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‘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 (#ulink_8f8378c4-61cb-562f-8f86-2734670e377b)
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.
