Ghost MacIndoe

Only if his friends took him off to play would Alexander leave his place. ‘Bad news I’m afraid, Mrs MacIndoe,’ Eric Mullins joked, twirling the horns of a phantom moustache as he brought his heels smartly together. ‘We need your son.’ The company behind him – Lionel Griffiths and Gareth Jones and Davy Hennessy, whose leather-trimmed beret would last far longer than any other aspect of his appearance in Alexander’s memory – nodded their regretful confirmation that this was so. ‘Beastly business,’ said Eric, jamming his spectacles tight to the bridge of his nose with a forefinger. ‘Sorry and all that.’

‘Very well. Dismissed,’ his mother replied solemnly, lowering her chin, and they ran around the corner to Mr Mullins’ pub.

Entering by the door marked ‘Private’, below the white plaster unicorn with its scarlet crown, they bounded up the back stairs to the empty top floor, where each of the rooms had no furniture nor any curtains or carpets, but had a washbasin with taps that did not work. The rooms were connected by a corridor that curved like the tunnel under the river, and up and down its lino they would smack a tin of snoek wrapped in a sock, using cricket bats for hockey sticks and aiming for the swing doors that led to the stairs. Or in their stockinged feet they would skate along the lino rink, and their feet would make a hissing noise that Alexander, looking down the corridor at the two blind eyes of the windows in the doors, once imagined as the building’s breathing, an idea that so absorbed and unsettled him that he was startled when Lionel Griffiths, slithering to a stop behind him, shouted in his ear: ‘Wake up, Alex. Park time.’

In the park, at the side of one of the hills, there was a miniature valley in which the grass grew long between untrimmed bushes, and there they would stalk each other, descending the slopes on their bellies. When the others had gone home Alexander would stay for a while in the overgrown gully, and lie unseen within earshot of the path and listen to the talk of the people trudging up the hill towards the Heath. And when there was time he would then go to the place he called the Doodlebug House and continued to call the Doodlebug House even after his father told him it was not a doodlebug that had wrecked it but incendiaries and a broken gas main, many months before the flying bombs arrived.

A flap of corrugated iron, daubed with Danger – Keep Out in wrinkled red paint, was the door to the ruin. The four outer walls still stood to the height of the gutter, framing a square of sky, and within the walls were piles of debris, embedded with fractured joists and floorboards and laths that were like the ribs of a scavenged carcass. Against one of the walls leaned a huge tent of roof tiles, protecting a mantelpiece that had not been damaged at all. A perpetual stink of damp plaster dust and cats and scorched wood filled the Doodlebug House, and silvery ash was in every cranny. Low on the walls were stuck little rags of ash that vanished when he touched them. A book with leaves of ash trembled under the block of the toppled chimney. A skin of ash, pitted by raindrops, covered the door that lay flat in the middle of the house. Lumps of ash like mushrooms lay around the sheltered cradle of broken boards in which Alexander would recline and watch his portion of sky, hearing in his head the doodlebug’s misfiring snarl and then the thrilling moment of silence before it plummeted, a silence that excited him like the moment before he let himself drop from the empty window into the pool of torn bedding and sodden clothes at the back of the Doodlebug House.

Ash as slippery as sleet coated the joist by which Alexander would climb to the window at the side of the house, to sit between the battens that had been hammered crosswise into the empty frame. There, hidden from view, he would watch the people in the street pass by, or take out his Tales from the Bible, and read the story of the walls of Jericho or the Tower of Babel. Every time he came to the Doodlebug House he would go up to the window, until the day that Mrs Darling walked by and, without raising her head, called out ‘Be careful up there, Alexander’ and waved her hand behind her as if fixing a headscarf that had become unknotted. In later years he would often recall his lookout in the Doodlebug House, but most frequently he would revisit the part of the building that had once been the kitchen. Beached on a hummock that bristled with fractured pipes, there was a bathtub in which he sometimes dozed, and ten feet or so from the bath, wedged into the stump of the stairs, there was a wardrobe door that had a mirror fixed to it. The mirror was cracked from top to bottom, and the door was set at such an angle that, as Alexander neared the top of the hummock, he would find a place from which the mirror showed the wreckage to his left and to his right, but did not show any image of himself. Perched on a raft of wallpapered plywood, his arms held out like a tightrope walker, he stared in fascination at the reflection of the ruin, experiencing the smells and sights and sounds of the Doodlebug House, while apparently invisible. And he remembered that as he squatted on a beam and surveyed the rubble, a sadness seemed to flow through his body, a sadness that seemed to strengthen and purify him, to raise him out of his childhood for as long as it lasted. He was the guardian of the house’s relics, and such was his care for them that fifty years later he could draw a plan of the craters and barrows of the Doodlebug House, mapping the resting place of every item. Behind the bath there lay a washboard with barley-sugar glass rods that had not even been chipped by the blast; beside it was the brown canvas camera case that had been chewed by mice, and the cookery book with the spine that was a strip of bandage clogged with brittle glue. Closer to the wall there was the black iron mincer with its heavy crank attached, and the mangle with hard blue rubber rollers, and the soggy cartons of bandages and rusting nails. Some days he would touch one of the relics or raise it on his open palms and close his eyes, and Mr Fitchie would sometimes appear and look at him, as if across a river.

