JONATHAN BUCKLEY

Ghost MacIndoe

Dedication

for Susanne Hillen

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

1. Our Lady of Fatima

2. Gisbert

3. Nan Burnett

4. Eck

5. The Doodlebug House

6. The Winslow Boy

7. The Bovis stove

8. Tollund Man

9. Praa

10. Monty

11. The girls’ party

12. The Diet of Augsburg

13. The great Mclndoe

14. The cave

15. 6 July 1958

16. Chocolate soldiers

17. Welcome back, Private MacIndoe

18. A Name You Can Trust

19. Edie the WAAF

20. Dixon’s Discs

21. Pen

22. The Crown and Anchor

23. The Park Rangers

24. Mitchell

25. Gone but forgotten

26. Shipping Supplied

27. All My Appointed Time

28. Edwin

29. Esmé

30. The riot in Buenos Aires

31. The light on the stairs

32. Mr Harvey

33. All Saints

34. Nafplio

35. MacIndoe’s

36. Pont des Arts

37. A Night at the Opera

38. The Greta

39. La Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda

40. 27 April 1983

41. Bank

42. The Bellevue

43. The Rotunda in Ranelagh Gardens

44. The desk

45. Titus Egnatius Tyrannus

46. Roderick

47. The firemen’s band

48. Goodnight Ralph

49. 5 November

50. Irene

51. Be like the dead

52. The father

53. Creeping Jesus

54. Flat 3

55. Carpe Mañana

56. Sea lavender

Copyright

About the Publisher

1. Our Lady of Fatima

The postman was sitting on the doorstep of a shop halfway down the hill, with his empty bag like a cat on his lap, but he stood up when Alexander MacIndoe and his mother stopped, as if he had been waiting for them. There was dust all over his moustache, Alexander noticed, and on his eyelashes. The postman tipped his helmet to Alexander’s mother. ‘Morning, Mrs Mac,’ he smiled, showing teeth that were the colour of pencil wood. ‘Very elegant today, I must say.’

‘Too kind, Mr Durrant,’ she replied, with a serious face. She adjusted Alexander’s cap and tucked the trailing end of his scarf into the breast of his coat.

Mr Durrant knocked the cap skew-whiff again, then straightened it. ‘Hello, Master Mac, how are we this morning?’ he asked.

Alexander said nothing. He looked from the postman’s grey jacket to the clouds behind him, which were a different grey, and then to the balloons that wagged above him, which were another different grey and were bent like sad old dogs on their long, long leads. And when, in his fifty-eighth year, Alexander MacIndoe came to assemble the chronology of his life, this would be the oldest memory of which he could be certain. He would see a postman in a grey jacket, with grey barrage balloons above him, on a cold yellow morning in February, in 1944.

‘A bad night, Mrs Mac,’ said Mr Durrant.

‘It was that,’ she agreed, shifting the canvas bag that she had put in the seat of Alexander’s pushchair.

‘A grim one,’ mused Mr Durrant. ‘Your place come through all right?’

‘Thank you, yes. All’s well.’

‘Count our blessings, eh?’

‘Indeed we must.’

Alexander turned for a moment to watch a dray-horse haul a van out of Wemyss Road, and Mr Durrant moved a step closer to his mother. ‘Copped it down there they did,’ the postman told her, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder. He smiled sympathetically at Alexander, who saw that his eyes had tears in them. ‘Would the wee man like something?’ asked Mr Durrant. And here Alexander MacIndoe’s earliest true memory would recommence, with a postcard sliding upwards from a flap and a picture of the Virgin Mary, her white-shrouded head at the centre of the swirling rays of an orange sun, against a sky that was bluer than any he had ever seen. Mr Durrant turned the card and traced the words he then displayed with a finger that was creased like a worn sock. ‘The Thompson Family, 13 Shooters Hill Road, London, England.’ He worked the card between Alexander’s fingers and left it in the boy’s grip.

‘He can’t take that,’ said his mother.

‘Well, I can’t deliver it, Mrs MacIndoe,’ Mr Durrant replied. ‘Nobody of that name at that address for as long as I’ve been around.’ Gently he extracted the postcard from the boy’s grip and turned its reverse to her. ‘No message anyhow, see? People, eh? Forget their own names, some of them would.’ He posted the card back into Alexander’s hands and patted him on the head.

‘Say thank you, Alexander,’ Irene MacIndoe instructed her son. Without a sound he mouthed the words.

‘We’ll meet again, young fellow-me-lad,’ said Mr Durrant, pinching a cheek. ‘Take care, Mrs Mac. Take care, tiny man.’

Alexander’s mother took him along a street that was not the way to Mrs Kiernan’s. Her curls bobbed quickly as she hurried, steering the pushchair with her fingertips; Alexander, holding the cold steel handle, had to skip along to keep up. She began to sing to him the song she sang every morning on the way to Mrs Kiernan’s house. ‘She’s the girl that makes the thing that drills the hole that holds the spring, that drives the rod that turns the knob, that works the thingumebob,’ she sang, stroking his nose with a fingertip at the end of the verse. The pavement became gritty, and soon there was water running down the road, water that was plaited like his father’s belt. He saw Mrs Murrell, Mrs Beckwith, Mrs Darling and Mrs Evans, standing side by side in the middle of the street, looking away from them. The women glanced back and parted to allow Alexander and his mother into the line. There were branches all over the ground and an ambulance parked by a stump of a tree, and behind it was a hill of bricks and broken boards, over which some men were walking. To the side of the hill was a wall with a chimney on it, and pink-striped wallpaper on the upper part, above patches of blue stripes. On one blue-striped patch hung a mirror on a thin chain.

‘Terrible business, Irene,’ said Mrs Evans, the first of the women to speak.

‘It is, it is,’ said Alexander’s mother. ‘There but for the grace,’ she added, a phrase her son would often, in the following weeks, repeat silently to himself, reassured of his mother’s wisdom by his inability to understand what she had meant.

‘The Fitchies,’ said Mrs Darling. She sniffed loudly, jerking her head back as though she had been struck on the forehead. The doors of the ambulance opened and two men stepped out of it, carrying two long poles between them, with a sling of canvas between the poles.

Irene MacIndoe took hold of Alexander’s hand. Where the two men walked he could make out a bread tin among the bricks, and a whole glass bottle between the legs of a chair with a snapped back. A mauve eiderdown, speared on a broken windowframe, was the only thing on the hill that was not the colour of cement. At the back of a gully in the rubble, an empty doorway stood upright still, and Mr Nesbit, from the ironmonger’s shop, stood in its frame, looking at something he had placed in the bowl of a white tin helmet. Alexander watched Mrs Murrell fold a handkerchief then drop it into her handbag, which fastened with a click of the two brass berries on the clasp.

The women talked in whispers to his mother. ‘They found Moira. Donald’s in there as well, almost definitely,’ he heard Mrs Murrell say, a moment before Mr Nesbit lost his footing and tumbled out of sight.

‘Mind how you go, Douggie,’ said Mrs Darling, not loudly.

All the women, even Alexander’s mother, made a brief laughing sound, but none of them smiled.

‘All right your way, Irene?’ asked Mrs Beckwith.

His mother nodded, watching Mr Nesbit as he clambered back up towards the doorway.

‘Ruby’s son-in-law, too. Out on patrol in East India Docks,’ said Mrs Murrell. ‘Couldn’t have seen the parachute. God knows how he missed it. Lovely lad,’ she said, and shook her head. ‘Shame it is. Bloody shame.’

‘Rita,’ said Mrs Evans.

‘Siemens caught it and all, I heard,’ said Mrs Darling.

‘Not what I heard,’ Mrs Murrell told her. ‘And a bloody shame is what it is. A bloody damned shame.’

‘Rita,’ insisted Mrs Evans. ‘The boy.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Mrs Beckwith winced. ‘Irene,’ she said, and then his mother’s hands closed over his face. He could not breathe properly, so he pulled at her hands. She turned his face into her coat, but Alexander strained his eyes to peer through a gap in her fingers, and what he saw was the two men coming down off the ruins of the house, and a pair of feet sticking up from the sling, one with a brown sock on it and the other bare and yellowish, like a pig’s trotter in the butcher’s. One of the men opened the ambulance door and climbed in. The feet waggled like ducks on a pond.

‘We’re not doing any good here, girls,’ said Mrs Darling, which made Mrs Murrell, Mrs Beckwith and Mrs Evans turn and form a circle around Alexander and the pushchair. Alexander put out a hand to bat a coat aside; the ambulance doors were closed.

Mrs Evans stooped down to Alexander and touched the postcard. ‘What have you got there, Allie?’ she asked him, squeezing his chin lightly.

He bowed his head and with the nose of a shoe scuffed a circle in the rough powder that lay over the pavement.

‘Be polite, Alexander,’ said his mother.

Mrs Murrell crouched beside Mrs Evans. There were grains like sugar, but finer, amid the fine pale hairs of her cheeks, and in her hat was a pin in the shape of a swan, with wings of red stones.

Alexander raised the postcard to hide himself behind it.

‘Same colour as I’m wearing,’ said Mrs Murrell, holding her overcoat open to reveal a pleat of her radiant blue dress.

Mrs Darling hitched up her coat and came down so her face was level with Alexander’s. Her lips glistened with wet red lipstick; her breath had a smell he would later know was the smell of cherries. ‘That’s nice. Where did you get that?’ she asked him. Alexander MacIndoe shrugged and looked to his mother. ‘Who is it?’ coaxed Mrs Darling.

‘The bomb lady,’ said Alexander.

Mrs Murrell laughed and touched his cheek as if to wipe a bit of dirt away. All together the three women stood up straight. Mrs Evans tapped the arm of his mother and spoke to her in a voice that sounded like gas flowing into a mantle. He felt something settle on his head; it was Mrs Beckwith’s hand. She teased his hair as his mother sometimes did at night when he could not sleep.

Mr Nesbit, raising a plank upright, called out and waved his hands. The other men all went towards him, kicking half-bricks down the hill.

‘Must get his highness delivered,’ his mother said, swivelling the pushchair around.

‘We’ll all be late at this rate,’ answered Mrs Murrell. ‘See you in the slave quarters, Irene.’

Mrs Evans squeezed his hand before he could reach the handle of the pushchair. ‘You’re a funny little mite,’ she said to him with a smile up at his mother, and she pressed his fingers softly in her soft, cool palm.

Alexander would remember clutching his postcard on a corner where the smell of burned paint was strong, and the clanging of a fire engine as his mother said goodbye, then being put on the draining board of the kitchen sink for his evening wash. He was there when his father returned.

His mother slapped the wrung flannel onto the sink between the taps before kissing his father, who flipped back the shiny steel bar of his briefcase and took out a thing that was like a dirty handkerchief stiffened with frost. He placed it on the table and gave it a nudge; it rattled on the wood. ‘Look at that,’ he said to them. ‘You know what they are?’ Alexander shook his head. ‘Letters, that’s what. Written on stuff called vellum, which is an old kind of paper. A fire shrivelled them up. Nobody will be reading those again, will they?’ he said to Alexander. His coat had brought the atmosphere of the street indoors; the perfume of smoke rose from his collar in a draught of coolness.

Touching the baked object, his mother shivered. ‘Like having someone’s shinbone on the table.’

‘Something odd to amuse our child,’ his father said. ‘It’s going back tomorrow anyway. If you knew the risks I’ve taken to bring it here.’ He turned up the collar of his coat and squinted shiftily at his son. ‘Mr MacIndoe, Undercover Operations Man,’ he croaked.

‘Mr MacIndoe, daft man,’ Alexander’s mother sighed. She raised the jug above the boy’s head to trickle the lukewarm water over him.

Alexander watched his father squirm free of his coat, then settle in his chair and close his eyes. A moment later his father yawned, took off his spectacles, placed them on the round table, and lifted the newspaper so close to his face that Alexander could see nothing of him except his hands and legs. Over the top of the paper was the top of the door, which had been on the tilt, his mother said, since the day after he was born, when the Thousand Pounder fell in the next street. The crockery had flown across the room and scratched a shape like the letter A in the table, which is why he had been called Alexander.

Briskly his mother rubbed his chest with the thick green towel, humming as she buffed his skin. His cheek rested on the flesh of her upper arm, which was smooth as soap and smelled of lavender. Wrapped in the towel, he was carried to the fireplace and into his mother’s lap, on the chair beside the round table. She scoured his hair and combed it and parted it, then placed him on her knee and held him towards her husband.

‘We are beautiful, aren’t we?’ she asked and then pressed her open lips to Alexander’s ear.

The newspaper came down a few inches. Slowly his father put on his spectacles again, and peeped over the edge of the drooping page. ‘We are,’ he said.

‘We both?’ replied his mother.

His father flapped the newspaper open wide. ‘Fish, fish, fish,’ he said, and turned a page.

‘Daddy will take you to bed,’ his mother told him, slicking his hair with her hand.

‘In a minute,’ said his father from behind the page. ‘The home front can wait a minute longer.’

Pursing her lips, Alexander’s mother looked towards the window. Underneath the reflection of the ceiling moved a cloud that was the colour of tea. ‘Where’s Mr Fitchie?’ Alexander asked.

She turned him to face her and regarded him as if she were not certain that it had been Alexander who had spoken. ‘Where’s who?’ she said.

‘Mr Fitchie. Where’s he gone?’

She tucked the towel more tightly around his shoulders. ‘He’s not here any more,’ she said.

‘I saw him.’

‘Saw who?’ his mother asked. He would remember the shape of her eyes as she asked him this, narrowed as if straining to see in the dark.

‘Mr Fitchie.’

‘When did you see him?’

‘Today. I saw him. Where’s he gone?’

‘Away, Alexander.’

‘Where to?’

His mother smoothed his hair again. ‘Graham,’ she pleaded.

‘I like Mr Fitchie,’ he told his mother.

‘So did I,’ said his mother.

‘He’s nice.’

‘Graham,’ she repeated.

‘Where’s he gone?’ asked Alexander.

‘He’s with Jesus, Alexander. Mr Fitchie’s gone to live with Jesus.’

‘Might have,’ his father joined in. ‘But then again –’

‘Graham. Please.’

Alexander closed his eyes once more, and in his head he saw the ambulance door and waggling feet. His father picked him up and carried him to his bed in the shelter.

From this night and from other nights Alexander would remember the top of the cellar steps, where the mud-coloured boards of the hallway ended at two shallow troughs of pale, splintery wood. The material of his father’s jacket scratched at his face when his father hunched over to duck through the gate of the cage in the cellar. He would recall his mattress in the corner of the cage, and the toy truck that was wedged into the folds of the blankets. He recalled gripping the wires in a span of his hand as his father climbed back up the steps, and testing his tongue against the metal, getting a taste that was tart.

Unequivocally from this February night he remembered waking in the darkness to hear first the grinding in the sky, and then his mother’s breathing. Her hand touched his forehead and its dampness made him shudder. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘They’ll soon be gone. We’ll be all right.’ He pressed his face against his mother’s arms, waiting for the ack-acks on the Heath and the woof of the big guns. Upstairs someone knocked on the door and he heard the clang of his father’s helmet against the wall as he left.

‘You were born on a night like this,’ his mother told him. ‘Nothing bad is going to happen to you, or to any of us.’ She sang to him quietly. ‘The cats and dogs will dance in the heather,’ she sang, and soon he could not hear the planes, but only his mother’s voice and her heartbeat, and Alexander slid into sleep, imagining tiny aeroplanes flying out from under a big blue gown like the flies around the bins at the end of the road, and the men on Shooters Hill firing their guns while the big balloons grazed in the clouds above them, and a factory full of seamen, and Mr Fitchie. Mr Fitchie was in a black suit that shone like a crow’s feathers and he was staring across a road at Alexander as if Alexander was floating past in a boat. Mr Fitchie was not happy but he was not sad either. He looked across the road with his head at an angle, and his hands in his pockets. His eyes blinked quickly three or four times, in the shadow of the brim of his hat, the way the geese blink at you through the railings around the lake in the park.

2. Gisbert

He was in the street with Jimmy Murrell, as Alexander was to recall in his fifty-eighth year, and they were taking it in turns to throw a ball against the kerbstone for the straw-coloured stray to catch. The ball was black and almost as hard as a cricket ball, and each time they took it from the dog’s mouth it left crumbs of rubber mixed with dog spit on their hands. Jimmy Murrell had a thick white gap in one eyebrow where he’d fallen from a rock and cracked his head in the farmyard at Exmouth, the town he soon went to live in, with his mother and father and his sisters.

To confuse the dog, Jimmy chucked a handful of air towards the kerb and the dog was twenty yards up the street before it heard the ball hit the tarmac down the slope. Its claws made a noise like a sewing machine as it ran, and its head went up and down in time with the bouncing ball. In Exmouth, Jimmy Murrell said, it was warmer than in London. With all the other children Jimmy used to go to a beach that was bigger than the Heath. Again he described the house at the back of the dunes, the only house for miles, with a fence of white boards around it and big nets hanging from the boards. The walls of the house were white wood, and right in the centre was a red door that looked like a pillarbox stuck in the sand. Thousands of pools were left on the sand when the tide went out, said Jimmy, with shreds of seaweed in them and sometimes a small green crab-shell. The tide went out so far that it was farther than walking from his house to the shops, and at night if the tide was low you couldn’t even hear the sea. But if the tide was high at night, you could see the waves glowing, as if there were torches under the water.

The dog, too tired to drop the ball, sat down beside Alexander. Its tongue was bent behind the ball and drooped sideways out of its mouth, dripping big dark circles onto the paving stones.

‘Bigger than all the houses,’ Jimmy Murrell said. ‘Higher and longer,’ and with a swing of his arm he made Alexander see the marvellous dunes.

Alexander would remember in his later years that Jimmy Murrell was waving his arms and speaking to him when he heard his mother’s voice. She was calling his name and she was running alongside the privet hedges with her arms straight up in the air in a gesture that frightened him.

‘Boys!’ she yelled, and then she did a couple of skips just like Jimmy’s sisters when they played on the path. ‘Boys! Come here!’ she shouted, though she was running so fast she was with them before they could get to their feet. She picked up Alexander and hugged him to her chest. It remained in Alexander’s memory that she was wearing the pale blue blouse with the daisies on it, and that the second button of her blouse was in the top buttonhole. Then she put him down and hugged Jimmy Murrell where he stood, squashing his face against her legs. She put out a hand and ruffled Alexander’s hair, and it was then he realised that nothing bad had happened.

‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘It’s over, it’s over, it’s over,’ she sang and she clapped her hands as she looked down on them, as though they had done something that had delighted her. ‘Your daddy will be back soon,’ she told Jimmy Murrell.

‘How soon?’ asked Jimmy.

‘Very soon,’ she said. With her left hand she took hold of Jimmy’s right and she gave the other to her son and whirled them both around her skirt. ‘Home we go,’ she declared, then hand in hand they walked back up the road, with the dog behind them.

The kitchen was full of women when they arrived. By the radio sat Mrs Murrell, her cheek close to the front of it, as if it was telling her something no one else was meant to hear, while Mrs Evans was at the sink, rinsing and wiping the tea cups. Other women stood around the table, and on the garden step was a woman Alexander knew worked at his mother’s factory, but he did not know her name; she was smoking a cigarette, and she turned as he came into the room and breathed out a cloud of smoke that covered her face for a moment. There was hardly any space for him to stand in.

‘Jimmy with you, Alexander?’ Mrs Murrell asked, then Jimmy stepped in from the hall. She did not get up, but held her arms wide open for her son to walk into, and pinched his cheeks so his lips stretched like a rubber band.

Setting the tray on the table, Mrs Evans remarked – ‘It’ll all be different now.’

‘It will that, Iris,’ said Irene MacIndoe. ‘Everything will change now.’

‘Different world,’ agreed Mrs Murrell.

Lying on the lawn beside his friend, Alexander stared at the sky and wondered in what way the sky would be a different sky. He imagined planes that were different planes, shaped like starfish or painted green. Rockets meandered over the horizon and nosed among the chimneys like curious dogs, then meandered off again. He thought he might live in a house by the sea, and he saw on the inside of his eyelids a beach as long as the river, and a house with a red door. He saw Mr Fitchie walking along a beach towards a red door that was on its own, and felt as if he were floating up off the grass into the warm high sky. A cheering came from the kitchen, and then church bells were ringing like on a Sunday, but they did not stop; the bells kept on for hours.

The following day his parents took him out of the house at an hour when normally he would already have been in bed, and they went to call for Mrs Beckwith. There were more people on the street that night than he had ever seen in the day. Their heads bobbed like apples in a bowl, and the noise of their voices and feet blended into one loud rumble. On the Heath there were hundreds and hundreds of people, moving towards a fire that rose in a single pinnacle of flame over their heads. Alexander and his parents and Mrs Beckwith joined the crowd, falling in with the purposeful pace. The people pressed more tightly on Alexander with every step; the bit of the sky that he could see was no larger than his father’s head; he looked down at the grass, and seeing it flattened and ripped by the thousands of feet he suddenly cried out, and was in an instant hoisted onto his father’s shoulders.

‘What can you see?’ his father asked. The fire glinted on his spectacles as he bent his head back to speak to him.

‘Nothing,’ Alexander reported.

‘You must see something, Alexander,’ said his mother.

‘I can see the top of the fire,’ he replied. ‘And lots of people,’ he added, scanning the Heath. Every road was full of marching people.

‘All of England must be here,’ said his mother.

‘Not quite,’ said Mrs Beckwith.

Alexander saw his mother touch Mrs Beckwith’s shoulder. He was impatient to discover what it was they had come to see.

They came across three soldiers in berets, sitting on a settee beside a track, and drinking from a bottle which one of them jiggled at Mrs Beckwith as they passed. Alexander saw a woman he thought at first was the woman who worked in Mr Prentice’s shop; a man’s bandaged hand was resting on her waist, and she had a little trumpet in her mouth. They were near enough to the fire for him to glimpse two shrieking faces on the other side of the flames when a split appeared in the crowd and what looked for a second like a galloping bull rushed through the gap. It was two men carrying a park bench between them; on the bench was stretched a man made out of an old jumper and trousers, with newspaper hands and feet and a football for a head. The two men seized the dummy, held it up for everyone to see, then hurled it onto the fire. The people around all cheered, and they cheered again when the two men rocked the bench backwards and forwards and let it go into the flames.

They stayed by the fire for half an hour or so, then his father led them off the Heath, past the Nissen huts. It was late, but they did not go straight home. They walked down the hill with Mrs Beckwith, who held Alexander’s hand but seemed dejected. His father and mother went in front, her head resting on his shoulder as they walked. At the railway bridge they stopped. A train was at the station below the road; above the grumbling of its engine he heard Mrs Beckwith say: ‘It’ll be a time yet, Irene.’ His mother put a hand on Mrs Beckwith’s shoulder again and nodded at his father, who lifted him to look over the parapet as the train pulled out.

Inside the carriages every seat was filled. Men were standing between the seats, clinging to the racks, while women were sitting on the laps of other women, and the pale blue light in the carriages made all the faces inside look as pale as peeled potatoes. A window clacked open and a man yelled up something that Alexander could not hear. Mrs Beckwith waved at the train without looking at it.

‘They’re going up to town,’ his father told him.

‘Tough work,’ said Mrs Beckwith, ‘but someone’s got to do it.’

‘Not for the likes of us, young man,’ said his father sternly, but smiling.

‘It’s bed for us,’ his mother confirmed, and Alexander watched the red light at the back of the train disappear into the darkness of the cutting on its way into town, a place he saw as an arrangement of perfectly regular streets and buildings with thousands of windows, all undamaged because town was somewhere that was always there, outside the war. It seemed to him that the passengers he had seen on the train were on a night-time mission of some sort, a mission that was to do with making things change.

His mother was always at home now, and throughout that summer he went to the shops with her most mornings, and queued beside her patiently, while the other children larked on the pavement outside. In the afternoon he would play with Jimmy Murrell or with other boys whose names he was to lose from his memory in his twenties and thirties, or he would walk through Greenwich Park with his mother, sometimes continuing right down to the river, where they might go into the tunnel beneath the water, to see the long walls that were curved and covered in tiles like frozen milk. Often, when they walked through the park, she would take him to the statue of Wolfe and sit on the slope below the bronze general, making an armchair for him from her arms and legs, and he would lie back against her chest while she sang an American song for him under her breath. Once she pointed across the river and said something about St Paul’s, something that made him think the church had somehow fought off the bombers, a scene he pictured as the dome swivelling and sending out some sort of beam to bring the enemy down.

