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.
Two buildings along from the cinema there was a blind alley which Eric Mullins had once taken him down. The alley made a right-angled turn twenty yards from the street, and on this angle there was a flat, handleless door which led, Eric said, to the cinema. ‘It’s not locked,’ he said. ‘They can’t lock it, because then it wouldn’t be an escape, would it? You can get it open with a knife.’ Alexander inserted a penny into the crack of the door and levered it out a quarter-inch. He grappled his fingers onto the strip of door and worked it open far enough to slip through.
On the other side was a corridor of bare brick with a floor of rough, ridged concrete; a single bare lightbulb burned in a socket above a door at the far end, through which came the sound of indistinct voices talking loudly. Another door, halfway down the corridor, opened with a judder and a woman came out, fiddling with a button on her blouse. She smiled and looked at him as if she were trying to work out who he was. ‘Hello, mischief,’ she said. The light from the bulb made her hair gauzy. She opened the door and pushed aside a velvet curtain. ‘You coming or aren’t you?’ she whispered.
He went inside. The cinema was so large and dark it seemed to have no boundary. Like a drift of scum on a river, a stream of smoke flowed upwards through the beam of light, which swelled and shrank and twitched incessantly. Dozens of faces tilted upwards underneath the beam, all of them with the same expression of expectation, or so it appeared initially. Alexander wrapped himself in the folds of the curtain, which smelt like curtains in Mr Mullins’s pub. Unable to understand what the people on the screen were doing, he looked again at the people who were watching them. A few sat open-mouthed, as if waiting to be fed. Some were chewing, while some sucked on cigarettes, making scarlet bugs appear in the darkness. One woman seemed to be joining in with the words that the actors were speaking. Under the lip of the balcony, a man kissed the woman in the seat beside him; in front of them a man had his eyes closed, next to a woman who was frowning as if she disagreed with everything she was hearing.
Alexander’s gaze travelled to the end of the row in which the frowning woman sat, and travelled gradually back, to halt at a face he had already passed over once, and realised now was his mother’s. It went dark for a moment and then the light flashed on her skin, but she remained motionless, like a woman balancing a book on her head. Voices were raised in the film. The frowning woman shook her head and the sleeping man woke up, and then his mother’s eyes widened in amazement, though nothing had happened, that Alexander could see, to make her react in this way, and her lips formed an expression as if someone he could not see was in the seat beside her and telling her