Neither would he forget the only time he ever took anyone to the Doodlebug House. Mrs Evans was with them, wearing the big silver brooch in the shape of a sleeping cat, and her green felt hat with a pheasant’s feather tucked under its band. They were at the butcher’s shop, and Mrs Evans made up another rhyme: ‘What a peculiar thing to do, to spend all day in the butcher’s queue, and all for a sausage, or sometimes two.’ When a man behind them started swearing, Mrs Evans cupped her fingers over Alexander’s ears. ‘For what we’re about to buggering well receive may the buggering Lord make us buggering grateful,’ said the man, and from the sly way Mrs Evans looked at Alexander he could not be sure if she had not meant him to hear. Then Mrs Beckwith turned up with Megan, who was holding the shopping bag in front of her, gripping its handles in both fists as if carrying the bag was a serious undertaking.

‘Why don’t you two go to the park?’ said Mrs Beckwith.

‘We’ll come for you in an hour,’ said his mother. ‘Shall we see you by the pond?’

Megan submitted the bag to her mother without saying anything, and the idea occurred to Alexander that he should take her to the Doodlebug House. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he told her as they entered the park. ‘It’s like being in a big well, or a castle. The walls are as high as that tree, on all four sides, and there’s nothing in the middle of them.’

‘How far is it?’ Megan asked.

‘Can’t tell you,’ said Alexander. ‘But we won’t be late back. Promise.’

Megan looked at the tree to which Alexander had pointed. She made her mouth and eyes slightly smaller, as though she doubted what he said, but then she followed him to the Doodlebug House.

‘No one except me has ever been in here,’ he told her. He pulled up a corner of the corrugated iron sheet so that she could crawl in. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone,’ he said.

Megan stood on a small rectangle of clear floor in the hallway, swatting the dust from her dress. Rising behind her, the walls seemed higher than ever, and the movement of the clouds that were edging over the Doodlebug House made the bricks seem to teeter. Alexander began to climb the joist to his window, but was stopped by Megan’s voice. ‘This is a pile of rubbish, Eck,’ she said, looking about her as if someone who had annoyed her was hiding in the ruin. ‘It’s nothing like a castle.’

He could not think what to say. He rested one foot on the fringe of floor that stuck out from the wall and held out a hand, though she was a long way below him. ‘Look from up here,’ he said.

‘Don’t be stupid, Eck,’ Megan told him. ‘It’s dangerous. I’m going.’ She licked a finger and turned her attention to a mark on her dress.

Despondent and resentful, he followed her away from the Doodlebug House. ‘You won’t tell anyone?’ he pleaded, when they were back in the park.

‘Of course not,’ she said.

‘Promise?’ he persisted.

‘God, Eck,’ she snapped. ‘Don’t be so boring. Why would I tell anyone? There’s nothing to tell.’

Alexander returned to the Doodlebug House many times afterwards, and the echo of Megan’s voice was always there. He could no more rid the atmosphere of her irritation than he could get rid of the smell of cats. With his arms crossed he would sit on the lip of the bath and scan the shell of the building, as if waiting with diminishing hope for a friend to answer an accusation. ‘A pile of rubbish,’ he heard her say, and he could no longer bring himself to see it differently. Finally there came the day on which he found that he was in a place that felt like a copy of the Doodlebug House, and he resolved that he would never visit it again.