It was an image he would always retain, though within a few years it had slipped from its mooring in the weeks between the victory days. What Alexander would recall unerringly from that interval, throughout his life, was the sight of his mother dabbing her eyes as she made his bed one morning, and on a different day dusting the sideboard as if in a daze, her eyes fixed on the wallpaper in front of her, and another day standing in the hallway with the mop planted upright in its bucket, gazing through the open door and down the front path as if she were waiting for someone, though it was several hours before his father would finish work. Many times he would stand silently beside her when she was doing her housework, as he did when they queued in the shops. And once, he remembered more completely than anything from that period, she put the mop aside and framed his face in her hands to stare into his eyes. ‘My God, you do look like an angel,’ she said, but she said it as if it were some illness that he had. She gathered both his hands in one of hers and kissed them. ‘My black-eyed angel,’ she murmured, and looked over his shoulder through the narrow window beside the door, at the pavement along which nobody was passing.

This was a short time before a Saturday on which he went with his father to the church hall to collect a pair of trestles which they put in the garden of Mrs Darling’s house, alongside a stack of planks. Later that day he made flags with his mother, holding the scissors for her as she pulled the old sheets through the open blades, so they ripped with a thrilling squeal. They cut out triangles of material and stewed them in pots of red and blue water, then pegged them out to dry on the line, and when that was done they made letters of black card which they pasted on a placard out the front, spelling the words ‘Welcome Home George’. When Mr Evans came over with Mrs Evans to see the placard, Alexander looked down from his bedroom and saw Mrs Evans begin crying as soon as she had read the word ‘Welcome’ aloud; Mr Evans steered her back through the gate, his enormous hand spread right across her back, and his shoes made sparks on the paving stones.

At the start of the party Jimmy Murrell handed out conical paper hats and Alexander was tucked into a place at the end of the table by Mrs Beckwith, facing the stage that the men from the pub had built. The air smelled special, of marzipan and hair oil and washing powder, and the sunlight made the raspberry jelly glow so beautifully that he felt sad when one of the adults spooned a divot from it and tipped it on his plate. The owner of the pub played the piano on the stage while everyone ate, and then Mr Evans made a speech and all the adults banged their cups up and down. ‘Irene, if you will,’ said Mr Evans, holding out a hand in mid-air. Alexander watched his mother climb the steps at the side of the stage. She went over to the piano and stood beside it, with one hand resting on the top of it. He waited for her to call him. The pianist played a few notes and stopped. Alexander leaned forward to find his father, but could not see where he was. His mother was looking at her shoes. Mrs Beckwith stood up and moved a couple of steps away from him, towards the stage. The pianist played the same tune again, and this time Alexander’s mother began to sing. It was the song about the bluebirds that she sang, and she sang it in a voice that was not like the voice with which she used to sing at home. Her eyes were closed as if she were singing for herself alone, but her voice was stronger than he had ever heard it, so strong that all the people around began to sing with her one by one, and when the chorus came he could barely hear her above their shouting. The pianist took one hand off the keyboard and made a scooping motion; all the adults who had been sitting rose in front of Alexander, excluding his mother from view. Hands went threading under elbows; backs swayed against backs.

Unnoticed, Alexander eased his seat back from the table. The stray was lying close by, under a tail of tablecloth. Crumbling a piece of cake on the road to entice the dog, Alexander wandered off, in the opposite direction from the stage. There was another chorus, even louder than the first, and when it was finished everyone sang it again. And as the first line began again, Alexander glanced up from the dog to see a man sitting with his back against the shelter at the top of the road. He was a thin man, doubled over as if he were made of folded card, and he had hair that was the colour of the dog’s hair. The man was looking at Alexander but he was not singing. He had eyes like the sky and a big thin nose.

Stretching his long legs into the gutter, the man put his hands on the sides of the dog’s head and looked at its face as if it was a cup that was cracked. ‘He is yours?’ he asked, in a voice that was peculiar, and sounded as though he was telling him something rather than asking. His jacket was inky blue and made of stuff like the felt Alexander’s mother put on the sideboard to stop the vase from scratching. ‘Not yours?’ the man asked, to which Alexander shook his head. ‘What is his name?’

‘He doesn’t have a name.’

‘But you have a name,’ the man responded, but Alexander did not reply. ‘My name is Gisbert,’ said the man. ‘My name is Gisbert. G-I-S-B-E-R-T,’ he recited. At the bottom of the street the piano made a booming sound and everybody laughed. ‘Now you tell me your name.’

‘Alexander.’

‘Alexander what?’ asked Gisbert.

‘Alexander MacIndoe.’ His name sounded strange when he spoke it to this stranger, as if he had been labelled like a bottle in the kitchen.

‘Where do you live, Alexander?’

He pointed to the placard. ‘The house with the writing,’ he said.

‘Welcome Home, George,’ Gisbert read, but he said the last word so it sounded like ‘judge’.

‘Where do you live?’ asked Alexander.

The man stood up; he was much taller than Alexander’s father, and the cuffs of his jacket did not cover his wrists. A bony forefinger indicated the rooftops. ‘Today I live on the Shooters Hill,’ he explained. ‘But my home is a longer way.’

‘Over the hill?’ asked Alexander.

‘Yes. A long way over the hill. A long way.’ Gisbert made his brow wrinkle, and scratched the side of his nose. ‘I will go there soon. Tomorrow perhaps. Next week perhaps.’ Then he smiled so widely that the gums showed above his back teeth.

‘Is it like here?’

‘No, not like here,’ said Gisbert, and he petted the dog as though the dog had asked the question. ‘There are big mountains, big forests, big lakes. Everything green. Not like here.’

Alexander would always remember Gisbert’s name, the fabric of his jacket, his chilly eyes, and these words that conjured for him a scene in which Gisbert walked over the rise of Shooters Hill and down a long slope to a vast green forest, a forest he imagined as being just beyond his sight when, some five months later, his father and mother took him past the crest of the hill for the first time.

‘Here is something for you, Alexander MacIndoe,’ said Gisbert as he reached into his jacket. He extracted a button, breathed on it and rubbed it on his sleeve. Alexander extended a palm to receive the gift. Raised on the button was a wonderful and mysterious sign, a pair of wings with no body. Holding it by the little loop of metal on the other side, Alexander breathed on the button too, and slipped it into his pocket. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘You are welcome,’ said Gisbert. ‘But I think you must leave, Alexander,’ he added, in the same moment as Alexander heard Mrs Beckwith’s voice.

‘Away, Alex,’ she shouted. ‘Come here. Come away. Here.’ She tugged him towards her and bent over to get close to his face. ‘You mustn’t talk to him,’ she said. Alexander looked back to see Gisbert shrug his shoulders at him and raise his left hand. Mrs Beck with tapped the boy’s chin to make him turn.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Because I say so.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you shouldn’t be talking to him, that’s why. He’s not one of us,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘Don’t be contrary, Alex,’ Mrs Beckwith told him.

‘One of who?’ Alexander persisted.

‘Us, Alex. You and me and your parents and your friends,’ she stated. ‘He shouldn’t be here.’

At the table she pushed the chair into the backs of his knees. His mother was moving towards him, cradling a dish of custard. Alexander craned his neck to see if he could see Gisbert, but he had gone back to the hill. He repeated inwardly the letters of Gisbert’s name, the first name he ever made an effort to remember.

Five hours more the party lasted, but only one moment from those hours was to endure in Alexander’s mind as long as Gisbert’s name and Gisbert’s forest. It was at the end of the night, and he alone was left sitting at the table. He was inhaling the tangy smoke from the candles that his mother and Mrs Beckwith had blown out, when he heard the sound of a footfall he recognised as his father’s. A firework slid up the sky with a shush and sprayed new stars on the sky. His father leaned over him to pick him up. ‘Little Lord Weary,’ his father said to his mother. Alexander watched a red dot of burning tobacco chase around the rim of his father’s cigar. He looked at the fire below the flower of grey ash and then he saw his father kiss his mother on her mouth, which he had never seen him do before.

3. Nan Burnett

The hedge at the front of his grandmother’s house was so high that even his father could not see over it, and instead of a front gate she had a proper door of dark wood, around which the leaves grew in a solid arch. The metal numbers on the door – 122 – were held in place by screws that had gone furry with rust. A spoon-shaped thumb-pad protruded through the keyhole on the right side of the door, and when it was pressed the catch always screeched. Inside there was a slab of greenish concrete on which the underside of the door would scrape, then three steps made of red bricks that had crumbled into a shape like a half-filled sack. From the steps a path of crazy paving zigzagged across the grass, passing a rose bush that grew so few flowers it looked like a ball of wire on which the shreds of a small pink scarf had snagged. Down the length of the garden ran a washing-line held high by a stick of dirty-looking wood, which was planted in the grass near the hollow that had once been a pond. All of this Alexander would remember, and the white rhododendron overhanging the hollow, under which he would find a frog sometimes, and kneel on the soggy ground to watch the panicky pulse in the animal’s side until it sprang away, falling into the dandelions with the quietest of crashes.

An ivy, rooted under the bay of the front room, swerved under the sills and then spread outwards, covering most of the bathroom window and part of the bedroom’s bay, spilling down over the porch and flowing inwards to the door. Once a month, on a Sunday, Alexander and his parents would visit Nan Burnett, and if the weather was fine his father would be certain, at some point in the afternoon, to lean aside and look down the hallway from the kitchen, remarking: ‘Things a bit wild out front, aren’t they, Nan?’ or ‘Had problems locating the entrance recently?’ or ‘Found any Japs this week?’ And whatever the joke, Nan Burnett would pat the back of his father’s hand and call him a treasure, and his father, standing behind a chair to grasp the topmost rung of its back like the handrail of a captain’s bridge, would order all MacIndoe hands on deck. ‘Action stations!’ he commanded, opening the door from the kitchen to the backyard, which was nothing but a small rectangle of glazed grey bricks, with a tiny shed where Nan Burnett stored the stepladders and the shears, and a gate opening onto an alley that had a crest of grass down the middle and lumps of black glassy rock on its verges.

Alexander would follow his father back through the house, bearing the shears blade-downwards past the coat-stand and the oval mirror and the line of Nan Burnett’s shoes, with their toe caps turned up like heads, watching the goings-on in the hall. When his father had rolled his sleeves up above his elbows and loosened his tie, Alexander would present the shears and then stand back in attendance, while his father sliced long cords of ivy from the wall and lopped hanks of foliage off the hedge that separated the garden from the street.

‘Remove please, toot sweet,’ his father said, glancing back over his shoulder first at his son and then at the tangle of cuttings, which Alexander scooped into his arms and carried out to the yard, where his father would burn them. If ever he was left alone to keep an eye on the smouldering leaves, Alexander would step into the blue, stripy smoke that streamed from the fire, so that his clothes that evening would be soaked with a smell that had come from Nan Burnett’s garden.

On days when Alexander’s mother had to go up to town or do something else that she had to do without him, she would usually take him to Nan Burnett’s house, and often another visitor would arrive while he was there. Sometimes it was Dot, whose surname he never knew; she lived somewhere further down the street, past the newsagent’s shop, and from time to time she would hand him a twist of paper in which four or five boiled sweets were wrapped. Or it might be Mrs Solomon, Nan Burnett’s neighbour, who brought one of her cats with her in a wicker basket, and had a hairy mole in the centre of her cheek. On a Wednesday it was likeliest to be Beryl Stringer, a woman of his mother’s age, whom he was to remember only for her turquoise woollen bonnet. If he were at Nan Burnett’s on a Saturday he might see Nurse Reilly, who had violet hair and thick legs that had no ankles, and always brought two things with her: a paper bag full of wool and knitting needles, and a small bale of magazines, tied up with rough yellow twine. Always Nan Burnett would place the magazines on a stool beneath the table before taking her own piece of knitting from the basket on the shelf above the oven, and then the two women would sit on opposite sides of the table and the only sounds would be the ticking of the big clock beside the hall door and the jittery clicking of the needles. And once in a while the caller would be Miss Blake, whose name perplexed Alexander, as Miss Blake was no younger than Nan Burnett. Neither her name nor any feature of her appearance lasted long in Alexander’s mind, but one image of her presence did persist, in a scene in which Nan Burnett and another old lady were seated at the kitchen table, each with one elbow on the tabletop, each facing the window that looked onto the yard. There was a pot of tea between them, under a knitted tea-cosy, and they were listening to a tennis match on the radio. Alexander was listening too, but intermittently, for what engrossed him was the intentness and pleasure of the two old women, whose eyes flickered back and forth as they listened, as if the game were visible to them on the glass of the kitchen window.

But the visitor whom Alexander was to remember most fully was the one whose heavy tread down the hallway made the boards creak in the front room, where Alexander was, and whose laugh – a laugh so like a scream that momentarily he thought Nan had scalded herself – raised his curiosity to a pitch that forced him out to see who this person was. It was a short fat woman, and she was sitting in the chair that Nan Burnett normally sat in. She was dressed all in black but for a band of shiny white material above her eyes, below the black scarf that covered her hair. Her skirt was made of stuff that was like a tablecloth and it came down to the laces of her highly polished shoes, which were men’s shoes and also black. Instead of a blouse or a cardigan she wore a sort of cape that hung from her shoulders down to her waist. Her arms, tightly covered in black fabric, rose from the folds of the cape as she gave Alexander her hand.

‘So this will be Alexander MacIndoe?’ she said. Her fingernails were so perfectly trimmed and so white and so clean they made him feel queasy. ‘Alexander the tiny, is it?’ she laughed, clapping her palms on her knees.

‘Don’t be shy, Alexander,’ said Nan Burnett. ‘Say hello to Sister Martha.’

He did not speak. He looked at Sister Martha’s faintly creased pink cheeks; they reminded him of marshmallows.

‘Let’s take a view of you,’ said Sister Martha, resting her hands on his shoulders. ‘You’re a fine young specimen of a boy, I must say,’ she said. ‘A handsome young man. You watch out for the ladies now,’ she warned him, and when she laughed her cheeks bunched into little globes right under her eyes. ‘Are you at school yet?’ asked Sister Martha, and Alexander replied that he was.

‘And are there other Alexanders at your school?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Do you like your name, Alexander?’

‘Yes,’ he replied, beginning to be troubled by the idea that his name bore some significance of which he was unaware.

‘And so you should, young fellow. It’s a distinguished name,’ said Sister Martha. ‘A very distinguished name. Lots of great men have been called Alexander. Alexander the Great, he goes without saying. There have been Russian kings and Scottish kings called Alexander, too. Mr Alexander Fleming, he’s a great man. There was Alexander Pope the poet, though I’m not so sure about him. And there have been many Alexander popes as well, of course,’ she chuckled.

Alexander looked at Nan Burnett, who winked at him and passed him a sandwich she had made. The sliver of brown meat lay between slices of bread that were as grey as her hair.

‘There have been many popes called Alexander,’ Sister Martha said. ‘There was Mister Borgia, who was from Spain and a very bad man, it must be admitted. Not a great one at all. But then there was Mr Chigi, who was Italian and a good man, though he was very rich. And a long time before him there was a young Pope Alexander, who was made a martyr in Rome on the third of May.’ Sister Martha wiggled her eyebrows at him. ‘You look astonished. Your birthday wouldn’t be the third of May, would it, by any chance?’

‘No,’ said Alexander, lifting the sandwich to his mouth.

‘No. That would have been a strange thing,’ Sister Martha told him. Putting her fists on her hips she looked up at the ceiling and said to it: ‘And we mustn’t overlook another young Pope Alexander, one of the seven sons of Felicitas.’ Her attention returned to the boy. ‘Another saint,’ she smiled, as if to encourage him. ‘Also made a martyr in Rome.’

When he was alone again, in the front room, he repeated to himself the mystifying phrase. ‘Made a martyr in Rome,’ he muttered, imagining something that was like being knighted, but more important, and very pleasing to the people who saw it happen.

He enjoyed sitting on the kitchen floor and scanning the pictures in the magazines that Nurse Reilly had brought. He might pass an hour bowling a ball at a line of milk bottles in the alley out the back, or shunting his Dinky van around the streets defined by the cracks between the bricks in the yard. Most of all, however, he enjoyed being in the front room of Nan Burnett’s house. The room had a rich and sleepy smell, a smell of varnished wood and old rugs, a smell that no other room had and was always the same. There were pictures in every corner of the room, hanging on nails midway up the walls, attached to the picture rail by slender brass chains, displayed in cardboard frames that stood on the sideboard, on the china cabinet and the mantelpiece above the fireplace, which had not been lit in years. To the left of the fireplace the miracles were gathered: The Loaves and the Fishes, The Bath at Bethesda, The Wedding at Cana, The Woman of Samaria, all in shades of cream and brown. To the right was Moses, tipping a dog-sized calf off its pedestal, standing aghast before a burning bush, dividing a sea that curled back onto itself like drying leaves. The pictures on the cabinet were photographs of his mother’s father and two other men, all in tones of brown and cream but with a chalky finish that made it seem as if everything in the pictures – the men’s skin, their jackets, the walls behind them – were made of the same stuff. Alexander once asked Nan Burnett who the other men were, expecting to hear that they were relatives, but they were friends of her husband, who had died with Stanley Burnett at a place Alexander never forgot because Nan Burnett swore when she said it. ‘Wipers,’ he would repeat as he regarded the dead men. ‘That bloody place,’ he would whisper, echoing his grandmother’s curse, and sometimes he would take the red glass stopper from the perfume bottle that Nan Burnett kept with the china and put it over one eye while he looked at them. And having looked at them, he would draw the thick brown curtains all the way across the window, then take the wide cushions from the brown velvet armchairs and lay them in front of the fireplace. Lying in the silence that seemed to come out of the walls of Nan Burnett’s front room, Alexander would close his eyes and see the handsome women balancing the pitchers on their heads, the men with smooth beards and the children in striped gowns, walking down roads that were strewn with stones shaped not like real stones but more like miniature boxes. As clearly as if his eyes were open he would see The Last Supper, with the figure of Jesus looking straight at him, and the picture of the nameless woman holding her chest on a crumpled bed, her head thrown back as if she felt sick, and the rigid faces of Stanley Burnett and his two dead friends.

‘What on earth do you do in there all day?’ he would recall his mother asking him, as he rubbed his eyes in the hall.

‘The boy just likes to be quiet,’ Nan Burnett answered for him.

‘Odd thing for a boy,’ said his mother.

‘Don’t fuss, Irene. He’s a happy lad. Aren’t you, Alexander?’ Nan Burnett asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, blushing, because he did not know if he was telling the truth.

Nan Burnett would never call him from the front room until his mother returned, but sometimes she called him from the yard to run an errand for her. He was on an errand when Megan arrived.

‘Take this round to Mrs Solomon, will you, pet,’ said Nan Burnett. She gave him a piece of paper full of numbers, with a drawing of a pullover on one side.

Mrs Solomon was putting a saucer of milk at the top of the stairs; one of her cats sprinted between Alexander’s legs and the banisters; he stroked the cat a few times, handed over the pattern, and no more than five minutes after leaving he was back in the hall of Nan Burnett’s house, his hand outstretched to open the door of the front room. Startled to hear his mother call his name, he jumped and looked to his left, and saw Megan for the first time.

His mother and Mrs Beckwith were advancing towards him down the hall, pushing the girl before them. Her eyes were the same colour as Gisbert’s had been, but they were wider and brighter, like marbles, and her hair was red, exactly the red of the stain under the tap in Nan Burnett’s bathroom. More than fifty years later, Alexander would be able to describe to Megan the outfit she was wearing: the white cotton blouse with the scallops around the neck; the blue-checked pinafore; the sandals with the pattern of petals cut over the toes. His mother said: ‘Alexander, this is Megan. She will be living with Mrs Beckwith now.’

The girl looked at him as if she was the one who lived in the house and Alexander was the one who had never been there before.

‘You’ll be friends, Alexander. That’ll be nice, won’t it?’ said his mother.

Megan held out her right hand like a man. ‘Hello, Alexander,’ she said.

‘Come on, say hello,’ said his mother.

Alexander stared at the girl. Silently he repeated her name. The word had a taste and a texture, a bit like toffee.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Megan, jerking her hand as if she were already holding his.

‘Come on, Alexander,’ his mother chivvied, but still Alexander stared. ‘Buck up, boy. Show some manners.’ Over his mother’s shoulder, Nan Burnett made a mock frown at him; she wagged a finger and mouthed the words ‘bad boy’. And then Alexander kissed the girl, who took a step back and put a hand to the place where his mouth had touched her. ‘You’re an impossible child,’ said his mother, taking hold of an arm.

A few minutes later Alexander and his mother were at the door, ready to leave. ‘Next week,’ she said as she reached for the handle. Alexander took one last look down the hall. Nan Burnett was standing in the kitchen with her hands on Megan’s shoulders and smiling as if the girl’s arrival were a treat she had arranged for him.

That was the face Alexander saw on the day on which, three years and five months after this one, he came back to Number 122 with his parents, to say goodbye to the house. His mother and father went upstairs, up the bare staircase, past the three white rectangles on the wall. He heard their feet on the floor above him, and when they moved into the room that had been Nan Burnett’s bedroom he pushed open the door of the front room. As the door gave way to his touch, he heard his mother’s voice in the hall say ‘Alexander’ softly, and he saw his grandmother in her kitchen, alone, but smiling as she had smiled when she had stood on that spot with Megan in front of her. A cold terror doused his body; he flinched and sucked in a breath without meaning to, and she was no longer there. And then it was like putting a finger in water and expecting it to be very cold and feeling it very cold when in fact it is warm, as it quickly becomes. He was not frightened, he realised. He had the sensation of being absolutely alone in a pleasant place, like a big garden that everyone else has left.

His mother saw a tear on his cheek. ‘Are you all right, Alexander?’ she asked him. ‘We are a pair,’ she said, and she put her handkerchief to the corners of her eyes and then to his.

‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’ asked his father.

‘Yes,’ said Alexander honestly, but he knew he must not mention what he had seen.

4. Eck

A nightlight, set on a saucer which had a crack across its pattern of blue willow leaves, burned on the stool between Alexander’s bed and the window, casting the hilly shadow of his body across the wall. The short yellow flame, batted by the draught, nodded on the surface of the molten wax, in which tiny tadpoles of cinder swam about in circles, drifting close to flame, darting away to the edge of the pool, drifting back. Sometimes he would pluck a hair from his head and feed it into the flame to watch it become a wisp of smoke before it could enter the body of the fire, or hold his hand over the candle until the heat felt like a nail driven through his palm. Then he would lie motionless again, his arms folded on his chest, his face to the ceiling, watching the steam of his breath roll off into the room. At last he heard his mother’s footsteps on the stairs, and the creak of the floorboards as she came to the landing. Downstairs the doors were being shut, always in the same order, ending with the clunk of the kitchen door and the rattle of its tall pane. His father’s slower tread followed, becoming even slower as he reached the top of the stairs, making a louder creak. And on the nights when the electricity was off he would twice see the candlelight rise and fade under his door as first his mother and then his father went by, and then the door of his parents’ room would close with a small thump and the light was gone. He lay listening to the rustling of the gardens and the dwindling grumble of his father’s voice, keeping his eyes open until only the sounds of the wind remained.

In the mornings the glass was caked with ice on the inside, and often the night’s fall of snow sloped high up the pane. When he opened the curtains the walls of his room were the tone of chicken flesh, and clammy as the disc of white wax that the nightlight had become. On the back of the chair beside the door a clean white shirt hung in the shadowless light like a big strip of cold fat. The tin bomber that was parked on the chest of drawers looked wet, like a car in fog. Rather than get out of bed, he would often daydream of Nan Burnett’s garden, where the snow was so deep he could tunnel through it, crawling on his hands and knees into the hollow that had once been the pond, and lying down under the radiant white roof, with no idea which way the house was, and then digging on until the floor of the tunnel changed from grass to bare earth, when he would leap upright, diving up into the world again. And sometimes, lying like an effigy on a tomb, he would send himself on an imaginary walk across the ceiling of his room, around and around the twisting stalk of the lightbulb’s flex, over the bulge of plaster that looked as if it should yield like a pillow, and then stepping over the dam below the door to gaze up at the stairwell, which he could see so clearly it was as if his door were not closed.

