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 parents, 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.

In the mornings the glass was caked with ice on the inside, and often the night’s fall of snow sloped high up the pane. When he opened the curtains the walls of his room were the tone of chicken flesh, and clammy as the disc of white wax that the nightlight had become. On the back of the chair beside the door a clean white shirt hung in the shadowless light like a big strip of cold fat. The tin bomber that was parked on the chest of drawers looked wet, like a car in fog. Rather than get out of bed, he would often daydream of Nan Burnett’s garden, where the snow was so deep he could tunnel through it, crawling on his hands and knees into the hollow that had once been the pond, and lying down under the radiant white roof, with no idea which way the house was, and then digging on until the floor of the tunnel changed from grass to bare earth, when he would leap upright, diving up into the world again. And sometimes, lying like an effigy on a tomb, he would send himself on an imaginary walk across the ceiling of his room, around and around the twisting stalk of the lightbulb’s flex, over the bulge of plaster that looked as if it should yield like a pillow, and then stepping over the dam below the door to gaze up at the stairwell, which he could see so clearly it was as if his door were not closed.

When his mother called from the foot of the stairs he dressed and went down. ‘Rip Van MacIndoe, awake at last,’ she often said, and this was how she greeted him on the one morning that he would always be able to recall from this winter.

The smell of the previous evening’s fish was still in the room. Every windowpane was streaming, and strings of water lay in the cracks of the windowframes between the sashes. Frozen clothes were stacked against the wall at an angle of forty-five degrees, the stiff cuffs and shirt-tails resting on the floor. He picked up a shirt and bent it across his knee; it cracked softly, like the rending of a dead branch.

‘Where’s your tumbler?’ his mother asked him. She was holding the ribbed glass bottle of rose-hip syrup in one hand, while the other formed the shape of the missing glass. ‘Have you left it in your room?’

‘No,’ he replied, and his mother laughed.

‘Look at that stupid animal,’ she said, pointing out of the window.

A black cat was stalking across the garden’s perfect snow, pausing after every step and lowering its head for a moment; a robin watched it from the fence then flew away before the cat was close. Alexander looked at the track that the cat’s belly had smudged across the snow, and it made him think of the snowball fight in the street two days before, when Mrs Beckwith and Megan had passed by. ‘Go on,’ Mrs Beckwith had said, and Megan had gone over to a car that was parked nearby and wiped a handful of snow from its bonnet. She raised her arm, but before she could throw it he threw a ball that hit her on the buttons of her coat. She dusted the snow off, and turned to walk back to Mrs Beckwith, and she did not stop when another snowball fell apart on her back. He called her name, but she did not look round. ‘It’s all right, Alexander,’ Mrs Beckwith had called to him, as she patted the snow from Megan’s back.

‘Is Mrs Beckwith Megan’s mother?’ he asked.

‘No, Alexander,’ his mother replied. ‘She’s her auntie.’

It was a word that Alexander had never heard Megan use. ‘So where is Megan’s mother?’ he asked. His mother placed the bottle on the draining board and drew a chair from the table for him to sit on. Putting her hands on his legs, she looked into his eyes.

‘She doesn’t have a mother any more,’ she said.

‘What about her father?’

‘Megan doesn’t have a father any more, either,’ said his mother. Her fingers went tight on his legs. ‘It is very sad, Alexander, and we mustn’t ever say anything about it. Not to her and not to anybody. Do you understand?’

‘Why doesn’t she have a mother and father?’ he persisted. ‘Were they killed?’

‘No, they weren’t killed.’

‘So where are they?’

‘They’re not here any longer, Alexander. That’s all we need to know. We mustn’t talk about it. It won’t do any good.’ She fastened the top button of his cardigan, as if to signify that the subject was at a close. ‘It would upset Megan and Mrs Beckwith and everybody. Now, let’s find that glass.’

Alexander followed his mother to the pantry, where her slippers made a sticky sound on the painted floor. She reached for a tin from the shelf below the perforated panel of zinc, on which the dots of sky always looked white, whatever kind of day it was.

