ghostly room.
‘Thank you, Alexander. Very professional,’ said Mr Stevens, satisfied at last, and then he dropped a spent flashbulb into Alexander’s hand. Waiting for his mother to change out of the borrowed clothes, Alexander rolled the warm bulb on his palm. In the pock-marked glass he saw the grey of railway lines in the rain, the grey of the silted riverbank below the power station in Greenwich, the grey of the ash in the Doodlebug House. This he would remember too, and he would remember looking up to see his mother in the doorway to the back room, where Mr Darby stood in her way and said something to her. She lowered her eyes, then after ten seconds or so she smiled at Mr Darby as if he had said something amusing, though it appeared he had said nothing. She reached into Mr Darby’s pocket, drew out his comb, snapped it in half and dropped the halves on the floor. Having wiped her fingers on the door jamb, she hurried across the shining floor, her heels hammering on the tiles.
‘A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr Stevens,’ she said, and snatched Alexander’s hand in passing.
‘And vice versa,’ replied Mr Stevens to her back. ‘Goodbye, Alexander.’
As the door to the office closed, Alexander turned to see Mr Stevens laughing with Mr Darby, who was fanning his hand in front of his mouth, miming an endless yawn.
‘What happened?’ Alexander asked his mother on the stairs.
‘A very rude man,’ she said, placing the back of a hand on her reddened cheeks. ‘A very disagreeable person.’
‘I didn’t like him,’ said Alexander.
‘Quite right,’ she told him.
‘Smarmy.’
‘Smarmy,’ she agreed, but she was making them walk so fast they could not talk, and on the train she sat in silence, glaring at the window as if her reflected face were Mr Darby’s.
The advertisement appeared in Every Woman magazine near the end of the year, next to a knitting pattern and opposite an advertisement in which a boy of Alexander’s age was striding along a road in a countryside of wheat fields and sheep and thatched cottages, with a spiral of steam rising from a mug in the foreground, above the slogan ‘It’s The Only Way To Start The Day!’ The road and fields and cottages were painted, not real, and the vista of cupboards and shelves behind his mother and Mr Darby was unreal as well, like a pencil tracing rather than a photograph.
His father leaned back in his chair and brought the page close to his face. ‘A peculiar scene all right, son,’ he said. ‘Looks like no kitchen I’ve ever been in. And as for Mr Handsome, the cuckoo in the nest.’ He shook his head in histrionic sorrow.
‘Your idea as well as mine,’ said Alexander’s mother, turning her embroidery frame. ‘We got a good deal.’
‘Imagine, son. Your poor old dad not wanted on voyage. Insufficient juttiness of jaw. The humiliation of it.’ He put down the magazine and picked up his newspaper, but as soon as they were left alone he turned to Alexander and whispered behind his hand, like a classmate playing a prank: ‘Borrow your pencil?’
Alexander sat on the arm of the chair and watched his father draw a goatee moustache and glasses on the man, and then a speech bubble from Alexander’s mouth. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he wrote in the bubble.
Their laughter brought Alexander’s mother back. ‘What’s funny?’ she asked, drying her hands on a tea-towel, and Alexander displayed the advertisement. ‘Which one of you two infants did that, then?’ she demanded, not smiling.
‘He did,’ said Alexander’s father, handcuffing his son with his fingers.
‘Idiot.’
‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity,’ his father replied, for which he received a swat on the back of the head with the newspaper. ‘I’ll get you another one,’ he laughed.
‘You will indeed,’ said Alexander’s mother.
‘Dog house for me,’ said his father. He took the newspaper from her hand and unrolled it. ‘Mind you, we’ll all be done for at this rate,’ he added, looking into the open pages as if he were staring into a pit.
Alexander would remember the words ‘38th Parallel’ in the headline, and his pang of perplexity at the notion that something was happening in which peril and geometry were in some way combined. And he would remember looking at the advertisement his father had defaced, at his mother stirring the empty pot, at the simpering boy who was more like the boy on the painted road than he was like himself, and at the unpleasant Mr Darby, who seemed to be smirking at him, as if he knew that Alexander wanted him to go away.
It was raining as the train went over Hungerford Bridge, and Alexander looked to his left at the roof of the Dome of Discovery, which was like a pavement of silver.
‘That’s called the Skylon,’ said his mother, pointing to the rocket-shaped thing that balanced on tightropes beside the river. A boy across the aisle leaned forward to see, and slapped his bare knees with excitement. On the far bank, the big tower of the Houses of Parliament was wrapped in a cocoon of scaffolding.
‘An hour till rendezvous,’ said his father as they jostled down the steps off the bridge. ‘Let’s follow our noses for a while.’
First they went to look at the section on British wildlife, where Alexander, willing the time to pass, entranced himself with a picture of a Scottish wild cat cringing into the hollow of a tree trunk. People buffeted his back as he stood his ground, staring at the cat’s gaping mouth. ‘Come along, daydream,’ said his mother, touching his neck. ‘There’s lots more to see. We can’t spend all day looking at a moggy.’
‘How much longer till they arrive?’ Alexander asked.
His father did not even check his watch. ‘Good grief,’ he said. ‘Patience, boy. About one hour minus five minutes.’
They went to a pavilion in which there were large straw figures of a lion and a unicorn. ‘The twin symbols of the Briton’s character,’ his father read.
‘Twin symbols?’ said Alexander.
‘Yes. Of the Britons,’ said his father. ‘All the people who are British. Me, you. All of us. What don’t you understand?’
‘Why two?’
‘The lion is like the lion on the flags,’ his father explained. ‘Like the British Lions. Richard the Lionheart. Lion-hearted Britons in general – Francis Drake, Henry the Fifth, Winston Churchill, Randolph Turpin.’
‘So not all of us?’
‘Deep down, all of us, yes. But it’s more obvious with some than with others, I grant you. Noël Coward, for instance. You have to dig pretty deep to find the lion there.’
‘I thought it was the British bulldog.’
‘It can be that too, yes,’ his mother said. ‘But the lion’s more noble, more regal. And more ancient. There’s history with the
