Ghost MacIndoe

The following day his parents took him out of the house at an hour when normally he would already have been in bed, and they went to call for Mrs Beckwith. There were more people on the street that night than he had ever seen in the day. Their heads bobbed like apples in a bowl, and the noise of their voices and feet blended into one loud rumble. On the Heath there were hundreds and hundreds of people, moving towards a fire that rose in a single pinnacle of flame over their heads. Alexander and his parents and Mrs Beckwith joined the crowd, falling in with the purposeful pace. The people pressed more tightly on Alexander with every step; the bit of the sky that he could see was no larger than his father’s head; he looked down at the grass, and seeing it flattened and ripped by the thousands of feet he suddenly cried out, and was in an instant hoisted onto his father’s shoulders.

‘What can you see?’ his father asked. The fire glinted on his spectacles as he bent his head back to speak to him.

‘Nothing,’ Alexander reported.

‘You must see something, Alexander,’ said his mother.

‘I can see the top of the fire,’ he replied. ‘And lots of people,’ he added, scanning the Heath. Every road was full of marching people.

‘All of England must be here,’ said his mother.

‘Not quite,’ said Mrs Beckwith.

Alexander saw his mother touch Mrs Beckwith’s shoulder. He was impatient to discover what it was they had come to see.

They came across three soldiers in berets, sitting on a settee beside a track, and drinking from a bottle which one of them jiggled at Mrs Beckwith as they passed. Alexander saw a woman he thought at first was the woman who worked in Mr Prentice’s shop; a man’s bandaged hand was resting on her waist, and she had a little trumpet in her mouth. They were near enough to the fire for him to glimpse two shrieking faces on the other side of the flames when a split appeared in the crowd and what looked for a second like a galloping bull rushed through the gap. It was two men carrying a park bench between them; on the bench was stretched a man made out of an old jumper and trousers, with newspaper hands and feet and a football for a head. The two men seized the dummy, held it up for everyone to see, then hurled it onto the fire. The people around all cheered, and they cheered again when the two men rocked the bench backwards and forwards and let it go into the flames.

They stayed by the fire for half an hour or so, then his father led them off the Heath, past the Nissen huts. It was late, but they did not go straight home. They walked down the hill with Mrs Beckwith, who held Alexander’s hand but seemed dejected. His father and mother went in front, her head resting on his shoulder as they walked. At the railway bridge they stopped. A train was at the station below the road; above the grumbling of its engine he heard Mrs Beckwith say: ‘It’ll be a time yet, Irene.’ His mother put a hand on Mrs Beckwith’s shoulder again and nodded at his father, who lifted him to look over the parapet as the train pulled out.

Inside the carriages every seat was filled. Men were standing between the seats, clinging to the racks, while women were sitting on the laps of other women, and the pale blue light in the carriages made all the faces inside look as pale as peeled potatoes. A window clacked open and a man yelled up something that Alexander could not hear. Mrs Beckwith waved at the train without looking at it.

‘They’re going up to town,’ his father told him.

‘Tough work,’ said Mrs Beckwith, ‘but someone’s got to do it.’

‘Not for the likes of us, young man,’ said his father sternly, but smiling.

‘It’s bed for us,’ his mother confirmed, and Alexander watched the red light at the back of the train disappear into the darkness of the cutting on its way into town, a place he saw as an arrangement of perfectly regular streets and buildings with thousands of windows, all undamaged because town was somewhere that was always there, outside the war. It seemed to him that the passengers he had seen on the train were on a night-time mission of some sort, a mission that was to do with making things change.

His mother was always at home now, and throughout that summer he went to the shops with her most mornings, and queued beside her patiently, while the other children larked on the pavement outside. In the afternoon he would play with Jimmy Murrell or with other boys whose names he was to lose from his memory in his twenties and thirties, or he would walk through Greenwich Park with his mother, sometimes continuing right down to the river, where they might go into the tunnel beneath the water, to see the long walls that were curved and covered in tiles like frozen milk. Often, when they walked through the park, she would take him to the statue of Wolfe and sit on the slope below the bronze general, making an armchair for him from her arms and legs, and he would lie back against her chest while she sang an American song for him under her breath. Once she pointed across the river and said something about St Paul’s, something that made him think the church had somehow fought off the bombers, a scene he pictured as the dome swivelling and sending out some sort of beam to bring the enemy down.

It was an image he would always retain, though within a few years it had slipped from its mooring in the weeks between the victory days. What Alexander would recall unerringly from that interval, throughout his life, was the sight of his mother dabbing her eyes as she made his bed one morning, and on a different day dusting the sideboard as if in a daze, her eyes fixed on the wallpaper in front of her, and another day standing in the hallway with the mop planted upright in its bucket, gazing through the open door and down the front path as if she were waiting for someone, though it was several hours before his father would finish work. Many times he would stand silently beside her when she was doing her housework, as he did when they queued in the shops. And once, he remembered more completely than anything from that period, she put the mop aside and framed his face in her hands to stare into his eyes. ‘My God, you do look like an angel,’ she said, but she said it as if it were some illness that he had. She gathered both his hands in one of hers and kissed them. ‘My black-eyed angel,’ she murmured, and looked over his shoulder through the narrow window beside the door, at the pavement along which nobody was passing.