‘Will we be friends?’ he asked.

‘Who?’

‘Me and Megan.’

‘Of course you’ll be friends. Don’t you like her?’

‘I don’t know,’ Alexander replied. ‘Why doesn’t she come here?’

‘She will do. She’s a bit shy, that’s all,’ his mother explained, but he thought of the way Megan looked at him when he said hello in the corridor at school, as if she had heard some story that had made her think she should stay away from him, and he remembered her walking across the playground with her teacher and talking to her as she would have talked to Mrs Beckwith, and she did not seem shy at all.

‘I don’t think she is,’ he said.

‘Yes, she is, Alexander,’ his mother assured him. ‘Give it time. Just wait.’

Through the spring of that year Alexander waited, even when he saw Megan ahead of him as they came out of school, walking on her own. She never looked back, and he could not speak to her, because there were things about Megan that nobody could speak about, and he was afraid that by accident he might say something that would make her unhappy.

‘Hello, Alexander, how are you?’ she said to him once, by the door of the assembly room, and it seemed she was pretending to be older to prevent him from talking to her, and he smiled at her and left her alone.

And so it continued until May, and the Saturday morning that would begin in Alexander’s memory outside the shoe repairer’s, from which he and his mother had emerged to find that the rain had stopped. His mother suggested they go to the park for an hour, and a short way beyond the gates, on the path to the Ranger’s House, they met Gladys Watts, who had also worked at the plating factory when the war was on. Too big to bend, Gladys tickled the side of Alexander’s face with her black cotton gloves.

‘I’ll be lucky if he’s sweet as this one,’ she said. ‘We’ve met before, young lad. At your house. Remember?’

Alexander glanced at his mother. ‘Go on, then,’ she said to him. ‘Not far, mind. Not out of sight.’ She unbuttoned the black and white cardigan that Nan Burnett had knitted for him.

‘One word from us and they do as they like,’ said Gladys Watts, who gave him a smile as if he had said something clever, though he had not said a word.

His mother folded the cardigan and threaded it through the handles of her shopping bag. ‘Wouldn’t say that,’ she remarked. ‘Would you, Alexander?’

He would not be able to recall, even five years later, to whom his mother had been talking in the park that Saturday morning, five minutes before he first saw Mr Beckwith, but he would remember to the end of his life what happened then.

He was standing close to the roses, and a squirrel was fretting at a nut by the foot of a chestnut tree, not a yard from where Alexander stood. A bandy-legged Jack Russell hurried after its owner with a peculiar skipping motion of its hind legs. To his right, walking along a tarmac path towards one of the gates, was Megan, two steps in front of a man who looked like no person Alexander had ever seen. The skin of his face and arms and hands was the colour of the wall behind him, but it shone like it had oil all over it. The man was both old and not old. His hair was dark and thick and he kept his back very straight as he walked, like Alexander’s father did, yet he had the face of an old man. Down his cheeks ran lines like the grain on floorboards, and the lines beside his mouth were so deep it was as if his jaw had two slots cut into it. He wore no tie but the collar of his shirt was fastened and looped slackly around his dark brown neck. The trousers that he was wearing did not seem to belong to him. They hung like curtains around his legs and were bunched around his waist with a narrow leather belt, the end of which dangled down past his pocket. His arms dangled too, lifelessly, from his rolled-up sleeves, as if they were attached to his body on hooks, and although he held his head up and was looking straight ahead, he did not seem to be seeing what was around him. The Jack Russell scampered across the path, kicking up clumps of cut grass, but he did not look down. A pigeon flew low past his head; he appeared not to notice it. Staying two steps behind Megan, saying nothing, the man might have been playing a game in which she was the adult and he the child.

Alexander followed them for a minute, keeping to the grass beside the path. ‘Megan?’ he said, when he was about ten feet from them. She looked up and quickly turned her face, as if she did not know who he was. Her left hand went back towards the man, and for a moment he touched her fingers as she led him to the gate. The man followed Megan out into the street, not even glancing at Alexander and his mother, who was now beside him, on her own. Preventing him from following, his mother’s hand came over his shoulder and pressed in the centre of his chest.