He would always remember something of the evening of the day on which he left the Doodlebug House. Sitting on the grass in the garden, he closed his eyes and brought to mind the things that he had abandoned. He could see the slivers of grime between the rods of the washboard and the lustrous disc of white porcelain on top of the bath’s single tap. He could see the rake of shadows on the wall above the upstairs fireplace and the stiff blisters of paint on the back door. He could even taste the bitter air of the Doodlebug House. It was as if he were lying on his cradle of boards, and the Doodlebug House was again a place that belonged only to him.

When Alexander came out of his daydream a red admiral was closing its wings on a dandelion beside him. He remembered this, and his father looking at him from the kitchen door. The light through the branches of the tree in next door’s garden made his father’s face vanish under a pattern of brilliant ovals. His mother’s voice came from very far away inside the house, saying something he could not hear, and his father went to her.

One morning towards the end of 1951, not long after Churchill’s election, Alexander heard that the Doodlebug House was being demolished. In the afternoon he watched the wrecking ball sink into the wall below his lookout window. The wall gave way like a hand making a catch, he would always remember.

6. The Winslow Boy

Alexander was sitting in the corner of the garden where the bindweed came over the fence and the fat tongues of dock leaves stuck out from under the nettles. Holding the stalk as he had seen his mother hold the stem of a glass, Alexander turned the white trumpet of a flower half a circle one way, half a circle back.

‘He’s a contented wee soul,’ he heard Mrs Beckwith remark. ‘If you ask me, he’s got a real talent for calmness.’

‘You think so?’ asked his mother, standing alongside her.

‘I don’t see what you’re fussing about, Irene. I’d be grateful if I were you. Not a minute’s peace with Megan.’

‘Nothing but peace with this one,’ said his mother, and she looked at him as if he were a mystifying but precious-looking object they had unearthed from the lawn. ‘Not like the others, are we, my love?’ With the toe of her sandals she dug gently at his ribs, he would remember. ‘Not a boisterous boy, are we?’ She threaded a hand under Mrs Beckwith’s elbow. ‘You wouldn’t credit how long this one can go without moving a muscle,’ she said. ‘Meditating MacIndoe we should have called him.’

‘A genius at hide and seek, I’ll bet,’ said Mrs Beckwith, and she kissed him on the top of his head.

A week later he was taken to see Dr Levine, in a room that he would remember for its smell of cold rubber and for its chairs, which were made of metal pipes and had red seats that glued to his skin. Dr Levine was a short, stout man with silver hair and a silver moustache that was striped with two yellow stains below his nostrils. His eyes were small and pale brown, and he looked at Alexander over the lenses of his half-moon glasses.

‘What exactly is the difficulty, Mrs MacIndoe?’ he asked.

‘It’s not a difficulty, as such,’ she replied.

‘Not a difficulty, as such,’ the doctor responded, as though repeating a sentence in a foreign language.

‘No.’

‘Then what precisely would it be?’

‘A feeling that something’s not quite right,’ she tentatively explained.

‘Could you be more specific, Mrs MacIndoe?’ asked the doctor. ‘Could we pin this something down?’

‘He doesn’t seem to have much energy, for a boy,’ she stated.

‘For a boy?’ smiled Dr Levine, putting down the gold-hooped black pen with which he had been toying.

‘For a child.’

‘He eats well? Sleeps well?’ asked Dr Levine.

‘Yes. I think so.’

Dr Levine rose from his chair and leaned on the edge of his desk, gazing down at Alexander. ‘Do you eat well, Alexander?’ he asked, and narrowed his eyes as if there was some trick to the question. ‘Do you sleep well?’ he added, before Alexander could speak.

‘Perfectly,’ said Alexander.

‘Perfectly,’ repeated Dr Levine, and he smiled at the floor as he placed a hand on Alexander’s brow. His skin was cold and very soft, like a balloon that has lost some air. ‘Give me your hands,’ he said. He put the tips of his fingers under the boy’s and bent forward to inspect the fingernails. ‘Look up,’ he said. He prodded the flesh around Alexander’s eyes, then took hold of his lashes and tugged at his eyelids. ‘Nothing to worry ourselves about so far,’ commented Dr Levine, reaching behind his back and lifting a small, flat stick.