This was a short time before a Saturday on which he went with his father to the church hall to collect a pair of trestles which they put in the garden of Mrs Darling’s house, alongside a stack of planks. Later that day he made flags with his mother, holding the scissors for her as she pulled the old sheets through the open blades, so they ripped with a thrilling squeal. They cut out triangles of material and stewed them in pots of red and blue water, then pegged them out to dry on the line, and when that was done they made letters of black card which they pasted on a placard out the front, spelling the words ‘Welcome Home George’. When Mr Evans came over with Mrs Evans to see the placard, Alexander looked down from his bedroom and saw Mrs Evans begin crying as soon as she had read the word ‘Welcome’ aloud; Mr Evans steered her back through the gate, his enormous hand spread right across her back, and his shoes made sparks on the paving stones.

At the start of the party Jimmy Murrell handed out conical paper hats and Alexander was tucked into a place at the end of the table by Mrs Beckwith, facing the stage that the men from the pub had built. The air smelled special, of marzipan and hair oil and washing powder, and the sunlight made the raspberry jelly glow so beautifully that he felt sad when one of the adults spooned a divot from it and tipped it on his plate. The owner of the pub played the piano on the stage while everyone ate, and then Mr Evans made a speech and all the adults banged their cups up and down. ‘Irene, if you will,’ said Mr Evans, holding out a hand in mid-air. Alexander watched his mother climb the steps at the side of the stage. She went over to the piano and stood beside it, with one hand resting on the top of it. He waited for her to call him. The pianist played a few notes and stopped. Alexander leaned forward to find his father, but could not see where he was. His mother was looking at her shoes. Mrs Beckwith stood up and moved a couple of steps away from him, towards the stage. The pianist played the same tune again, and this time Alexander’s mother began to sing. It was the song about the bluebirds that she sang, and she sang it in a voice that was not like the voice with which she used to sing at home. Her eyes were closed as if she were singing for herself alone, but her voice was stronger than he had ever heard it, so strong that all the people around began to sing with her one by one, and when the chorus came he could barely hear her above their shouting. The pianist took one hand off the keyboard and made a scooping motion; all the adults who had been sitting rose in front of Alexander, excluding his mother from view. Hands went threading under elbows; backs swayed against backs.

Unnoticed, Alexander eased his seat back from the table. The stray was lying close by, under a tail of tablecloth. Crumbling a piece of cake on the road to entice the dog, Alexander wandered off, in the opposite direction from the stage. There was another chorus, even louder than the first, and when it was finished everyone sang it again. And as the first line began again, Alexander glanced up from the dog to see a man sitting with his back against the shelter at the top of the road. He was a thin man, doubled over as if he were made of folded card, and he had hair that was the colour of the dog’s hair. The man was looking at Alexander but he was not singing. He had eyes like the sky and a big thin nose.

Stretching his long legs into the gutter, the man put his hands on the sides of the dog’s head and looked at its face as if it was a cup that was cracked. ‘He is yours?’ he asked, in a voice that was peculiar, and sounded as though he was telling him something rather than asking. His jacket was inky blue and made of stuff like the felt Alexander’s mother put on the sideboard to stop the vase from scratching. ‘Not yours?’ the man asked, to which Alexander shook his head. ‘What is his name?’

‘He doesn’t have a name.’

‘But you have a name,’ the man responded, but Alexander did not reply. ‘My name is Gisbert,’ said the man. ‘My name is Gisbert. G-I-S-B-E-R-T,’ he recited. At the bottom of the street the piano made a booming sound and everybody laughed. ‘Now you tell me your name.’

‘Alexander.’

‘Alexander what?’ asked Gisbert.

‘Alexander MacIndoe.’ His name sounded strange when he spoke it to this stranger, as if he had been labelled like a bottle in the kitchen.

‘Where do you live, Alexander?’

He pointed to the placard. ‘The house with the writing,’ he said.

‘Welcome Home, George,’ Gisbert read, but he said the last word so it sounded like ‘judge’.

‘Where do you live?’ asked Alexander.

The man stood up; he was much taller than Alexander’s father, and the cuffs of his jacket did not cover his wrists. A bony forefinger indicated the rooftops. ‘Today I live on the Shooters Hill,’ he explained. ‘But my home is a longer way.’

‘Over the hill?’ asked Alexander.

‘Yes. A long way over the hill. A long way.’ Gisbert made his brow wrinkle, and scratched the side of his nose. ‘I will go there soon. Tomorrow perhaps. Next week perhaps.’ Then he smiled so widely that the gums showed above his back teeth.

‘Is it like here?’

‘No, not like here,’ said Gisbert, and he petted the dog as though the dog had asked the question. ‘There are big mountains, big forests, big lakes. Everything green. Not like here.’

Alexander would always remember Gisbert’s name, the fabric of his jacket, his chilly eyes, and these words that conjured for him a scene in which Gisbert walked over the rise of Shooters Hill and down a long slope to a vast green forest, a forest he imagined as being just beyond his sight when, some five months later, his father and mother took him past the crest of the hill for the first time.

‘Here is something for you, Alexander MacIndoe,’ said Gisbert as he reached into his jacket. He extracted a button, breathed on it and rubbed it on his sleeve. Alexander extended a palm to receive the gift. Raised on the button was a wonderful and mysterious sign, a pair of wings with no body. Holding it by the little loop of metal on the other side, Alexander breathed on the button too, and slipped it into his pocket. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘You are welcome,’ said Gisbert. ‘But I think you must leave, Alexander,’ he added, in the same moment as Alexander heard Mrs Beckwith’s voice.

‘Away, Alex,’ she shouted. ‘Come here. Come away. Here.’ She tugged him towards her and bent over to get close to his face. ‘You mustn’t talk to him,’ she said. Alexander looked back to see Gisbert shrug his shoulders at him and raise his left hand. Mrs Beck with tapped the boy’s chin to make him turn.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Because I say so.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you shouldn’t be talking to him, that’s why. He’s not one of us,’ she said.

‘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 now,’ 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.