When his mother called from the foot of the stairs he dressed and went down. ‘Rip Van MacIndoe, awake at last,’ she often said, and this was how she greeted him on the one morning that he would always be able to recall from this winter.

The smell of the previous evening’s fish was still in the room. Every windowpane was streaming, and strings of water lay in the cracks of the windowframes between the sashes. Frozen clothes were stacked against the wall at an angle of forty-five degrees, the stiff cuffs and shirt-tails resting on the floor. He picked up a shirt and bent it across his knee; it cracked softly, like the rending of a dead branch.

‘Where’s your tumbler?’ his mother asked him. She was holding the ribbed glass bottle of rose-hip syrup in one hand, while the other formed the shape of the missing glass. ‘Have you left it in your room?’

‘No,’ he replied, and his mother laughed.

‘Look at that stupid animal,’ she said, pointing out of the window.

A black cat was stalking across the garden’s perfect snow, pausing after every step and lowering its head for a moment; a robin watched it from the fence then flew away before the cat was close. Alexander looked at the track that the cat’s belly had smudged across the snow, and it made him think of the snowball fight in the street two days before, when Mrs Beckwith and Megan had passed by. ‘Go on,’ Mrs Beckwith had said, and Megan had gone over to a car that was parked nearby and wiped a handful of snow from its bonnet. She raised her arm, but before she could throw it he threw a ball that hit her on the buttons of her coat. She dusted the snow off, and turned to walk back to Mrs Beckwith, and she did not stop when another snowball fell apart on her back. He called her name, but she did not look round. ‘It’s all right, Alexander,’ Mrs Beckwith had called to him, as she patted the snow from Megan’s back.

‘Is Mrs Beckwith Megan’s mother?’ he asked.

‘No, Alexander,’ his mother replied. ‘She’s her auntie.’

It was a word that Alexander had never heard Megan use. ‘So where is Megan’s mother?’ he asked. His mother placed the bottle on the draining board and drew a chair from the table for him to sit on. Putting her hands on his legs, she looked into his eyes.

‘She doesn’t have a mother any more,’ she said.

‘What about her father?’

‘Megan doesn’t have a father any more, either,’ said his mother. Her fingers went tight on his legs. ‘It is very sad, Alexander, and we mustn’t ever say anything about it. Not to her and not to anybody. Do you understand?’

‘Why doesn’t she have a mother and father?’ he persisted. ‘Were they killed?’

‘No, they weren’t killed.’

‘So where are they?’

‘They’re not here any longer, Alexander. That’s all we need to know. We mustn’t talk about it. It won’t do any good.’ She fastened the top button of his cardigan, as if to signify that the subject was at a close. ‘It would upset Megan and Mrs Beckwith and everybody. Now, let’s find that glass.’

Alexander followed his mother to the pantry, where her slippers made a sticky sound on the painted floor. She reached for a tin from the shelf below the perforated panel of zinc, on which the dots of sky always looked white, whatever kind of day it was.

‘Will we be friends?’ he asked.

‘Who?’

‘Me and Megan.’

‘Of course you’ll be friends. Don’t you like her?’

‘I don’t know,’ Alexander replied. ‘Why doesn’t she come here?’

‘She will do. She’s a bit shy, that’s all,’ his mother explained, but he thought of the way Megan looked at him when he said hello in the corridor at school, as if she had heard some story that had made her think she should stay away from him, and he remembered her walking across the playground with her teacher and talking to her as she would have talked to Mrs Beckwith, and she did not seem shy at all.

‘I don’t think she is,’ he said.

‘Yes, she is, Alexander,’ his mother assured him. ‘Give it time. Just wait.’

Through the spring of that year Alexander waited, even when he saw Megan ahead of him as they came out of school, walking on her own. She never looked back, and he could not speak to her, because there were things about Megan that nobody could speak about, and he was afraid that by accident he might say something that would make her unhappy.

‘Hello, Alexander, how are you?’ she said to him once, by the door of the assembly room, and it seemed she was pretending to be older to prevent him from talking to her, and he smiled at her and left her alone.

And so it continued until May, and the Saturday morning that would begin in Alexander’s memory outside the shoe repairer’s, from which he and his mother had emerged to find that the rain had stopped. His mother suggested they go to the park for an hour, and a short way beyond the gates, on the path to the Ranger’s House, they met Gladys Watts, who had also worked at the plating factory when the war was on. Too big to bend, Gladys tickled the side of Alexander’s face with her black cotton gloves.

‘I’ll be lucky if he’s sweet as this one,’ she said. ‘We’ve met before, young lad. At your house. Remember?’

Alexander glanced at his mother. ‘Go on, then,’ she said to him. ‘Not far, mind. Not out of sight.’ She unbuttoned the black and white cardigan that Nan Burnett had knitted for him.

‘One word from us and they do as they like,’ said Gladys Watts, who gave him a smile as if he had said something clever, though he had not said a word.

His mother folded the cardigan and threaded it through the handles of her shopping bag. ‘Wouldn’t say that,’ she remarked. ‘Would you, Alexander?’

He would not be able to recall, even five years later, to whom his mother had been talking in the park that Saturday morning, five minutes before he first saw Mr Beckwith, but he would remember to the end of his life what happened then.

He was standing close to the roses, and a squirrel was fretting at a nut by the foot of a chestnut tree, not a yard from where Alexander stood. A bandy-legged Jack Russell hurried after its owner with a peculiar skipping motion of its hind legs. To his right, walking along a tarmac path towards one of the gates, was Megan, two steps in front of a man who looked like no person Alexander had ever seen. The skin of his face and arms and hands was the colour of the wall behind him, but it shone like it had oil all over it. The man was both old and not old. His hair was dark and thick and he kept his back very straight as he walked, like Alexander’s father did, yet he had the face of an old man. Down his cheeks ran lines like the grain on floorboards, and the lines beside his mouth were so deep it was as if his jaw had two slots cut into it. He wore no tie but the collar of his shirt was fastened and looped slackly around his dark brown neck. The trousers that he was wearing did not seem to belong to him. They hung like curtains around his legs and were bunched around his waist with a narrow leather belt, the end of which dangled down past his pocket. His arms dangled too, lifelessly, from his rolled-up sleeves, as if they were attached to his body on hooks, and although he held his head up and was looking straight ahead, he did not seem to be seeing what was around him. The Jack Russell scampered across the path, kicking up clumps of cut grass, but he did not look down. A pigeon flew low past his head; he appeared not to notice it. Staying two steps behind Megan, saying nothing, the man might have been playing a game in which she was the adult and he the child.

Alexander followed them for a minute, keeping to the grass beside the path. ‘Megan?’ he said, when he was about ten feet from them. She looked up and quickly turned her face, as if she did not know who he was. Her left hand went back towards the man, and for a moment he touched her fingers as she led him to the gate. The man followed Megan out into the street, not even glancing at Alexander and his mother, who was now beside him, on her own. Preventing him from following, his mother’s hand came over his shoulder and pressed in the centre of his chest.

‘Who’s that with Megan?’ he asked, and she told him it was Mrs Beckwith’s husband.

‘Why wouldn’t they stop?’ he asked.

‘It’s nothing to concern yourself over, Alexander. Sometimes when we’re together we don’t want other people barging in. Isn’t that so? Even if they are friends. Some things are private.’

‘But they weren’t talking to each other,’ Alexander observed.

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I do. I was watching them. They didn’t say anything.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t be so nosy, Alexander,’ said his mother, refolding his cardigan. She looked towards the gate through which Megan and Mr Beckwith had departed. ‘The thing is, Alexander,’ she went on, ‘that Mr Beckwith is poorly, and you don’t really want to talk much when you’re poorly, do you?’

Alexander looked at the gate, where the trace of the brown-skinned man appeared in a dark flash, in the way a shape of light would appear inside his eyes after he had glanced at the sun.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ he asked.

‘It doesn’t matter. He needs to be left alone for a while, that’s all. He’ll be well again soon.’

Several times that summer Alexander saw Megan and her uncle, and Mr Beckwith never seemed to be well. The next time he saw them was at All Saints church. From the parade of shops he watched Megan walking down the path from the church door, as if testing an icy track for Mr Beckwith, who walked two steps behind her, with his arms as loose as lengths of rope. Then on Vanbrugh Hill he saw her standing on the kerb and beckoning across the road to Mr Beckwith, who lifted his head and looked at her and squinted as if she were too far away to make out clearly who she was. Megan crossed over and took his hand to lead him to the pavement, where she let it go and his arm swung back onto his leg as if it had gone dead. Once he saw them crossing the Heath, on the horizon of the hill, as if pretending to be Indian scouts in file. And once again, allowed to roam away from his mother for a while, Alexander saw Mr Beckwith and Megan in the park, and followed them again, but from a greater distance than before. For a quarter of an hour he followed them, down the broad path past the hollow oak tree, back up the slope, on the grass. Now and then Mr Beckwith would stop and stare up into the branches of a tree, or stop and look down at his feet, like a clockwork toy that had wound down, and Megan would crouch at his knees and gaze up at him, and brush his hand to make him walk after her again. Mr Beckwith never spoke, nor did he look at Megan, except for a moment, when, standing underneath a plane tree in a spread of light that turned his white shirt the colour of lime juice, he threw aside his cigarette and touched her on the back of the head, and Alexander saw her smile as broadly as she had smiled in the hallway of Nan Burnett’s house. Fascinated by the strangeness of it, Alexander stood wondering, until Megan came hurrying towards him, leaving Mr Beckwith to continue his walk without her.

She held out her hands as though pushing something invisible. A couple of yards from Alexander she stopped and pointed a finger like a gun. ‘Don’t stare at him,’ she demanded.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘You always stare.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Alexander repeated.

‘You always stare. Do you think nobody can see you? Standing there gawping. Don’t stare at him.’ She pushed her hair out of her eyes and glared at him before turning back.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

‘You’re so stupid,’ she shouted over her shoulder.

When she and her uncle had gone from sight he returned disconsolately to his mother, pausing on his way under the plane tree, where he retrieved the stub of Mr Beckwith’s cigarette.

This was the last occasion that Alexander spoke to Megan Beckwith that summer, and it was not until one morning in late September that he spoke to her again. He was sitting on the step that had sparkling bits of mica in it, watching the cricket game, when Megan came clambering over the wall from the girls’ playground. She pushed him on the shoulder to move him along, sat down beside him and asked directly: ‘What are you thinking about?’

He would always remember what he was thinking about. The night before, listening from the top of the stairs on his way to bed, he had overheard his father talking to his mother. He had heard the words ‘Marshall aid’ and something of an explanation, from which he had arrived at a picture of men like military cowboys, patrolling the towns of Europe and handing out money to the grateful people.

‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ said Megan, circling her knees with her arms. ‘It’s a man’s name. He’s an American,’ she stated firmly. ‘My mum says that America is the country of the future,’ she said. ‘It’s amazing what they have there. In America they’ve seen UFOs. That stands for Unidentified Flying Objects.’

Megan peered up into the sky, wrinkling her nose; Alexander mimicked her gaze. She looked at him and sighed an adult sigh. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, in a tone that sounded like his mother’s. ‘About my father. It’s all right. Mum talked to me.’

A teacher appeared in the doorway and called out: ‘Megan Beckwith. Come here. This instant.’

‘Caught,’ she muttered, and she shook his hand. ‘I’m sorry I was angry with you, Eck,’ she said, using for the first time the name she was always to use.

The teacher, after shepherding Megan into the corridor, asked him: ‘Exempt from exercise are we, Alexander?’

‘No, miss,’ he said, but he returned to the step as soon as she had gone, to sit where Megan had sat.

5. The Doodlebug House

His mother would take his hand to cross the road and, pointing towards the shops, begin gaily: ‘Now what do we see?’

And he would quickly respond: ‘We see a queue.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘We join it.’

‘And when do we join it?’

‘Straight away.’

‘We join it now, without delay,’ his mother agreed, concluding the singsong exchange that she and Mrs Evans had made up as the three of them walked along the same street on another Saturday morning.

There were always five or six women outside the shop, whichever one they stopped at, and another woman halfway through the doorway, with her foot against the bottom of the door, and a dozen more inside, packed tightly like on the bus. ‘What’s today’s special, girls?’ Mrs Evans might ask as they took their place at the back, and sometimes she would answer herself: ‘Whatever it is, it’ll be worth the wait.’ Once, however, a woman in a black coat with huge buttons turned round and said sharply, ‘I don’t know what you’re so cheerful about. The war’s not over yet.’ Then another woman said, ‘You’re right about that,’ and thus Alexander conceived a dread of the day when the bombers would come back, a fear he kept to himself until the day, five weeks later, on which a dormant mine, excited by the tremors of a nearby demolition, exploded in the garden of a house two streets from where he lived. That night he told his mother what he thought about every night, and he would always remember standing beside the bath that evening, gazing at the ebbing bathwater as his mother explained that he had misunderstood, while rubbing the towel on his hair as if to scrub off his foolishness.

An hour or more they sometimes queued, but Alexander’s patience was constant, because no pleasure could exceed the pleasure of at last entering the shop. Nestled amid coats and skirts, he would breathe in greedily to take hold of the scents that came from the women. An elusive aroma of lemons arose whenever one particular woman stepped forward, a woman with soft white arms and bracelets that clinked when she handed her money over. There was a woman who sometimes had a thin black line down the centre of her bare calves, whose clothes gave off a perfume that was like roses when they begin to wilt. Often she was with a friend called Alice, who had beautiful fingers and a perfume that remained mysterious until the day his father brought home a pomegranate in a stained paper bag.

Every sense was satisfied in these crowded shops, and a dense residue of memories was left in Alexander’s mind by the mornings he spent in them. Forty years later, looking at the maritime souvenirs that filled the window of what had been the grocer’s, he could hear above the traffic’s growl the crunch and chime of the ancient cash till, and he saw again the brass plate on the front of the till, and the comical bulbous faces mirrored in its embossed lettering. He saw the counter of the chemist’s shop, with the dimpled metal strip on its front edge that looked like a frozen waterfall. His fingers touched the window as he remembered how he would stroke the old wooden drawers by the chemist’s counter, sweeping his fingertips slowly across the varnished scars that looked like the script of an unknown language. The scurf of stinking pink sawdust in the butcher’s shop returned to him, and the sun shining off the slanted glass that covered the white trays of kidneys in their little puddles of brown blood. And standing before the Cutty Sark, gazing up through its spars at the coalsack-coloured October sky, he sensed the elation that arose instantly in him one morning, when he arrived at the head of the queue to see, displayed in a wicker basket, a heap of fat oranges that had come from Spain.

Only if his friends took him off to play would Alexander leave his place. ‘Bad news I’m afraid, Mrs MacIndoe,’ Eric Mullins joked, twirling the horns of a phantom moustache as he brought his heels smartly together. ‘We need your son.’ The company behind him – Lionel Griffiths and Gareth Jones and Davy Hennessy, whose leather-trimmed beret would last far longer than any other aspect of his appearance in Alexander’s memory – nodded their regretful confirmation that this was so. ‘Beastly business,’ said Eric, jamming his spectacles tight to the bridge of his nose with a forefinger. ‘Sorry and all that.’

‘Very well. Dismissed,’ his mother replied solemnly, lowering her chin, and they ran around the corner to Mr Mullins’ pub.

Entering by the door marked ‘Private’, below the white plaster unicorn with its scarlet crown, they bounded up the back stairs to the empty top floor, where each of the rooms had no furniture nor any curtains or carpets, but had a washbasin with taps that did not work. The rooms were connected by a corridor that curved like the tunnel under the river, and up and down its lino they would smack a tin of snoek wrapped in a sock, using cricket bats for hockey sticks and aiming for the swing doors that led to the stairs. Or in their stockinged feet they would skate along the lino rink, and their feet would make a hissing noise that Alexander, looking down the corridor at the two blind eyes of the windows in the doors, once imagined as the building’s breathing, an idea that so absorbed and unsettled him that he was startled when Lionel Griffiths, slithering to a stop behind him, shouted in his ear: ‘Wake up, Alex. Park time.’

In the park, at the side of one of the hills, there was a miniature valley in which the grass grew long between untrimmed bushes, and there they would stalk each other, descending the slopes on their bellies. When the others had gone home Alexander would stay for a while in the overgrown gully, and lie unseen within earshot of the path and listen to the talk of the people trudging up the hill towards the Heath. And when there was time he would then go to the place he called the Doodlebug House and continued to call the Doodlebug House even after his father told him it was not a doodlebug that had wrecked it but incendiaries and a broken gas main, many months before the flying bombs arrived.

A flap of corrugated iron, daubed with Danger – Keep Out in wrinkled red paint, was the door to the ruin. The four outer walls still stood to the height of the gutter, framing a square of sky, and within the walls were piles of debris, embedded with fractured joists and floorboards and laths that were like the ribs of a scavenged carcass. Against one of the walls leaned a huge tent of roof tiles, protecting a mantelpiece that had not been damaged at all. A perpetual stink of damp plaster dust and cats and scorched wood filled the Doodlebug House, and silvery ash was in every cranny. Low on the walls were stuck little rags of ash that vanished when he touched them. A book with leaves of ash trembled under the block of the toppled chimney. A skin of ash, pitted by raindrops, covered the door that lay flat in the middle of the house. Lumps of ash like mushrooms lay around the sheltered cradle of broken boards in which Alexander would recline and watch his portion of sky, hearing in his head the doodlebug’s misfiring snarl and then the thrilling moment of silence before it plummeted, a silence that excited him like the moment before he let himself drop from the empty window into the pool of torn bedding and sodden clothes at the back of the Doodlebug House.

Ash as slippery as sleet coated the joist by which Alexander would climb to the window at the side of the house, to sit between the battens that had been hammered crosswise into the empty frame. There, hidden from view, he would watch the people in the street pass by, or take out his Tales from the Bible, and read the story of the walls of Jericho or the Tower of Babel. Every time he came to the Doodlebug House he would go up to the window, until the day that Mrs Darling walked by and, without raising her head, called out ‘Be careful up there, Alexander’ and waved her hand behind her as if fixing a headscarf that had become unknotted. In later years he would often recall his lookout in the Doodlebug House, but most frequently he would revisit the part of the building that had once been the kitchen. Beached on a hummock that bristled with fractured pipes, there was a bathtub in which he sometimes dozed, and ten feet or so from the bath, wedged into the stump of the stairs, there was a wardrobe door that had a mirror fixed to it. The mirror was cracked from top to bottom, and the door was set at such an angle that, as Alexander neared the top of the hummock, he would find a place from which the mirror showed the wreckage to his left and to his right, but did not show any image of himself. Perched on a raft of wallpapered plywood, his arms held out like a tightrope walker, he stared in fascination at the reflection of the ruin, experiencing the smells and sights and sounds of the Doodlebug House, while apparently invisible. And he remembered that as he squatted on a beam and surveyed the rubble, a sadness seemed to flow through his body, a sadness that seemed to strengthen and purify him, to raise him out of his childhood for as long as it lasted. He was the guardian of the house’s relics, and such was his care for them that fifty years later he could draw a plan of the craters and barrows of the Doodlebug House, mapping the resting place of every item. Behind the bath there lay a washboard with barley-sugar glass rods that had not even been chipped by the blast; beside it was the brown canvas camera case that had been chewed by mice, and the cookery book with the spine that was a strip of bandage clogged with brittle glue. Closer to the wall there was the black iron mincer with its heavy crank attached, and the mangle with hard blue rubber rollers, and the soggy cartons of bandages and rusting nails. Some days he would touch one of the relics or raise it on his open palms and close his eyes, and Mr Fitchie would sometimes appear and look at him, as if across a river.

Neither would he forget the only time he ever took anyone to the Doodlebug House. Mrs Evans was with them, wearing the big silver brooch in the shape of a sleeping cat, and her green felt hat with a pheasant’s feather tucked under its band. They were at the butcher’s shop, and Mrs Evans made up another rhyme: ‘What a peculiar thing to do, to spend all day in the butcher’s queue, and all for a sausage, or sometimes two.’ When a man behind them started swearing, Mrs Evans cupped her fingers over Alexander’s ears. ‘For what we’re about to buggering well receive may the buggering Lord make us buggering grateful,’ said the man, and from the sly way Mrs Evans looked at Alexander he could not be sure if she had not meant him to hear. Then Mrs Beckwith turned up with Megan, who was holding the shopping bag in front of her, gripping its handles in both fists as if carrying the bag was a serious undertaking.

‘Why don’t you two go to the park?’ said Mrs Beckwith.

‘We’ll come for you in an hour,’ said his mother. ‘Shall we see you by the pond?’

Megan submitted the bag to her mother without saying anything, and the idea occurred to Alexander that he should take her to the Doodlebug House. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he told her as they entered the park. ‘It’s like being in a big well, or a castle. The walls are as high as that tree, on all four sides, and there’s nothing in the middle of them.’

‘How far is it?’ Megan asked.

‘Can’t tell you,’ said Alexander. ‘But we won’t be late back. Promise.’

Megan looked at the tree to which Alexander had pointed. She made her mouth and eyes slightly smaller, as though she doubted what he said, but then she followed him to the Doodlebug House.

‘No one except me has ever been in here,’ he told her. He pulled up a corner of the corrugated iron sheet so that she could crawl in. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone,’ he said.

Megan stood on a small rectangle of clear floor in the hallway, swatting the dust from her dress. Rising behind her, the walls seemed higher than ever, and the movement of the clouds that were edging over the Doodlebug House made the bricks seem to teeter. Alexander began to climb the joist to his window, but was stopped by Megan’s voice. ‘This is a pile of rubbish, Eck,’ she said, looking about her as if someone who had annoyed her was hiding in the ruin. ‘It’s nothing like a castle.’

He could not think what to say. He rested one foot on the fringe of floor that stuck out from the wall and held out a hand, though she was a long way below him. ‘Look from up here,’ he said.

‘Don’t be stupid, Eck,’ Megan told him. ‘It’s dangerous. I’m going.’ She licked a finger and turned her attention to a mark on her dress.

Despondent and resentful, he followed her away from the Doodlebug House. ‘You won’t tell anyone?’ he pleaded, when they were back in the park.

‘Of course not,’ she said.

‘Promise?’ he persisted.

‘God, Eck,’ she snapped. ‘Don’t be so boring. Why would I tell anyone? There’s nothing to tell.’

Alexander returned to the Doodlebug House many times afterwards, and the echo of Megan’s voice was always there. He could no more rid the atmosphere of her irritation than he could get rid of the smell of cats. With his arms crossed he would sit on the lip of the bath and scan the shell of the building, as if waiting with diminishing hope for a friend to answer an accusation. ‘A pile of rubbish,’ he heard her say, and he could no longer bring himself to see it differently. Finally there came the day on which he found that he was in a place that felt like a copy of the Doodlebug House, and he resolved that he would never visit it again.

He would always remember something of the evening of the day on which he left the Doodlebug House. Sitting on the grass in the garden, he closed his eyes and brought to mind the things that he had abandoned. He could see the slivers of grime between the rods of the washboard and the lustrous disc of white porcelain on top of the bath’s single tap. He could see the rake of shadows on the wall above the upstairs fireplace and the stiff blisters of paint on the back door. He could even taste the bitter air of the Doodlebug House. It was as if he were lying on his cradle of boards, and the Doodlebug House was again a place that belonged only to him.

When Alexander came out of his daydream a red admiral was closing its wings on a dandelion beside him. He remembered this, and his father looking at him from the kitchen door. The light through the branches of the tree in next door’s garden made his father’s face vanish under a pattern of brilliant ovals. His mother’s voice came from very far away inside the house, saying something he could not hear, and his father went to her.

One morning towards the end of 1951, not long after Churchill’s election, Alexander heard that the Doodlebug House was being demolished. In the afternoon he watched the wrecking ball sink into the wall below his lookout window. The wall gave way like a hand making a catch, he would always remember.

