almost touching as they talked. ‘Come on, Joan, tell me,’ Alexander heard his mother say, and he stopped on the carpet that ran to the door, to avoid eavesdropping on Mrs Beckwith’s reply. He would remember looking at the sharp tendons of their ankles as they moved away from him, and then looking at his mother’s face, which now was in perfect profile. She laughed and her eyes became huge with astonishment as her mouth formed a word like ‘No’. The vivacity of her expression was of a kind that Alexander had never previously seen in her face; it was mischievous and very young, more like Megan than his mother. With a vertiginous lurch he felt that he was seeing a moment from the life she had led before he existed, or her life as it would have been had he not been born, and he understood in that instant that she loved him out of choice. A curl of hair fell across her ear. He wanted to rush to her, but his legs were like iron. She turned, as if she had become conscious of the empty space behind her, and then noticed him standing on his own. ‘Catch up, Alexander,’ she called. He trudged to the door, encumbered by sadness. ‘Slowcoach,’ his mother said, with a look that told him she knew there was something on his mind but was not going to ask what it was.
‘You have a run about, so we can gossip,’ said Mrs Beckwith outside. ‘We’ll all go for something to eat soon.’
Alexander walked around the train that was parked on a short length of track nearby. He sat down on the pavement on the far side of the train, so that he could see his mother and Mrs Beckwith through the gap between the undercarriage and the track. Where the sun hit the rails there were red and blue grains in the steel. Tufts of grease glistened on the bolts of the rails; they were the colour of the jelly in a pork pie. Alexander touched a finger to one of them, and the smell of it made him close his eyes. He saw the fire station and remembered how, when he was younger, his mother used to lift him so that he could see through the panes in the folding red wooden doors. Pressing his palms to his temples he willed into sight the scarlet metal of the fire engines and the black gleam of their tyres, like varnished charcoal, and the firemen’s jackets and tall boots arranged around the walls like vestments. Across his eyelids flooded a red so profound it brought a taste to the air in his mouth, a sweet and elusive taste he could name only as the flavour of redness. Again he brought the greasy fingertip to his nose. Water sprang into his mouth as if out of hunger.
‘Are you all right?’ someone was asking.
Alexander opened his eyes, and saw that a tall elderly man with a white moustache was looking at him quizzically. The waxed tips of the man’s moustache stuck out of the bristles like prongs of chicken bone; these repulsive miniature horns would still be in his memory more than forty years later, though the face to which they had belonged would not, nor the place where he had seen that face.
‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you,’ said Alexander, and he peered under the train. His mother and Mrs Beckwith, arm in arm, were approaching. ‘I’m waiting for my mother. She’s coming now,’ he said, pointing.
‘Jolly good,’ said the man, and he doffed his hat to Mrs Beckwith and Alexander’s mother.
‘Not easy, pet, I’ll tell you that much,’ concluded Mrs Beckwith, and she blinked one eye at the sting of the smoke from her raised cigarette. She looked at Alexander and it was clear that she knew he had heard. Her dress tightened across her ribs and creased as she sighed.
They all ate in the Regatta Restaurant, where the door handles were shaped like hands, and the plates were thicker and heavier and whiter than the plates at home, and they were served by a woman who said ‘Oh yes’ after every order, as if she had guessed perfectly what each of them was going to say.
‘What did you do, Eck?’ Megan asked as she chopped at her food.
‘Just wandered,’ Alexander replied.
‘So what did you find out?’
Alexander glanced at Mrs Beckwith, who was comparing the contents of her plate with his father’s. ‘This and that,’ he said.
Megan fidgeted dismissively. ‘Mr MacIndoe explained such a lot of things,’ she said to his mother. ‘We’re going back to the Dome after this.’
‘Are we now?’ his mother asked his father.
‘It would appear so,’ he said. ‘Alexander, are you a member of the expedition?’
Megan was fiddling with one of her hair clips. ‘These are a nuisance,’ she complained. ‘Help me out, Eck.’
The clip jumped like a cricket into Alexander’s hand. ‘Are we all going?’ he asked.
His mother said they were, but before they left the restaurant she changed her mind. ‘We’ll join you in a bit,’ she said to his father as she stood up. Alexander took hold of Mrs Beckwith’s arm.
‘Latching on to us, are we?’ teased Mrs Beckwith.
‘You don’t want to listen to our chatter, Alexander,’ said his mother.
‘I won’t listen,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk behind.’
‘In front, so we can keep an eye on you,’ Mrs Beckwith ordered, and the three of them went one way while his father and Megan went the other.
Alexander led his mother and Mrs Beckwith from pavilion to pavilion, through rooms of new furniture and electric machines and wallpaper that was covered with patterns of crystals, and all the time he was holding the hairclip tightly in his palm. He was still holding it when Megan and Mrs Beckwith left, but the following day he decided to take it back, having convinced himself that it would not be wrong to go to Megan’s house, now that she and Mrs Beckwith had spent a day with him and his parents.
Because his parents did not know John Halloran’s parents, he made out that he was going to John’s house. It began to rain, and he ran to the Beckwiths’ house, where he paused at the gate to inspect the building. It appeared that nobody was in. He swung the gate back and advanced, cautiously, halfway up the path. Through the living room window he could see a newspaper lying in damp light on the arm of an empty settee. Alexander took the clip from his pocket and eased the letterbox open like a trap. He looked into the hallway; every door inside was closed. He was about to drop the clip when a sound to his left made him jump and the steel flap clacked shut. Mr Beckwith was standing at the end of the path that went down the side of the house. He was holding a trowel in one hand and something black in the other fist, and his white cotton shirt was clinging to his ribs, which showed like gills through the fabric. His bony knees looked like hammer-heads under the wet cloth of his trousers.
Alexander had seen Mr Beckwith many times in the previous year, always alone, always walking steadily with his peculiar padding gait, facing straight ahead. He had never seen him speak to anyone, nor even exchange a greeting with anyone, nor stop at any shop. Mr Beckwith was always moving, and now he looked at Alexander as if the boy had brought him to a standstill and he did not know what to do.
‘Hello, Mr Beckwith,’ said Alexander timidly.
Mr Beckwith looked meaninglessly at him, and his jaw moved rapidly up and down in a silent stammering.
‘I didn’t mean to disturb anybody,’ Alexander apologised.
Mr Beckwith looked at the front door as if it were a third person waiting for him to speak. ‘No one in, lad,’ he said. His voice was very low, like the voice of a fat man, and the words seemed to buzz in his throat.
‘I was only going to give this back,’ said Alexander, unfurling his fingers from the clip.
Mr
