Mr Beckwith appeared to hear nothing. ‘Is that all right?’ he repeated. ‘If I put it through?’
‘Put it through,’ said Mr Beckwith, and with the trowel he made a posting action. Black water was dripping from the underside of his left hand. ‘Are you Alexander?’ he asked, stretching his narrow neck as if looking through murk.
‘Yes, sir,’ Alexander replied. ‘Alexander MacIndoe.’
Mr Beckwith considered what Alexander had said. ‘At school with Megan, are you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Yes,’ echoed Mr Beckwith. Seeming to have nothing more to say, he watched a car go past the house. His head swung back to face Alexander. ‘My name’s Harold,’ he remarked at last, and he transferred the trowel to a windowsill so that he could offer a hand. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said. His fingers were cold, and rolled in Alexander’s hand like a sheaf of short sticks. ‘It’s raining. Do you want to shelter inside for a while?’
‘I should go home,’ said Alexander.
Mr Beckwith looked at the sky. ‘No,’ he told him with a grave shake of his head. ‘It’ll get worse before it gets better. Come with me,’ he said, and he picked up the trowel and turned back down the side path.
Ignoring the door to the kitchen, Mr Beckwith led Alexander into the garden. It was as neat as a garden in a magazine, and there were more colours in it than in any garden Alexander had ever seen. The lawn was an oval, not a rectangle like at his own house and every other house he knew, and close to its centre was an oval bed, in which only white flowers grew. In one part of the garden was a bed of yellow flowers; in another part every bloom was a shade of purple; at the end of the garden stood a wooden shed, with a row of red flowers along its wall. Every plant and bush seemed perfect in its shape, as if a smoothing hand had moulded the body of the foliage in one long caress, and there was not so much as a single stray petal to mar the darkness of the soil beneath the leaves.
Mr Beckwith opened the shed door, and they stepped into air that was warmer than the air outside and smelled of creosote and grass and newly cut wood. Their tread made the floor bend and croak. A rack of seed packets hung on one wall, above a tower of yellow newspapers. In a corner stood a stack of clay pots, next to a tool box and below a saw and a pair of shears that hung from the same nail. By the window was a high bench that was cross-hatched with blade marks, with a vice bolted to one end.
‘Look at this,’ said Mr Beckwith. He put his left hand on the bench and opened his fingers to expose the ball of wet soil that he had been carrying. ‘Blackleg,’ he stated. ‘See?’ He turned his wrist, revealing the limp stem of a flower drooping from one side of the clod. He stuck the point of the trowel into the dark stringy pulp at its base. ‘There’s nothing you can do about this. Incurable, blackleg. You have to burn it and go back to square one.’ With a foot he dragged a bucket out from under the bench. ‘Look at that,’ said Mr Beckwith. Half a dozen flowers lay on a bed of sludge in the bottom of the bucket. ‘All of them ruined with it,’ Mr Beckwith said. His teeth were as long as a dog’s, Alexander noticed, and the skin of his cheeks seemed as thin as a leaf. Mr Beckwith looked at Alexander abruptly, as if he had asked him a question. ‘Do you know what this flower is?’ he asked. Alexander shook his head. ‘No? Not to worry. It’s a geranium. They’re all geraniums.’ Mr Beckwith lowered the clod and its diseased stem into the bucket, as if it were a small sleeping animal. ‘Got a garden, have you?’ he demanded suddenly.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Nice one, is it?’
‘Yes, sir. But not as nice as this.’
Gazing out of the window, Mr Beckwith lowered his head towards Alexander. ‘Say that again,’ he said. ‘Hearing a bit dicky.’
‘Not as nice as your garden, sir.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘I didn’t eat enough for a long time, you see. That’s what did my ears. Do you eat properly?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Look like you do.’ A sound that was like the first part of a laugh made his chest shudder, yet he did not smile. ‘So you’ve got a garden?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Don’t need the sir, lad. I’m not your teacher.’ Mr Beckwith’s face wore a vague and thoughtful look, a look that made it seem as if he were being reminded that there was something he should be doing but could not for the moment recall what it was. ‘Megan’s a good girl,’ he declared.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Don’t need the sir, lad. Any good at woodwork?’ He lifted from the bench two blocks of pale wood that had been fixed together in a mortice and tenon joint.
‘Not really, Mr Beckwith,’ replied Alexander, wondering what use the wooden object might serve.
‘Neither am I,’ said Mr Beckwith seriously. ‘What about gardening?’
‘Not really. My dad does the garden. Mum sometimes helps. I do a bit, too. Not much, though.’
Mr Beckwith raised his chin and turned his eyes to a blank portion of the wooden wall, as if allowing Alexander’s words to trickle into his mind. Gradually he turned his head to look out of the window again. ‘Rain’s easing off,’ he observed. ‘Give it a minute or two. Sit yourself down.’ He waved a hand at the pile of newspapers, and he turned his attention to cleaning the trowel and the other tools he had been using. Streaks of dark skin appeared through Mr Beckwith’s shirt as he worked, and the sinews at the back of his neck stood out like the muscles of his forearm.
The stack swayed as Alexander sat on it, and when he spread his feet to steady himself his left foot slipped on a magazine. Alexander lifted his foot from a photograph that seemed to be of an old woman asleep on a mattress, with an old-fashioned night-cap on her head. He bent over the picture and realised that the person was not an old woman and was not asleep. What he had thought was a nightdress was in fact skin, which clung to the dead man’s bones like a collapsed tent of soft leather. Fleshless fingers, sickle-shaped, hung from the wrists. A shaft of bare bone ended in a strong plump foot. Alexander picked up the magazine to read the caption. ‘Who’s Tollund Man, Mr Beckwith?’ he asked.
Unwinding a length from a ball of twine, Mr Beckwith looked over his shoulder at Alexander. ‘I’m sorry, lad. What did you say?’
‘Who’s Tollund Man?’ Alexander repeated, holding the page outwards.
Mr Beckwith put his face close to the magazine. He pulled back a bit, then looked closely again. ‘Danish chap,’ he said at last. ‘Hundreds of years old. From the Iron Age. They found him in a bog. All the water in the peat kept him fresh. He was hanged. See?’ His finger touched the cord around Tollund Man’s throat.
Alexander gazed at the ancient man, curled on his platform of peat. The leathery face seemed to be wincing away from the photographer. It should be terrible, this image of a murdered man, and yet Alexander could not feel what he knew it was proper for him to feel. Waiting for an urgent emotion to seize him, he gazed at Tollund Man, at the body and the peat that seemed all of one piece, like a pouring of dark metal.
‘Fresh as a flower,’ commented Mr Beckwith. ‘Do you want it?’ To please Mr Beckwith, Alexander said that he did. With three swift passes of his rigid fingers, Mr Beckwith tore the picture cleanly