6. The Winslow Boy

Alexander was sitting in the corner of the garden where the bindweed came over the fence and the fat tongues of dock leaves stuck out from under the nettles. Holding the stalk as he had seen his mother hold the stem of a glass, Alexander turned the white trumpet of a flower half a circle one way, half a circle back.

‘He’s a contented wee soul,’ he heard Mrs Beckwith remark. ‘If you ask me, he’s got a real talent for calmness.’

‘You think so?’ asked his mother, standing alongside her.

‘I don’t see what you’re fussing about, Irene. I’d be grateful if I were you. Not a minute’s peace with Megan.’

‘Nothing but peace with this one,’ said his mother, and she looked at him as if he were a mystifying but precious-looking object they had unearthed from the lawn. ‘Not like the others, are we, my love?’ With the toe of her sandals she dug gently at his ribs, he would remember. ‘Not a boisterous boy, are we?’ She threaded a hand under Mrs Beckwith’s elbow. ‘You wouldn’t credit how long this one can go without moving a muscle,’ she said. ‘Meditating MacIndoe we should have called him.’

‘A genius at hide and seek, I’ll bet,’ said Mrs Beckwith, and she kissed him on the top of his head.

A week later he was taken to see Dr Levine, in a room that he would remember for its smell of cold rubber and for its chairs, which were made of metal pipes and had red seats that glued to his skin. Dr Levine was a short, stout man with silver hair and a silver moustache that was striped with two yellow stains below his nostrils. His eyes were small and pale brown, and he looked at Alexander over the lenses of his half-moon glasses.

‘What exactly is the difficulty, Mrs MacIndoe?’ he asked.

‘It’s not a difficulty, as such,’ she replied.

‘Not a difficulty, as such,’ the doctor responded, as though repeating a sentence in a foreign language.

‘No.’

‘Then what precisely would it be?’

‘A feeling that something’s not quite right,’ she tentatively explained.

‘Could you be more specific, Mrs MacIndoe?’ asked the doctor. ‘Could we pin this something down?’

‘He doesn’t seem to have much energy, for a boy,’ she stated.

‘For a boy?’ smiled Dr Levine, putting down the gold-hooped black pen with which he had been toying.

‘For a child.’

‘He eats well? Sleeps well?’ asked Dr Levine.

‘Yes. I think so.’

Dr Levine rose from his chair and leaned on the edge of his desk, gazing down at Alexander. ‘Do you eat well, Alexander?’ he asked, and narrowed his eyes as if there was some trick to the question. ‘Do you sleep well?’ he added, before Alexander could speak.

‘Perfectly,’ said Alexander.

‘Perfectly,’ repeated Dr Levine, and he smiled at the floor as he placed a hand on Alexander’s brow. His skin was cold and very soft, like a balloon that has lost some air. ‘Give me your hands,’ he said. He put the tips of his fingers under the boy’s and bent forward to inspect the fingernails. ‘Look up,’ he said. He prodded the flesh around Alexander’s eyes, then took hold of his lashes and tugged at his eyelids. ‘Nothing to worry ourselves about so far,’ commented Dr Levine, reaching behind his back and lifting a small, flat stick.

‘I’m not worried.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ replied Dr Levine, and he pressed his lips together, making his moustache bulge outwards. He placed the smooth dry wood on Alexander’s tongue and peered along it; the whites of the doctor’s eyes, Alexander noted, were the colour of the wax of his nightlight in the morning.

‘There’s nothing wrong with him that I can see,’ declared Dr Levine eventually. ‘Do you feel there’s anything wrong with you, Master MacIndoe?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, neither do I.’ Dr Levine yawned, removed his glasses and bent his fingers to grind at his eyes with his knuckles.

‘He looked like a big squirrel,’ Alexander told Megan that afternoon, and he copied the way the doctor’s mouth had grimaced and his cheeks puffed out as he rubbed his eyes. ‘Nothing wrong with him,’ he repeated with a superior sniff, twiddling his thumbs pompously on his stomach. ‘Are you a fool, Mrs MacIndoe?’

It was not the first time he had heard Megan laugh, but that is how he was to recall it, with Megan standing on the opposite side of the road from Mrs Beckwith’s house, and stamping her foot as though the shock of her laughter had travelled right through her body. ‘So you’re not ill then?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m not ill.’

‘You’re just odd. That’s all there is to it,’ she said, walking backwards across the street.

‘That’s all there is to it,’ he parroted.

‘Odd Eck,’ said Megan as a goodbye.

‘Odd Eck, odd Eck; odd Eck, odd Eck,’ he repeated for her, to the tune of two chiming bells.

There was a place at the turn of the stairs where the grain of the wood had come through the varnish to form sand-coloured terraces that he would magnify in his imagination to the dimensions of the cliffs and bays that Jimmy Murrell had described. At the foot of the banister that rose from this step he had found a globule of varnish that was not absolutely hard, from which his thumbnail could detach a black sliver that had an aroma that was something like the tobacco that was left in the bowl when his father’s pipe went out. The morning after the visit to Dr Levine, he was sitting at the turn of the stairs, his face against the cool wood of the banister. His mother came up, carrying the laundry basket, and as she sidled past him he asked her: ‘Do you think I’m odd?’ The smile that he saw, immediately before she put her arms around him and kissed him, convinced him that she did.

‘You do, don’t you?’ he called up to her.

‘I don’t at all,’ she said, and she dropped over the banister a handkerchief that fell over his face.

She was as worried after the visit to the doctor as she had been before. He would be sitting on the threshold of the house, watching the traffic or the sky, and she would rush to him and urge him out into the street to play. ‘Come on, Alexander, look lively,’ she would almost shout, clapping her hands to recruit him for some chore about the house. ‘Watching the grass grow?’ she would ask, or ‘Saving shoe leather?’ or ‘Holding the floor down?’ And once, when he was in the garden, he heard her say to his father, ‘Our son’s turning into a tree, Graham.’

One afternoon in April she strode down the hall, lifted him up, and said: ‘What would you say if I said we were going up to town? To see the lights come on.’

‘That’d be nice,’ he replied.

‘Once more, with feeling?’ she requested.

‘That’d be very nice,’ he said, loudly enough to earn an embrace.

They left the house in the dusk, and it was dark when they reached Nelson’s Column. His mother pointed down the wide road that stretched off to Buckingham Palace. ‘Do you want to go down there?’ she asked. She did not seem interested by the idea.

‘Don’t mind,’ he said.

‘Fine. What about down there? Do you want to go and see the Houses of Parliament?’ she asked, and it seemed she would be disappointed if he did.

He looked down Whitehall. The buildings were all the same colour and all the people were walking with their heads down, as if they didn’t want to see anyone. ‘We saw them from the train, didn’t we?’ he replied.

‘Let’s go and see the lights then,’ she proposed.

The lights were in Leicester Square, where the Empire was presenting Easter Parade with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. For a few minutes they stood in the drizzle, while his mother marvelled at the signs for the shows. ‘Magnificent, isn’t it?’ she said, gesturing at a building on which huge grey shadows floated like the spirits of the dead in the picture of heaven in Nan Burnett’s front room. ‘We’ll take a walk through theatreland,’ said his mother, and bareheaded in the rain they went up Haymarket and down St Martin’s Lane and across Covent Garden, where the pavements smelled of dustbins. Facing the Theatre Royal she took his hand and said to him, as if telling him something he must not tell anyone else: ‘This is a very famous place. A very special place. The Desert Song, Show Boat, Oklahoma! – they were all performed here.’ Under the theatre’s colonnade she sang a whole song for him, and she sang a few lines as they strolled back along the Strand, and on the journey home. But before the train reached Blackheath station she turned away from him and rested her forehead on the dark glass. From what felt like a great distance, Alexander regarded her, wondering what they had done that had made her unhappy.

Within twenty years the walk through theatreland would dwindle to the memory of the rain-slicked cars in Leicester Square and the sign for Easter Parade. The train journey home would vanish, but for the image of the tree of steam that rose from the funnel of a waiting engine, and of the railway lines rushing in like streams between the platforms of London Bridge station. The face of Dr Levine would vanish, as would the conversation on the stairs, and his mother’s conversation with Mrs Beckwith in the garden. All this he would forget, but he would remember acutely and at length the Saturday, in July of that year, on which he followed his mother.

Early on a Saturday afternoon he would sometimes go to Mr Prentice’s shop, for no reason except that it was a pleasant place to be. For as long as ten minutes he would stand behind the potato sacks, where he was not in anybody’s way. Breathing in the bountiful smells of the shop, he watched the brass cylinders flying over the heads of the customers, shuttling along the wires that ran between the counters and the cashier’s turret, where an old woman with a hairnet unscrewed the lids from the cylinders and scooped out the money and the chits, like a cat hooking food from a bowl. To his left were ranged the glazed grey flagons of ginger ale, lemonade and dandelion and burdock, and to the right were the greasy pink hams and wheels of cheese, and the slicing machine with the blade that spun quickly under its shiny steel cowl and made a ringing sound when its edge came out of the meat. Opposite was the door to the back room, where Mr Prentice worked.

Sometimes Mr Prentice would turn round from his desk and call out to him: ‘All in order, MacIndoe?’ To which Alexander’s response, copied from his father, was: ‘Aye aye, Mr P,’ and a soldier’s salute. And in reply Mr Prentice would brush his brow with his forefinger; and then, having hitched up the metal bands that held his shirtsleeves to his upper arms, he would return to his letters and bills. On this particular afternoon, Mr Prentice gave his one-fingered salute, glanced over Alexander’s shoulder and said, pointing: ‘Wasn’t that your mum going past?’

Through the gaps in the whitewash prices on the window Alexander watched his mother hurrying along the pavement. She was wearing her long chequered skirt and her chequered jacket, and the dark blue hat that he had seen on top of her wardrobe but never seen her wear.

Alexander looked at Mr Prentice, but Mr Prentice was leaning forward in his chair and looking out at the street, though there was no longer anyone to see there. ‘Better hurry home,’ he said.

‘Suppose,’ responded Alexander. He stepped out under the awning and saw his mother go straight across the road at which she would have turned right had she been going home. From a distance he pursued her, dashing from doorway to doorway, watching for a few seconds before following, excited by the adventure but agitated by a sense of his own deceitfulness. When he saw a man stop to look at her as, waiting on a kerb, she glanced at a window and altered the angle of her hat, Alexander’s anxiety became so strong that he almost turned back. He saw his mother pull at her cuff to check her watch, then quicken her stride; he followed again, his heartbeat seeming to increase with the speed of her footsteps. She crossed another road and then, beyond her, a bus drew out from its stop, uncovering The Winslow Boy in white boxy letters, and his limbs became hollow with the relief of knowing where his mother was going.

From behind a lamppost he watched her slide a coin under the grille of the booth and receive her ticket. She smiled at the woman in the booth, and she was smiling as she pushed at the curving brass door-handle and crossed the deep red carpet of the foyer. A commissionaire with golden bands around his cuffs held open the inner door, and eased it shut once she had passed through, as if it were the heavy steel door of a strongroom.

Alexander sat on the pavement, his back against the lamppost, and waited for a while. When three men arrived and bought tickets he stood up to watch the commissionaire open his door, thinking that perhaps she would come out as they went in. He walked around the block, stopped to watch the commissionaire’s fingers drumming on the ashtray on the wall, and walked around the block again. He crossed the street. In a padlocked glass cabinet to the side of the outer doors there were advertisements for the new films: a photograph of Orson Welles in a shadowy doorway, and a picture of Alec Guinness in a dress and one of John Wayne on a horse. It was when he noticed that the woman in the ticket booth was watching him out of the corner of her eye that Alexander was spurred into making up his mind.

Two buildings along from the cinema there was a blind alley which Eric Mullins had once taken him down. The alley made a right-angled turn twenty yards from the street, and on this angle there was a flat, handleless door which led, Eric said, to the cinema. ‘It’s not locked,’ he said. ‘They can’t lock it, because then it wouldn’t be an escape, would it? You can get it open with a knife.’ Alexander inserted a penny into the crack of the door and levered it out a quarter-inch. He grappled his fingers onto the strip of door and worked it open far enough to slip through.

On the other side was a corridor of bare brick with a floor of rough, ridged concrete; a single bare lightbulb burned in a socket above a door at the far end, through which came the sound of indistinct voices talking loudly. Another door, halfway down the corridor, opened with a judder and a woman came out, fiddling with a button on her blouse. She smiled and looked at him as if she were trying to work out who he was. ‘Hello, mischief,’ she said. The light from the bulb made her hair gauzy. She opened the door and pushed aside a velvet curtain. ‘You coming or aren’t you?’ she whispered.

He went inside. The cinema was so large and dark it seemed to have no boundary. Like a drift of scum on a river, a stream of smoke flowed upwards through the beam of light, which swelled and shrank and twitched incessantly. Dozens of faces tilted upwards underneath the beam, all of them with the same expression of expectation, or so it appeared initially. Alexander wrapped himself in the folds of the curtain, which smelt like curtains in Mr Mullins’s pub. Unable to understand what the people on the screen were doing, he looked again at the people who were watching them. A few sat open-mouthed, as if waiting to be fed. Some were chewing, while some sucked on cigarettes, making scarlet bugs appear in the darkness. One woman seemed to be joining in with the words that the actors were speaking. Under the lip of the balcony, a man kissed the woman in the seat beside him; in front of them a man had his eyes closed, next to a woman who was frowning as if she disagreed with everything she was hearing.

Alexander’s gaze travelled to the end of the row in which the frowning woman sat, and travelled gradually back, to halt at a face he had already passed over once, and realised now was his mother’s. It went dark for a moment and then the light flashed on her skin, but she remained motionless, like a woman balancing a book on her head. Voices were raised in the film. The frowning woman shook her head and the sleeping man woke up, and then his mother’s eyes widened in amazement, though nothing had happened, that Alexander could see, to make her react in this way, and her lips formed an expression as if someone he could not see was in the seat beside her and telling her something she could scarcely believe. She smiled to herself, curling a strand of hair around her finger.

Alexander smiled too, yet her lonely pleasure made him sorrowful. He was ashamed, and he told himself that he should not have left Mr Prentice’s shop. He picked a cancelled ticket from the carpet and turned it repeatedly in his fingers to keep his eyes from his mother.

‘This is where we came in,’ said a man somewhere in the shadows under the balcony. Three men and a woman came down the slope, making the floor boom under their tread. Alexander rolled under the curtain and reached the end of the corridor before the door behind him opened. He returned to his post at the end of the side street, and waited. Half an hour passed, and still his mother did not come out. He counted the buses that drove by. Ten buses passed, and in that time he saw many people leave, but not his mother. The sun was resting on the roofs when he decided to go home.

Alexander would remember the pursuit of his mother, and the apparition of her face amid the other shadowed faces. And from the evening of that day he would remember his father putting his elbows on the dinner table and drawing on his pipe so strongly the liquid rattled in its stem, and saying to him: ‘Anything wrong?’

Alexander stirred his spoon around the empty soup bowl as his mother gathered the rest of the cutlery and crockery. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘There is, I think,’ his mother teased.

‘Come on, what’s up?’ asked his father, taking off his glasses.

‘No, nothing,’ he repeated. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ he grinned, holding his spoon upright like a sceptre. ‘Dr Levine said so.’

‘Comedian,’ said his mother. She stacked the plates and went off to the kitchen.

‘Come on,’ his father said. ‘Let’s go and help your mother in the galley.’

Alexander followed his father down the hall, twisting the ticket in his pocket as he walked.

In the kitchen his mother was reading a newspaper she had spread out on the draining board. Her head was posed like one of the women in the glass cabinet at the cinema, but she was even prettier. Alexander stood in the doorway and looked at her in the way the man in the street had looked at her, with his head angled slightly to one side and both hands in his pockets.

‘Can I have a picture of you?’ he asked her.

His mother looked sideways at him. ‘What do you need a picture for?’ she asked.

‘For my room.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she told him. ‘You’ve got the real thing. You don’t need a picture.’

‘Please.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re being silly.’

‘Please.’

‘Alexander, stop it,’ she said, and he ran out of the kitchen because he felt he might cry.

7. The Bovis stove

The afternoon was so hot that Alexander’s father took a chair from the kitchen and carried it out into the garden, where Alexander, propped on his elbows in the middle of the lawn, was turning the pages of the old atlas.

‘Would I be disturbing you, son and heir?’ his father enquired, in the butler’s voice he often used when he was joking. ‘I would not? Well and good. We shall study together,’ he replied to Alexander’s smile, and he placed the chair on the patch of concrete to the side of the kitchen door, under the honeysuckle that grew across the wall that year. He went back inside and emerged again with a sheaf of square-ruled paper and the big tin tray, which he laid across the arms of the chair to make a desk. ‘This is very agreeable,’ he remarked, examining the point of a pencil approvingly. He unbuttoned his collar and slipped his feet out of his broad-strapped sandals.

Askance Alexander watched his father working, drawing graphs and reckoning figures across the gridded paper, placing the completed sheets neatly upon the pile underneath the chair. His mother brought a pitcher of lemonade and poured a glass for each of them; his father kissed her fingers and his mother made a curtsy, holding out the hem of her dress so the shape of a leg showed through the red and white checks, as Alexander would remember.

‘Alexander, come inside when you’ve finished your drink,’ she said.

‘He’s fine, Irene,’ said his father. ‘Quiet as a monk, aren’t you?’

So Alexander continued to roam the pink expanses of the maps, measuring the distances between names that seemed to have been invented for their melody, tracing systems of rivers that looked like roots. From time to time he turned to the first page of the atlas, where his great-grandfather’s name was written in a script that resembled blades of grass, with ink that was chestnut brown and gave the book an aura which the name of Duncan Manus MacIndoe deepened with its ancient, clannish sound. With a forefinger he stroked the loops and limbs of the writing, as if to encourage a visible presence to rise like a genie from the paper.

Occasionally his father broke the silence, stopping his pencil and enquiring quietly, without looking up: ‘Eight times thirteen?’ or ‘Twenty-two nines?’ or some other sum. Alexander would give his answer, and whenever the answer was correct his father would say, with pretended briskness and still without looking at him, ‘Carry on,’ then get back to his work.

Late in the afternoon the clouds began to cluster on the city side of the sky. Alexander watched the sun fall behind them, turning parts of them to tangerine foam as it sank. The white shirts on the neighbours’ washing line, hanging with arms raised in the breezeless air, took on the tint of skin. As if soaking a dye from the horizon, the clouds became tangerine right through, a colour that brought to Alexander a sensation that seemed a foretaste of the pleasure he would have at the funfair that evening. It was a sensation so strong that for many years this quality of sunlight in a cumulus sky would elicit a moment of anticipatory happiness, and sometimes he would glimpse the tomato-red metal panels of the merry-go-rounds under loops of electric bulbs, and hear the jubilant, malicious music of the steam organ above the hum of the generators.

Following his father, he passed between the caravans that formed a wall around the fair, and stepped onto grass that had been mashed into arrowhead tracks and heel shapes. Beside the Hall of Mirrors there was a coconut shy, where his father handed his jacket to Alexander before hurling three wooden balls into the netting behind the coconuts, and close by was a stall at which his mother threw two black rubber rings at hooks on a wall that was painted with red fish, then handed the third ring to Alexander, whose throw struck a hook and bounced off. They bought toffee apples from a man with blurred tattoos of a dagger and a red snake on his right arm. Standing by the test-your-strength machine, Alexander raised his half-eaten apple in the direction of the Big Wheel.

‘Can we go on that?’ he asked.

‘You’re not getting me on that, I can tell you that right now,’ said his mother to his father.

‘Can I go?’ Alexander asked his father.

‘You wouldn’t like it,’ his father told him.

‘Have you been on one?’

‘No.’

‘Then how do you know I wouldn’t like it?’

‘I know.’

‘How?’

‘Don’t be contrary, Alexander,’ said his mother.

‘No, he’s right,’ said his father, raising one forefinger in judgement. ‘But don’t say you weren’t warned. You’ll get no sympathy from me if you get up there and find it’s too high. Do you want me to go on with you?’ his father asked, in a tone that Alexander took as a challenge.

‘Not if you don’t want to,’ Alexander replied, and his father pressed a couple of coins into his hand, as if he were handing over an important message for him to deliver.

A woman with curlers in her hair took the money. ‘Just for you, lover?’ she asked, letting the coins slide down her hip into the pouch that was slung across her dress. Alexander looked at his mother, who looked at his father, who was studying the wheel. ‘Shouldn’t really, you being a little ‘un,’ said the woman; then, after a teasing pause, ‘but go on.’ She touched his cheek with her inky fingertips as he crossed the steel ramp to the empty car. ‘Hold tight,’ she told him, pressing his hands onto the iron bar that she fastened across his belly, and then she turned towards the man in the sentrybox at the foot of the ramp and cried ‘Up and away,’ letting her voice trail off like someone falling a long distance.

With a jolt he rose backwards and in a second he was above the stalls and then pitching down towards them, through air that smelled of onions and hot sugar. His parents appeared and receded, and he looked over his shoulder, down on the tarpaulin roofs, which glowed like multicoloured lampshades. He saw the gigantic shadows of the stallkeepers quivering on the tents as he swooped towards his parents. At the top he looked across the fairground, and was fascinated to see how orderly it appeared from this height, but the wheel was now gathering speed. A wind was whirring in his ears. Becoming frightened, he closed his eyes. The car swung as it was flung over the apex, and swung again at the end of its fall. A woman in a car behind him let out a gleeful yell, urging the wheel to turn faster. Alexander screwed his eyes so tightly shut that he could no longer sense the fairground lights. He heard his mother’s voice say his father’s name. ‘Make it stop. Please make it stop,’ he prayed, and then it did stop.

The car rocked, suspended at the start of its descent. On the rim of the footplate a line of red lightbulbs bobbed like fishing floats, then came to rest. Under him something metallic clanged against another piece of metal. The wheel juddered forward an inch, another inch, another inch, and stopped again. ‘Alexander!’ his mother cried out. She ran into his sight, waving her arms; miniature black cars circled behind her, on a roundabout for small children. ‘Keep calm,’ she called. ‘Alexander. Can you hear me? They’ll get it going in a minute. Stay calm, Alexander. Stay calm,’ she kept repeating, but there was no need, for he was no longer upset, not in the slightest. He gazed over the Heath, where the blades of grass seemed to stand to attention in the headlights of the cars, and then he surveyed the fairground, carefully, as if it were an interesting picture spread out below him. Here and there stood groups of people who were looking in his direction; new groups were forming on every path, and from the farther parts of the fairground they were coming nearer. The hats and headscarves moved between the stalls like leaves flowing on water towards a drain. Over the wall of the park he could see the paths that ran under the black foliage of the trees. Wings clattered somewhere among the leaves, but no birds appeared; he imagined the grass alive with nocturnal animals, foraging on the slopes where people cycled in the day. The park was transformed into an enclave of forest, but he understood that he could only observe this forest and never be in it, because it would cease to be a forest if anybody was in it. He told himself that he would be happy to stay all night where he was, and see the sun come up over the houses, and the park become a park again.

He realised that the steam organ had fallen silent. The horses had ceased prancing on the biggest of the merry-go-rounds, but a girl remained seated on one of them, pointing straight at him and laughing. Alexander waved to her, and leaned forward to wave to the people gathered around the booth below. His mother had one hand to her mouth and with the other was waving to him with her fingers, while his father was chatting to the woman with the hair-curlers as if he were simply talking to an acquaintance in a shop.

‘Sit back,’ his mother called, making the motion of pushing at a door. His father glanced up and appeared to nod commendingly to him before resuming his conversation with the woman, who turned away briefly to shout ‘Hurry it up, for God’s sake,’ to someone hidden from view by the floor of the car. ‘Sit back, Alexander,’ his mother called, and it was then he noticed that a man with a panama hat was standing to her side, watching her as she gestured. Alexander watched the man follow her line of sight upward. ‘Alexander, please sit back,’ his mother cried. The man’s eyes were trained on Alexander’s face for a few seconds, then traced the track of his mother’s gaze back down to her face. ‘Alexander! Now!’ his mother demanded, unaware that she was being watched. Alexander lay down on the bench. He regarded the stars for a while, and fell asleep in the mild summer night’s air.

