Sometimes Paul Malinowski would come to the shop after school, and begin his homework in the back room, because it was quieter than home, where there was now a baby sister. Some afternoons Roy Pickering would wheel his bicycle into the doorway and stop for a few minutes. Mr Barrington came in several times, and bought an old flyposter for the Lewisham Hippodrome, advertising ‘Kit-Kat And His Saxophone Rascals’ and ‘Mademoiselle Rubina, The World’s Most Artistic Dancer’. Occasionally Mrs Beckwith would drop by, with his mother, and leave a slice of cake for him. But John Halloran was the one who visited the shop most frequently, except for Megan, who would come to the shop at least one day each week.
Having peered through the window to check that Alexander was alone, she would deposit her beret on the elephant’s-foot umbrella stand by the door and loosen her tie, just as his father did as soon as the front door was shut behind him. Sitting on the Chesterfield that remained unsold for more than a year because one arm had been badly repaired and was no longer upright, they talked about her lessons and the essays she had to write, or about things they could not talk about when Alexander came to her house to work in the garden with Mr Beckwith. ‘Dad was talking to himself last night,’ she told him once. ‘Mum thinks it’s you he’s talking to,’ she said, and she took an exercise book from her briefcase so that he could test her. ‘Meanwhile she’s getting all worked up about germs. Obsessed. Spent all yesterday scrubbing the kitchen, Dad said. Looks like an operating theatre.’ Perusing the incomprehensible diagrams and charts that she had drawn, Alexander imagined her at work in her classroom, and her hand moving across the page, neatly transcribing the numerals from a blackboard. ‘And she’s not keen on me doing geography. She thinks it’s a brawny subject. Not the right thing for a young lady. Not keen on university, come to that. Thinks I’ll get led astray,’ she sighed, and she moved closer to him, to point out what he should read. The thought of their separation made the ticking of the clocks become louder and a taste of glue rise on his tongue.
In the same month Megan would be leaving to go to university and he would be called up for his National Service, and the closer they came to that month the more often their conversation wandered into reminiscence during their hours together in Sidney Dixon’s shop. Asked for the name of the girl who had once brought her cat to school, or the location of a shop in which they had both been accidentally left behind by his mother, or the place where they had seen the woman with the monkey on her arm, Alexander would close his eyes to see the scene that she wanted, and describe its details for her, and Megan would gaze at the ceiling while he talked, as if she were watching a cinema screen. More than forty years later Alexander would remember one afternoon especially. Someone had slashed the awning the week before, and now the rain was falling through the slit, making a noise like a football rattle being turned slowly. It had been raining all day. A man had called to read the electricity meter in the morning, but nobody else had entered the shop before Megan came running across the road, holding her briefcase over her head. Alexander draped her gaberdine over a chair in the doorway and she put her shoes and socks on the radiator in the back room. They sat on the Chesterfield. Mrs Giles, the chemistry teacher, having found an impertinent remark written in chalk on her desk, had lectured the class on the paramount importance of laws in all things. Megan put a cold white foot onto his hand while he tested her knowledge of the periodic table. The rain intensified, tumbling through the hole in the awning as if from a burst pipe. ‘Terrific noise,’ said Megan, and he propped the door open so they could hear and see the rain better. The pavement shimmered with rebounding water; a car slowed down outside the shop and crept through the pool, raising a wake that lapped the doorstep.
‘Remember that time in Cornwall, Eck?’ Megan remarked. ‘When we took the bus to the other beach, and sheltered in the cave?’
Alexander saw the low arch of black rock and the silver-grey veil of rainwater that hid everything outside. The rain on the beach made a sound like breath drawn in through clenched teeth. Feeling his way along the damp walls, he led Megan into the depths of the cave. The rock became so low he had to crawl, and Megan turned back. Then suddenly the roof was out of reach, and he was in another chamber with a hole high above him and a cord of rainwater gyrating in the shaft of light. Suspended by its roots, a bush swung like a chandelier underneath the hole. He pressed his hand into the chilly sand, leaving imprints as clear as plastercasts. ‘You worked out that the tide was coming in,’ he said.
‘I did?’
