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