He awoke with a spasm of the machinery and found that he was slowly returning to the ground. The woman with the hair-curlers took him by the hand and passed him to his mother as though he had gone missing and she had discovered him. ‘You’ll be the death of me, young man,’ said his mother, sandwiching his head between her hands. ‘I told you it was dangerous, and then you make it worse. Messing around like that.’

‘I wasn’t messing around,’ he replied.

‘Give me patience,’ said his mother to nobody. She held him tightly against her side and sniffed. Under her arm he saw the man in the panama giving a small white card to his father.

‘We’ll consider it,’ his father was saying. The man raised his hat as they shook hands.

‘Hello, Alexander,’ said the man, bracing his hands on his knees to greet him. His eyebrows bounced up and down as he smiled. ‘You handled that situation with aplomb, I must say,’ he remarked, narrowing his eyes admiringly. With a thumb he scratched the bristles in the hollow beneath his lower lip. ‘Not to be flattered, eh? I like that in a chap,’ said the man. Obtaining no response, he straightened his back and turned down the brim of his hat. ‘Extraordinary,’ he muttered. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr MacIndoe, Mrs MacIndoe,’ said the man, making a bow to each of them. ‘An extraordinary child,’ he remarked. He wriggled his neck to settle the fit of his collar and strode away across the fairground as if he were going to greet someone, but he walked past the tombola stall and kept going, through the wall of caravans, across the road and onto the Heath.

‘Who was that?’ Alexander asked.

‘Nobody in particular,’ replied his father, interrupting his mother before she could utter anything more than the first syllable of his name. ‘Someone who fancied a yatter, that’s all.’

The following Friday evening, at bedtime, Alexander’s mother told him that the next day they were going up to town, just the two of them. ‘A sort of adventure,’ she said. Tantalisingly she flourished the small white card, which had something written on the side that was not printed. ‘We’ll have a bit of a laugh.’ In the morning she made him wash his hair, and she washed her own as soon as he was out of the bathroom. When she came downstairs her lips were made up the way Mrs Darling did hers. They were going to see the man in the panama hat, Alexander knew, and this made him feel uneasy and vaguely ashamed of his mother. On the platform of the Underground station he noticed her surreptitiously checking the handwritten words on the card. ‘Where are we going?’ he shouted over the roar of the arriving train.

‘You’ll see,’ she replied, wincing at the noise and the gritty air. ‘It’ll be fun,’ she assured him, but she fussed at his hair as if she were taking him to an examination.

They came back above ground in a place that was not like the streets around his house. There were more cars here, and fewer shops. The paving stones were perfectly level, and the houses were taller and had rows of bell-pushes beside the entrance. Some of the houses were made of bricks that were dark red and smooth.

‘Which way’s the river from here?’ Alexander asked, and he would remember the way his mother put her hand on the pillar of the Belisha beacon as she looked one way up the street and then the other way, like an explorer taking her bearings in a jungle clearing.

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ she said. ‘Which way is it to Timbuktu?’ she asked him.

It was as though she had known what he had been thinking as she stood beside the beacon, and instantly Alexander was cheerful for the first time that morning. ‘I’d really like it if you’d tell me where we’re going,’ he said, sensing that this time she would tell him.

‘We’re going to have our picture taken,’ she replied, and the next moment she stopped walking. They were at an open door, beside a clothes shop. She consulted the card again. ‘We’re here,’ she announced, reaching for a hand.

At the end of a corridor that smelled of paste there was a flight of stairs, and at the top of the stairs there was a door of ribbed glass through which Alexander could see something pink and conical. ‘Please enter’ he read from a card that was attached to a sucker on the wall. His mother let him turn the handle, and as the door opened he saw a fat little girl in a pink frilly dress, holding the hand of a woman with a fierce fat face. A very short man with wide braces over his dirty white shirt was writing something in one of the squares of a calendar that hung above a filing cabinet. That he was not the man in the panama hat both relieved and confused Alexander.

‘Goodbye, Elizabeth. Mrs Gordon,’ said the short man.

‘Thank you, Mr Stevens,’ replied the woman rapidly, and she pushed past Alexander without acknowledging him or his mother.

‘Mrs MacIndoe and Alexander,’ said the man, looking at them appreciatively, with his hands on his hips. ‘Ha ha,’ he exclaimed. ‘Sounds like a music-hall act, doesn’t it?’ His eyes were perfectly circular and his brow wrinkled, which made him look as if he’d just heard something that had surprised him pleasantly. Flakes of white skin, like the fraying skin of a mushroom, stuck to the sides of his nose. ‘Harold Stevens,’ he said, and smiled widely. Not one of his teeth was at the same angle as any other. ‘Alexander?’ he enquired, with the look of a delivery man estimating a parcel’s weight. ‘Who else could it be?’ Mr Stevens answered himself. ‘This won’t take much of your time, Mrs MacIndoe. All has been arranged, has it not? The quid pro quo, as it were?’

‘It has,’ said Alexander’s mother.

‘Excellent,’ said Mr Stevens. ‘Follow me, if you’d be so good.’

Sunlight sparkled on the floor of the inner room, most intensely in front of the platform that was built against the wall on their right. On the platform, in front of a placard of plain black paper, there was a brand new stove with a smooth yellow door that looked like a huge half-melted slab of butter and had the word ‘Bovis’ in sloping silver letters above the handle. At the far end of the room stood a big black camera on a tripod, its concertina lens pointing towards a young man who was hurling plump blue cushions onto a settee. ‘Colin, my assistant,’ said Mr Stevens, gesturing at the young man. Like a cymbals player Colin banged two cushions together, raising a smoulder of dust from each. Mr Stevens aimed his hand at a door beyond the platform. ‘Colin will get you ready, Alexander. Colin, if you’d be so good? I am grateful. Mrs MacIndoe, if you’d follow Colin too?’

‘Your things are behind there, Mrs MacIndoe,’ said Colin when they were in the other room, indicating a folding cloth screen with willows painted on it. ‘And this is your kit,’ he told Alexander, lifting a towel from a pile of school clothes that lay folded on the seat of a chair. The uniform had never been worn before: the cuffs of the shirt were as hard as tea cups, and the toe caps of the shoes had not a single dent in them. Colin aligned the knot of Alexander’s tie then slung an empty leather satchel over his shoulder.

‘The model schoolboy,’ his mother remarked as she came out from behind the screen. ‘Perhaps Colin should get you ready every day.’ She had a different dress on, and a starched white apron over it.

‘You’ll be needing this,’ said Colin, and he thrust a wooden spoon into her hand. ‘The master awaits,’ he told them, in a voice that dragged with the dreariness of his duties. He held the door open and waved them through like a traffic policeman.

In the main room Mr Stevens was straightening the skirt of black material that hung from the back of the camera, and another man was entering from the office, combing his hair as he walked.

‘This is Mr Darby,’ said Mr Stevens. ‘Mr Darby will be completing our – ensemble.’

Mr Darby had a face as smooth and symmetrical as a shopwindow dummy’s, and like a dummy’s outfit his white shirt and grey suit had no creases. He combed back his oily forelock, so it stood up like a little grille, and said ‘Hi,’ instead of ‘Hello’.

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Darby,’ said Alexander’s mother.

‘Call me Geoff,’ he replied with a smile that went up as if pulled by wires. ‘Irene, right?’

‘And Alexander,’ said his mother.

Mr Darby peered at Alexander over his mother’s shoulder; he might have been looking over a wall at a guard dog. ‘Hi, kid. Things OK?’ he asked, turning straight away to Mr Stevens. ‘Come on, Harry, let’s go. Tempus fugit.’ Mr Darby leaped onto the podium and took up a position behind the stove, jerking the sleeves of his jacket and then his cuffs.

Mr Stevens manoeuvred Alexander and his mother into their places around the stove, on which Colin set a big copper pot and a snow-white saucepan. Mr Darby put his hand on Irene MacIndoe’s shoulder and looked into the copper pot. ‘Yum yum,’ he said heavily, ‘that does look so good. Get that spoon in there, girl, and give it a stir.’

A muffled voice came out of the head of the one-eyed, five-legged creature that was watching Alexander and his mother and Mr Darby. ‘Mrs MacIndoe, could you raise your right hand a bit, and keep your left by your side? That’s good. And look as if you’ve found fifty pounds in among the carrots. The imaginary carrots. That’s good, Mrs MacIndoe.’ Like a monstrous spider a hand crept out from the pleats of the cloth and advanced to the front of the camera, where it writhed around the lens and then retreated. ‘Come on, Geoff, look keen,’ said the voice. ‘This blasted stove is the best thing that’s happened to you since I don’t know what.’

‘The weekend?’ suggested Mr Darby. He made a movement with his lips as if dislodging something from between his teeth.

The skirt of the camera bulged and out slipped Mr Stevens’ head. ‘Alexander, could you move in a bit closer?’ he requested. ‘And look at the pot, not the camera. Try to forget I’m here.’ He raised the cloth, drew a deep breath like a diver, and ducked under. ‘Nearly there, Alexander, nearly there. Left foot forward a bit. Perhaps tiptoes? And not quite so glum?’

‘Smile at me, Alexander,’ said his mother, and this was the moment of the day that he would remember most clearly: her damp red lips smiling into the vacant copper pot, while the fingers of her left hand shook against her thigh.

‘The quid pro quo,’ Alexander repeated quietly to himself, and the comical words made his face adjust itself to Mr Stevens’ satisfaction.

‘Excellent,’ said Mr Stevens. ‘Excellent. Don’t move.’ There was a flash into which everything vanished, and then the room seemed to assemble itself quickly out of the white air, wobbling for a second before standing firm. Alexander blinked. He saw a room that was colourless and stood like a ghost in front of the real room. He blinked again and the phantom room was fainter, and smaller, as if it were retreating. ‘One more, everyone,’ Mr Stevens called. Again everything disappeared and rushed back, and Alexander blinked to see the ghostly room.

‘Thank you, Alexander. Very professional,’ said Mr Stevens, satisfied at last, and then he dropped a spent flashbulb into Alexander’s hand. Waiting for his mother to change out of the borrowed clothes, Alexander rolled the warm bulb on his palm. In the pock-marked glass he saw the grey of railway lines in the rain, the grey of the silted riverbank below the power station in Greenwich, the grey of the ash in the Doodlebug House. This he would remember too, and he would remember looking up to see his mother in the doorway to the back room, where Mr Darby stood in her way and said something to her. She lowered her eyes, then after ten seconds or so she smiled at Mr Darby as if he had said something amusing, though it appeared he had said nothing. She reached into Mr Darby’s pocket, drew out his comb, snapped it in half and dropped the halves on the floor. Having wiped her fingers on the door jamb, she hurried across the shining floor, her heels hammering on the tiles.

‘A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr Stevens,’ she said, and snatched Alexander’s hand in passing.

‘And vice versa,’ replied Mr Stevens to her back. ‘Goodbye, Alexander.’

As the door to the office closed, Alexander turned to see Mr Stevens laughing with Mr Darby, who was fanning his hand in front of his mouth, miming an endless yawn.

‘What happened?’ Alexander asked his mother on the stairs.

‘A very rude man,’ she said, placing the back of a hand on her reddened cheeks. ‘A very disagreeable person.’

‘I didn’t like him,’ said Alexander.

‘Quite right,’ she told him.

‘Smarmy.’

‘Smarmy,’ she agreed, but she was making them walk so fast they could not talk, and on the train she sat in silence, glaring at the window as if her reflected face were Mr Darby’s.

The advertisement appeared in Every Woman magazine near the end of the year, next to a knitting pattern and opposite an advertisement in which a boy of Alexander’s age was striding along a road in a countryside of wheat fields and sheep and thatched cottages, with a spiral of steam rising from a mug in the foreground, above the slogan ‘It’s The Only Way To Start The Day!’ The road and fields and cottages were painted, not real, and the vista of cupboards and shelves behind his mother and Mr Darby was unreal as well, like a pencil tracing rather than a photograph.

His father leaned back in his chair and brought the page close to his face. ‘A peculiar scene all right, son,’ he said. ‘Looks like no kitchen I’ve ever been in. And as for Mr Handsome, the cuckoo in the nest.’ He shook his head in histrionic sorrow.

‘Your idea as well as mine,’ said Alexander’s mother, turning her embroidery frame. ‘We got a good deal.’

‘Imagine, son. Your poor old dad not wanted on voyage. Insufficient juttiness of jaw. The humiliation of it.’ He put down the magazine and picked up his newspaper, but as soon as they were left alone he turned to Alexander and whispered behind his hand, like a classmate playing a prank: ‘Borrow your pencil?’

Alexander sat on the arm of the chair and watched his father draw a goatee moustache and glasses on the man, and then a speech bubble from Alexander’s mouth. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he wrote in the bubble.

Their laughter brought Alexander’s mother back. ‘What’s funny?’ she asked, drying her hands on a tea-towel, and Alexander displayed the advertisement. ‘Which one of you two infants did that, then?’ she demanded, not smiling.

‘He did,’ said Alexander’s father, handcuffing his son with his fingers.

‘Idiot.’

‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity,’ his father replied, for which he received a swat on the back of the head with the newspaper. ‘I’ll get you another one,’ he laughed.

‘You will indeed,’ said Alexander’s mother.

‘Dog house for me,’ said his father. He took the newspaper from her hand and unrolled it. ‘Mind you, we’ll all be done for at this rate,’ he added, looking into the open pages as if he were staring into a pit.

Alexander would remember the words ‘38th Parallel’ in the headline, and his pang of perplexity at the notion that something was happening in which peril and geometry were in some way combined. And he would remember looking at the advertisement his father had defaced, at his mother stirring the empty pot, at the simpering boy who was more like the boy on the painted road than he was like himself, and at the unpleasant Mr Darby, who seemed to be smirking at him, as if he knew that Alexander wanted him to go away.

8. Tollund Man

It was raining as the train went over Hungerford Bridge, and Alexander looked to his left at the roof of the Dome of Discovery, which was like a pavement of silver.

‘That’s called the Skylon,’ said his mother, pointing to the rocket-shaped thing that balanced on tightropes beside the river. A boy across the aisle leaned forward to see, and slapped his bare knees with excitement. On the far bank, the big tower of the Houses of Parliament was wrapped in a cocoon of scaffolding.

‘An hour till rendezvous,’ said his father as they jostled down the steps off the bridge. ‘Let’s follow our noses for a while.’

First they went to look at the section on British wildlife, where Alexander, willing the time to pass, entranced himself with a picture of a Scottish wild cat cringing into the hollow of a tree trunk. People buffeted his back as he stood his ground, staring at the cat’s gaping mouth. ‘Come along, daydream,’ said his mother, touching his neck. ‘There’s lots more to see. We can’t spend all day looking at a moggy.’

‘How much longer till they arrive?’ Alexander asked.

His father did not even check his watch. ‘Good grief,’ he said. ‘Patience, boy. About one hour minus five minutes.’

They went to a pavilion in which there were large straw figures of a lion and a unicorn. ‘The twin symbols of the Briton’s character,’ his father read.

‘Twin symbols?’ said Alexander.

‘Yes. Of the Britons,’ said his father. ‘All the people who are British. Me, you. All of us. What don’t you understand?’

‘Why two?’

‘The lion is like the lion on the flags,’ his father explained. ‘Like the British Lions. Richard the Lionheart. Lion-hearted Britons in general – Francis Drake, Henry the Fifth, Winston Churchill, Randolph Turpin.’

‘So not all of us?’

‘Deep down, all of us, yes. But it’s more obvious with some than with others, I grant you. Noël Coward, for instance. You have to dig pretty deep to find the lion there.’

‘I thought it was the British bulldog.’

‘It can be that too, yes,’ his mother said. ‘But the lion’s more noble, more regal. And more ancient. There’s history with the lion.’

‘And a damned great straw bulldog would look pretty silly,’ said his father, and he blew some dirt off his glasses.

‘What’s a unicorn got to do with it?’ asked Alexander. ‘They never existed, did they?’

His father pressed a thumb to the furrow between his eyebrows; he drew a long breath and let it go. ‘No, that’s right. They never existed.’

‘The unicorn is for fantasy, Alexander,’ said his mother. ‘Imagination, playfulness, that sort of thing.’

‘Think of Denis Compton,’ said his father, and with an imaginary bat he clipped an imaginary ball up to the ceiling. ‘Éclat, élan, vim, panache, et cetera, et cetera.’

‘What?’

‘Or Noël Coward,’ said his mother.

Alexander trailed his parents out of the pavilion, ruminating on the mythical Briton, whose qualities were combined in nobody he knew. Sheltering under the eaves of the Dome, he watched the row of fountains in front of the Skylon as they wriggled like a squad of restless giants.

‘This is definitely the right place?’ his father asked his mother, hooking his cuff clear of his wrist.

‘Well, how many domes can you see, Graham?’ replied his mother. ‘The dome at eleven,’ she assured him, and no sooner had she said the words than Megan and Mrs Beckwith arrived, under a big black umbrella.

‘We late, Irene?’ asked Mrs Beckwith, picking at the net that held her hair bunched at the back of her head. ‘Problems choosing young madam’s wardrobe. Us girls always have to look our best, you know. A lesson you’ll learn soon enough, Alexander,’ she said, and she kissed him on his forehead.

Megan stood behind her, twirling her pleated tartan skirt. Her hair was held back above her ears by plastic clips that matched her eyes. ‘Hello, Mrs MacIndoe,’ said Megan, stepping out to the side. ‘Hello, Mr MacIndoe. Hello, Eck. What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Alexander, and he looked to his mother.

‘Can I decide then?’ Megan asked.

‘Bossy child,’ said Mrs Beckwith, and she nudged Megan towards Alexander.

Megan looked over his shoulder at the Skylon. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said to Alexander. Her eyes followed the tower’s curve up into space.

‘No visible means of support,’ observed his father. ‘Just like the country.’

‘Cynicism is inappropriate here, Graham,’ chided his mother. ‘For domestic consumption only.’

Tapping a cigarette on the lid of the steel case she had taken from her handbag, Mrs Beckwith nodded in the direction of the river. Two boys were kicking each other’s shins underneath the Skylon. ‘The male of the species,’ she commented drily, then accepted the match that Alexander’s father held out to her.

‘Boys will be boys,’ agreed his mother.

Megan’s fingers appeared on Alexander’s sleeve, and she said the only words that he would always be able to retrieve from his memory of that morning. ‘But you’re different, Eck,’ she said, as if placating him. ‘You’re almost a girl.’

‘Beg pardon?’ exclaimed Mrs Beckwith.

‘Whatever do you mean, young lady?’ his father asked Megan, putting his hands on her shoulders from behind and looking down onto her face.

‘I was being nice, Mr MacIndoe, that’s all. Eck’s gentle, like a girl, that’s all I meant.’

Alexander’s father frowned at Megan but he was more amused by her than he ever was by him, it seemed to Alexander, and it seemed throughout that morning that he preferred her company to his son’s. ‘That’s called the regulator,’ his father said to her, putting a finger close to a photograph in which a trio of iron spheres whirled on thick iron arms above a huge steam engine. Crouching between Alexander and Megan, he explained how the apparatus worked, but it was to Megan that he was speaking. ‘They rise up, and the steam escapes here, and so the pressure drops and they fall again,’ he said.

‘Ingenious,’ Megan commented, as if Alexander’s father were the inventor and she was congratulating him.

‘Ingenious indeed,’ his father agreed, smiling to himself.

‘Too technical for us,’ commented his mother, pulling a face for Alexander, though he understood the machine well enough. She put a hand out to steer him to the next exhibit; he shrugged his shoulder away and followed his father.

‘Now this,’ said his father, in front of another photograph, ‘was invented by a man who used to live not very far from here. Sir Henry Bessemer. He lived in Herne Hill. Do you know where Herne Hill is?’

‘No,’ said Megan, before Alexander could say ‘Near Camberwell.’

‘Between Camberwell and Dulwich,’ his father said.

Side by side the three of them looked at the picture of a huge bucket from which a burning liquid flowed.

‘What is it?’ Megan asked, and his father explained how steel was manufactured.

At every picture they stopped and listened as his father talked to them like a schoolteacher. They were standing in front of a photograph of a shipyard when Alexander heard Mrs Beckwith, standing a couple of yards behind him, say to his mother: ‘Sun’s coming out, Irene.’ Through a window Alexander saw a glow rise quickly on a wet concrete wall, turning it to the colour of chalk. The last raindrops of the exhausted shower sparkled against the dark gaberdine raincoat of a woman who stood with her back to him, her hand on the catch of her half-lowered umbrella.

‘Shame to squander it,’ said his mother, raising her voice slightly.

‘Right enough,’ agreed Mrs Beckwith.

‘We can’t leave yet,’ moaned Megan. ‘We haven’t seen half of it.’

‘You can’t see everything here,’ said Mrs Beckwith.

‘Why not?’ Megan demanded, with an eagerness that seemed overdone to Alexander and annoyed him.

‘Well, let’s work it out,’ said Alexander’s father. ‘How long have we been looking at this one?’

‘Half a minute,’ replied Megan.

‘More than that,’ Alexander interjected.

‘Let’s say half a minute,’ said his father, ticking off the first stage of the calculation on a little finger for Megan’s benefit. ‘There are twenty-five thousand photos here, it says. That’s twelve and a half thousand minutes. That’s more than two hundred hours. That’s more than a week. And we have less than one day.’

Disgruntled by this proof, Megan appealed to her aunt. ‘A bit longer?’

Mrs Beckwith looked at his father; his father smiled at Megan and rubbed his palms together as if limbering up for a tug-of-war.

‘The wives are playing truant, then,’ said his mother. ‘Outside in an hour?’

Megan and his father walked away, and Alexander followed his mother and Mrs Beckwith, who were not aware that he had decided to go with them. Arm in arm the women walked, like grown-up sisters, perfectly in step with each other, their foreheads almost touching as they talked. ‘Come on, Joan, tell me,’ Alexander heard his mother say, and he stopped on the carpet that ran to the door, to avoid eavesdropping on Mrs Beckwith’s reply. He would remember looking at the sharp tendons of their ankles as they moved away from him, and then looking at his mother’s face, which now was in perfect profile. She laughed and her eyes became huge with astonishment as her mouth formed a word like ‘No’. The vivacity of her expression was of a kind that Alexander had never previously seen in her face; it was mischievous and very young, more like Megan than his mother. With a vertiginous lurch he felt that he was seeing a moment from the life she had led before he existed, or her life as it would have been had he not been born, and he understood in that instant that she loved him out of choice. A curl of hair fell across her ear. He wanted to rush to her, but his legs were like iron. She turned, as if she had become conscious of the empty space behind her, and then noticed him standing on his own. ‘Catch up, Alexander,’ she called. He trudged to the door, encumbered by sadness. ‘Slowcoach,’ his mother said, with a look that told him she knew there was something on his mind but was not going to ask what it was.

‘You have a run about, so we can gossip,’ said Mrs Beckwith outside. ‘We’ll all go for something to eat soon.’

Alexander walked around the train that was parked on a short length of track nearby. He sat down on the pavement on the far side of the train, so that he could see his mother and Mrs Beckwith through the gap between the undercarriage and the track. Where the sun hit the rails there were red and blue grains in the steel. Tufts of grease glistened on the bolts of the rails; they were the colour of the jelly in a pork pie. Alexander touched a finger to one of them, and the smell of it made him close his eyes. He saw the fire station and remembered how, when he was younger, his mother used to lift him so that he could see through the panes in the folding red wooden doors. Pressing his palms to his temples he willed into sight the scarlet metal of the fire engines and the black gleam of their tyres, like varnished charcoal, and the firemen’s jackets and tall boots arranged around the walls like vestments. Across his eyelids flooded a red so profound it brought a taste to the air in his mouth, a sweet and elusive taste he could name only as the flavour of redness. Again he brought the greasy fingertip to his nose. Water sprang into his mouth as if out of hunger.

‘Are you all right?’ someone was asking.

Alexander opened his eyes, and saw that a tall elderly man with a white moustache was looking at him quizzically. The waxed tips of the man’s moustache stuck out of the bristles like prongs of chicken bone; these repulsive miniature horns would still be in his memory more than forty years later, though the face to which they had belonged would not, nor the place where he had seen that face.

‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you,’ said Alexander, and he peered under the train. His mother and Mrs Beckwith, arm in arm, were approaching. ‘I’m waiting for my mother. She’s coming now,’ he said, pointing.

‘Jolly good,’ said the man, and he doffed his hat to Mrs Beckwith and Alexander’s mother.

‘Not easy, pet, I’ll tell you that much,’ concluded Mrs Beckwith, and she blinked one eye at the sting of the smoke from her raised cigarette. She looked at Alexander and it was clear that she knew he had heard. Her dress tightened across her ribs and creased as she sighed.

They all ate in the Regatta Restaurant, where the door handles were shaped like hands, and the plates were thicker and heavier and whiter than the plates at home, and they were served by a woman who said ‘Oh yes’ after every order, as if she had guessed perfectly what each of them was going to say.

‘What did you do, Eck?’ Megan asked as she chopped at her food.

‘Just wandered,’ Alexander replied.

‘So what did you find out?’

Alexander glanced at Mrs Beckwith, who was comparing the contents of her plate with his father’s. ‘This and that,’ he said.

Megan fidgeted dismissively. ‘Mr MacIndoe explained such a lot of things,’ she said to his mother. ‘We’re going back to the Dome after this.’

‘Are we now?’ his mother asked his father.

‘It would appear so,’ he said. ‘Alexander, are you a member of the expedition?’

Megan was fiddling with one of her hair clips. ‘These are a nuisance,’ she complained. ‘Help me out, Eck.’

The clip jumped like a cricket into Alexander’s hand. ‘Are we all going?’ he asked.

His mother said they were, but before they left the restaurant she changed her mind. ‘We’ll join you in a bit,’ she said to his father as she stood up. Alexander took hold of Mrs Beckwith’s arm.

‘Latching on to us, are we?’ teased Mrs Beckwith.

‘You don’t want to listen to our chatter, Alexander,’ said his mother.

‘I won’t listen,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk behind.’

‘In front, so we can keep an eye on you,’ Mrs Beckwith ordered, and the three of them went one way while his father and Megan went the other.

Alexander led his mother and Mrs Beckwith from pavilion to pavilion, through rooms of new furniture and electric machines and wallpaper that was covered with patterns of crystals, and all the time he was holding the hairclip tightly in his palm. He was still holding it when Megan and Mrs Beckwith left, but the following day he decided to take it back, having convinced himself that it would not be wrong to go to Megan’s house, now that she and Mrs Beckwith had spent a day with him and his parents.

Because his parents did not know John Halloran’s parents, he made out that he was going to John’s house. It began to rain, and he ran to the Beckwiths’ house, where he paused at the gate to inspect the building. It appeared that nobody was in. He swung the gate back and advanced, cautiously, halfway up the path. Through the living room window he could see a newspaper lying in damp light on the arm of an empty settee. Alexander took the clip from his pocket and eased the letterbox open like a trap. He looked into the hallway; every door inside was closed. He was about to drop the clip when a sound to his left made him jump and the steel flap clacked shut. Mr Beckwith was standing at the end of the path that went down the side of the house. He was holding a trowel in one hand and something black in the other fist, and his white cotton shirt was clinging to his ribs, which showed like gills through the fabric. His bony knees looked like hammer-heads under the wet cloth of his trousers.

Alexander had seen Mr Beckwith many times in the previous year, always alone, always walking steadily with his peculiar padding gait, facing straight ahead. He had never seen him speak to anyone, nor even exchange a greeting with anyone, nor stop at any shop. Mr Beckwith was always moving, and now he looked at Alexander as if the boy had brought him to a standstill and he did not know what to do.

‘Hello, Mr Beckwith,’ said Alexander timidly.

Mr Beckwith looked meaninglessly at him, and his jaw moved rapidly up and down in a silent stammering.

‘I didn’t mean to disturb anybody,’ Alexander apologised.

Mr Beckwith looked at the front door as if it were a third person waiting for him to speak. ‘No one in, lad,’ he said. His voice was very low, like the voice of a fat man, and the words seemed to buzz in his throat.

‘I was only going to give this back,’ said Alexander, unfurling his fingers from the clip.

Mr Beckwith gazed uncomprehendingly at the piece of plastic. ‘Oh,’ he said, as if rebuking himself.

‘Is that all right?’ asked Alexander, but Mr Beckwith appeared to hear nothing. ‘Is that all right?’ he repeated. ‘If I put it through?’

‘Put it through,’ said Mr Beckwith, and with the trowel he made a posting action. Black water was dripping from the underside of his left hand. ‘Are you Alexander?’ he asked, stretching his narrow neck as if looking through murk.

‘Yes, sir,’ Alexander replied. ‘Alexander MacIndoe.’

Mr Beckwith considered what Alexander had said. ‘At school with Megan, are you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Yes,’ echoed Mr Beckwith. Seeming to have nothing more to say, he watched a car go past the house. His head swung back to face Alexander. ‘My name’s Harold,’ he remarked at last, and he transferred the trowel to a windowsill so that he could offer a hand. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said. His fingers were cold, and rolled in Alexander’s hand like a sheaf of short sticks. ‘It’s raining. Do you want to shelter inside for a while?’

‘I should go home,’ said Alexander.

Mr Beckwith looked at the sky. ‘No,’ he told him with a grave shake of his head. ‘It’ll get worse before it gets better. Come with me,’ he said, and he picked up the trowel and turned back down the side path.

Ignoring the door to the kitchen, Mr Beckwith led Alexander into the garden. It was as neat as a garden in a magazine, and there were more colours in it than in any garden Alexander had ever seen. The lawn was an oval, not a rectangle like at his own house and every other house he knew, and close to its centre was an oval bed, in which only white flowers grew. In one part of the garden was a bed of yellow flowers; in another part every bloom was a shade of purple; at the end of the garden stood a wooden shed, with a row of red flowers along its wall. Every plant and bush seemed perfect in its shape, as if a smoothing hand had moulded the body of the foliage in one long caress, and there was not so much as a single stray petal to mar the darkness of the soil beneath the leaves.

Mr Beckwith opened the shed door, and they stepped into air that was warmer than the air outside and smelled of creosote and grass and newly cut wood. Their tread made the floor bend and croak. A rack of seed packets hung on one wall, above a tower of yellow newspapers. In a corner stood a stack of clay pots, next to a tool box and below a saw and a pair of shears that hung from the same nail. By the window was a high bench that was cross-hatched with blade marks, with a vice bolted to one end.

‘Look at this,’ said Mr Beckwith. He put his left hand on the bench and opened his fingers to expose the ball of wet soil that he had been carrying. ‘Blackleg,’ he stated. ‘See?’ He turned his wrist, revealing the limp stem of a flower drooping from one side of the clod. He stuck the point of the trowel into the dark stringy pulp at its base. ‘There’s nothing you can do about this. Incurable, blackleg. You have to burn it and go back to square one.’ With a foot he dragged a bucket out from under the bench. ‘Look at that,’ said Mr Beckwith. Half a dozen flowers lay on a bed of sludge in the bottom of the bucket. ‘All of them ruined with it,’ Mr Beckwith said. His teeth were as long as a dog’s, Alexander noticed, and the skin of his cheeks seemed as thin as a leaf. Mr Beckwith looked at Alexander abruptly, as if he had asked him a question. ‘Do you know what this flower is?’ he asked. Alexander shook his head. ‘No? Not to worry. It’s a geranium. They’re all geraniums.’ Mr Beckwith lowered the clod and its diseased stem into the bucket, as if it were a small sleeping animal. ‘Got a garden, have you?’ he demanded suddenly.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Nice one, is it?’

‘Yes, sir. But not as nice as this.’

Gazing out of the window, Mr Beckwith lowered his head towards Alexander. ‘Say that again,’ he said. ‘Hearing a bit dicky.’

‘Not as nice as your garden, sir.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘I didn’t eat enough for a long time, you see. That’s what did my ears. Do you eat properly?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Look like you do.’ A sound that was like the first part of a laugh made his chest shudder, yet he did not smile. ‘So you’ve got a garden?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Don’t need the sir, lad. I’m not your teacher.’ Mr Beckwith’s face wore a vague and thoughtful look, a look that made it seem as if he were being reminded that there was something he should be doing but could not for the moment recall what it was. ‘Megan’s a good girl,’ he declared.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Don’t need the sir, lad. Any good at woodwork?’ He lifted from the bench two blocks of pale wood that had been fixed together in a mortice and tenon joint.

‘Not really, Mr Beckwith,’ replied Alexander, wondering what use the wooden object might serve.

‘Neither am I,’ said Mr Beckwith seriously. ‘What about gardening?’

‘Not really. My dad does the garden. Mum sometimes helps. I do a bit, too. Not much, though.’

Mr Beckwith raised his chin and turned his eyes to a blank portion of the wooden wall, as if allowing Alexander’s words to trickle into his mind. Gradually he turned his head to look out of the window again. ‘Rain’s easing off,’ he observed. ‘Give it a minute or two. Sit yourself down.’ He waved a hand at the pile of newspapers, and he turned his attention to cleaning the trowel and the other tools he had been using. Streaks of dark skin appeared through Mr Beckwith’s shirt as he worked, and the sinews at the back of his neck stood out like the muscles of his forearm.

The stack swayed as Alexander sat on it, and when he spread his feet to steady himself his left foot slipped on a magazine. Alexander lifted his foot from a photograph that seemed to be of an old woman asleep on a mattress, with an old-fashioned night-cap on her head. He bent over the picture and realised that the person was not an old woman and was not asleep. What he had thought was a nightdress was in fact skin, which clung to the dead man’s bones like a collapsed tent of soft leather. Fleshless fingers, sickle-shaped, hung from the wrists. A shaft of bare bone ended in a strong plump foot. Alexander picked up the magazine to read the caption. ‘Who’s Tollund Man, Mr Beckwith?’ he asked.

Unwinding a length from a ball of twine, Mr Beckwith looked over his shoulder at Alexander. ‘I’m sorry, lad. What did you say?’

‘Who’s Tollund Man?’ Alexander repeated, holding the page outwards.

Mr Beckwith put his face close to the magazine. He pulled back a bit, then looked closely again. ‘Danish chap,’ he said at last. ‘Hundreds of years old. From the Iron Age. They found him in a bog. All the water in the peat kept him fresh. He was hanged. See?’ His finger touched the cord around Tollund Man’s throat.

Alexander gazed at the ancient man, curled on his platform of peat. The leathery face seemed to be wincing away from the photographer. It should be terrible, this image of a murdered man, and yet Alexander could not feel what he knew it was proper for him to feel. Waiting for an urgent emotion to seize him, he gazed at Tollund Man, at the body and the peat that seemed all of one piece, like a pouring of dark metal.

‘Fresh as a flower,’ commented Mr Beckwith. ‘Do you want it?’ To please Mr Beckwith, Alexander said that he did. With three swift passes of his rigid fingers, Mr Beckwith tore the picture cleanly out. ‘It’s stopped now,’ Mr Beckwith said, scratching a cheek that was as soft and dark as Tollund Man’s. ‘Shall we go?’

Together they walked a circuit of the garden, Mr Beckwith naming his plants as if introducing them, Alexander repeating the names and striving to embed them in his mind. Holding the picture of Tollund Man lightly in both hands, like a prayer book, he concentrated on the soft white flowerheads to which the word Viburnum belonged. The fragrant pink roses were called Penelope; the artificial-looking flowers that clung to the wall, like purple and white targets fringed with coronets of white petals, had two names, Passiflora and Passion Flower.

Clockwise Mr Beckwith and Alexander processed around the garden, then anti-clockwise they circled back. Mr Beckwith paused before a sheaf of pink flowers in a bed that was shaded by the neighbour’s house, and gestured as if offering them to Alexander.

‘Hydrangea?’ Alexander volunteered.

‘Exactly,’ said Mr Beckwith. He took a step into the sun. ‘And these?’ he asked, by some yellow button-like flowers. ‘No matter. It’s Lavender Cotton, or Santolina.’

Five minutes later the rain recommenced, and Alexander’s first conversation with Mr Beckwith was over. He would always remember how they parted. ‘Hurry home,’ said Mr Beckwith, and Alexander walked down the path at the side of the house, dodging the water that dripped from a crack in the guttering. He was by the back door when Mr Beckwith called his name.

‘Mr Beckwith?’ Alexander replied.

Standing in the slot of light between the two houses, Mr Beckwith held out a flat hand. ‘Whatever it was you were bringing back?’

Alexander placed the clip on Mr Beckwith’s muddy skin. Mr Beckwith looked at it, rocking his hand a fraction of an inch this way and that, as if playing with a drop of water, and his eyes became kindly. ‘Goodbye, Alexander,’ he said. He looked at Alexander and seemed to be contemplating whether he should tell him something. ‘Goodbye,’ he said again, and went back into his garden.

9. Praa

They were standing at the end of a gravel driveway that ran between high walls of fresh brick. ‘There’s a five-a-side pitch out the back,’ John Halloran said to Alexander, looking avariciously at the long clapboard hut that stood at the end of the driveway. ‘They play football after every session,’ he went on. ‘Sometimes they do a manhunt round the streets. You get a five-minute start and you have to make chalk marks on the walls as you go, and the rest of them come after you.’

‘It looks like an army camp,’ Alexander observed. The severed neck of a milk bottle, like a crown of jagged glass, lay on the kerbstone. This detail Alexander would always remember, and that John kicked it away to make him listen.

‘It’s not like the army at all. You’re not going to end up dead, for one thing, and you don’t have to sign up if you don’t want to. Come on, Al. Don’t be wet. If we don’t like it we won’t join.’

‘We don’t have to join right away?’

‘Definitely don’t. You can muck around for months before making your mind up. That’s what Pete did.’

‘You sure?’ asked Alexander, and he took a few steps up the drive, as if a nearer view of the building might dissipate his doubts. The hut occupied its quiet yard like a boat in a backwater dock. There was something appealing about its solitariness, and about the fleur-de-lys badge that gleamed on the door like an occult symbol.

‘It’ll be a giggle,’ John urged. ‘Give it a go, Al.’

So that evening they were collected from John Halloran’s house by Peter Nichols, who was standing stiffly on the path when they opened the door, his arms straight against his sides. ‘At ease,’ John shouted, but their classmate’s punctilious expression did not change.

Placing first one foot and then the other on the doorstep, Peter Nichols corrected the garters of his thick grey socks, and then he tapped the peak of his cap, to make the point that his uniform was the token of his seniority. ‘You’d better button your shirt up,’ he told John.

‘You’re kidding,’ John replied.

‘No,’ said Peter Nichols.

‘But it’s not school.’

‘It’s not school, but if you’re not smart you won’t go far,’ Peter Nichols told them. ‘Better get used to it now,’ he said, and he escorted them to the scout hut at a quick march, barely speaking to them.

When they entered the hut Peter Nichols crossed the floor to talk to a group of uniformed boys at the back of the room. Some of the boys Alexander recognised from school, but none of them took any notice of him or John. All were behaving like Peter Nichols, as if to make it clear that this place was governed by rules that superseded mere friendship. One boy even shook hands with Peter and folded his arms across his chest to listen to him, like a middle-aged man at a business meeting.

‘Grim,’ John commented. ‘This is very grim. Not what I expected, I’ll admit.’ His doleful gaze moved down the rows of pennants and flags that were pinned to the rafters. At the end of the hall, under a large photograph of the king, one of the senior scouts was energetically buffing his shoes with a duster. ‘We’ve come to a Nuremberg rally, mate,’ said John.

The scout master, Mr Gardiner, introduced himself to them. His shorts were as wide as a skirt and his whiskerless white skin was as delicate as Mrs Beckwith’s. ‘Peter told me about you,’ he said, looking at them as though they were items in an auction room. ‘So what has kindled your interest in scouting?’ he asked, with a whimsical lilt to his voice.

‘All the things that Peter has told us, sir,’ John replied. ‘Making ourselves better members of society, helping each other, that kind of thing.’

Mr Gardiner made a concurring squint. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s what it’s about. And you think it’s the kind of thing for you, do you?’

‘We think so, sir,’ said John.

‘Jolly good. Jolly good,’ said Mr Gardiner, and he checked the time on his wristwatch. ‘You two can join Peewit patrol for now. Peter will show you what to do.’

‘Peewit patrol, eh?’ John remarked to Peter Nichols once Mr Gardiner had left them.

‘Yes. That’s my patrol,’ Peter Nichols replied.

‘That’s nice.’

‘What’s nice?’

‘Peewit patrol.’

‘What do you mean, it’s nice?’

‘It’s a nice name.’

‘It’s not meant to be nice,’ said Peter Nichols primly.

‘No, but it’s nice anyway. Nice sound to it. Peter’s Peewit patrol.’ John scowled at the floorboards and then at Alexander. ‘But what’s a peewit when it’s at home?’

‘Search me,’ said Alexander.

‘Another name for the lapwing,’ Peter Nichols interrupted.

‘Lapwing?’

‘A type of bird, obviously. Now get in line. Stand like me,’ he told them, sliding his left foot away from his right and stiffening his shoulders.

Mr Gardiner positioned himself proudly in front of the king and locked his hands in the small of his back. A thin, tall boy with a very narrow head took his place beside Mr Gardiner; with a hand placed over his heart he recited an oath, accompanied by a mumbling from the two parallel ranks of scouts.

‘Jesus,’ John groaned.

‘It’s not going well,’ Alexander agreed, though he was intrigued and amused by the proceedings. The appearance of the skinny scout, like a small boy made big by stretching, seemed to Alexander wholly appropriate to this comical ritual.

‘Sorry, Al,’ John murmured.

‘Quiet!’ ordered Mr Gardiner, so ferociously that both John and Alexander blushed. The skinny scout was saluting the picture of the king with a rake-like hand.

‘When’s the football, Pete?’ John enquired as the two ranks broke up, but Peter Nichols, drawing back the bolt on a black tin chest, ignored him.

‘A few basics,’ said Peter Nichols. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, letting a bolt of cloth drop open from his outstretched hands.

‘The Union Jack,’ Alexander replied.

‘Wrong. It’s the Union Flag. The Union Jack is flown from a ship. On land it’s the Union Flag.’

‘What’s the difference?’ asked John.

‘I told you the difference. The Union Jack is flown from a ship. On land it’s the Union Flag.’

‘But it’s the same flag?’

‘Yes. But it’s wrong to call this the Union Jack, and there’s a right and a wrong way to fly it.’ Peter Nichols demonstrated the right way, and then they studied a chart of national flags and signalling flags, and then the skinny scout stood by the door to send semaphore messages to Mr Gardiner, who flapped his two small flags in reply, from in front of the king.

‘SOS!’ Mr Gardiner cried, and his rigid arms flew up and down in a sequence of electrocuted spasms. ‘Once again!’ cried Mr Gardiner, and the flags went up and down with a cracking sound.

‘Why do they need the flags when they can holler at each other?’ John asked Peter Nichols.

‘That wouldn’t do any good, would it?’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s obvious.’

‘Not to me.’

‘You couldn’t be heard in a storm, could you? It’s obvious,’ said Peter Nichols, with a contemptuous look. ‘Use your head.’

‘Ah,’ said John, relieved to have at last been given access to understanding. ‘This’ll be handy, I’m sure. One day. Lost in a storm on the Thames, miles from dry land.’

‘If you’re going to be flippant, Halloran,’ said Peter Nichols angrily, ‘there’s little point in your being here.’

‘Quite true, mein kapitan,’ John replied, but he and Alexander did return the following week and for several weeks after that. Under the tutelage of Peter Nichols they learned how to make a fire without matches, clean their teeth without a toothbrush, identify badger tracks and the tracks of foxes, otters, goats and sheep. They learned never to shelter under an oak tree in a thunderstorm, because the rainwater coursing through the grooved bark would conduct the lethal lightning bolt. They were required to memorise nonsense syllables that were said to represent the songs of birds they would never find in London. Doggedly Peter Nichols tied and untied knots of pointless complexity, until Alexander could form them unaided.

By then it required effort for John Halloran to dissemble his discontent. ‘Only deer we’re going to see are in the zoo,’ he grumbled, as Peter Nichols, his hand obscuring the captions, held up a page of hoofprints. ‘What about doing makes of cars instead?’ he suggested, when presented with the silhouettes of various wings. ‘Any chance of football, Pete?’ he would ask at some point in every evening, and ‘Not until you’ve got this right,’ became Peter Nichols’ customary reply. But only once did they go out to the yard for a game, and that was for no more than ten minutes, and then one evening Alexander called at John Halloran’s house and was told that he would have to go on his own.

‘Kicked out before I could walk out,’ John explained. ‘Himmler put in a call to the ma. It’ll be your turn next if you don’t put your name on the dotted line. Why don’t you tell them to stuff it?’

‘I think I will,’ said Alexander. ‘Soon.’

‘It’s so boring,’ said John. ‘Making a bivouac out of lettuce leaves and all that.’

Alexander did soon leave, but not because he was bored by the peculiar skills he was being taught. He was never bored, though he could rarely think of any use for what he was learning. He enjoyed making cross-sections from contoured maps of London, plotting the altitudes on a graph and bringing out the shape of the land beneath the houses and roads of his neighbourhood. There was pleasure in becoming able to shorten a length of rope with a sheepshank without looking at what his hands were doing, and to read the coming weather from the clouds. Had it not been for Mr Gardiner, he would have stayed longer. ‘You have an enthusiasm,’ said Mr Gardiner, but in a way that made enthusiasm sound like something Alexander did not want to have. The blue skin under his eyes, Alexander noticed, was like the skin that covered the bulging eyes of the dead fledgling he had found one evening below the gutter of the scouts’ hall. Mr Gardiner sat so close that his feet jammed against Alexander’s underneath the bench. ‘Johnny was a disruptive influence. You have the makings of a good scout,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep my eye on you,’ Mr Gardiner smiled, and an odour of sour milk escaped from his mouth. It was that evening, in the week that the last London tram broke down on its final journey to New Cross, that Alexander told his parents he did not want to go back.

‘Why on earth not?’ asked his father, folding the map that had been spread open on his lap.

‘It’s dull,’ said Alexander.

‘Dull,’ echoed his father dully.

‘Really dull.’

‘It’ll do you good if you stick at it.’

‘But it’s so boring.’

‘Any training’s boring sometimes.’

‘This isn’t training for anything, and it’s boring all the time.’

‘So it wasn’t boring when John Halloran was with you, but now it’s boring all the time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sounds to me as if you weren’t there for the right reason in the first place.’

‘And we’ll have to get him the uniform soon, if he keeps going,’ said Alexander’s mother. ‘The uniform’s expensive, Graham.’

‘We’ve discovered that today, have we?’ his father rejoined.

‘No. Alexander has discovered that it’s not for him. That’s what we’ve discovered.’

‘There would seem to be little purpose in continuing this discussion,’ said his father, raising the map. He was still reading it, as if it were a device to preserve his annoyance, when Alexander came downstairs to say goodnight.

‘What’s the map for, Mum?’ Alexander asked.

‘A graphic representation of the land, for the purposes of comprehension and navigation,’ replied his father. His left hand let go of the map, stirred the spoon in his mug of cocoa, and took hold of the map again.

‘Graham,’ said his mother. She closed the fashion magazine in her lap and stared at the map, waiting for it to be lowered. ‘Graham,’ she said again, and his father made busy humming noises. His mother made a loudhailer from the magazine and directed it at Alexander. ‘He’s planning our holiday,’ she whispered loudly. ‘A proper holiday.’ ‘Possibly,’ responded his father.

‘Two whole weeks,’ said his mother, making delighted eyes.

‘Possibly. If the piggy bank has put on enough weight.’

‘In sunny Cornwall.’

‘Don’t count your chickens.’

‘Next month.’ ‘Possibly,’ his father repeated, but there was now a sardonic inflection to his gruffness.

‘Graham,’ said his mother. ‘Come on, Graham. Don’t be a grump.’

‘A grump?’ said his father, feigning bafflement. ‘A grump? Come,’ he called, and when Alexander came around to the side of his chair his father reached out to fold down the collars of his dressing gown and pyjamas, feigning displeasure at Alexander’s disarray. ‘X marks the spot,’ he said, scribbling with the mouthpiece of his pipe on a long stroke of yellow ink. ‘Praa,’ he read. ‘Possibly Praa.’

