Ghost MacIndoe

His mother’s hand, cooler than the air, made a band around his brow. ‘We’ve a surprise, Alexander,’ she said, and she turned him to face her.

‘Yes, we’re going straight back to London,’ said his father with a straight face, buttoning his jacket.

‘Mr and Mrs Beckwith are here, and Megan as well,’ his mother told him. ‘Two weeks they’ll be here, same as us.’

A man and a woman were coming onto the beach; Alexander watched them approach until it was clear that they were not the Beckwiths. ‘They’re here already?’ he asked his mother warily.

‘Yes. They arrived yesterday.’

‘We thought you might be pleased,’ said his father in such a tone as to make it seem that the Beckwiths’ presence was a gift that it was in his power to revoke.

‘No, I am, I am,’ said Alexander. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

His mother pointed up the hill. ‘Over there somewhere.’

‘Hendra,’ confirmed his father. ‘A place called Hendra.’

The white walls had turned the colour of mackerel in the thickening darkness, and here and there a lighted window shone, tantalizing as the windows of an Advent calendar. A car’s headlights tilted down from the top of the hill and brushed along the houses, as if inviting Alexander to guess which one was home to the Beckwiths.

‘We’ll see them tomorrow,’ said his mother. ‘Next thing you know we’ll all be together.’

In the back bedroom of Mrs Pardoe’s house Alexander slept with his window open, listening to the sea at its nocturnal work, imagining that Megan was listening to it too, in her room somewhere up the hill, in a village with a name like a girl’s name. And in the morning, after Mrs Pardoe had knocked on the door to rouse him, he sat on his bed for a few minutes, looking over the rooftops towards Hendra and listening for the sea through the racket of the gulls and the clink of the cutlery in the dining room. His mother opened the door, and a smell of smoked fish gusted into the room. ‘Let’s be having you,’ she said. ‘We haven’t come all this way for you to hibernate.’ Alexander listened for the sea and did not hear it, but there were grains of sand on the pillow case, and these were sign enough that a day unlike any other had begun.

After breakfast they walked in procession down to the beach, fifty paces behind a woman with a blue towel held under her arm like a pet dog. His mother bought some food and his father bought a newspaper in a shop that sold sandals and rubber balls as well as bread and sweets and cigarettes. At a chart of the tides his father stopped again, as if he had forgotten that the Beckwiths were waiting. ‘Should be fine today,’ he announced. A luring breeze swirled over Alexander’s skin. At the end of the road the surf was rushing up as though to meet them, then scampering away.

Cubicles of striped canvas had been raised on the beach. Alexander and his parents walked past them all, searching for the Beckwiths. They walked towards the cliffs on their right, checking every hunched and supine figure. A woman in a turquoise swimsuit looked like Mrs Beckwith from afar, but was not Mrs Beckwith. They turned round and retraced the footsteps they had left. As they reached the end of their trail Alexander looked up at the dune and saw that a woman wearing a dark blue dress and dark glasses was waving as if wiping an invisible window.

Mr Beckwith stood up on the crest of the dune and came down the slope to shake hands with them all, including Alexander. ‘Graham,’ said Mrs Beckwith to his father, shaking his hand. ‘Irene,’ she said to his mother, and kissed her once on each cheek. To Alexander she said nothing, but looked at him with her hands on her hips as if debating with herself what was to be done with him. At last she smiled concedingly: ‘Megan’s with the other loonies,’ she said.

‘There,’ explained Mr Beckwith, raising a heavy arm to point across the beach. ‘The woman in the red cap’s keeping an eye on her.’

Without changing into his swimming trunks Alexander leapt down the dune and ran out to the sea. The woman in the red cap was standing in hip-high water, watching a girl who was dog-paddling along with her head held up and her eyes wide open, as if peeping over a tiny wall. Beyond her was Megan, her brick-coloured hair making snakes on the surface of the sea. She stood up and ducked her head into a breaking wave.

Alexander cupped his hands and shouted to her. She looked the wrong way, then noticed him. Her mouth spat out a gobbet of seawater and made a shape that might have been the shape of his name. With the flats of her hands she beat on her belly. ‘Eck?’ she yelled, and Alexander realised then that his parents and the Beckwiths had plotted together to bring about this moment for himself and Megan.

‘Didn’t you know?’ he called, as Megan strode towards him, raising frills of water from her foam-white legs.

‘Top of the class, Eck.’ Her laugh became a cough as she stumbled out of the shallow water. ‘No, of course I didn’t know. Did you?’

‘Not till last night,’ Alexander replied.

