caught it and all, I heard,’ said Mrs Darling.
‘Not what I heard,’ Mrs Murrell told her. ‘And a bloody shame is what it is. A bloody damned shame.’
‘Rita,’ insisted Mrs Evans. ‘The boy.’
‘Oh Christ,’ Mrs Beckwith winced. ‘Irene,’ she said, and then his mother’s hands closed over his face. He could not breathe properly, so he pulled at her hands. She turned his face into her coat, but Alexander strained his eyes to peer through a gap in her fingers, and what he saw was the two men coming down off the ruins of the house, and a pair of feet sticking up from the sling, one with a brown sock on it and the other bare and yellowish, like a pig’s trotter in the butcher’s. One of the men opened the ambulance door and climbed in. The feet waggled like ducks on a pond.
‘We’re not doing any good here, girls,’ said Mrs Darling, which made Mrs Murrell, Mrs Beckwith and Mrs Evans turn and form a circle around Alexander and the pushchair. Alexander put out a hand to bat a coat aside; the ambulance doors were closed.
Mrs Evans stooped down to Alexander and touched the postcard. ‘What have you got there, Allie?’ she asked him, squeezing his chin lightly.
He bowed his head and with the nose of a shoe scuffed a circle in the rough powder that lay over the pavement.
‘Be polite, Alexander,’ said his mother.
Mrs Murrell crouched beside Mrs Evans. There were grains like sugar, but finer, amid the fine pale hairs of her cheeks, and in her hat was a pin in the shape of a swan, with wings of red stones.
Alexander raised the postcard to hide himself behind it.
‘Same colour as I’m wearing,’ said Mrs Murrell, holding her overcoat open to reveal a pleat of her radiant blue dress.
Mrs Darling hitched up her coat and came down so her face was level with Alexander’s. Her lips glistened with wet red lipstick; her breath had a smell he would later know was the smell of cherries. ‘That’s nice. Where did you get that?’ she asked him. Alexander MacIndoe shrugged and looked to his mother. ‘Who is it?’ coaxed Mrs Darling.
‘The bomb lady,’ said Alexander.
Mrs Murrell laughed and touched his cheek as if to wipe a bit of dirt away. All together the three women stood up straight. Mrs Evans tapped the arm of his mother and spoke to her in a voice that sounded like gas flowing into a mantle. He felt something settle on his head; it was Mrs Beckwith’s hand. She teased his hair as his mother sometimes did at night when he could not sleep.
Mr Nesbit, raising a plank upright, called out and waved his hands. The other men all went towards him, kicking half-bricks down the hill.
‘Must get his highness delivered,’ his mother said, swivelling the pushchair around.
‘We’ll all be late at this rate,’ answered Mrs Murrell. ‘See you in the slave quarters, Irene.’
Mrs Evans squeezed his hand before he could reach the handle of the pushchair. ‘You’re a funny little mite,’ she said to him with a smile up at his mother, and she pressed his fingers softly in her soft, cool palm.
Alexander would remember clutching his postcard on a corner where the smell of burned paint was strong, and the clanging of a fire engine as his mother said goodbye, then being put on the draining board of the kitchen sink for his evening wash. He was there when his father returned.
His mother slapped the wrung flannel onto the sink between the taps before kissing his father, who flipped back the shiny steel bar of his briefcase and took out a thing that was like a dirty handkerchief stiffened with frost. He placed it on the table and gave it a nudge; it rattled on the wood. ‘Look at that,’ he said to them. ‘You know what they are?’ Alexander shook his head. ‘Letters, that’s what. Written on stuff called vellum, which is an old kind of paper. A fire shrivelled them up. Nobody will be reading those again, will they?’ he said to Alexander. His coat had brought the atmosphere of the street indoors; the perfume of smoke rose from his collar in a draught of coolness.
Touching the baked object, his mother shivered. ‘Like having someone’s shinbone on the table.’
‘Something odd to amuse our child,’ his father said. ‘It’s going back tomorrow anyway. If you knew the risks I’ve taken to bring it here.’ He turned up the collar of his coat and squinted shiftily at his son. ‘Mr MacIndoe, Undercover Operations Man,’ he croaked.
‘Mr MacIndoe, daft man,’ Alexander’s mother sighed. She raised the jug above the boy’s head to trickle the lukewarm water over him.
Alexander watched his father squirm free of his coat, then settle in his chair and close his eyes. A moment later his father yawned, took off his spectacles, placed them on the round table, and lifted the newspaper so close to his face that Alexander could see nothing of him except his hands and legs. Over the top of the paper was the top of the door, which had been on the tilt, his mother said, since the day after he was born, when the Thousand Pounder fell in the next street. The crockery had flown across the room and scratched a shape like the letter A in the table, which is why he had been called Alexander.
Briskly his mother rubbed his chest with the thick green towel, humming as she buffed his skin. His cheek rested on the flesh of her upper arm, which was smooth as soap and smelled of lavender. Wrapped in the towel, he was carried to the fireplace and into his mother’s lap, on the chair beside the round table. She scoured his hair and combed it and parted it, then placed him on her knee and held him towards her husband.
‘We are beautiful, aren’t we?’ she asked and then pressed her open lips to Alexander’s ear.
The newspaper came down a few inches. Slowly his father put on his spectacles again, and peeped over the edge of the drooping page. ‘We are,’ he said.
‘We both?’ replied his mother.
His father flapped the newspaper open wide. ‘Fish, fish, fish,’ he said, and turned a page.
‘Daddy will take you to bed,’ his mother told him, slicking his hair with her hand.
‘In a minute,’ said his father from behind the page. ‘The home front can wait a minute longer.’
Pursing her lips, Alexander’s mother looked towards the window. Underneath the reflection of the ceiling moved a cloud that was the colour of tea. ‘Where’s Mr Fitchie?’ Alexander asked.
She turned him to face her and regarded him as if she were not certain that it had been Alexander who had spoken. ‘Where’s who?’ she said.
‘Mr Fitchie. Where’s he gone?’
She tucked the towel more tightly around his shoulders. ‘He’s not here any more,’ she said.
‘I saw him.’
‘Saw who?’ his mother asked. He would remember the shape of her eyes as she asked him this, narrowed as if straining to see in the dark.
‘Mr Fitchie.’
‘When did you see him?’
‘Today. I saw him. Where’s he gone?’
‘Away,
