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‘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 (#ulink_9a0e165d-2ae1-5b7c-bf5a-4d6d47521612)
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 (#ulink_d8221191-8e5f-50cc-9a0b-2e9583fa0fbc)
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.’