Alexander looked at the bite-shaped bays and the roads that ended short of the coast, like wires that had been cut. ‘Next month?’ he asked his father.

‘I should think so,’ his father said. ‘Let’s see.’

Every night until the day they left Alexander lay in bed at night, recalling the enormous dunes that Jimmy Murrell had seen, and the glowing sea, and repeating the strange bleat of a word, ‘Praa, Praa.’ He tacked the map to the back of his door, and drew a bull’s eye around the beach. He would always remember staring at the pencilled ring, as if into the entrance to a tunnel that led to a place that was unlike any he had seen before, and he would remember standing at the window of the train carriage and asking his father to name a distant town that came into view as the trees fell away from the railway line, and being pleased that his father could not name it, because this meant they had reached a region that was mysterious to all of them. He would remember the trees becoming stunted and the fields bigger, and his expectation that every vague, flat vista would come into focus as the sea, and his disappointment when one far-off field did indeed become the ocean, making its appearance as though by subterfuge. He would remember that the windows of the bus they boarded in Penzance were greasy with sea-spray, and that when his father asked for three tickets to Germoe, the conductor said something that his father could not understand, which made his mother hold Alexander so tightly he could feel her ribs vibrating with pent-up laughter. And he would remember the bus doors smacking open, and there were the houses of Germoe, all low and white, as if salt had caked every one of them.

In Mrs Pardoe’s dining room they ate mackerel that Mrs Pardoe’s son had caught, and then they walked down to the beach in the last minutes of dusk. They passed a castle and a lorry carrying steel churns as big as pillar boxes. Flowers of a sort that Alexander had never seen before overflowed from a barrel. The vinegary smell of the beach grew stronger, and the road began to go under a skim of sand that had cigarette butts and lollipop sticks in it. Taking one hand each, his parents swung him over a long bolster of sand and he sprinted away, down to the water. Though the dunes were smaller than he had imagined they would be, he was thrilled by what he saw. This was not a sea like the sea near London: here was the ocean, a wilderness of immeasurable dark water. Looking towards the black horizon, he imagined that the night was not falling but was rising from the sea. Low in the sky a single yellow star could be seen, above a boat that seemed to dissolve into the clouds as he watched. All he could hear was the ceaseless gasping of the surf, and when he breathed deeply the air from the sea made a column he could feel in his throat. In his exhilaration he gathered a handful of soft dry sand and threw it onto the breeze.

His mother’s hand, cooler than the air, made a band around his brow. ‘We’ve a surprise, Alexander,’ she said, and she turned him to face her.

‘Yes, we’re going straight back to London,’ said his father with a straight face, buttoning his jacket.

‘Mr and Mrs Beckwith are here, and Megan as well,’ his mother told him. ‘Two weeks they’ll be here, same as us.’

A man and a woman were coming onto the beach; Alexander watched them approach until it was clear that they were not the Beckwiths. ‘They’re here already?’ he asked his mother warily.

‘Yes. They arrived yesterday.’

‘We thought you might be pleased,’ said his father in such a tone as to make it seem that the Beckwiths’ presence was a gift that it was in his power to revoke.

‘No, I am, I am,’ said Alexander. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

His mother pointed up the hill. ‘Over there somewhere.’

‘Hendra,’ confirmed his father. ‘A place called Hendra.’

The white walls had turned the colour of mackerel in the thickening darkness, and here and there a lighted window shone, tantalizing as the windows of an Advent calendar. A car’s headlights tilted down from the top of the hill and brushed along the houses, as if inviting Alexander to guess which one was home to the Beckwiths.

‘We’ll see them tomorrow,’ said his mother. ‘Next thing you know we’ll all be together.’

In the back bedroom of Mrs Pardoe’s house Alexander slept with his window open, listening to the sea at its nocturnal work, imagining that Megan was listening to it too, in her room somewhere up the hill, in a village with a name like a girl’s name. And in the morning, after Mrs Pardoe had knocked on the door to rouse him, he sat on his bed for a few minutes, looking over the rooftops towards Hendra and listening for the sea through the racket of the gulls and the clink of the cutlery in the dining room. His mother opened the door, and a smell of smoked fish gusted into the room. ‘Let’s be having you,’ she said. ‘We haven’t come all this way for you to hibernate.’ Alexander listened for the sea and did not hear it, but there were grains of sand on the pillow case, and these were sign enough that a day unlike any other had begun.

After breakfast they walked in procession down to the beach, fifty paces behind a woman with a blue towel held under her arm like a pet dog. His mother bought some food and his father bought a newspaper in a shop that sold sandals and rubber balls as well as bread and sweets and cigarettes. At a chart of the tides his father stopped again, as if he had forgotten that the Beckwiths were waiting. ‘Should be fine today,’ he announced. A luring breeze swirled over Alexander’s skin. At the end of the road the surf was rushing up as though to meet them, then scampering away.

Cubicles of striped canvas had been raised on the beach. Alexander and his parents walked past them all, searching for the Beckwiths. They walked towards the cliffs on their right, checking every hunched and supine figure. A woman in a turquoise swimsuit looked like Mrs Beckwith from afar, but was not Mrs Beckwith. They turned round and retraced the footsteps they had left. As they reached the end of their trail Alexander looked up at the dune and saw that a woman wearing a dark blue dress and dark glasses was waving as if wiping an invisible window.

Mr Beckwith stood up on the crest of the dune and came down the slope to shake hands with them all, including Alexander. ‘Graham,’ said Mrs Beckwith to his father, shaking his hand. ‘Irene,’ she said to his mother, and kissed her once on each cheek. To Alexander she said nothing, but looked at him with her hands on her hips as if debating with herself what was to be done with him. At last she smiled concedingly: ‘Megan’s with the other loonies,’ she said.

‘There,’ explained Mr Beckwith, raising a heavy arm to point across the beach. ‘The woman in the red cap’s keeping an eye on her.’

Without changing into his swimming trunks Alexander leapt down the dune and ran out to the sea. The woman in the red cap was standing in hip-high water, watching a girl who was dog-paddling along with her head held up and her eyes wide open, as if peeping over a tiny wall. Beyond her was Megan, her brick-coloured hair making snakes on the surface of the sea. She stood up and ducked her head into a breaking wave.

Alexander cupped his hands and shouted to her. She looked the wrong way, then noticed him. Her mouth spat out a gobbet of seawater and made a shape that might have been the shape of his name. With the flats of her hands she beat on her belly. ‘Eck?’ she yelled, and Alexander realised then that his parents and the Beckwiths had plotted together to bring about this moment for himself and Megan.

‘Didn’t you know?’ he called, as Megan strode towards him, raising frills of water from her foam-white legs.

‘Top of the class, Eck.’ Her laugh became a cough as she stumbled out of the shallow water. ‘No, of course I didn’t know. Did you?’

‘Not till last night,’ Alexander replied.

‘You’re staying here?’ she asked. He told her about Mrs Pardoe’s, and she trampled the soggy sand while he was speaking. ‘This is terrific, Eck,’ she said, poking him in the midriff with a forefinger.

‘You getting out now?’ asked Alexander. ‘It’s really warm up on the dunes.’ Megan looked landward and then seaward. Her eyes were bloodshot and a violet line was spreading from the centre of her upper lip. ‘Come on,’ Alexander urged, touching her stippled forearm. ‘You’re freezing.’

‘I’ve only been in a couple of minutes, Eck. Why don’t you get changed and come in?’ she cajoled. ‘Go on. Go and get changed.’

Alexander removed his shoes and socks and extended a foot into the rinse of an expiring wave. ‘You’ve got to get right in,’ said Megan, walking backwards into the water, ‘otherwise it’s cold. Once it’s over your chest you start to warm up. Believe me,’ she said, kicking with her heels. ‘A city boy,’ she commented to the woman in the red cap, and she sprawled into the surf and swam away. Alexander turned to wave at the dune, though now there were so many people on it that he could not be certain where his parents and the Beckwiths were.

Every day they all shared a picnic in a trough of sand on the grassy dune. Alexander and Megan would watch for the signal from Mrs Beckwith’s polka-dot scarf, and their return was in turn a signal to Mr Beckwith, who would come down from the crest of the dune where he sat like a sentinel through most of the morning, his face directed at the horizon.

On the third afternoon, once the sandwiches were finished, Mr Beckwith stood up, shook the sand and crumbs from the lap of his trousers, and then, instead of climbing back up to his lookout, placed a hand on Alexander’s shoulderblades and said to him: ‘I’ll show you something, young Alexander.’

At the back of the dune Mr Beckwith stopped, his feet bracketing a tussock of pink flowers. ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked.

‘I don’t,’ replied Alexander, promptly, as Mr Beckwith required.

‘It’s thrift,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘It’s called thrift because its leaves retain its water thriftily. Do you recognise it? You’ve seen it before.’ Mr Beckwith looked at Alexander with an expression that was as stern as the one with which he faced the sea, but his voice was soft and coaxing.

‘Have I?’

‘Yes, you have,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘You’ve seen it on the back of a threepenny bit,’ he said, displaying a coin on the tip of a middle finger. ‘You see: thrift on a coin. It makes sense. It’s also known as sea-pink or ladies’ cushions, and that makes sense as well.’ Turning slowly, he looked around the dune. ‘And that,’ he said, not indicating what he meant, ‘is lady’s bedstraw.’ Alexander followed him to a spume of tiny yellow flowers. ‘Put your nose on that,’ Mr Beckwith told him. ‘What does it smell of?’

‘Honey,’ replied Alexander.

‘Used to be put in mattresses to make them smell nice. And that over there, that’s henbane by the look of it,’ he said, walking over to a stunted bush on which grew clusters of watery yellow flowers. ‘Henbane all right. Take a look, but don’t touch it.’

Alexander crouched by Mr Beckwith’s feet. Thin purple lines made webs on the petals and the leaves were hairy as caterpillars.

‘A type of nightshade this is. Can make you very ill indeed. Worse than ill, in fact. Dr Crippen – you’ve heard of Dr Crippen?’ Alexander shook his head. ‘No matter. A nasty piece of work was Dr Crippen. Poisoned his wife he did, and this is what he poisoned her with.’ The face of Dr Crippen appeared to Alexander as a version of Mr Gardiner’s, sallow as henbane flowers, with hard little veins under his eyes.

From then on, Alexander spent part of every afternoon with Mr Beckwith. When the picnic was over, and the others spread out the towels to sunbathe or went down the slope to look for shells, Mr Beckwith would unhurriedly survey the sky and the sea and the beach, and quietly propose: ‘Shall we take a stroll?’ Over the dune and onto the roads they would walk, not strolling but striding, as if Mr Beckwith were taking him to an important appointment. From village to village they strode along the empty lanes, beyond the reach of the sea’s rustle, and sometimes the only sound was the ripping of the soles of their sandals on the hot tarmac. Looking to right and left in regular alternation, as if to ensure that nothing could happen on the other side of the hedgerows without his noticing it, Mr Beckwith would suddenly remark ‘Look at this,’ and drop a hand onto Alexander’s shoulder to steer him towards a verge. ‘Look,’ he would say, kneeling on the turf to hold aside a stand of grass, revealing a flower with petals like shavings of frozen cream, or moths’ wings, or tiny bits of sky-blue silk.

As if they were the words of a vow between himself and Mr Beckwith, Alexander would never forget the names of the villages and hamlets through which he walked with him: through Rinsey Croft and Colvorry and Trewithick they went, through Pentreath, through Kenneggy and on to the path above Kenneggy Sands, through Penhale Jakes and Trevena and then up the hill at Tresoweshill, and through Hendra, past the wooden bungalow in which the Beckwiths were staying, with its porch of white-painted wood and the whitewashed stones beside the path to the door. And after more than forty years he would still be able to recall every plant that Mr Beckwith named for him during the walk of one particular afternoon. ‘Common mallow,’ he said, crouching at the roadside to cradle in his palm one of the dark pink flowers that hid behind the dust-covered leaves. ‘Marsh-mallows are related to these. You make the sweets from its roots.’ The road curved in the shadow of a slender elm, and where the road straightened a company of tall yellow flowers stood on the verge. ‘Now this is a kind of St John’s-wort,’ Mr Beckwith explained. ‘If you snap the stem a juice comes out that’s red as blood.’ He put a finger on the translucent speckles of a leaf. ‘Because of that, and because these look like holes, people used to think it was a cure for wounds. But they’re not holes. They’re like sweat glands. Smell,’ said Mr Beckwith, and Alexander squatted next to the flowers to inhale a smell of dog fur. On a wall near the sign for Germoe they saw navelwort. ‘Known as coolers,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘Used to be put on burns, to cool them.’ He took Alexander’s hand and turned it over to press the dimpled leaves to Alexander’s skin. On the church at Germoe there was saffron-coloured lichen and red valerian. ‘Called kiss-me-quick, or drunkards,’ said Mr Beckwith, smiling as a breeze made the deep red flowers bob drunkenly for them.

A tractor was snarling up the hill, out of sight, when they sat down on a tussock to look at a pat of bird’s-foot trefoil, a flower as gorgeous as yolks. ‘Known as eggs and bacon, ham and eggs, butter and eggs, hen and chickens,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘Sometimes called Dutchman’s clogs,’ he added. He hooked a little finger under a flower and made it move, as if tickling it.

‘Day,’ said the driver of the tractor, eyeing them dourly.

‘Good afternoon,’ replied Mr Beckwith to the driver’s back. ‘Cheerful soul,’ he commented to Alexander, and he released the tiny flowers. ‘The others will wonder what’s become of us,’ he said wearily. ‘We should get going. Lead the way.’

On the way back Mr Beckwith walked a pace behind Alexander, as he used to do with Megan, and did not speak until they came to the top of the cliff, where they sat together cross-legged on the closely cropped grass, overlooking the beach. A black and white collie coursed across the sand; a man in voluminous swimming trunks swung a bat, and the impact of the ball sounded faintly at the cliff-top, like the click of a pen-cap. A trawler on the horizon was overtaken by the sky’s solitary bulbous cloud. ‘There’s our girl,’ said Mr Beckwith, raising an arm. ‘Off you go,’ he said, as though he thought Alexander had been waiting for permission to leave him.

Megan was walking with stiff, long strides and her head down, seeming to count her steps, and then she stopped and looked back towards the cliff, as if aware that he was following her. Putting her hand out like a relay runner receiving the baton, she continued her walk, smacking her feet onto the sand. She let him take her hand, but there was no pressure to her touch. It was as if her hand were something she was allowing him to carry.

‘You must have gone miles,’ she said.

‘We did.’

‘I’m going to the rock pools,’ Megan told him. ‘Mum’s asleep but your dad said it was all right.’

The tide was low and the sand they were treading was rippled like the soles of feet that have been in a bath too long. Megan released his hand and bent down to uproot an open razor clam. She scooped the runny sand from the shell into her palm and held it chest-high between them. ‘It makes you feel frightened when you think about what this is, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘Look at those cliffs. All this sand has come from them, and one day they’ll be nothing but sand. Isn’t that frightening?’ Alexander regarded the pat of damp grains. ‘Like looking at the stars,’ said Megan. ‘You must do that sometimes?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what does it make you think? Doesn’t it make you frightened? You must think something.’

‘Makes me wish there were no clouds in the way.’

‘That isn’t a proper thought, Eck,’ said Megan sharply, and she shook the sand from her hand. ‘Some of them are millions and millions and millions of miles away. So many millions that what you’re looking at isn’t there any longer. The light is like a parcel sent by somebody who’s died before it reaches you. Isn’t that horrible?’ She watched Alexander as he inspected the sky. ‘The stars are there now, but we can’t see them because the sun’s out. Or did you think they all went off somewhere for the day?’

‘Of course not.’

‘But doesn’t it make you feel giddy?’

‘Doesn’t what?’

‘That a long time ago all this wasn’t here, and a long time from now it won’t be here any more.’

‘No,’ said Alexander. ‘It’s here now. We’re here now. I don’t think anything about the beach. It just is.’

‘Don’t be daft, Eck. Nothing just is.’

‘Well, you just are. I just am.’

‘No you’re not. You’re the son of your parents. You’re part of them.’

‘No I’m not.’

‘You are, Eck. Where do you think you came from?’

‘I know where I came from. I’m not thick.’

‘Well then. You look like your mum. Exactly like her. It’s not a coincidence. A part of you is her.’

‘No,’ protested Alexander. ‘All of me is me.’

‘Same with your dad,’ continued Megan.

‘I’m nothing like him.’

‘Your dad’s a bit serious and a bit scatty.’

‘He’s not. He’s not at all scatty.’

‘Yes, he is. He’s always larking about.’

‘I don’t lark about,’ Alexander complained.

‘Yes you do. You do silly voices.’

‘No I don’t.’

‘Eck, you do,’ said Megan emphatically. ‘You do other people’s voices.’

‘But that’s not silly voices.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘What’s the point of this?’ he asked. ‘Why do you want to argue?’

‘I don’t, Eck. But you’re so sweet, I can’t help it,’ Megan told him, and she took his hand as they picked a route through the fallen stones.

They were on their own below Hoe Point, where Megan found a pool that was as smooth and long as a bathtub, with a fringe of spinach-coloured seaweed at one end, where she rested her head as she lay down. Water from the breaking waves frisked along the channels of the rocks and leaped into the pool. The water lapped at Megan’s goosefleshed thighs. Alexander would always remember this, and her hair twisted into unravelled plaits by the saltwater, and the freckles of dried salt that were mixed with the freckles of her cheeks.

Alexander watched the gulls wheeling out from the cliff where he had sat with Mr Beckwith. The birds made no noise now, and evening was beginning. The white flecks on the sea were like flowers that nobody would ever be able to pick.

‘You haven’t blinked for a minute,’ said Megan. ‘What are you thinking about?’

‘Not again,’ he moaned. ‘I’m just looking, Meg.’

‘Looking without thinking anything. I don’t believe you. It’s not possible.’

‘There’s a lot to look at.’

She looked at him as if pretending to be baffled. ‘Faraway Eck,’ she said, and she put her arms around his shoulders as a sister might have done.

‘Odd Eck,’ he responded. Creamy water hurried up through the gullies and touched his toes.

And he would remember the pyramid of towels packed onto a saddle of sand between two clumps of grass, and his father handing Mr Beckwith his Brownie camera. His father and mother and Mrs Beckwith stood at the back, their arms folded as if they were footballers in a team photograph. Alexander knelt in the sand by a mat of black seaweed that was baked as stiff as wicker, and Megan looped her arm through his. He looked back to see his mother picking a windblown strand of hair from her face. ‘Come on, Harry,’ said Mrs Beckwith. ‘The tide’ll wash us away before you press that blasted shutter.’ Mr Beckwith’s smile appeared at the side of the camera. Drifts of dry sand were moving down to the sea, flexing like snakes in their sidelong flight. A dog came running through the marram grass and Alexander wanted someone to ask him if he was happy because he wanted an excuse to say it, because he had realised that he had never been happier than he was at that moment, looking over Mr Beckwith’s shoulder and seeing the colour that the setting sun was painting on the rocks of Rinsey Head and the engine house of the Wheal Prosper mine.

10. Monty

Mr Owen had been at the school for no more than a month when, one morning after assembly, he stopped Alexander in the corridor, outside Mr Darrow’s room, and said to him in an aggrieved tone of voice: ‘Montgomery is an hero, is he not?’

‘Sir,’ Alexander agreed, after a hesitation, having heard ‘Anne Eero’.

‘Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, commander of the Eighth Army and victor of El Alamein, is an hero.’ Mr Owen shifted his feet as if adjusting his balance on a moving deck, and his plimsolls squealed on the stone floor. ‘He is a man who has achieved things. Stupendous things. He is a leader of men,’ said Mr Owen.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘A leader of men you are not.’

‘No, sir,’ Alexander replied, puzzled as to what he might have done to offend Mr Owen. His classmates were passing behind Mr Owen, filing in for the English lesson. John Halloran glanced at Alexander and grimaced in sympathy.

‘So?’ demanded Mr Owen. He wiped a hand over the crown of his head, as if to quell his exasperation.

‘Sir?’

‘What is the connection, MacIndoe? Where is the relevance?’

Still having no notion what Mr Owen was talking about, Alexander assumed a posture of contrition, fixing his gaze on the books he was holding to his waist.

‘Simple question, lad. It’s not an algebra problem. All I want to know is what’s the connection?’

At the window of Mr Darrow’s room appeared a sheet of paper on which the word ‘MAD’ was crayoned in capital letters. Lionel Griffiths’ head rose into view beside it, with a finger tapping at his temple. All of a sudden Alexander understood. ‘Not that Monty, sir,’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon?’ queried Mr Owen, his lip crumpling into a sneer.

‘It’s not that Monty, sir.’

‘What do you mean, MacIndoe? “Not that Monty”? There is only one Monty.’

‘No, sir, there’s another one. It’s the other one, sir. Montgomery Clift.’

‘Montgomery Clift?’ Mr Owen repeated in an outraged shriek.

‘The actor, sir. The Search. Red River. A Place in the Sun.’

‘Yes, yes. I am not an ignoramus, MacIndoe.’ Momentarily deflated, Mr Owen looked without interest at Alexander’s books, and then he looked Alexander in the eye and instantly rediscovered his indignation. ‘Montgomery Clift? The gooey American?’

‘Sir.’

‘That long lump of unbaked dough?’

‘Yes, sir. They think I look like him. Some of them do.’

‘Is that so?’ Mr Owen rejoined, and the delayed repercussions of a thought spread across his features, like a gust of wind rippling the grass on a hill. The sneer subsided, to be succeeded by a look of placid distaste. ‘Nothing like him, if you ask me,’ he said.

‘I don’t see it either, sir,’ Alexander replied.

‘Whatever could they be thinking of, eh?’ Mr Owen rubbed the toe of one plimsoll with the toe of the other, then looked at Alexander’s face as if it were a tepidly amusing drawing that a child had done. ‘Off you go, MacIndoe.’

The gymnasium was beyond a pair of storage rooms and a padlocked classroom that he was never to see open, at the end of a corridor that smelled of stale canvas and rubber and skin and coconut matting. The way in was through the changing rooms, where in the morning the dairy-white tiles gleamed in the light that came in through the gymnasium door. From the playground the pointed high windows of the gymnasium and the terracotta plaques on the wall gave it the look of a chapel, and there was something church-like in its appearance in the morning, before it had been used. Some mornings Alexander would arrive at school early and enter the corridor by the door that led to the playground, and if nobody was around he would creep between the steel mesh clothes-racks, and go into the quiet, high-ceilinged hall. The painted white lines on the parquet he could see as the patterns on the floor of an aisle, and he could see the vaulting horse, standing against the end wall behind a painted semicircle, as an altar of sorts, capped with its pad of blood-red leather. Between the windows on both sides the wall-bars were arrayed like tiers of memorials. Looped over the bars, the ropes made curves like stone vaulting, rising to the rings by which they were attached to the rafters. Until five minutes before the bell was due to ring he would sit under a window, listening to the voices growing louder outside, fortifying himself with the emptiness of the gymnasium before crossing the playground to his classroom.

Mr Owen’s lessons always began the same way. They would await his arrival in a line across the centre of the gymnasium, facing the changing-room door, through which the squeak of Mr Owen’s plimsolls would be heard and then, a few seconds before he appeared, his command: ‘To attention!’ Swivelling on his heels, he closed the door, leaving his hand on the knob for a moment, an action that signified that he was not merely shutting a door but imprisoning them for his thirty minutes. ‘All here?’ he would ask, before squeaking towards them, reciting a selection from his roster of nicknames. ‘Hercules Halloran here; Goliath Griffiths here; Tiny Tim Pottinger here,’ he would call out, while Alexander concentrated on the great volume of air above their heads. ‘The Mighty Pickering here; Girly MacIndoe here; Fat Boy Radford here,’ Mr Owen would call out, smiling to himself.

‘One day, one day,’ Mick Radford once muttered as he retrieved a medicine ball that Mr Owen had thrown at him, and the phrase became the class’s refrain. ‘One day, one day,’ repeated John Halloran, peeling a handkerchief from his bleeding shin. ‘One day, one day,’ promised Timothy Pottinger, running cold water over a rope burn, before writing ‘One’ on the underside of the tongue of his left plimsoll, and ‘Day’ on the tongue of the right.