‘You realized it was coming in, because there was a rock in the entrance with a border of water around it, and you noticed the water was getting wider.’
‘I did that?’
‘Yes, you did. And you said “We’ve got to go, Eck,” as if there was a bomb that was going to go off.’ He imitated her direful whisper, and the way she pulled her fringe from her eyes. ‘So we counted to three and ran out together.’
‘I remember that bit. And your mother. She was furious.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘No idea.’
‘You said “Sowwy,” and that made it worse. “Irresponsible infants,” she called us.’ Alexander saw his mother’s hand on Megan’s bare back, and his father and Mr Beckwith in the car park, with their arms crossed as if watching a cricket match on the beach. ‘We went and had a cup of tea. My mother kept wiping your head with a towel. There was a labrador under one of the tables that you called Nelson, because it was blind in one eye.’
‘You remember all that?’
‘Of course.’
‘You’re not making it up?’
‘I couldn’t make it up.’
Megan rested her head on the arm of the Chesterfield and closed her eyes. One of the clocks commenced its whirring and crunching, as if clearing its throat before the chimes. Then Megan opened one eye, looked intently at him, and said: ‘Eck, how can you stand this?’
‘Stand what?’ he asked.
‘Stand this.’ She waved one arm over her head. ‘This.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean, Eck.’ She sat up and clutched her feet. ‘What I mean is, what are you going to do with yourself?’
‘I am doing something.’
‘You’re not. This isn’t something. Sitting in a shop all day, staring out of the window. That’s not doing anything.’
‘I enjoy it.’
‘You enjoy staring out of the window?’
‘I learn things,’ Alexander protested, tapping a foot on a book that lay open on the floor.
‘Nothing much. And that’s not the point. It’s not why you’re here.’
‘So why am I here?’
‘You’re here because you feel sorry for your boss.’
‘I like him.’
‘That as well. But really you’re doing this because you feel sorry for him. It’s good of you. I’m not criticising you, Eck. But what’s the plan? You can’t do this for ever.’
‘It’s not for ever.’
‘You’re getting settled. I can see it happening. You’ll go off and be a soldier, and then you’ll come back here. I can see it.’
‘You can see better than me, then,’ said Alexander.
‘Well, that’s not right, is it? You’ve got to have some idea of where you’re going.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘God’s sake, Eck, I don’t know. Get an apprenticeship. Learn to make something. Clocks, for instance.’
‘Clocks.’
‘It’s not such a dim idea. You need to be patient to make clocks. Careful. Steady. That’s you.’
‘Right-oh,’ he said, glumly.
‘A good eye. You’ve got that. Fine hands.’
Alexander inspected his hands, turning them mechanically at the wrist: palm up, palm down; palm up, palm down.
‘Eck, I’m being serious. You can do better than this.’ She gathered her books and stood up. ‘A bit of willpower. That’s all it takes.�
��
A cloud of ambition drifted over him while Megan spoke, but evaporated as soon as she had gone. He turned the pages of Sidney Dixon’s books and tried to imagine himself making cabinets or chairs, or making anything at all. He tried to imagine being somewhere else, but could think only of places he had already been. The sound of the clocks was like a continuation of Megan’s argument. He withdrew to the back room and looked at the picture of the three paddle-steamers at Woolwich, and the one of the woman selling crockery from a horse-drawn cart, and William Gladstone at the hustings in Greenwich, addressing a mass of top hats and bowlers and soldiers’ caps.
15. 6 July 1958
While he talked to his mother and opened the ledgers for her, Mrs Beckwith would stroll about the shop, giving the pictures and the trinkets a leisurely look, flicking a glove at the things that took her fancy and asking Alexander about their price or origin, and then she would sit down on one of the armchairs, to wait for his mother to finish her assessment of his progress. They never stayed for more than five minutes and it was always Mrs Beckwith who spoke last, calling ‘See you soon, Alexander,’ or ‘Keep busy, Alexander,’ as she stood aside and held open the door for his mother, whose style of leaving was that of a shop inspector who had now completed her day’s assignment, to her partial satisfaction.
