The End of the Alphabet Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Az Za

  This story is unlikely.

  On or about his fiftieth…

  Ambrose Zephyr lived with his…

  Indeed, said the doctor. Arrangements.

  Ambrose Zephyr was married to…

  Zipper sat silent beside her…

  Depending on the storyteller, Ambrose…

  Why you? Why anyone? responded…

  Ambrose Zephyr’s father toiled as…

  Ambrose Zephyr sat dumb and…

  Ambrose Zephyr began life a…

  Zipper woke to what felt…

  As a boy, Ambrose Zephyr…

  A list of what? said…

  A.

  B.

  C.

  Nearing midnight, the hum of…

  D.

  E.

  F.

  The Mediterranean was passing far…

  G.

  H.

  I.

  The next morning near sunrise…

  K.

  J.

  L.

  MNOPQRSTU.

  V.

  Z.

  A few evenings later, Zipper…

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise for The End of the Alphabet

  Copyright

  For Rebecca…

  TMD

  Think of the long trip home

  Should we have stayed at home and thought of here

  Where should we be today?

  ELIZABETH BISHOP, ‘Questions of Travel’

  AZ

  ZA

  This story is unlikely.

  Were it otherwise, or at the least more wished for, it would have begun on a Sunday morning. Early, as that was his best time of the day, and in April, that odd time between a thin winter and a plump spring.

  He would have closed the door of his house and stood on his front step, eyeing the predawn sky. He would have given the neighbourhood stray a shove from its perch on his window ledge. The scruffy cat would have hissed and bolted across the narrow road to the park across the way. He would have hissed back, proud he had at last defeated the mangy beast, and set off. As he had every Sunday morning as far back as he could remember.

  As he walked up the road, the woman from number eighteen would be retrieving the morning paper from her doorstep. The cool morning would have meant she had remembered to throw on a dressing gown. They would have traded pleasant, awkward good-mornings. He knew her to be the mother of two energetic children whose names he could never recall. She knew he worked in some sort of creative field. After a moment or two of searching for common ground, he would have asked after her children’s artwork. He and his wife had no children of their own.

  Farther on, he would have seen the elderly man and his tiny dog that lived at number twelve, about to begin their morning walk around the park. The pair would be waiting to say hello. The man would have tipped his cap and launched directly into an eccentric opinion about something. The tiny dog would have begun yapping at the neighbourhood stray.

  He would have worried about disagreeing with the old fellow and causing offence, or starting a discussion on a topic he knew nothing about, or the soundness of his own opinion. He would have forced an agreeing laugh, wished his neighbour a good day and eyed the dog with suspicion.

  He would have made his way to Kensington High Street and grumbled about the winter that had passed. He would have wished he had taken his wife to Italy. But that would have been expensive or difficult or meant a bad time at the office. He would have sighed to himself, then smiled as the London sky inched from black to grey to yellow to blue.

  He would have turned in at Kensington Gardens, up past the palace and on to Broad Walk. Here he would have been happiest. He would have paused near the Round Pond, looked towards the east and the swans, and squinted in his way to watch a girl of perhaps nine or ten, her hair dark and fine and in need of a trim or a ribbon, reading a book beyond her years. He would have closed his eyes in the warmth of a sun just clearing the budding treetops.

  He would have checked his watch, counted his minutes and the day’s schedule in his head, and turned for home. He would have retraced his route down the Walk, past the palace, along the High Street, into his road, past number twelve and number eighteen and the cat now back on the window ledge, and through his front door.

  His wife would have begun to stir in her sleep. Five minutes more, she would have mumbled, just loud enough for him to hear as he made her tea. As usual, a tepid cup with too much milk.

  Ambrose Zephyr would have been content that it was Sunday and that spring had come again to that part of London and that there was no need to go to the office. He would have read a draft of his wife’s latest magazine column and (as gentle readers are obliged) made one or two enthusiastic comments.

  He would have wondered about the days ahead of him and, as was his habit, dreamed of doing something else. And there it would have ended.

  But that is not this story.

  On or about his fiftieth birthday, Ambrose Zephyr failed his annual medical exam. An illness of inexplicable origin with neither known nor foreseeable cure was discovered. It would kill him within the month. Give or take a day.

  It was suggested he might want to make arrangements concerning his remaining time.

  Ambrose Zephyr lived with his wife—content, quiet, with few extravagances—in a narrow Victorian terrace full of books.

  He owned two bespoke suits, one of which he had been married in. The other—a three-piece linen number with lapelled waistcoat—he wore whenever and wherever he travelled: on business, on the underground, on his Sunday walk. A pocket square, discreetly puffed, always in place. He collected French-cuffed shirts as others might collect souvenir spoons or back issues of National Geographic. He rarely wore ties but liked them as challenges in graphic design. His footwear was predominantly Italian, loaferish and bought in the sales on Oxford Street. His watches—of which there were many—were a range of silly colours and eccentric shapes.

  When cornered, he claimed to read Joyce, Ford and Conrad. Rereads of Fleming and Wodehouse were a more accurate library. His opinion of Miss Elizabeth Bennet was not favourable (though he liked Mr B and held a wary respect for Darcy). Wuthering Heights, according to Ambrose, was the dullest book ever written.