‘I’m not worried.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ replied Dr Levine, and he pressed his lips together, making his moustache bulge outwards. He placed the smooth dry wood on Alexander’s tongue and peered along it; the whites of the doctor’s eyes, Alexander noted, were the colour of the wax of his nightlight in the morning.

‘There’s nothing wrong with him that I can see,’ declared Dr Levine eventually. ‘Do you feel there’s anything wrong with you, Master MacIndoe?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, neither do I.’ Dr Levine yawned, removed his glasses and bent his fingers to grind at his eyes with his knuckles.

‘He looked like a big squirrel,’ Alexander told Megan that afternoon, and he copied the way the doctor’s mouth had grimaced and his cheeks puffed out as he rubbed his eyes. ‘Nothing wrong with him,’ he repeated with a superior sniff, twiddling his thumbs pompously on his stomach. ‘Are you a fool, Mrs MacIndoe?’

It was not the first time he had heard Megan laugh, but that is how he was to recall it, with Megan standing on the opposite side of the road from Mrs Beckwith’s house, and stamping her foot as though the shock of her laughter had travelled right through her body. ‘So you’re not ill then?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m not ill.’

‘You’re just odd. That’s all there is to it,’ she said, walking backwards across the street.

‘That’s all there is to it,’ he parroted.

‘Odd Eck,’ said Megan as a goodbye.

‘Odd Eck, odd Eck; odd Eck, odd Eck,’ he repeated for her, to the tune of two chiming bells.

There was a place at the turn of the stairs where the grain of the wood had come through the varnish to form sand-coloured terraces that he would magnify in his imagination to the dimensions of the cliffs and bays that Jimmy Murrell had described. At the foot of the banister that rose from this step he had found a globule of varnish that was not absolutely hard, from which his thumbnail could detach a black sliver that had an aroma that was something like the tobacco that was left in the bowl when his father’s pipe went out. The morning after the visit to Dr Levine, he was sitting at the turn of the stairs, his face against the cool wood of the banister. His mother came up, carrying the laundry basket, and as she sidled past him he asked her: ‘Do you think I’m odd?’ The smile that he saw, immediately before she put her arms around him and kissed him, convinced him that she did.

‘You do, don’t you?’ he called up to her.

‘I don’t at all,’ she said, and she dropped over the banister a handkerchief that fell over his face.

She was as worried after the visit to the doctor as she had been before. He would be sitting on the threshold of the house, watching the traffic or the sky, and she would rush to him and urge him out into the street to play. ‘Come on, Alexander, look lively,’ she would almost shout, clapping her hands to recruit him for some chore about the house. ‘Watching the grass grow?’ she would ask, or ‘Saving shoe leather?’ or ‘Holding the floor down?’ And once, when he was in the garden, he heard her say to his father, ‘Our son’s turning into a tree, Graham.’

One afternoon in April she strode down the hall, lifted him up, and said: ‘What would you say if I said we were going up to town? To see the lights come on.’

‘That’d be nice,’ he replied.

‘Once more, with feeling?’ she requested.

‘That’d be very nice,’ he said, loudly enough to earn an embrace.

They left the house in the dusk, and it was dark when they reached Nelson’s Column. His mother pointed down the wide road that stretched off to Buckingham Palace. ‘Do you want to go down there?’ she asked. She did not seem interested by the idea.

‘Don’t mind,’ he said.

‘Fine. What about down there? Do you want to go and see the Houses of Parliament?’ she asked, and it seemed she would be disappointed if he did.

He looked down Whitehall. The buildings were all the same colour and all the people were walking with their heads down, as if they didn’t want to see anyone. ‘We saw them from the train, didn’t we?’ he replied.

‘Let’s go and see the lights then,’ she proposed.

The lights were in Leicester Square, where the Empire was presenting Easter Parade with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. For a few minutes they stood in the drizzle, while his mother marvelled at the signs for the shows. ‘Magnificent, isn’t it?’ she said, gesturing at a building on which huge grey shadows floated like the spirits of the dead in the picture of heaven in Nan Burnett’s front room. ‘We’ll take a walk through theatreland,’ said his mother, and bareheaded in the rain they went up Haymarket and down St Martin’s Lane and across Covent Garden, where the pavements smelled of dustbins. Facing the Theatre Royal she took his hand and said to him, as if telling him something he must not tell anyone else: ‘This is a very famous place. A very special place. The Desert Song, Show Boat, Oklahoma! – they were all performed here.’ Under the theatre’s colonnade she sang a whole song for him, and she sang a few lines as they strolled back along the Strand, and on the journey home. But before the train reached Blackheath station she turned away from him and rested her forehead on the dark glass. From what felt like a great distance, Alexander regarded her, wondering what they had done that had made her unhappy.