His mother had seemed not to notice when Mrs Beckwith ceased calling him Alex, though the change had been sudden and absolute. From the day Mrs Beckwith kissed him he was Alexander. Nothing in the tone of her voice nor anything in the way she looked at him was different immediately, but he was always Alexander and never Alex after that, and she would use his name more frequently than she had ever used its abbreviation, as though she thought it was a charm that would banish by its repetition his evident embarrassment in her presence. For a time he avoided her whenever he could, sometimes making excuses for not going to the Beckwiths’ house on Sunday, as had become his habit. Soon a teasing nuance appeared in Mrs Beckwith’s gaze as she pronounced his name. ‘Harry’s missing his assistant, Alexander,’ he would remember her saying to him when they met one afternoon in the street, and it was plain to Alexander that she was rebuking him for his recalcitrance. Eventually he resumed his weekly visits, and the guilt that he felt in the company of Mr Beckwith diminished quickly, though sometimes the afternoon of Mrs Beckwith’s kiss would resurrect itself as if through a depth of muddy water, and he would start at the realisation that it had not been a tenacious dream.
It seemed that nobody noticed anything different in his manner with Mrs Beckwith and hers with him, not even Megan, who explained his absences by the moodiness of all boys. And he himself did not notice one particular and significant change, not until the day they all went to Whitstable together and walked to Reculver. Six abreast, hand in hand, they walked into the wind. Alexander, at one end, held Megan’s hand. Mr Beckwith, his shirt wrapped as tight as a shroud to his torso, walked between Megan and his wife, whose handkerchief was snatched from her hand and vanished instantly into the fields. Alexander’s mother kept laughing as she staggered over the molehills, and his father, folding his glasses away because he could no longer see through the spatter of sea mist, assumed the doughty expression of a polar hero and urged them on. At the Roman fort they huddled in the lee of a wall to eat the picnic that Mr Beckwith had carried in his knapsack, and then Mr Beckwith took a photo. Alexander knelt beside Megan in the hissing grass and the adults stood behind them. ‘Chop-chop, Harry,’ said Mrs Beckwith. ‘We’ll be blown back to London in a second.’ It was then that Alexander remembered the evening on the beach at Praa. He recalled that he had been happy, and that the windblown sand had rippled on the beach, and that Mrs Beckwith’s hands had rested on his shoulders. He glanced back and saw that she was standing close behind him but with her arms linked with his parents’, and it occurred to him that he could not remember an occasion when she had touched him affectionately since the afternoon of the kiss. As readily as she put her arms around Megan’s shoulders she had used to put her arms around him, but now she did not. When she brought a tray into the garden on a Sunday afternoon she might place it beside Alexander, but her hand would rest on Megan’s back or on her husband’s, but never on his. Even at Christmas, when the Beckwiths filed into the hall under the arch of holly, she no longer embraced him but instead shook his hand, as if it were his joke to play at being the manager of the establishment.
He had once been a sort of son to Mrs Beckwith but in time he became a sort of ally, who was required to side with her in her disagreements with Megan. When, one autumn Sunday evening, Megan came downstairs wearing coral pink lipstick, Mrs Beckwith called him to the hallway, where she was obstructing Megan’s exit.
‘I told her she can get that stuff off her face for starters,’ she declared. ‘She’s not leaving this house looking like that. Makes her look like a tart,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t it?’
Megan glared at him. ‘It does not,’ she said.
‘Don’t you backchat me, young woman,’ said Mrs Beckwith. ‘You look like a tart and that’s that. Upstairs and get it off.’
‘It’s your lipstick,’ Megan stated.
‘Upstairs,’ shouted Mrs Beckwith.
‘Do I look like a tart to you?’ Megan asked him.
‘Thank you, Alexander,’ said Mrs Beckwith.
‘Well?’ demanded Megan.
‘Better without it,’ Alexander replied, and he tried to look at her as he would have done had Mrs Beckwith not been there to observe him.
‘Thank you, Alexander,’ said Mrs Beckwith.
‘Thank you, Alexander,’ Megan parroted. ‘Stooge MacIndoe.’
