A Fool's Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks Read Free Book Online Page A

the hope of making more. He smiled his thanks without looking down at his hand. By the time Pietromanaged to ease him out of the room the boy was still unaware of how much was in his palm.
    Pietro placed his large camera bag on the table by the air conditioner. From a side pocket in the case he pulled out a number of prints made at different times: The top one was about eight years old. It showed a young, fair-haired woman with brown eyes and a bright vermilion sweater. The picture had been taken somewhere in the United States, perhaps New England. The tail-end of a station wagon was visible to one side bearing a Vermont registration number. Half a woolly dog disappeared from the other side of the imitation-leather frame. Composition had at that stage been low on Pietro’s list of priorities. He had learned a good deal in the meantime – about the girl in the picture and about photography. At the time he had been anxious just to catch her likeness.
    He took a sleeping pill – two,
nocte
, the pharmacist’s instructions read, for benefit of Latin speakers – and lit the mosquito coil. He turned his transistor radio to the World Service and lay back under the sheet. A few minutes later he felt the sleeping pill reach out and gently uncouple the connections in his brain.
    He took breakfast beneath a roughly constructed porch by the pool. By daylight he could see the broken tiles on the inner roofs and the rough masonry of the hotel walls. He also saw a rat which was the size of a small dog. It was strolling along the flowerbed beyond the pool. A waiter told him not to worry. ‘Is bandicoot, sir. Friend to man.’ It was hard to see how a giant rat could be friend to man, but Pietro trusted the local knowledge. The boiled egg he had ordered arrived after forty-five minutes, and he ate it with a wary eye on the flowerbed.
    Later that morning he drove up into the hills in a Japanese car he had hired in Colombo. As the road snaked through the tea plantations small children tried to sell him flowers. While the car took the gradual ascent round the edge of the hill the children ran up the escarpment and were ready atthe next corner. Finally he stopped and took the photograph of a small girl. She handed him a ready-written piece of paper with her name and address on it. He promised to send her a print.
    The man he was due to meet lived in an old plantation house near Kandy. It had a veranda with wickerwork chairs and a gloomy sitting room in which an electric fan, suspended from the ceiling, turned with an unoiled click at each grudging rotation.
    Mr de Silva was a small, bald man in his fifties with a round face and tortoiseshell glasses.
    â€˜Will you take beer?’ he asked Pietro.
    â€˜Thank you.’ Pietro stretched out his legs on the veranda and clasped the beer bottle. It was marginally below room temperature. Mr de Silva filled his own glass with gin and water.
    Pietro explained that he had come to take pictures to accompany a newspaper article. Mr de Silva knew this; the journalist had already done the interview, which was to form part of a series on new politicians of the Third World. Pietro said he would like to take some shots that would show his subject looking urgent, or wise, or leaderly.
    Mr de Silva nodded. ‘Tell me about this newspaper. Is it as good as the old
Times
? By God, that was a paper. The “Thunderer”. I used to read it for the law reports.’
    It turned out that Mr de Silva had once been a barrister in London. He asked Pietro for news of his contemporaries, many of whom were now judges. He was on first-name terms with most of the law lords.
    â€˜And Simpson’s in the Strand. You could have a good blow-out there. Not that I could often afford it in those days.’
    Pietro brought him up to date with Lyons Corner Houses, the Boat Race, various West End theatres, and, so far as he could, the results of the county cricket competition. He asked him