‘Who?’
‘Don’t be contrary, Alex,’ Mrs Beckwith told him.
‘One of who?’ Alexander persisted.
‘Us, Alex. You and me and your parents and your friends,’ she stated. ‘He shouldn’t be here.’
At the table she pushed the chair into the backs of his knees. His mother was moving towards him, cradling a dish of custard. Alexander craned his neck to see if he could see Gisbert, but he had gone back to the hill. He repeated inwardly the letters of Gisbert’s name, the first name he ever made an effort to remember.
Five hours more the party lasted, but only one moment from those hours was to endure in Alexander’s mind as long as Gisbert’s name and Gisbert’s forest. It was at the end of the night, and he alone was left sitting at the table. He was inhaling the tangy smoke from the candles that his mother and Mrs Beckwith had blown out, when he heard the sound of a footfall he recognised as his father’s. A firework slid up the sky with a shush and sprayed new stars on the sky. His father leaned over him to pick him up. ‘Little Lord Weary,’ his father said to his mother. Alexander watched a red dot of burning tobacco chase around the rim of his father’s cigar. He looked at the fire below the flower of grey ash and then he saw his father kiss his mother on her mouth, which he had never seen him do before.
3. Nan Burnett
The hedge at the front of his grandmother’s house was so high that even his father could not see over it, and instead of a front gate she had a proper door of dark wood, around which the leaves grew in a solid arch. The metal numbers on the door – 122 – were held in place by screws that had gone furry with rust. A spoon-shaped thumb-pad protruded through the keyhole on the right side of the door, and when it was pressed the catch always screeched. Inside there was a slab of greenish concrete on which the underside of the door would scrape, then three steps made of red bricks that had crumbled into a shape like a half-filled sack. From the steps a path of crazy paving zigzagged across the grass, passing a rose bush that grew so few flowers it looked like a ball of wire on which the shreds of a small pink scarf had snagged. Down the length of the garden ran a washing-line held high by a stick of dirty-looking wood, which was planted in the grass near the hollow that had once been a pond. All of this Alexander would remember, and the white rhododendron overhanging the hollow, under which he would find a frog sometimes, and kneel on the soggy ground to watch the panicky pulse in the animal’s side until it sprang away, falling into the dandelions with the quietest of crashes.
An ivy, rooted under the bay of the front room, swerved under the sills and then spread outwards, covering most of the bathroom window and part of the bedroom’s bay, spilling down over the porch and flowing inwards to the door. Once a month, on a Sunday, Alexander and his parents would visit Nan Burnett, and if the weather was fine his father would be certain, at some point in the afternoon, to lean aside and look down the hallway from the kitchen, remarking: ‘Things a bit wild out front, aren’t they, Nan?’ or ‘Had problems locating the entrance recently?’ or ‘Found any Japs this week?’ And whatever the joke, Nan Burnett would pat the back of his father’s hand and call him a treasure, and his father, standing behind a chair to grasp the topmost rung of its back like the handrail of a captain’s bridge, would order all MacIndoe hands on deck. ‘Action stations!’ he commanded, opening the door from the kitchen to the backyard, which was nothing but a small rectangle of glazed grey bricks, with a tiny shed where Nan Burnett stored the stepladders and the shears, and a gate opening onto an alley that had a crest of grass down the middle and lumps of black glassy rock on its verges.
Alexander would follow his father back through the house, bearing the shears blade-downwards past the coat-stand and the oval mirror and the line of Nan Burnett’s shoes, with their toe caps turned up like heads, watching the goings-on in the hall. When his father had rolled his sleeves up above his elbows and loosened his tie, Alexander would present the shears and then stand back in attendance, while his father sliced long cords of ivy from the wall and lopped hanks of foliage off the hedge that separated the garden from the street.
‘Remove please, toot sweet,’ his father said, glancing back over his shoulder first at his son and then at the tangle of cuttings, which Alexander scooped into his arms and carried out to the yard, where his father would burn them. If ever he was left alone to keep an eye on the smouldering leaves, Alexander would step into the blue, stripy smoke that streamed from the fire, so that his clothes that evening would be soaked with a smell that had come from Nan Burnett’s garden.