Within twenty years the walk through theatreland would dwindle to the memory of the rain-slicked cars in Leicester Square and the sign for Easter Parade. The train journey home would vanish, but for the image of the tree of steam that rose from the funnel of a waiting engine, and of the railway lines rushing in like streams between the platforms of London Bridge station. The face of Dr Levine would vanish, as would the conversation on the stairs, and his mother’s conversation with Mrs Beckwith in the garden. All this he would forget, but he would remember acutely and at length the Saturday, in July of that year, on which he followed his mother.

Early on a Saturday afternoon he would sometimes go to Mr Prentice’s shop, for no reason except that it was a pleasant place to be. For as long as ten minutes he would stand behind the potato sacks, where he was not in anybody’s way. Breathing in the bountiful smells of the shop, he watched the brass cylinders flying over the heads of the customers, shuttling along the wires that ran between the counters and the cashier’s turret, where an old woman with a hairnet unscrewed the lids from the cylinders and scooped out the money and the chits, like a cat hooking food from a bowl. To his left were ranged the glazed grey flagons of ginger ale, lemonade and dandelion and burdock, and to the right were the greasy pink hams and wheels of cheese, and the slicing machine with the blade that spun quickly under its shiny steel cowl and made a ringing sound when its edge came out of the meat. Opposite was the door to the back room, where Mr Prentice worked.

Sometimes Mr Prentice would turn round from his desk and call out to him: ‘All in order, MacIndoe?’ To which Alexander’s response, copied from his father, was: ‘Aye aye, Mr P,’ and a soldier’s salute. And in reply Mr Prentice would brush his brow with his forefinger; and then, having hitched up the metal bands that held his shirtsleeves to his upper arms, he would return to his letters and bills. On this particular afternoon, Mr Prentice gave his one-fingered salute, glanced over Alexander’s shoulder and said, pointing: ‘Wasn’t that your mum going past?’

Through the gaps in the whitewash prices on the window Alexander watched his mother hurrying along the pavement. She was wearing her long chequered skirt and her chequered jacket, and the dark blue hat that he had seen on top of her wardrobe but never seen her wear.

Alexander looked at Mr Prentice, but Mr Prentice was leaning forward in his chair and looking out at the street, though there was no longer anyone to see there. ‘Better hurry home,’ he said.

‘Suppose,’ responded Alexander. He stepped out under the awning and saw his mother go straight across the road at which she would have turned right had she been going home. From a distance he pursued her, dashing from doorway to doorway, watching for a few seconds before following, excited by the adventure but agitated by a sense of his own deceitfulness. When he saw a man stop to look at her as, waiting on a kerb, she glanced at a window and altered the angle of her hat, Alexander’s anxiety became so strong that he almost turned back. He saw his mother pull at her cuff to check her watch, then quicken her stride; he followed again, his heartbeat seeming to increase with the speed of her footsteps. She crossed another road and then, beyond her, a bus drew out from its stop, uncovering The Winslow Boy in white boxy letters, and his limbs became hollow with the relief of knowing where his mother was going.

From behind a lamppost he watched her slide a coin under the grille of the booth and receive her ticket. She smiled at the woman in the booth, and she was smiling as she pushed at the curving brass door-handle and crossed the deep red carpet of the foyer. A commissionaire with golden bands around his cuffs held open the inner door, and eased it shut once she had passed through, as if it were the heavy steel door of a strongroom.

Alexander sat on the pavement, his back against the lamppost, and waited for a while. When three men arrived and bought tickets he stood up to watch the commissionaire open his door, thinking that perhaps she would come out as they went in. He walked around the block, stopped to watch the commissionaire’s fingers drumming on the ashtray on the wall, and walked around the block again. He crossed the street. In a padlocked glass cabinet to the side of the outer doors there were advertisements for the new films: a photograph of Orson Welles in a shadowy doorway, and a picture of Alec Guinness in a dress and one of John Wayne on a horse. It was when he noticed that the woman in the ticket booth was watching him out of the corner of her eye that Alexander was spurred into making up his mind.