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‘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 (#ulink_2012cfcc-40dd-5f7a-909e-cf8e9ece1c5b)
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.