On days when Alexander’s mother had to go up to town or do something else that she had to do without him, she would usually take him to Nan Burnett’s house, and often another visitor would arrive while he was there. Sometimes it was Dot, whose surname he never knew; she lived somewhere further down the street, past the newsagent’s shop, and from time to time she would hand him a twist of paper in which four or five boiled sweets were wrapped. Or it might be Mrs Solomon, Nan Burnett’s neighbour, who brought one of her cats with her in a wicker basket, and had a hairy mole in the centre of her cheek. On a Wednesday it was likeliest to be Beryl Stringer, a woman of his mother’s age, whom he was to remember only for her turquoise woollen bonnet. If he were at Nan Burnett’s on a Saturday he might see Nurse Reilly, who had violet hair and thick legs that had no ankles, and always brought two things with her: a paper bag full of wool and knitting needles, and a small bale of magazines, tied up with rough yellow twine. Always Nan Burnett would place the magazines on a stool beneath the table before taking her own piece of knitting from the basket on the shelf above the oven, and then the two women would sit on opposite sides of the table and the only sounds would be the ticking of the big clock beside the hall door and the jittery clicking of the needles. And once in a while the caller would be Miss Blake, whose name perplexed Alexander, as Miss Blake was no younger than Nan Burnett. Neither her name nor any feature of her appearance lasted long in Alexander’s mind, but one image of her presence did persist, in a scene in which Nan Burnett and another old lady were seated at the kitchen table, each with one elbow on the tabletop, each facing the window that looked onto the yard. There was a pot of tea between them, under a knitted tea-cosy, and they were listening to a tennis match on the radio. Alexander was listening too, but intermittently, for what engrossed him was the intentness and pleasure of the two old women, whose eyes flickered back and forth as they listened, as if the game were visible to them on the glass of the kitchen window.
But the visitor whom Alexander was to remember most fully was the one whose heavy tread down the hallway made the boards creak in the front room, where Alexander was, and whose laugh – a laugh so like a scream that momentarily he thought Nan had scalded herself – raised his curiosity to a pitch that forced him out to see who this person was. It was a short fat woman, and she was sitting in the chair that Nan Burnett normally sat in. She was dressed all in black but for a band of shiny white material above her eyes, below the black scarf that covered her hair. Her skirt was made of stuff that was like a tablecloth and it came down to the laces of her highly polished shoes, which were men’s shoes and also black. Instead of a blouse or a cardigan she wore a sort of cape that hung from her shoulders down to her waist. Her arms, tightly covered in black fabric, rose from the folds of the cape as she gave Alexander her hand.
‘So this will be Alexander MacIndoe?’ she said. Her fingernails were so perfectly trimmed and so white and so clean they made him feel queasy. ‘Alexander the tiny, is it?’ she laughed, clapping her palms on her knees.
‘Don’t be shy, Alexander,’ said Nan Burnett. ‘Say hello to Sister Martha.’
He did not speak. He looked at Sister Martha’s faintly creased pink cheeks; they reminded him of marshmallows.
‘Let’s take a view of you,’ said Sister Martha, resting her hands on his shoulders. ‘You’re a fine young specimen of a boy, I must say,’ she said. ‘A handsome young man. You watch out for the ladies n
ow,’ she warned him, and when she laughed her cheeks bunched into little globes right under her eyes. ‘Are you at school yet?’ asked Sister Martha, and Alexander replied that he was.
‘And are there other Alexanders at your school?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do you like your name, Alexander?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, beginning to be troubled by the idea that his name bore some significance of which he was unaware.
‘And so you should, young fellow. It’s a distinguished name,’ said Sister Martha. ‘A very distinguished name. Lots of great men have been called Alexander. Alexander the Great, he goes without saying. There have been Russian kings and Scottish kings called Alexander, too. Mr Alexander Fleming, he’s a great man. There was Alexander Pope the poet, though I’m not so sure about him. And there have been many Alexander popes as well, of course,’ she chuckled.
Alexander looked at Nan Burnett, who winked at him and passed him a sandwich she had made. The sliver of brown meat lay between slices of bread that were as grey as her hair.
‘There have been many popes called Alexander,’ Sister Martha said. ‘There was Mister Borgia, who was from Spain and a very bad man, it must be admitted. Not a great one at all. But then there was Mr Chigi, who was Italian and a good man, though he was very rich. And a long time before him there was a young Pope Alexander, who was made a martyr in Rome on the third of May.’ Sister Martha wiggled her eyebrows at him. ‘You look astonished. Your birthday wouldn’t be the third of May, would it, by any chance?’
