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‘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?’
