A Fool's Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks

Author:Sebastian Faulks [Sebastian Faulks]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2007-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

MONS

BELGIUM 1914

THERE WERE TWO reasons Pietro dreaded going to see his grandfather in Nottingham. The first was Bobby, a woolly-coated terrier who lay in front of the fire letting off staccato noises, the loudest of which made him stand up and sniff in an accusing way, as though someone else were responsible. The other reason was the old man’s conversation, which ran along lines which were familiar and uninteresting to a sixteen-year-old boy. Later, when his grandfather was dead, he wished he had listened harder. At the time, the stories seemed all part of the atmosphere of dog and sealed windows and stifling gas fire.

‘And where is it this year?’ said old Russell, settling ominously back in his chair.’

‘Ibiza,’ said Pietro.

‘And where’s that then?’

‘It’s in the Mediterranean.’ It sounded promising enough, with cheap food and wine and young English people. Girls.

‘Everyone goes abroad these days, don’t they?’

‘I suppose so. It’s become cheaper, hasn’t it? And the weather. It always seems to rain in England.’

Pietro expected a homily on the virtues of the English seaside. He had been instructed by his father to spend the afternoon with the old man but was to be allowed out to go to the cinema on his own in the evening.

What his grandfather was in fact saying was, ‘Those places we went to every now and again on the east coast, like Skegness, they were bloody terrible. You were always so cold. I couldn’t wait to go abroad. That’s why I joined up in the first place on the seven and five. It was the only way you could afford it, if someone else was paying.’

Pietro glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was a quarter past three. The other side of the river, at Trent Bridge, the test match was midway through the afternoon session. They would have tea at five in the hot little house, supervised by a friendly neighbour. He let his mind drift into neutral, as for a divinity lesson at school, and settled back to let his grandfather talk. He was not yet eighty; he had a full head of hair and no physical disability, but to Pietro he seemed to have lived in an era he had mentally filed under ‘history’. His conversation always looked to the past, and what he said therefore went unregarded.

‘. . . so of course it was a big excitement when you got the telegram, or when you heard in the pub or whatever you were doing. I packed up the shop there and then and told Watkins he’d have to look after it while I was away. And you can’t say we weren’t well looked after then, either. They gave you a warrant if I remember rightly in the post office, just a little ticket sort of thing, and you took that to the station and they gave you a free ride to your headquarters. It was full of reservists when we got there and some of the regulars didn’t like it at all.

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