  He had not read a newspaper in some time.

  Everything Ambrose Zephyr knew about cuisine he learned from his wife. He was allowed in the kitchen, but under no circumstance was he to touch anything. He was a courageous eater, save Brussels sprouts and clams. His knowledge of wine was vague and best defined as Napa good, Australian better, French better still. Kir royale was his drink of occasion. For an Englishman, he made a poor cup of tea.

  He believed women to be quantifiably wiser than men. He was neither a breast nor a leg nor an ass man; hair could be any length, any colour. Ambrose preferred the complete puzzle to a bit here, a piece there.

  He stood when someone entered the room. He walked to the street side. Opened his wife’s door first. He could be trusted.

  Ambrose Zephyr worked as the creative wallah for Dravot, Carnehan. Ill-mannered competitors termed it the D&C. Messrs Dravot and Carnehan had long ago divested their interests in the advertising agency to a globalizing media concern. The principals then went off to seek other fortunes and left Ambrose working for a wise and exhausted woman named Greta.

  Co-workers considered Ambrose to possess an inventive if journeyman approach to the creative process: on time, on budget, realistic, reasonable. He was neither star nor guru. Ambrose was comfortable with that. A client is in the business
of selling something, he often said, but that something is usually not Ambrose Zephyr.

  With his heels to the wall Ambrose stood an inch or two under six feet. Excluding the inevitable middle-years-droop of waist and waddle, his frame was thinnish. His head, well seasoned, carried the same amount of hair it did when he was a boy. His eyes were creased at the corners and as blue as the day when, fifty years before, a young and sad Queen had come home from Africa.

  Those who knew him described Ambrose Zephyr as a better man than some. Wanting a few minor adjustments, they would admit, but didn’t we all. His wife described him as the only man she had loved. Without adjustment.

  Indeed, said the doctor. Arrangements.

  Ambrose Zephyr suggested, for all in the outer office to hear, that the doctor might want to wait one damn minute before suggesting that Ambrose might want to arrange his remaining days. Days that until moments before had been assumed would stretch to years. With luck to decades. Not shrink to weeks.

  If that, said the doctor.

  The room filled with fog. The doctor became a blurry lump behind the desk. The air turned as thick as custard, sauna hot. Ambrose struggled to keep his questions from spilling out with his breakfast in a puddle on the floor.

  Something of a mystery, answered the doctor.

  Not contagious as far as we can tell.

  Fatal? Yes, quite.

  Very sure.

  Ambrose Zephyr was married to Zappora Ashkenazi, a woman as comfortable in her own skin as anyone else. She had kept her name for the apparent reasons, would have preferred to have been born a Frenchwoman, suffered fools with grace and a smile, loathed insects.

  She had decorated the Victorian terrace in tastefully Swedish DIY, updating as budget and wear dictated. She was resigned to the likelihood that a pied-à-terre in the sixth arrondissement might not be in her future. She was content with that.

  She wore the best labels she could afford and knew the mysteries that moved a £500 ensemble to the £50 rack. Red and black and white were her ‘colours.’ Accessorizing she considered well worth the effort, and her earrings were almost always perfect with that outfit. She owned one pair of stilettoed shoes that hurt just to look at. But Ambrose liked them. Which was enough.

  She read everything. Russian epics, French confections, American noir, English tabloids had at one time or another taken their place in a wobbly pile beside the bed. Non-fiction was too much like school, she said. Experimental literature left her cold and annoyed and despairing for the so-called modern craft. She had lost count of how many times she had read Wuthering Heights.

  She could walk into a kitchen she had never seen before and—without a recipe—plate a meal worthy of a starred review in half the time it took her husband to find an egg to boil. Her kitchen was full of cookery books that had never felt the splash of an errant sauce. She read them, she displayed them; they felt good in hand. They completed the room. Like earrings.

  Men brought out her best and made her laugh. She liked most beards, hated all moustaches and furrowed her brow at the mention of tattoos. Height and weight and size didn’t matter. Manners and nice shoes mattered. Doing the better thing mattered.

  Her shoulder was ready when friends felt a cry coming on. She knew where to offer opinion and when to shut up. She could juggle oranges. She lied only a little, and they were always white.

  Zappora Ashkenazi was the literary editor for the country’s third most-read fashion magazine. Her publisher had wanted to introduce the magazine’s reluctant readership to both new and classic literature, and if that literature held a passing link to couture, so much the better. It was a job with challenge: Austen, Woolf and Parker had never, so far as Zappora knew, assembled a spring collection. Yet those who read ‘On the Night Stand’ every month did so faithfully and first. Her writing was known for its economic style and refreshing avoidance of simile. Her husband was her first reader. Every word, every draft. You always have an interesting story to tell, he would say.

  Zappora started in the fashion trade as a photographer’s dresser. She flipped collars, fanned skirts, hitched pants, buttoned, tied, zipped. By the end of the first hour with her first model on her first day of her first real job she was given her first nickname.

  Zipper.

  She was very proud.

