A Fool's Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks Page B

was a kind face. I liked his narrow eyes and he had a lovely mouth which moved in a very seductive way when he talked. But he was frightened. I could tell that almost straight away. He wasn’t at peace with himself.
    We had dinner. He had mussels, I remember. He was struck by how many mussels people ate. He wanted them with mustard, because he’d seen someone in Mons or Charleroi or somewhere eating them like that. I told him it was very bourgeois, like talking about dogs and football. He said that was all right with him and he teased me a bit for what I ordered. I can’t remember what it was now. The truth was, he thought I was a really solid landlady, a bossy woman with just a bit of sparkle in her eye. I think that was what he wanted from me in some funny way. I didn’t mind.
    He had been doing business in the south and had been driving back to catch the ferry at Ostend when he decidedto pull off the motorway. Apparently he had fallen in with Wilfred in some bar. So they’d drunk a lot, and Wilfred had introduced him to Belgian beer. There’s some stuff they pour in a glass bowl which is held up by a wooden stand. You have to grasp the wooden bit to drink it. It tastes like beer, but it’s as strong as wine.
    So the usual thing had happened. They’d drunk a lot of these, and then they’d met these two girls and Wilfred asked them back and so on. He told me all this in a very straightforward way. Then he asked me a lot about what I did, and about my family. He seemed fascinated that I spoke such good English. I explained all about the country and how people in the south spoke French and so on and he was very interested in all that.
    â€˜Do you mean to say,’ he said, ‘that people in the same country have different names for the same places?’
    I said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’
    He seemed amazed, and I suppose it must seem peculiar to an outsider. It’s something we were brought up with, though even so I suppose we are a bit sensitive about it. I explained how every political party had a Flemish-speaking and a French-speaking wing, how the whole place was split in two in every way, except Brussels which was more like an island. I said that when we were at school our teacher had told us that in Yugoslavia they were even worse off. Half of them wrote in Greek letters because they followed the Greek Orthodox Church and half of them wrote like us. So it wasn’t just different names but different letters.
    He asked about my education, and when I told him he said something like, ‘Belgian schoolgirls. Belgian schoolgirls on a bridge. My grandfather would have liked that.’ I hadn’t a clue what he meant.
    I wanted to know about him. He told me all the jobs he’d had. Some of them were very strange. In America he’d worked as a garage mechanic and then he’d spent one summer on a chicken farm, catching them by their legs for vaccination. In Italy he said he’d worked a ski lift. He spent a whole winterthere. But then he’d discovered photography. He explained to me how you develop and print pictures; he sounded quite entranced by it. All the time he was telling me these stories I was wondering why he’d never really settled on one thing. He told me he was settled now, that he’d got a little company in London and this was what he was going to do. But I looked at him then, and there was something wild in him, it seemed to me. I don’t know what it was – something that made him restless, that wouldn’t let him be. I wanted it to be all right for him. I felt he could still be caught just in time, but this was the last chance. So I held his hand across the table. He was moved by this, and I couldn’t believe he could be so soft after all the things he’d been telling me.
    I let him kiss me that night. I let him kiss me as much as he wanted. He had a beautiful soft mouth. He stayed for days and days in Ghent,