‘You’re staying here?’ she asked. He told her about Mrs Pardoe’s, and she trampled the soggy sand while he was speaking. ‘This is terrific, Eck,’ she said, poking him in the midriff with a forefinger.

‘You getting out now?’ asked Alexander. ‘It’s really warm up on the dunes.’ Megan looked landward and then seaward. Her eyes were bloodshot and a violet line was spreading from the centre of her upper lip. ‘Come on,’ Alexander urged, touching her stippled forearm. ‘You’re freezing.’

‘I’ve only been in a couple of minutes, Eck. Why don’t you get changed and come in?’ she cajoled. ‘Go on. Go and get changed.’

Alexander removed his shoes and socks and extended a foot into the rinse of an expiring wave. ‘You’ve got to get right in,’ said Megan, walking backwards into the water, ‘otherwise it’s cold. Once it’s over your chest you start to warm up. Believe me,’ she said, kicking with her heels. ‘A city boy,’ she commented to the woman in the red cap, and she sprawled into the surf and swam away. Alexander turned to wave at the dune, though now there were so many people on it that he could not be certain where his parents and the Beckwiths were.

Every day they all shared a picnic in a trough of sand on the grassy dune. Alexander and Megan would watch for the signal from Mrs Beckwith’s polka-dot scarf, and their return was in turn a signal to Mr Beckwith, who would come down from the crest of the dune where he sat like a sentinel through most of the morning, his face directed at the horizon.

On the third afternoon, once the sandwiches were finished, Mr Beckwith stood up, shook the sand and crumbs from the lap of his trousers, and then, instead of climbing back up to his lookout, placed a hand on Alexander’s shoulderblades and said to him: ‘I’ll show you something, young Alexander.’

At the back of the dune Mr Beckwith stopped, his feet bracketing a tussock of pink flowers. ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked.

‘I don’t,’ replied Alexander, promptly, as Mr Beckwith required.

‘It’s thrift,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘It’s called thrift because its leaves retain its water thriftily. Do you recognise it? You’ve seen it before.’ Mr Beckwith looked at Alexander with an expression that was as stern as the one with which he faced the sea, but his voice was soft and coaxing.

‘Have I?’

‘Yes, you have,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘You’ve seen it on the back of a threepenny bit,’ he said, displaying a coin on the tip of a middle finger. ‘You see: thrift on a coin. It makes sense. It’s also known as sea-pink or ladies’ cushions, and that makes sense as well.’ Turning slowly, he looked around the dune. ‘And that,’ he said, not indicating what he meant, ‘is lady’s bedstraw.’ Alexander followed him to a spume of tiny yellow flowers. ‘Put your nose on that,’ Mr Beckwith told him. ‘What does it smell of?’

‘Honey,’ replied Alexander.

‘Used to be put in mattresses to make them smell nice. And that over there, that’s henbane by the look of it,’ he said, walking over to a stunted bush on which grew clusters of watery yellow flowers. ‘Henbane all right. Take a look, but don’t touch it.’

Alexander crouched by Mr Beckwith’s feet. Thin purple lines made webs on the petals and the leaves were hairy as caterpillars.

‘A type of nightshade this is. Can make you very ill indeed. Worse than ill, in fact. Dr Crippen – you’ve heard of Dr Crippen?’ Alexander shook his head. ‘No matter. A nasty piece of work was Dr Crippen. Poisoned his wife he did, and this is what he poisoned her with.’ The face of Dr Crippen appeared to Alexander as a version of Mr Gardiner’s, sallow as henbane flowers, with hard little veins under his eyes.

From then on, Alexander spent part of every afternoon with Mr Beckwith. When the picnic was over, and the others spread out the towels to sunbathe or went down the slope to look for shells, Mr Beckwith would unhurriedly survey the sky and the sea and the beach, and quietly propose: ‘Shall we take a stroll?’ Over the dune and onto the roads they would walk, not strolling but striding, as if Mr Beckwith were taking him to an important appointment. From village to village they strode along the empty lanes, beyond the reach of the sea’s rustle, and sometimes the only sound was the ripping of the soles of their sandals on the hot tarmac. Looking to right and left in regular alternation, as if to ensure that nothing could happen on the other side of the hedgerows without his noticing it, Mr Beckwith would suddenly remark ‘Look at this,’ and drop a hand onto Alexander’s shoulder to steer him towards a verge. ‘Look,’ he would say, kneeling on the turf to hold aside a stand of grass, revealing a flower with petals like shavings of frozen cream, or moths’ wings, or tiny bits of sky-blue silk.

