its teeming cells. Three years married, he thought, as he began to move backwards and forwards into her; three years and no word about a child. He had begun to fear that this was something more sinister than chance delay.

He wanted so desperately to have a child, to see some imprint of himself and what he had believed in, something that would live on, for what it was worth, when he was dead. He thought that if he concentrated hard enough, if he willed it, then he might help the fusion happen; nothing else would make tolerable the inexplicable days of war or the random tragedies of peace.

So Russell, not an imaginative man by nature, came in the urgency of his longing to picture what was happening beneath him. He could feel the forces gathering in him, ready to be released, and when the spasm came he held it back, checking his movements, twice, three times, until he judged the force was unstoppable. And when he let it come it was with a powerful shudder and a cry not of satisfaction but of hope
and urging. In his mind he saw the milky fluid spurting and charging into the rosy flesh; then somehow, as the picture became less clear, he saw the daunting journey of some brave outrider of himself. He pictured it journeying through pathways lit as if by pink candlelight, through passageways and tubes and junctions, borne on only by the momentum of his hope. Then he opened his eyes and looked down at the naked body and the face of this woman, whom he loved, and buried his head in her neck, weeping, urging the seed on, willing it home.

Every atom links us

Every feeling binds us

Every thought connects us

Terrified, a young prisoner in the Second World War closes his eyes and pictures himself going out to bat on a sunlit cricket ground in Hampshire.

Across the courtyard in a Victorian workhouse, a father is too ashamed to acknowledge his son.

A skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar; her voice sends shivers through the skull.

Soldiers and lovers, parents and children, scientists and musicians risk their bodies and hearts in search of connection – some key to understanding what makes us the people we become.

Provocative and profound, Sebastian Faulks's dazzling novel journeys across continents and time to explore the chaos created by love, separation and missed opportunities. From the pain and drama of these highly particular lives emerges a mysterious consolation: the chance to feel your heart beat in someone else's life.