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‘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 (#ulink_43e6294c-7aae-567c-8b17-b66968fa9201)
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.
