A Fool's Alphabet Read Online Free PDF

which showed in the way he spoke to animals or the puzzled manner in which he would hold a flower up for his mother’s inspection and then put it back in its vase. He seemed impressed by the natural world, pointing in wordless wonder to the trees and hills near where they lived. There was often alarm in his voice when he first noticed something, particularly a new place, but he could be reassured by Francesca and would then become protective towards the thing he had seen. She thought of this gentleness as in some way connected to his Italian side. She told him he had her father’s eyes and thought they were in some way the witness of his inheritance.
    Though she was still almost a girl herself, Francesca felt the weight of adulthood when she looked at the unprotected innocence of the boy. It made her frightened when she thought of the masculinity he would rapidly and eagerly acquire. Then he would be taken away from her. Even in his innocence, which was really neither boy’s nor girl’s, only human, she was aware of the pattern of manhood waiting to emerge. When they talked and played together, Francesca felt strange in the protective role of her femininity towards his childish maleness. She held him in her arms and prayed, one thing: that her son would not, like her brother, die in war.
    Raymond Russell hired a woman from the village to come and help his wife with the house. Mrs Graham was a large, uncompromising person who was used to being obeyed. She introduced a routine which had previously been lacking. Until then Francesca’s start to the day had been three cups of coffee and a hurried breakfast with her husband before going to the garden gate and waving as his grey HumberHawk disappeared from view. Then she went to play the gramophone or the radio, tucked her hair up into a scarf and zipped round the house with a duster. There was no pattern or purpose to her cleaning until Mrs Graham insisted on doing different rooms properly on selected days.
    Pietro by this time was at school, where he was frustrated by his inability to do things. He could see in his mind the pictures he wanted to paint and was disappointed by the blotches he produced on the paper. Once he poured the coloured water in his jam jar over the girl sitting next to him. The headmistress of the school said he was not a naughty boy but that he needed bringing out of himself. Francesca used to go to collect him before lunch and put him on a seat on the back of her bicycle. He told her there were Red Indians following them.
    Francesca Russell loved her son and she loved her husband. He wasn’t an exciting or romantic man and, though she was undemanding, even Francesca noticed that he had an aversion to parting with money. He also, however, had an extreme modesty of aspiration. He had twice rejected the offer of further promotion in the army; he was grateful to have come through the war alive. To have married such a woman and to be a father was as much as he asked. Once a colleague at work hinted that he was a lucky devil to have a glamorous young Italian wife. Russell didn’t know how to respond. His admiration of Francesca was at odds with his belief that nothing he himself had won or achieved could be worth having. He looked flustered and confused, and none of his colleagues raised the subject again.
    When her husband had gone to work Francesca sometimes used to turn on the radio in the sitting room. She listened to
Housewives’ Choice
or any programme that played tuneful music. When Pietro was very small she sometimes danced with him, going down on her knees so she was on the same level. When the music stopped she would speak to him, her cheeks a little pink from the exertion, her breath hot on his face.
    He liked this moment in particular, and it came to be one of his first clear memories. Her breath sometimes had a faint residual smell of roast coffee, sometimes of violets, but usually it was just warm air which he felt