‘Who’s that with Megan?’ he asked, and she told him it was Mrs Beckwith’s husband.

‘Why wouldn’t they stop?’ he asked.

‘It’s nothing to concern yourself over, Alexander. Sometimes when we’re together we don’t want other people barging in. Isn’t that so? Even if they are friends. Some things are private.’

‘But they weren’t talking to each other,’ Alexander observed.

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I do. I was watching them. They didn’t say anything.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t be so nosy, Alexander,’ said his mother, refolding his cardigan. She looked towards the gate through which Megan and Mr Beckwith had departed. ‘The thing is, Alexander,’ she went on, ‘that Mr Beckwith is poorly, and you don’t really want to talk much when you’re poorly, do you?’

Alexander looked at the gate, where the trace of the brown-skinned man appeared in a dark flash, in the way a shape of light would appear inside his eyes after he had glanced at the sun.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ he asked.

‘It doesn’t matter. He needs to be left alone for a while, that’s all. He’ll be well again soon.’

Several times that summer Alexander saw Megan and her uncle, and Mr Beckwith never seemed to be well. The next time he saw them was at All Saints church. From the parade of shops he watched Megan walking down the path from the church door, as if testing an icy track for Mr Beckwith, who walked two steps behind her, with his arms as loose as lengths of rope. Then on Vanbrugh Hill he saw her standing on the kerb and beckoning across the road to Mr Beckwith, who lifted his head and looked at her and squinted as if she were too far away to make out clearly who she was. Megan crossed over and took his hand to lead him to the pavement, where she let it go and his arm swung back onto his leg as if it had gone dead. Once he saw them crossing the Heath, on the horizon of the hill, as if pretending to be Indian scouts in file. And once again, allowed to roam away from his mother for a while, Alexander saw Mr Beckwith and Megan in the park, and followed them again, but from a greater distance than before. For a quarter of an hour he followed them, down the broad path past the hollow oak tree, back up the slope, on the grass. Now and then Mr Beckwith would stop and stare up into the branches of a tree, or stop and look down at his feet, like a clockwork toy that had wound down, and Megan would crouch at his knees and gaze up at him, and brush his hand to make him walk after her again. Mr Beckwith never spoke, nor did he look at Megan, except for a moment, when, standing underneath a plane tree in a spread of light that turned his white shirt the colour of lime juice, he threw aside his cigarette and touched her on the back of the head, and Alexander saw her smile as broadly as she had smiled in the hallway of Nan Burnett’s house. Fascinated by the strangeness of it, Alexander stood wondering, until Megan came hurrying towards him, leaving Mr Beckwith to continue his walk without her.

She held out her hands as though pushing something invisible. A couple of yards from Alexander she stopped and pointed a finger like a gun. ‘Don’t stare at him,’ she demanded.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘You always stare.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Alexander repeated.

‘You always stare. Do you think nobody can see you? Standing there gawping. Don’t stare at him.’ She pushed her hair out of her eyes and glared at him before turning back.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

‘You’re so stupid,’ she shouted over her shoulder.

When she and her uncle had gone from sight he returned disconsolately to his mother, pausing on his way under the plane tree, where he retrieved the stub of Mr Beckwith’s cigarette.

This was the last occasion that Alexander spoke to Megan Beckwith that summer, and it was not until one morning in late September that he spoke to her again. He was sitting on the step that had sparkling bits of mica in it, watching the cricket game, when Megan came clambering over the wall from the girls’ playground. She pushed him on the shoulder to move him along, sat down beside him and asked directly: ‘What are you thinking about?’

He would always remember what he was thinking about. The night before, listening from the top of the stairs on his way to bed, he had overheard his father talking to his mother. He had heard the words ‘Marshall aid’ and something of an explanation, from which he had arrived at a picture of men like military cowboys, patrolling the towns of Europe and handing out money to the grateful people.

‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ said Megan, circling her knees with her arms. ‘It’s a man’s name. He’s an American,’ she stated firmly. ‘My mum says that America is the country of the future,’ she said. ‘It’s amazing what they have there. In America they’ve seen UFOs. That stands for Unidentified Flying Objects.’

Megan peered up into the sky, wrinkling her nose; Alexander mimicked her gaze. She looked at him and sighed an adult sigh. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, in a tone that sounded like his mother’s. ‘About my father. It’s all right. Mum talked to me.’

A teacher appeared in the doorway and called out: ‘Megan Beckwith. Come here. This instant.’

‘Caught,’ she muttered, and she shook his hand. ‘I’m sorry I was angry with you, Eck,’ she said, using for the first time the name she was always to use.

The teacher, after shepherding Megan into the corridor, asked him: ‘Exempt from exercise are we, Alexander?’

‘No, miss,’ he said, but he returned to the step as soon as she had gone, to sit where Megan had sat.

5. The Doodlebug House

His mother would take his hand to cross the road and, pointing towards the shops, begin gaily: ‘Now what do we see?’

And he would quickly respond: ‘We see a queue.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘We join it.’

‘And when do we join it?’

‘Straight away.’

‘We join it now, without delay,’ his mother agreed, concluding the singsong exchange that she and Mrs Evans had made up as the three of them walked along the same street on another Saturday morning.

There were always five or six women outside the shop, whichever one they stopped at, and another woman halfway through the doorway, with her foot against the bottom of the door, and a dozen more inside, packed tightly like on the bus. ‘What’s today’s special, girls?’ Mrs Evans might ask as they took their place at the back, and sometimes she would answer herself: ‘Whatever it is, it’ll be worth the wait.’ Once, however, a woman in a black coat with huge buttons turned round and said sharply, ‘I don’t know what you’re so cheerful about. The war’s not over yet.’ Then another woman said, ‘You’re right about that,’ and thus Alexander conceived a dread of the day when the bombers would come back, a fear he kept to himself until the day, five weeks later, on which a dormant mine, excited by the tremors of a nearby demolition, exploded in the garden of a house two streets from where he lived. That night he told his mother what he thought about every night, and he would always remember standing beside the bath that evening, gazing at the ebbing bathwater as his mother explained that he had misunderstood, while rubbing the towel on his hair as if to scrub off his foolishness.

An hour or more they sometimes queued, but Alexander’s patience was constant, because no pleasure could exceed the pleasure of at last entering the shop. Nestled amid coats and skirts, he would breathe in greedily to take hold of the scents that came from the women. An elusive aroma of lemons arose whenever one particular woman stepped forward, a woman with soft white arms and bracelets that clinked when she handed her money over. There was a woman who sometimes had a thin black line down the centre of her bare calves, whose clothes gave off a perfume that was like roses when they begin to wilt. Often she was with a friend called Alice, who had beautiful fingers and a perfume that remained mysterious until the day his father brought home a pomegranate in a stained paper bag.

Every sense was satisfied in these crowded shops, and a dense residue of memories was left in Alexander’s mind by the mornings he spent in them. Forty years later, looking at the maritime souvenirs that filled the window of what had been the grocer’s, he could hear above the traffic’s growl the crunch and chime of the ancient cash till, and he saw again the brass plate on the front of the till, and the comical bulbous faces mirrored in its embossed lettering. He saw the counter of the chemist’s shop, with the dimpled metal strip on its front edge that looked like a frozen waterfall. His fingers touched the window as he remembered how he would stroke the old wooden drawers by the chemist’s counter, sweeping his fingertips slowly across the varnished scars that looked like the script of an unknown language. The scurf of stinking pink sawdust in the butcher’s shop returned to him, and the sun shining off the slanted glass that covered the white trays of kidneys in their little puddles of brown blood. And standing before the Cutty Sark, gazing up through its spars at the coalsack-coloured October sky, he sensed the elation that arose instantly in him one morning, when he arrived at the head of the queue to see, displayed in a wicker basket, a heap of fat oranges that had come from Spain.

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