As if they were the words of a vow between himself and Mr Beckwith, Alexander would never forget the names of the villages and hamlets through which he walked with him: through Rinsey Croft and Colvorry and Trewithick they went, through Pentreath, through Kenneggy and on to the path above Kenneggy Sands, through Penhale Jakes and Trevena and then up the hill at Tresoweshill, and through Hendra, past the wooden bungalow in which the Beckwiths were staying, with its porch of white-painted wood and the whitewashed stones beside the path to the door. And after more than forty years he would still be able to recall every plant that Mr Beckwith named for him during the walk of one particular afternoon. ‘Common mallow,’ he said, crouching at the roadside to cradle in his palm one of the dark pink flowers that hid behind the dust-covered leaves. ‘Marsh-mallows are related to these. You make the sweets from its roots.’ The road curved in the shadow of a slender elm, and where the road straightened a company of tall yellow flowers stood on the verge. ‘Now this is a kind of St John’s-wort,’ Mr Beckwith explained. ‘If you snap the stem a juice comes out that’s red as blood.’ He put a finger on the translucent speckles of a leaf. ‘Because of that, and because these look like holes, people used to think it was a cure for wounds. But they’re not holes. They’re like sweat glands. Smell,’ said Mr Beckwith, and Alexander squatted next to the flowers to inhale a smell of dog fur. On a wall near the sign for Germoe they saw navelwort. ‘Known as coolers,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘Used to be put on burns, to cool them.’ He took Alexander’s hand and turned it over to press the dimpled leaves to Alexander’s skin. On the church at Germoe there was saffron-coloured lichen and red valerian. ‘Called kiss-me-quick, or drunkards,’ said Mr Beckwith, smiling as a breeze made the deep red flowers bob drunkenly for them.

A tractor was snarling up the hill, out of sight, when they sat down on a tussock to look at a pat of bird’s-foot trefoil, a flower as gorgeous as yolks. ‘Known as eggs and bacon, ham and eggs, butter and eggs, hen and chickens,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘Sometimes called Dutchman’s clogs,’ he added. He hooked a little finger under a flower and made it move, as if tickling it.

‘Day,’ said the driver of the tractor, eyeing them dourly.

‘Good afternoon,’ replied Mr Beckwith to the driver’s back. ‘Cheerful soul,’ he commented to Alexander, and he released the tiny flowers. ‘The others will wonder what’s become of us,’ he said wearily. ‘We should get going. Lead the way.’

On the way back Mr Beckwith walked a pace behind Alexander, as he used to do with Megan, and did not speak until they came to the top of the cliff, where they sat together cross-legged on the closely cropped grass, overlooking the beach. A black and white collie coursed across the sand; a man in voluminous swimming trunks swung a bat, and the impact of the ball sounded faintly at the cliff-top, like the click of a pen-cap. A trawler on the horizon was overtaken by the sky’s solitary bulbous cloud. ‘There’s our girl,’ said Mr Beckwith, raising an arm. ‘Off you go,’ he said, as though he thought Alexander had been waiting for permission to leave him.

Megan was walking with stiff, long strides and her head down, seeming to count her steps, and then she stopped and looked back towards the cliff, as if aware that he was following her. Putting her hand out like a relay runner receiving the baton, she continued her walk, smacking her feet onto the sand. She let him take her hand, but there was no pressure to her touch. It was as if her hand were something she was allowing him to carry.

‘You must have gone miles,’ she said.

‘We did.’

‘I’m going to the rock pools,’ Megan told him. ‘Mum’s asleep but your dad said it was all right.’

The tide was low and the sand they were treading was rippled like the soles of feet that have been in a bath too long. Megan released his hand and bent down to uproot an open razor clam. She scooped the runny sand from the shell into her palm and held it chest-high between them. ‘It makes you feel frightened when you think about what this is, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘Look at those cliffs. All this sand has come from them, and one day they’ll be nothing but sand. Isn’t that frightening?’ Alexander regarded the pat of damp grains. ‘Like looking at the stars,’ said Megan. ‘You must do that sometimes?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what does it make you think? Doesn’t it make you frightened? You must think something.’

‘Makes me wish there were no clouds in the way.’

‘That isn’t a proper thought, Eck,’ said Megan sharply, and she shook the sand from her hand. ‘Some of them are millions and millions and millions of miles away. So many millions that what you’re looking at isn’t there any longer. The light is like a parcel sent by somebody who’s died before it reaches you. Isn’t that horrible?’ She watched Alexander as he inspected the sky. ‘The stars are there now, but we can’t see them because the sun’s out. Or did you think they all went off somewhere for the day?’

