Grandad seemed to hear the question in her sigh.
‘How I used to hate these,’ he said. ‘My desk was by the window, and I could see the hillside above my father’s farm. We were beaten for every mistake. I had many beatings that year. You are a far better scholar than ever I was.’
‘I mean, what are they for?’ said Letta. ‘If ever I get to Varina I’m not going to go to the supermarket and – hang on while I work it out – when I get to the check-out with all this stuff in my basket and then I find I’ve left my purse at home, I’m not going to say “Would that my purse had not been left behind!” Am I?’
‘You would not find a supermarket in Varina, and if there were one you would find almost nothing on the shelves to fill your basket.’
‘Really? But . . . Anyway, just suppose . . .’
‘First you must express the wish for me in Formal.’
‘Oh, hell. Fayaletu bijon?’
‘Fayo is a weak irregular deponent, remember. And you must modify the noun.’
‘Hell and hell! Let’s see . . . Gefayaleto . . . no, Gefayalento bijoñ?’
‘Well done. You had bad luck choosing Fayo. We used to call it the pig-verb. Now, suppose you found this supermarket and suppose you were able to fill your basket and suppose there were any chance of your having the money to pay for what you had bought, and suppose you then said to the check-out clerk – if such a creature were conceivable in Varina – Gefayalento bijoñ, why, she would certainly burst out laughing.’
‘What’s the point, then?’
‘The point is not to bury a great treasure beyond human reach. For instance, my great-grandfather, your great-great-great-grandfather, when he was in exile in Rome, wrote a poem retelling one of our stories about a feud between two families over a piece of mountain pasture. At the end of it a father finds the bodies of his three sons, killed in an ambush. He stands on the mountain track and thinks about the disputed field. He sees it in his mind, after the snow melts, the swathes of bright mountain flowers with the sweet new grass springing between. The last line of the poem is a single word. Anastrondaitu. Can you tell me what that means?’
‘Is it strondu with the twiddly bits?’
‘Yes.’
‘“If only it had not been remembered”, then?’
‘Yes, and no. Yes, because that is what it literally means. No, because as a single word, complex but exact, coming after the simple words describing the pasture, it pierces right to the heart with its loss and grief. My darling, I would never force you to learn Formal. It is no use unless you genuinely want to.’
‘But I do!’
This was old stuff. The family had argued it through and through. Momma had been against the idea, because she said it was a waste of time when Letta should be doing English schoolwork, and Letta – partly to please Grandad, partly because she thought it might be interesting, but mainly to get her own way with Momma about something – had insisted she did want to learn Formal, and Poppa, who usually kept out of arguments between his wife and his father-in-law, had this time taken Letta’s side. It would be difficult for her to back out now. Besides, whatever he said, Grandad would have been desperately hurt. Again, he seemed to read her thought.
‘It is not for you or for me,’ he said. ‘It is somehow for all mankind. If there is nobody left in the world whom the single word Anastrondaitu can pierce to the heart, then a great treasure will have become buried beyond human reach. Well now, enough of that. No, one thing more. It is for you too. It is more than a treasure. It is life itself. I have survived experiences which, if it had not been for this thing . . .’ and he tapped the worn old grammar book with the two fingers of his left hand, ‘. . . would either have killed me or driven me mad. Oh, may you never have the same need, my darling! Now we must get on.’
Letta was too astonished to work well. Grandad never spoke about what had been done to him. If anyone asked what had happened to his hand he would glance at it and say, ‘Frost-bite,’ and change the subject. Occasionally strangers came to visit him. They talked to him in his room, and after they’d gone he usually seemed a bit depressed. Once Letta had asked who they were and he’d said they’d been policemen, just checking that he still wasn’t plotting to assassinate the Queen. That had been one of his unsmiling jokes, of course, but it had also been a way of telling her he didn’t want to be asked.
What did she know about him, really? Not much, though she felt closer to him than anyone else in the family, and he seemed to feel the same. ‘We arrived together,’ he used to say, meaning that in the same week she’d been born he’d been allowed out of Varina to join his daughter in England. And they were the two who were mostly at home. Poppa was a road engineer, always flying round the world to advise on tricky bits of highway building, and Momma worked for IBM outside Winchester and often didn’t get home till late.
But there was more to their closeness than that. Letta was pretty well certain that she’d been born by accident. After all, Momma had been getting on for forty, with a really good job, and a grandchild on the way when she’d become pregnant. And it was a bit the same about Grandad. Nobody’d ever really expected the Communists would let him out, though there’d been a terrific campaign, and Momma must have been really happy when it happened, still, now she’d got this old man to think about as well as the baby . . . Momma was a perfectly good mother. She did everything she was supposed to, and took trouble over it, but somehow there was a sort of barrier between her and Letta. They didn’t touch or hug much, or talk about things that mattered. Letta felt closer to her eldest brother Steff, whom she saw only four or five times a year, than she did to Momma. And Poppa was away too much for her to get to know him well, either, if you could. She wasn’t sure about that either. So Grandad was the person who mattered most in her life. They shared a sort of out-sidishness, accidentalness, not-quite-fittingness as members of the family. They didn’t talk about any of this, but Letta was pretty sure that Grandad knew about it and felt it too.
But what else? Last birthday he’d been eighty-one. And years before that, when he was still almost a young man, he’d been Prime Minister of Varina for a fortnight, ‘because I had the same name as my great-grandfather’. Another of his jokes. He never said any more about it than that. Then the Communists had taken over and put him in prison, and he’d stayed there over thirty years. He never talked about that either. Today was the first time Letta had heard him even hint at it.
About twenty minutes later, he sighed and closed the grammar.
‘Neither of us is paying attention,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, but . . .’
‘We are both thinking of other things. It’s my fault. I should not have talked about the past. What shall we do instead?’
‘Well, there’s the goat-boy book. We never finished that.’
Grandad made a face.
‘I think we can spare ourselves that,’ he said.
Letta had done her first lessons from the book, which was even more battered than the grammar, simple stories written years and years ago for children to start learning Formal, but whoever had written it – she was called Anya Orestes, Grandad said, though the title page was missing – didn’t seem to have had much idea what children are interested in, so the stories were the worst kind of soppy-pretty, and boring with it.