She called him the same name during the last argument that Alexander witnessed. He was in the kitchen with Mr Beckwith, filling the watering can, when he heard Megan’s voice rising stridently above the blurred sound of Mrs Beckwith’s. ‘It’s important,’ she insisted.
‘It’s ridiculous is what it is,’ Mrs Beckwith retorted.
‘Mum,’ pleaded Megan, making a whine of the single syllable.
‘I’ve said no.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s fifty miles, that’s one good reason.’
‘I won’t go all the way. A few miles.’
‘You won’t go any of the way.’
‘I will.’
‘You will not, madam.’
Mr Beckwith tightened the tap and looked at Alexander. ‘Trouble,’ he said, nodding towards the door. ‘Let’s retreat.’ Alexander followed him out of the kitchen, but was summoned to the bottom of the stairs by Mrs Beckwith.
‘How do you bear her, Alexander?’ she asked. ‘Can you reason with her? I can’t.’
‘Where’s the reason?’ demanded Megan. She was standing on the landing, with her hands on her hips, mirroring the stance of Mrs Beckwith.
‘Listen to her,’ said Mrs Beckwith to Alexander.
‘That’s the idea,’ Megan retorted.
‘I am listening to you, Megan, and I’m telling you you’re talking rubbish, and you’re not going on any damned march.’
‘It’s not rubbish. You don’t understand it, that’s all.’
‘You’re a young girl, Megan. Outside this house nobody cares what a young girl thinks.’
‘Not here, either.’
‘You chanting slogans isn’t going to make a difference to anything.’
‘If there’s enough of us it will. And they’re not slogans. They’re called principles. Bertrand Russell doesn’t chant slogans. You’ve heard of Bertrand Russell?’
‘Megan,’ interrupted Alexander, ‘don’t sneer.’
‘Course I’ve heard of Bertrand bloody Russell,’ said Mrs Beckwith. ‘Have you heard of Stalin? Have you?’
‘Have you heard of Hiroshima?’
‘Will you listen to yourself, you stupid child?’
‘I’m going,’ said Megan. ‘I’ve made my mind up and you can’t stop me.’
‘Yes I can. As long as you’re living under my roof you�
��ll do as I tell you.’
Megan leaned back against the wall, crossed her arms and regarded Alexander accusingly. ‘What does the head warder’s stooge have to say?’
‘You’re not going, and that’s all there is to say,’ shouted Mrs Beckwith. ‘But what do you think, Alexander? Should my daughter be wasting her time with a bunch of dimwit priests and journalists and ne’er-do-wells?’ Megan slammed the door of her room before Alexander could answer. ‘See what I have to put up with?’ said Mrs Beckwith, and she looked out of the hall window to hide her face from him.
There were other arguments that Alexander overheard, but he would be able to recall no later ones, nor anything that happened in the Beckwiths’ house between that Easter and the sixth of July, a day that would commence in his memory with the image of Mr Beckwith in the garden and Megan standing beside him, vigilant, but with an expression of suppressed distaste about her lips. Raising a leaf by its tip, Mr Beckwith revealed a ball of tiny flies on the underside, packed like iron filings on a magnet. Alexander doused the flies with soapy water; the froth dripped from the leaves onto Mr Beckwith’s legs.
‘Another blast,’ said Mr Beckwith, lifting the branch higher. ‘Let them have it. Never know when they’re beaten, these lads.’ Every shoot of the plant was infested. Mr Beckwith took the bottle from Alexander, crouched down and waddled under the foliage to get at the back of the bush. The air around them became hazy as he sprayed. ‘Need more. More ammunition, Alexander,’ he said, handing him the bottle.
Alexander went in through the French windows. He saw that Mrs Beckwith was in the room; the top of her hair could be seen over the back of the settee. The air inside the room was cool and smelled of polish, as it always did, but the atmosphere was unusual, and he could not understand why this was. He looked to his left again: beside the settee was the baize-topped card table, on which were placed Mrs Beckwith’s sewing box and a decanter of water. The door, blown alternately by the draught from the hall and the breeze from the garden, knocked the jamb softly four or five times. Straight ahead was the ship’s-wheel clock, showing that it was twenty-six minutes past four. And then it occurred to him that he could hear its ticking, and that this was strange.
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