‘No,’ said Alexander, lifting the sandwich to his mouth.
‘No. That would have been a strange thing,’ Sister Martha told him. Putting her fists on her hips she looked up at the ceiling and said to it: ‘And we mustn’t overlook another young Pope Alexander, one of the seven sons of Felicitas.’ Her attention returned to the boy. ‘Another saint,’ she smiled, as if to encourage him. ‘Also made a martyr in Rome.’
When he was alone again, in the front room, he repeated to himself the mystifying phrase. ‘Made a martyr in Rome,’ he muttered, imagining something that was like being knighted, but more important, and very pleasing to the people who saw it happen.
He enjoyed sitting on the kitchen floor and scanning the pictures in the magazines that Nurse Reilly had brought. He might pass an hour bowling a ball at a line of milk bottles in the alley out the back, or shunting his Dinky van around the streets defined by the cracks between the bricks in the yard. Most of all, however, he enjoyed being in the front room of Nan Burnett’s house. The room had a rich and sleepy smell, a smell of varnished wood and old rugs, a smell that no other room had and was always the same. There were pictures in every corner of the room, hanging on nails midway up the walls, attached to the picture rail by slender brass chains, displayed in cardboard frames that stood on the sideboard, on the china cabinet and the mantelpiece above the fireplace, which had not been lit in years. To the left of the fireplace the miracles were gathered: The Loaves and the Fishes, The Bath at Bethesda, The Wedding at Cana, The Woman of Samaria, all in shades of cream and brown. To the right was Moses, tipping a dog-sized calf off its pedestal, standing aghast before a burning bush, dividing a sea that curled back onto itself like drying leaves. The pictures on the cabinet were photographs of his mother’s father and two other men, all in tones of brown and cream but with a chalky finish that made it seem as if everything in the pictures – the men’s skin, their jackets, the walls behind them – were made of the same stuff. Alexander once asked Nan Burnett who the other men were, expecting to hear that they were relatives, but they were friends of her husband, who had died with Stanley Burnett at a place Alexander never forgot because Nan Burnett swore when she said it. ‘Wipers,’ he would repeat as he regarded the dead men. ‘That bloody place,’ he would whisper, echoing his grandmother’s curse, and sometimes he would take the red glass stopper from the perfume bottle that Nan Burnett kept with the china and put it over one eye while he looked at them. And having looked at them, he would draw the thick brown curtains all the way across the window, then take the wide cushions from the brown velvet armchairs and lay them in front of the fireplace. Lying in the silence that seemed to come out of the walls of Nan Burnett’s front room, Alexander would close his eyes and see the handsome women balancing the pitchers on their heads, the men with smooth beards and the children in striped gowns, walking down roads that were strewn with stones shaped not like real stones but more like miniature boxes. As clearly as if his eyes were open he would see The Last Supper, with the figure of Jesus looking straight at him, and the picture of the nameless woman holding her chest on a crumpled bed, her head thrown back as if she felt sick, and the rigid faces of Stanley Burnett and his two dead friends.
‘What on earth do you do in there all day?’ he would recall his mother asking him, as he rubbed his eyes in the hall.
‘The boy just likes to be quiet,’ Nan Burnett answered for him.
‘Odd thing for a boy,’ said his mother.
‘Don’t fuss, Irene. He’s a happy lad. Aren’t you, Alexander?’ Nan Burnett asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, blushing, because he did not know if he was telling the truth.
Nan Burnett would never call him from the front room until his mother returned, but sometimes she called him from the yard to run an errand for her. He was on an errand when Megan arrived.
‘Take this round to Mrs Solomon, will you, pet,’ said Nan Burnett. She gave him a piece of paper full of numbers, with a drawing of a pullover on one side.
Mrs Solomon was putting a saucer of milk at the top of the stairs; one of her cats sprinted between Alexander’s legs and the banisters; he stroked the cat a few times, handed over the pattern, and no more than five minutes after leaving he was back in the hall of Nan Burnett’s house, his hand outstretched to open the door of the front room. Startled to hear his mother call his name, he jumped and looked to his left, and saw Megan for the first time.