‘Of course not.’

‘But doesn’t it make you feel giddy?’

‘Doesn’t what?’

‘That a long time ago all this wasn’t here, and a long time from now it won’t be here any more.’

‘No,’ said Alexander. ‘It’s here now. We’re here now. I don’t think anything about the beach. It just is.’

‘Don’t be daft, Eck. Nothing just is.’

‘Well, you just are. I just am.’

‘No you’re not. You’re the son of your parents. You’re part of them.’

‘No I’m not.’

‘You are, Eck. Where do you think you came from?’

‘I know where I came from. I’m not thick.’

‘Well then. You look like your mum. Exactly like her. It’s not a coincidence. A part of you is her.’

‘No,’ protested Alexander. ‘All of me is me.’

‘Same with your dad,’ continued Megan.

‘I’m nothing like him.’

‘Your dad’s a bit serious and a bit scatty.’

‘He’s not. He’s not at all scatty.’

‘Yes, he is. He’s always larking about.’

‘I don’t lark about,’ Alexander complained.

‘Yes you do. You do silly voices.’

‘No I don’t.’

‘Eck, you do,’ said Megan emphatically. ‘You do other people’s voices.’

‘But that’s not silly voices.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘What’s the point of this?’ he asked. ‘Why do you want to argue?’

‘I don’t, Eck. But you’re so sweet, I can’t help it,’ Megan told him, and she took his hand as they picked a route through the fallen stones.

They were on their own below Hoe Point, where Megan found a pool that was as smooth and long as a bathtub, with a fringe of spinach-coloured seaweed at one end, where she rested her head as she lay down. Water from the breaking waves frisked along the channels of the rocks and leaped into the pool. The water lapped at Megan’s goosefleshed thighs. Alexander would always remember this, and her hair twisted into unravelled plaits by the saltwater, and the freckles of dried salt that were mixed with the freckles of her cheeks.

Alexander watched the gulls wheeling out from the cliff where he had sat with Mr Beckwith. The birds made no noise now, and evening was beginning. The white flecks on the sea were like flowers that nobody would ever be able to pick.

‘You haven’t blinked for a minute,’ said Megan. ‘What are you thinking about?’

‘Not again,’ he moaned. ‘I’m just looking, Meg.’

‘Looking without thinking anything. I don’t believe you. It’s not possible.’

‘There’s a lot to look at.’

She looked at him as if pretending to be baffled. ‘Faraway Eck,’ she said, and she put her arms around his shoulders as a sister might have done.

‘Odd Eck,’ he responded. Creamy water hurried up through the gullies and touched his toes.

And he would remember the pyramid of towels packed onto a saddle of sand between two clumps of grass, and his father handing Mr Beckwith his Brownie camera. His father and mother and Mrs Beckwith stood at the back, their arms folded as if they were footballers in a team photograph. Alexander knelt in the sand by a mat of black seaweed that was baked as stiff as wicker, and Megan looped her arm through his. He looked back to see his mother picking a windblown strand of hair from her face. ‘Come on, Harry,’ said Mrs Beckwith. ‘The tide’ll wash us away before you press that blasted shutter.’ Mr Beckwith’s smile appeared at the side of the camera. Drifts of dry sand were moving down to the sea, flexing like snakes in their sidelong flight. A dog came running through the marram grass and Alexander wanted someone to ask him if he was happy because he wanted an excuse to say it, because he had realised that he had never been happier than he was at that moment, looking over Mr Beckwith’s shoulder and seeing the colour that the setting sun was painting on the rocks of Rinsey Head and the engine house of the Wheal Prosper mine.

10. Monty

Mr Owen had been at the school for no more than a month when, one morning after assembly, he stopped Alexander in the corridor, outside Mr Darrow’s room, and said to him in an aggrieved tone of voice: ‘Montgomery is an hero, is he not?’

‘Sir,’ Alexander agreed, after a hesitation, having heard ‘Anne Eero’.

‘Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, commander of the Eighth Army and victor of El Alamein, is an hero.’ Mr Owen shifted his feet as if adjusting his balance on a moving deck, and his plimsolls squealed on the stone floor. ‘He is a man who has achieved things. Stupendous things. He is a leader of men,’ said Mr Owen.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘A leader of men you are not.’

‘No, sir,’ Alexander replied, puzzled as to what he might have done to offend Mr Owen. His classmates were passing behind Mr Owen, filing in for the English lesson. John Halloran glanced at Alexander and grimaced in sympathy.

