A Fool's Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks

impossible,’ said Pietro. ‘I might have to take a picture of him one day.’ They shook hands and surveyed the tropical fertility that tumbled away from the edge of Mr de Silva’s garden. ‘It is the most beautiful island on earth,’ said Mr de Silva, answering the question Pietro had been asking himself. ‘If only it had the Inns of Court!’ They both laughed as Pietroloaded his camera bag into the back of the car. On the way back he took two films of pictures trying to capture something of the landscape.
    The following night he sat by the pool in Colombo, drinking a glass of arrack, the local spirit, diluted with Coca-Cola. Mr de Silva had seemed to him to be the prisoner of another country’s culture. ‘Prisoner’ was perhaps the wrong word for a man who seemed so happy in his condition. A willing captive, perhaps; or some other more colloquial phrase which Mr de Silva himself would have been able to produce. Even in de Silva’s historical contentment there was a trace of sadness, Pietro thought. A man cannot have everything.
    It was very late when a porter on his routine round shone his torch about the edges of the courtyard. Pietro, who was gazing up at the hot stars, asked him about the bandicoot and the man settled down to explain the habits of the creature and in what way, precisely, such a beast could be considered ‘friend to man’. They drank some whisky that Pietro fetched from his room, and the local man went into detail about the eating habits of the bandicoot’s close relation, something which was apparently called a ‘hotampoor’. He, it appeared from the porter’s excited narrative, was a redneck country cousin of the bandicoot. He lived off eggs and chickens and made a nuisance of himself to farmers and smallholders. The streetwise bandicoot, by contrast, lived only in the city where he liked nothing more than killing snakes. But more than this, his particularly prized meal was the one poisonous snake in Sri Lanka. They drank a toast to the bandicoot, truly friend to man, then refilled their glasses, the porter because he had seldom tasted whisky before. Pietro because he was anxious about lying down to sleep.

DORKING
ENGLAND 1963
    RAYMOND RUSSELL’S FLAT was in a mansion block off Baker Street. It had large, elegant rooms kept at a stifling temperature by the furnace in the basement of the block. None of the apartments had their own heating controls, and the previous tenants, a thin-blooded old couple, had sealed the windows in the sitting room. There were long corridors with mauve carpets leading from the front door. The proportions stifled noise. Laughter was swallowed in the vacuum of the airless spaces and silence could never be driven back more than an inch or two before it seeped in again like the warmed air from the boiling radiators behind the curtains.
    Russell had been transferred, at his own request, by the Civil Service. His steady record and occasional ability to solve problems that had perplexed his superiors had been appreciated. In the evenings he had begun to cultivate a new hobby. A planning application he had been supervising in Swindon turned on the addition to a listed building of something the owner described as a penthouse. Russell was familiar with the word only from American films and, like the rest of his department, was unclear exactly what it was. According to the applicant, a penthouse was another name for a top floor, usually with a good view and a built-in cocktail bar. Some discussion followed, and Russell called in at the library on the way back from work and looked the word up in the full Oxford English Dictionary. He was surprised and oddly interested to see that it had nothing to do with houses – or pents, for that matter – at all. It was a corruption of the Frenchword
appentis
, from the Latin
appendicium
, meaning an appendage. At the next meeting of the committee he told them this