That day arrived at the end of an unseasonably cold week, near the end of term. It was a dark morning, as Alexander would remember, and it became darker and colder during the walk to school. Hail started to fall during assembly, and pools of melting ice were forming in the playground as they crossed to the gymnasium.

Alexander took his place in the line, underneath the basketball hoop. Locking and unlocking his fingers as Mr Owen would do when watching them exercise, he leaned forward to look at John Halloran. He licked his palm and swiped it across his hair from brow to nape, and blinked as if unable to credit the evidence of his eyes. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ he said. ‘What an abomination. Yes. You. An Johnny Weissmuller you are not, Halloran.’ He put his hands behind his back and flexed his knees, like Mr Owen did, and mimicked Mr Owen’s dry, mirthless laugh: ‘uck, uck, uck’. Roy Pickering bit his lip to prevent a smile. ‘I don’t know what you find so funny, Pickering. You are an fairy, are you not?’ Roy Pickering’s lip was turning white under the pressure of his teeth, and it was then that Alexander saw that Mr Owen had come soundlessly into the gymnasium, and was closing the door.

‘You’re dead, Monty,’ whispered Mick Radford. ‘I’ll bring the wreath.’

But Mr Owen did not appear to have heard Alexander. ‘Come on. Jump to it! In line!’ he ordered, looking at nobody in particular. ‘Right then, girls,’ he shouted in his usual exultant voice. ‘Ten sit-ups, ten squats, ten press-ups. Spread out. Now. Get to it.’ As he did every day, he wandered among them, ordering one to stand and explain the state of his singlet, another to account for the hole in his shoes. ‘Sloppy, Pickering, sloppy. Parents got no pride?’ Grinding the keys in the pocket of his tracksuit, he stood over David Kingsley. ‘Oh come on, Kingsley. This is pathetic. My grandmother could do better.’ He spun round to shout at Roy Pickering: ‘You seem to think you could do better, Pickering. Ten extra press-ups. Yes. You. Now. Get to it.’

Mr Owen wiped his hair; the flesh above his mouth flinched as if he had toothache. ‘Right, then,’ he said, in the doom-laden tone that always signified the same thing. ‘Your favourite game. Captains Allerton and Fletcher. Come here.’ Neil Allerton swaggered to his place on Mr Owen’s right hand, rotating his arms as if swinging Indian clubs; Dennis Fletcher stood on his left, regarding his classmates with a compromised look. ‘Allerton first,’ said Mr Owen, and so Allerton and Fletcher took turns to choose the members of their teams. Only Lionel Griffiths and John Halloran were left after Alexander had been selected for Allerton’s squad.

Mr Owen had left the gymnasium while the captains made their choices, and now he returned, cajoling a football along the floor with dainty taps of his instep. He inspected the teams. ‘No, no,’ he decided. ‘Too many weeds in this brigade. MacIndoe, go to Fletcher. You too, Malinowski. I’ll join Allerton’s mob. Form up.’

They adopted their skittle formations at opposite ends of the hall. Mr Owen nudged the ball towards Fletcher’s team, then pushed his way into the midst of Allerton’s. ‘Fletcher, your man,’ said Mr Owen.

Paul Malinowski, from his place at the point of the triangle, chipped the ball softly into the midst of the opposition. The boy whom the ball had first struck stepped out of the formation, taking care that his gratitude was not apparent. ‘Ten squats, ten press-ups, ten sit-ups,’ Mr Owen ordered. The boy withdrew to the sector of the gymnasium where the eliminated players did their penance, while Malinowski went back to his position.

Allerton’s front player kicked the ball hard and low into Fletcher’s formation, dislodging Malinowski. A member of Fletcher’s front line retaliated with a powerful strike, and thus the game proceeded until Alexander, the last survivor of his row, faced Mr Owen. Alexander would remember the way Mr Owen put the ball softly on the circle of blue paint in the middle of the floor, then turned it two or three times, as if locking a manhole cover. He would remember seeing the wet leaves swabbing the glass of the windows to Mr Owen’s left, and noticing for the first time the pelt of dust on top of the rafter closest to the door, while in the periphery of his vision Mr Owen took a pace backwards. Then he realised that Mr Owen was taking more than a single pace. He saw Mr Owen look at the ball, at him, at the ball, again at him, and dash forward, his face still up.

There was no pain to the blow immediately, just a sound like the sizzle of lard in a hot pan, and a warm dribble over his lips. His head felt too heavy on the floor. A long way away, Mr Owen’s feet were splayed like a penguin’s; there were other feet close by, rocking from heel to toe. No one approached him. The ball was at rest against his arm; he placed his hand on it, and felt the texture of the matt leather, the rib-like laces and the yielding rubber nipple between them. With no thought of what he was doing, he scooped the ball into his lap and lifted it. He stood up dizzily, and then he dropped the ball and kicked it on the half-volley. Indifferently he saw Mr Owen double over. He could feel the air congeal about him.

Mr Owen unfolded himself and looked pensively around the gymnasium. He contemplated the cages that protected the light bulbs on the walls; his gaze skimmed over the boys’ faces, and his head nodded in agreement with himself. When at last he spoke, his voice was precise and low, and pleasant. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Continue this game without me. Then the same teams for an end-to-end relay. Then out on the field for a few laps. Allerton, keep order.’ He fetched the ball from the corner of the room and handed it to Allerton. ‘MacIndoe. You come with me.’

Mr Owen led him through the changing rooms and out into the corridor, where he opened the outside door. ‘Please,’ he said, ushering Alexander into the rain. ‘If you’d oblige,’ Mr Owen requested, indicating that Alexander should move farther away. Alexander took a backwards step, into the puddle that was spreading from the drain; the cold water flowed over the tops of his plimsolls. From the shelter of the doorway Mr Owen looked at Alexander with the expression of someone trying to understand why the shivering boy had chosen to stand in ankle-deep water. ‘Now, Monty,’ began Mr Owen solicitously. ‘We have a choice. We could proceed forthwith to the headmaster’s office. It is my belief that a measure of corporal punishment would ensue from this course of action. A report to your parents might follow. To be frank, Monty, I would stake my job on such an outcome. In fact, not to beat about the bush, I would make damned sure of it.’ He stooped forward to inspect the sky and made a snort of satisfaction. ‘Or we could resolve this matter now and have done with it. What do you say, Monty? The choice is yours.’

Water dripped from Alexander’s fingertips; blood dripped from his chin. Watching Mr Owen’s hands squirming in his tracksuit pockets, he realised that he could hold an adult in contempt, and the chill of his flesh seemed to increase his exhilaration at his discovery. It was his intention to say nothing, so he was taken aback to hear himself say: ‘I don’t mind, sir.’

One of Mr Owen’s feet made a movement as if crushing a cigarette. ‘I suggest the latter course of action,’ he said.

‘Whatever you say, sir,’ Alexander replied.

For half a minute Mr Owen blankly regarded Alexander, and then, like a man preparing for an arduous task, he pulled the hood of his tracksuit slowly over his head. ‘We shall proceed to the playing field. On the double. Now.’

On the slope above the cricket nets Mr Owen overtook him and stopped him with a straight arm. ‘Give me those shoes,’ he demanded, and he cracked the soles against the back of Alexander’s legs six times. ‘Now you’ll run around that field until I tell you to stop. Do you understand? And if you ever do anything like that again, ever, ever,’ he repeated, with the tendons of his neck straining, ‘I’ll have you running on roads in your bare feet until the bones come through. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Alexander.

‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.’

The pain of Alexander’s beaten skin seemed to dissolve into his body, and as it weakened he experienced a clenching of his mind against Mr Owen. It was not a hatred he felt now, but an adamant exclusion, and the pain in his ribcage enclosed him perfectly. Armoured by his discomfort he ran over the cold, clutching grass; the rain tingled on his tongue.

‘Don’t slacken, MacIndoe,’ shouted Mr Owen from the embankment, flapping a plimsoll.

‘No, sir,’ Alexander replied, assuming for Mr Owen’s benefit a rictus of agony.

Alexander’s classmates were appearing on the path above the playing field. ‘Right, MacIndoe,’ called Mr Owen when Alexander came back on to the straight. ‘Back to the gym with you. A dozen more press-ups, I think.’ He lobbed the sodden plimsolls towards him, so they landed short, in the waterlogged long-jump pit. ‘Eyes right!’ ordered Mr Owen as Alexander neared his approaching friends. They all looked away from him, and he from them, but as he trudged down the line Alexander heard them chanting quietly: ‘One day. One day. One day.’

Before the day was over Alexander MacIndoe understood that he had been transformed into a new character. Mick Radford, who had often thrown a punch at him whenever they had met in a place where there was no teacher to observe them, ambushed him in an empty corridor. The fingers of Mick Radford’s right hand furled into a fist, then opened out again as he cackled. ‘An hero, Monty,’ he said. ‘Proud of you, pal.’

Mr Owen did not return after the summer holiday, and by many of the boys it was taken as a fact that his departure was due to his punishment of Alexander MacIndoe. ‘That’s what made the boss twig he was a loony,’ said Lionel Griffiths on their first day back. ‘It’s obvious.’ A note in Paul Malinowski’s handwriting was glued to the underside of his desk’s lid: ‘By his sacrifice we were redeemed.’ Throughout the winter term and into the spring, boys to whom he had never spoken would acknowledge him with the password of his name. ‘MacIndoe,’ they hailed him, clenching a fist and raising it to shoulder height. He was being acclaimed for something he had not intended to do, but which had become a story, he told himself, a story like a garment that had been put over him. ‘MacIndoe,’ the boys pronounced defiantly, and he would be obliged to act in a manner befitting the figure he had become, nodding like an officer to his off-duty men.

11. The girls’ party

The Gattings moved into their house before Coronation Day. Of this Alexander would always be certain, because he would remember the way the street looked for the party: the bunting slung so low that he could touch it when he stood on his chair, and the house in which the new family lived standing out from the others in the terrace, with its windowframes freshly painted white and the front door a blue-grey colour that was like a pigeon’s plumage. He would remember helping to set the trestle tables down the centre of the road, as they had done for the VJ party, and the paper plates coloured red, white and blue. He would remember that he had tried to picture the makeshift stage on which his mother had sung eight years before, and had succeeded in hearing her voice for an instant, like the voice of someone trapped. This he would recall, and the car – a black Jowett, with one front wheel removed – that was parked exactly where Gisbert had sat. He would not remember, however, that it was over Liz Gatting’s bent back that he had looked to see where Gisbert had been. Alexander would have no recollection of Liz Gatting that preceded a birthday party the following year, a week after Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile.

It was because he was a friend of Megan’s that he was invited, but he walked to the house on his own, and she took no notice of him when he arrived. Sitting on one of the rugs that had been spread on the lawn, she was taking a plate of sandwiches from the mother of the girl whose birthday it was. ‘Feeding time,’ the mother called out, and each of the girls who were sitting in a ring around Megan reached over to grab from the plate.

The mother carried a plate to a second group of girls sitting on another rug, in front of a juniper bush. Her husband came out of the kitchen, bearing a pie in a fish-shaped dish. Balls of sweat were threaded onto the hair at his temples, and ovals of pale skin were disclosed between the buttons of his straining shirt. ‘A gooseberry are you, son?’ he remarked to Alexander in passing, as he swivelled the dish high above his head. Only then did Alexander realise that, apart from himself, there were just two boys in the garden.

‘Find yourself a place,’ said the mother. ‘This lot’ll eat every last crumb in five minutes.’

A tortoiseshell cat with matted fur butted its head on Alexander’s shins. Turning away from the girls, he knelt on the grass to rub the animal’s throat. A pair of crepe-soled sandals appeared beside the cat. Crumpled white cotton protruded through the gaps between the straps, like peaks of mashed potato, Alexander thought, and he almost laughed.

‘That’s Nelly’s cat,’ said a girl’s voice. ‘His name’s Willow, but her dad calls him Zeppelin. I’m Liz. Who are you?’

‘I’m Alexander,’ he said. ‘Megan’s friend.’

‘Only got one, has she?’ Liz replied. The gap where a tooth had come out at the side of her mouth increased the jollity of her smile, and there was something amusing, too, about the way her hair was done, in ringlets that bent on her shoulders, like the hair of a much younger girl. The collar of her blouse was sticking up, as if she had pulled it over her head. Awaiting Alexander’s answer, she tucked her thumbs behind the big rectangular buckle of her belt. Her missing tooth and this buckle, covered with grass-green hessian, would be what Alexander would continue to remember of her appearance that afternoon.

‘She’s got a lot of friends, I think,’ said Alexander.

‘You think?’

‘No, she does,’ said Alexander. ‘Don’t you?’ he asked Megan, who had left her group and was coming towards him.

‘Don’t I what?’ Megan asked.

‘Have lots of friends.’

‘What are you talking about, Eck?’ said Megan. She gave the cat’s head a quick scratch then looked impatiently at Alexander. ‘Come over here if you want anything to eat,’ she told him, hauling him by a shirt-sleeve.

When the food was finished they all went indoors to play games. In the hall Liz Gatting jabbed him in the small of his back and demanded: ‘We too boring for you, then?’

A girl in a pink cardigan rested her chin on Liz’s shoulder to stare at him. ‘Yes. More fun with your Megan, is it?’ asked the girl.

‘Stick with his Megan,’ said Liz to her companion, smugly.

‘Alexander’s Megan’s friend,’ said the girl in the pink cardigan, putting on a haughty face.

‘Goodbye, Megan’s friend,’ taunted Liz.

The two girls went into the living room, but Alexander stayed in the hall until Megan joined him.

‘You know Liz?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you get on with her?’

‘Sort of,’ said Megan.

‘So you don’t?’

‘So I do.’

‘So why are they being like that?’

‘Like what?’ she asked, and Alexander repeated what they had said. Megan looked at him for a moment, searching for something in his face. ‘You don’t know?’

‘No. If I knew I wouldn’t ask you.’

Water filled the inner corners of Megan’s eyes; she put her right hand firmly on his shoulder. ‘Eck, sometimes you really are slow, you know that?’

‘What do you mean?’ Alexander asked.

‘I mean, there is a mirror in your house somewhere, isn’t there?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘Good grief, Eck. It’s perfectly simple. She wanted you to sit with them, not with me.’ She raised her hands to her face in mockery of his surprise.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Alexander.

‘No, Eck. “I don’t think.” That’s what you should say.’

‘She doesn’t even know who I am,’ he protested.

Megan pulled her socks up tight to her knees. ‘What a nit,’ she said to her shoes, and she left him in the hall.

For an hour or so they played charades. Embarrassed by the perpetual blush that he could feel on his skin, Alexander sat on the floor in a corner of the room, trying to hide behind the other two boys, who sat upright on adjacent straight-backed chairs. ‘One of the boys should have a go,’ the mother decreed, and the two on the chairs simultaneously looked back at Alexander, as if passing the blame for something.

Encircled by the girls, Alexander could think of nothing except his awkwardness. Megan was sitting under the keyboard of the piano, her chin on her knees, waiting for him. ‘Do The Cruel Sea,’ the mother told him. Alexander ground his teeth on the mouthpiece of an imaginary pipe and made a visor with his palm. Heroically he scanned the room’s horizon, facing the terrible waves. Decisive as Jack Hawkins, he gave wordless orders to his men and directed their efforts. Nobody guessed what he was doing.

‘That’s not how you do it, you nit,’ said Megan after he had given them the answer. With a mad grin she flailed at the carpet, then serenely made wave shapes with a fluttering hand. ‘That’s how you do The Cruel Sea. You do “cruel” and then you do “sea”.’ She smiled at him for a long time, however, and it was Megan who took the satin scarf to blindfold him for the last game of the party, and spun him around three times. ‘Behind you, behind you,’ she murmured. ‘Behind you, behind you.’ Shoeless feet made a constant shuffling all around him, and the springs of the armchairs groaned as they were trampled. Alexander’s fingers fell into the pleats of a puffed sleeve. He could distinguish the pitch of this girl’s breathing and the minty smell of her. As Liz Gatting’s hip touched his a girl shrieked, ‘Sandy MacIndoe, beware!’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Liz. Her eyes were levelled at his when he slipped the scarf off. ‘Take no notice,’ she said, and she touched his hand as he pulled the knotted blindfold over her hair.

‘That’s right,’ said Megan, ‘take no notice.’ She sat down on the edge of the settee, where she remained, with her arms crossed, while Liz Gatting fumbled along the curtains and groped broadly at the air. ‘Over here,’ instructed Megan, and then she walked on her toes to the door, stealthily pushed its handle down, and closed it silently behind her, as if this were part of the game. She had left the house before Alexander could think of an excuse to follow her.

Three days later he went to visit Mr Beckwith, hoping to see Megan. He went to the back of the house without knocking on the front door. Mr Beckwith was not in the garden and the padlock was clasped on the shed. The lilies Alexander had planted with Mr Beckwith were in bloom. He picked a snail shell from the soil of the flowerbed and lobbed it over the shed, but his throw was too weak and the shell bounced on the roof and fell back on the lawn.

Until he heard Mrs Beckwith’s voice he had not seen that the French windows were open. ‘Who’s that?’ she called from somewhere inside the back room. ‘Is that you, Megan?’

‘It’s me, Mrs Beckwith.’

‘Alex?’ she responded in a strange voice, as if he were someone who had been away for years.

‘Yes, Mrs Beckwith.’ Alexander stood on the edge of the grass, stranded.

‘He’s asleep, if it’s Harry you’re after.’

Alexander approached the windows. The curtains were three-quarters drawn, obscuring everything except one end of the table and a rectangle of wallpaper to which was attached a calendar and a clock in the form of a ship’s wheel. ‘Sorry to have disturbed you, Mrs Beckwith,’ said Alexander, speaking into this segment of the room.

‘And Megan’s down the shops,’ she said, as though conversing with someone right beside her.

‘Oh well,’ Alexander replied. ‘I’ll be going.’ He had moved closer and was standing on the crescent of irregular paving stones in front of the French windows. Still he could not see where Mrs Beckwith was.

‘She’ll be back in a little while. Come in and wait for her.’ Alexander placed one foot on the metal strip at the threshold.

‘It was Mr Beckwith I came to see really. In case I could help out, that’s all. It’s not important.’

‘Well, you’re here now. Come on in,’ said Mrs Beckwith. She was sitting in an armchair, facing the empty grate and brushing at a lapel of her navy blue dress. A sliver of sunlight cut across the arm of the chair, on which Mrs Beckwith’s hand was curved around a glass of clear liquid with a cube of ice in it.

‘How are you, Alex?’ she asked, pushing herself up on her elbows to look at him. Her mouth was darkened with lipstick and she was wearing ruby-coloured studs in her ears, as if she were about to go out.

‘I’m well, Mrs Beckwith, thank you,’ Alexander responded.

‘Sit down, why don’t you?’ said Mrs Beckwith, pointing at the armchair beside the chimney breast.

Next to the chair in which Alexander sat was a cabinet with sliding glass doors and a tea service on the lowest of its three shelves, below two rows of books. Aware that Mrs Beckwith was watching him, he began to read the spines. ‘The Day of the Triffids,’ he said, at the first title he recognised.

‘Megan’s the reader in this household,’ said Mrs Beckwith.

‘My dad’s the reader in ours. I think he’s read that one.’ Mrs Beckwith stirred the ice with a little finger and did not speak. Alexander completed his reading of the higher row; upstairs a toilet flushed. ‘I’m in your way,’ said Alexander. ‘There wasn’t anything special.’

‘No, Alex, wait for her,’ said Mrs Beckwith softly. ‘She’ll be glad to see you. We’re always glad to see you.’

Eking it out for as long as he could, Alexander read the lower titles; the churning of the water pipes was the only sound.

‘How’s school?’ Mrs Beckwith asked.

‘It’s OK, Mrs Beckwith.’

‘Do you like school?’

‘Not much.’

‘Neither did I,’ said Mrs Beckwith, with a rueful smile at the grate.

In the room above them Mr Beckwith coughed; a thrush sprang across the piece of paving that Alexander could see from where he sat. He twisted in his chair so that Mrs Beckwith could see him look at the ship’s-wheel clock. ‘I should be going, Mrs Beckwith. My mother will be expecting me back soon.’

‘Your mother and I,’ said Mrs Beckwith, and she paused for so long that Alexander thought she had finished her sentence and he had misheard. ‘We were at school together. You knew that?’

‘Mum said, yes,’ he replied.

‘She was gorgeous. A stunner she was. We used to go out together. To the cinema. Very popular with the boys was your mother. I was the invisible girl when I was with her.’

The talk of his mother’s schooldays made Alexander uncomfortable, and from the way Mrs Beckwith took a sip from her drink he sensed that if he stayed he would hear something he should not know. He cleared his throat, but she looked at him and spoke before he could get to his feet.

‘She could have been a singer, I reckon. A professional singer. On stage. Had the looks, had the voice. You’ve heard her sing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course you have. Silly question. Wonderful voice. It’s a waste, Alex.’

‘I don’t know, Mrs Beckwith,’ replied Alexander.

‘Not the worst waste in the world, I grant you,’ said Mrs Beckwith, but suddenly her eyes became lustreless. ‘My brother went somewhere in France and never came back and his wife has gone looking for him and won’t ever come back now.’ She scratched at the lapel of her dress as if something were stuck to it. ‘Harry gets taken into some godforsaken jungle halfway round the world and comes back half-starved and half-cracked,’ she said, forcing a laugh.

‘Mr Beckwith doesn’t seem cracked to me, Mrs Beckwith.’

‘You’re sweet, Alex,’ she said. ‘Half-cracked, not cracked all the way.’ She took another sip. ‘Harry’s very fond of you. You know that?’

‘I like him a lot.’

‘So do I,’ she smiled, turning to look at him. ‘He thinks you’re like him. You’ve got patience, he says.’

‘That’s kind of him.’

‘And respect. A respectful young man, Harry calls you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Not many young ones have that. Respect and patience, either of them.’

‘No, Mrs Beckwith,’ Alexander replied.

Mrs Beckwith took a final sip of her drink. ‘He was a handsome one, too.’ She put the empty glass on the floor and stood up for a moment, before sitting back on the arm of her chair, facing him.

‘I should be going, Mrs Beckwith,’ he told her.

‘Megan will be here any second,’ she said. She folded her arms on her stomach and, bending forward, looked at him as though to press the anxiety out of his mind with her gaze. ‘You’re such a beautiful boy, Alex. One day my girl will fall in love with you, I wouldn’t mind betting.’ The fabric of her dress hung away from her skin in a hammock shape, exposing to Alexander the swell of her breast.

‘She thinks I’m stupid,’ he said.

‘She thinks we’re all stupid sometimes, Alex.’

Alexander meshed his hands together and clenched his fingers on his knuckles.

‘You’re a fearful lad, aren’t you? Don’t be. You don’t want to have lots of regrets when you’re older. They eat you up, regrets.’

‘I don’t think I’m fearful, Mrs Beckwith.’

‘Don’t be. Because nothing lasts, Alex. The whites of my eyes, look at them. They’ve gone all mucky now. But they used to be like yours once. Look here,’ she instructed, and she pinched up a ridge of skin on the back of her hand and watched it subside. ‘I was a slender girl. A slip of a thing, my mother used to say. But nothing lasts,’ and she leaned over him. She kissed him lightly on the lips. Her lipstick pulled at his skin and he caught the sweet fume of her breath. Sitting on the arm of the chair once more, she breathed out as if exhaling smoke and gave him a look as if he had done something foolish but endearing. A key rattled angrily in the lock of the front door. ‘The princess returns,’ said Mrs Beckwith. ‘That you, Megan?’ she called out.

‘Who else?’ asked Megan from behind the opening door. ‘Hello, Eck,’ she said upon seeing him, and then she went out of the room, closing the door.

‘Sorry, Alex,’ said Mrs Beckwith after a minute. ‘Megan’s in a mood, it looks like.’

‘I’ll go then.’

‘Yes, OK,’ agreed Mrs Beckwith cheerfully, as if what had happened had been instantly forgotten.

12. The Diet of Augsburg

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