‘So?’ demanded Mr Owen. He wiped a hand over the crown of his head, as if to quell his exasperation.

‘Sir?’

‘What is the connection, MacIndoe? Where is the relevance?’

Still having no notion what Mr Owen was talking about, Alexander assumed a posture of contrition, fixing his gaze on the books he was holding to his waist.

‘Simple question, lad. It’s not an algebra problem. All I want to know is what’s the connection?’

At the window of Mr Darrow’s room appeared a sheet of paper on which the word ‘MAD’ was crayoned in capital letters. Lionel Griffiths’ head rose into view beside it, with a finger tapping at his temple. All of a sudden Alexander understood. ‘Not that Monty, sir,’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon?’ queried Mr Owen, his lip crumpling into a sneer.

‘It’s not that Monty, sir.’

‘What do you mean, MacIndoe? “Not that Monty”? There is only one Monty.’

‘No, sir, there’s another one. It’s the other one, sir. Montgomery Clift.’

‘Montgomery Clift?’ Mr Owen repeated in an outraged shriek.

‘The actor, sir. The Search. Red River. A Place in the Sun.’

‘Yes, yes. I am not an ignoramus, MacIndoe.’ Momentarily deflated, Mr Owen looked without interest at Alexander’s books, and then he looked Alexander in the eye and instantly rediscovered his indignation. ‘Montgomery Clift? The gooey American?’

‘Sir.’

‘That long lump of unbaked dough?’

‘Yes, sir. They think I look like him. Some of them do.’

‘Is that so?’ Mr Owen rejoined, and the delayed repercussions of a thought spread across his features, like a gust of wind rippling the grass on a hill. The sneer subsided, to be succeeded by a look of placid distaste. ‘Nothing like him, if you ask me,’ he said.

‘I don’t see it either, sir,’ Alexander replied.

‘Whatever could they be thinking of, eh?’ Mr Owen rubbed the toe of one plimsoll with the toe of the other, then looked at Alexander’s face as if it were a tepidly amusing drawing that a child had done. ‘Off you go, MacIndoe.’

The gymnasium was beyond a pair of storage rooms and a padlocked classroom that he was never to see open, at the end of a corridor that smelled of stale canvas and rubber and skin and coconut matting. The way in was through the changing rooms, where in the morning the dairy-white tiles gleamed in the light that came in through the gymnasium door. From the playground the pointed high windows of the gymnasium and the terracotta plaques on the wall gave it the look of a chapel, and there was something church-like in its appearance in the morning, before it had been used. Some mornings Alexander would arrive at school early and enter the corridor by the door that led to the playground, and if nobody was around he would creep between the steel mesh clothes-racks, and go into the quiet, high-ceilinged hall. The painted white lines on the parquet he could see as the patterns on the floor of an aisle, and he could see the vaulting horse, standing against the end wall behind a painted semicircle, as an altar of sorts, capped with its pad of blood-red leather. Between the windows on both sides the wall-bars were arrayed like tiers of memorials. Looped over the bars, the ropes made curves like stone vaulting, rising to the rings by which they were attached to the rafters. Until five minutes before the bell was due to ring he would sit under a window, listening to the voices growing louder outside, fortifying himself with the emptiness of the gymnasium before crossing the playground to his classroom.

Mr Owen’s lessons always began the same way. They would await his arrival in a line across the centre of the gymnasium, facing the changing-room door, through which the squeak of Mr Owen’s plimsolls would be heard and then, a few seconds before he appeared, his command: ‘To attention!’ Swivelling on his heels, he closed the door, leaving his hand on the knob for a moment, an action that signified that he was not merely shutting a door but imprisoning them for his thirty minutes. ‘All here?’ he would ask, before squeaking towards them, reciting a selection from his roster of nicknames. ‘Hercules Halloran here; Goliath Griffiths here; Tiny Tim Pottinger here,’ he would call out, while Alexander concentrated on the great volume of air above their heads. ‘The Mighty Pickering here; Girly MacIndoe here; Fat Boy Radford here,’ Mr Owen would call out, smiling to himself.

‘One day, one day,’ Mick Radford once muttered as he retrieved a medicine ball that Mr Owen had thrown at him, and the phrase became the class’s refrain. ‘One day, one day,’ repeated John Halloran, peeling a handkerchief from his bleeding shin. ‘One day, one day,’ promised Timothy Pottinger, running cold water over a rope burn, before writing ‘One’ on the underside of the tongue of his left plimsoll, and ‘Day’ on the tongue of the right.