  Zipper was not quite as tall as her husband, not quite as thin and not quite as old. Her hair was dark and fine and trimmed precisely every eight weeks. Coloured, perhaps tied with a ribbon, as required.

  Her eyes were creased at the corners. She wore glasses when reading. The glasses were purchased in a small shop in Paris, around the corner from an antiquarian bookshop.

  Zipper sat silent beside her husband, thinking how curious it was that her body had stopped working. That the doctor sounded like he was speaking under water.

  She wondered what would happen if she got up and left. Better yet, hadn’t come in at all. She clung to the sense of it.

  I am not in the room.

  Ambrose is not unravelling into the sweating, pasty stranger sitting next to me.

  We are at home, preparing a meal for friends or deciding which film to see or selecting which book to curl up with or standing on the doorstep watching that annoying cat with those stupid birds.

  We are not here.

  None of this is happening to us.

  Depending on the storyteller, Ambrose and Zipper met for the first or second time in the offices of Dravot, Carnehan. The third most-read fashion magazine in the country was at the time a fledgling and unread concept. It was being pitched to the city’s advertising community in an effort to change that.

  Messrs Dravot and Carnehan sat at one end of their unnecessarily long boardroom table. Ambrose stood in a corner trying to look creative. He was the only man in the room not wearing a tie. The magazine’s presentation team was led by a painfully loud publisher and trailed by a nervous junior editor, introduced as Young Ms Ashkenazi Who I Believe Will Be Heading Up Our Literary Efforts.

  Ambrose would later admit to a nagging sensation of having seen this Ms Ashkenazi before. How he could not place her, but that her handshake felt small, warm, a touch damp. How he could not take his eyes off her. And how, more than once, he had narrowed his gaze to watch her, topless, eating tapas on a beach in Spain. She might have been twenty, maybe twenty-one years old. It was hard to see clearly, Ambrose would explain, what with the sun and the heat and the glare off the sea.

  Zipper had an equally odd feeling throughout the meeting. She thought, but couldn’t be sure, that she knew the slightly handsome man in the corner who said nothing. (What she never mentioned to anyone was the pleasant hum she felt as Ambrose spent the meeting trying not to glance at her breasts. Or that she found his periodic squint boyishly charming.)

  Looking back, Ambrose and Zipper agreed the meeting could not have ended soon enough. As we’ll-be-in-touch’s went around the room, Ambrose complimented Ms Ashkenazi on her glasses. In that moment Zipper recalled where she had seen this man before.

  Coffee? Ambrose then suggested.

  It’s Zappora. Zipper, actually.

  But if you’d rather not…

  Zipper smiled.

  You’re busy then…not to worry. Right. Zipper? Well. Yes. Lovely. Perhaps another time…Have we met? No, my mistake. There you are. Sorry. Right. Well.

  Zipper remembered the rain in Paris. Tea would be brilliant, she said.

  Ambrose escorted the magazine team to the street. While everyone waited for taxis and compared notes for their next presentation, Zipper conjured a case of performance nerves and told the team she’d catch up. Ambrose never went back to the office.

  They spent the rest of the morning and the better part of the afternoon in a tiny café near Seven Dials. The next day a grinning Ambrose turned up at D&C at noon, wearing a shambled version of the clothes he had worn the day before.

  Ambrose Zephyr later claimed that Zipper was the only woman he had ever been honest with. Not that he had
ever misled anyone (perhaps a mild fib here and there), but with Zipper there would be no showing off, no blurring of unfortunate detail, no exaggeration for effect. In the face of all reason she was interested in him as he was. Not as he wished he was.

  From that morning across the boardroom table, or earlier—depending on the storyteller—on a narrow street in Paris, Ambrose and Zipper were almost effortless.

  They were married beside an anonymous willow near a statue of Peter Pan.

  It was a small, drenched affair. All parents attended, as uncomfortable as newly met in-laws can be, but managing to find common ground in grumbles about the weather, the venue, the damned informality of it all. A blown light bulb from the recently acquired and completely bare Victorian terrace was broken under foot.

  The following week a notice ran in the social pages of the Sunday editions:

  ZEPHYR/ASHKENAZI. Saturday last, at Kensington Gardens. Ambrose Zephyr (Esq) and Zappora Ashkenazi (Ms), attended by Katerina Mankowitz (Ms) of Bayswater and Frederick Wilkes (Esq) of Her Majesty’s Foreign Office. The bride, who will retain her maiden name, wore a vintage ensemble in off-white, tailored by Umtata’s of Old Jewry. The couple is currently honeymooning on the continent. Their long-term plans were not available at press time.

  Why you? Why anyone? responded the doctor.

  I’m afraid not. Nothing to be done.

  Unlikely, but perhaps.

  Could be, but doubtful.

  How long? Thirty days. Give or take.

  Faculties may dull a bit. Blurred eyesight, ringing ears, numbed fingertips. That sort of thing. Happens rather quickly as far as we can tell.

  Yes, the doctor offered, unfair would be a very good word about now.

  Ambrose Zephyr’s father toiled as a wordsmith for one of the more popular broadsheets of the day. Not long after writing his son’s wedding notice, he had taken an early retirement. Enough reading about it, he told his wife.