His mother and Mrs Beckwith were advancing towards him down the hall, pushing the girl before them. Her eyes were the same colour as Gisbert’s had been, but they were wider and brighter, like marbles, and her hair was red, exactly the red of the stain under the tap in Nan Burnett’s bathroom. More than fifty years later, Alexander would be able to describe to Megan the outfit she was wearing: the white cotton blouse with the scallops around the neck; the blue-checked pinafore; the sandals with the pattern of petals cut over the toes. His mother said: ‘Alexander, this is Megan. She will be living with Mrs Beckwith now.’
The girl looked at him as if she was the one who lived in the house and Alexander was the one who had never been there before.
‘You’ll be friends, Alexander. That’ll be nice, won’t it?’ said his mother.
Megan held out her right hand like a man. ‘Hello, Alexander,’ she said.
‘Come on, say hello,’ said his mother.
Alexander stared at the girl. Silently he repeated her name. The word had a taste and a texture, a bit like toffee.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Megan, jerking her hand as if she were already holding his.
‘Come on, Alexander,’ his mother chivvied, but still Alexander stared. ‘Buck up, boy. Show some manners.’ Over his mother’s shoulder, Nan Burnett made a mock frown at him; she wagged a finger and mouthed the words ‘bad boy’. And then Alexander kissed the girl, who took a step back and put a hand to the place where his mouth had touched her. ‘You’re an impossible child,’ said his mother, taking hold of an arm.
A few minutes later Alexander and his mother were at the door, ready to leave. ‘Next week,’ she said as she reached for the handle. Alexander took one last look down the hall. Nan Burnett was standing in the kitchen with her hands on Megan’s shoulders and smiling as if the girl’s arrival were a treat she had arranged for him.
That was the face Alexander saw on the day on which, three years and five months after this one, he came back to Number 122 with his paren
ts, to say goodbye to the house. His mother and father went upstairs, up the bare staircase, past the three white rectangles on the wall. He heard their feet on the floor above him, and when they moved into the room that had been Nan Burnett’s bedroom he pushed open the door of the front room. As the door gave way to his touch, he heard his mother’s voice in the hall say ‘Alexander’ softly, and he saw his grandmother in her kitchen, alone, but smiling as she had smiled when she had stood on that spot with Megan in front of her. A cold terror doused his body; he flinched and sucked in a breath without meaning to, and she was no longer there. And then it was like putting a finger in water and expecting it to be very cold and feeling it very cold when in fact it is warm, as it quickly becomes. He was not frightened, he realised. He had the sensation of being absolutely alone in a pleasant place, like a big garden that everyone else has left.
His mother saw a tear on his cheek. ‘Are you all right, Alexander?’ she asked him. ‘We are a pair,’ she said, and she put her handkerchief to the corners of her eyes and then to his.
‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’ asked his father.
‘Yes,’ said Alexander honestly, but he knew he must not mention what he had seen.
4. Eck
A nightlight, set on a saucer which had a crack across its pattern of blue willow leaves, burned on the stool between Alexander’s bed and the window, casting the hilly shadow of his body across the wall. The short yellow flame, batted by the draught, nodded on the surface of the molten wax, in which tiny tadpoles of cinder swam about in circles, drifting close to flame, darting away to the edge of the pool, drifting back. Sometimes he would pluck a hair from his head and feed it into the flame to watch it become a wisp of smoke before it could enter the body of the fire, or hold his hand over the candle until the heat felt like a nail driven through his palm. Then he would lie motionless again, his arms folded on his chest, his face to the ceiling, watching the steam of his breath roll off into the room. At last he heard his mother’s footsteps on the stairs, and the creak of the floorboards as she came to the landing. Downstairs the doors were being shut, always in the same order, ending with the clunk of the kitchen door and the rattle of its tall pane. His father’s slower tread followed, becoming even slower as he reached the top of the stairs, making a louder creak. And on the nights when the electricity was off he would twice see the candlelight rise and fade under his door as first his mother and then his father went by, and then the door of his parents’ room would close with a small thump and the light was gone. He lay listening to the rustling of the gardens and the dwindling grumble of his father’s voice, keeping his eyes open until only the sounds of the wind remained.
Ghost MacIndoe Page 3