of dirty-looking wood, which was planted in the grass near the hollow that had once been a pond. All of this Alexander would remember, and the white rhododendron overhanging the hollow, under which he would find a frog sometimes, and kneel on the soggy ground to watch the panicky pulse in the animal’s side until it sprang away, falling into the dandelions with the quietest of crashes.
An ivy, rooted under the bay of the front room, swerved under the sills and then spread outwards, covering most of the bathroom window and part of the bedroom’s bay, spilling down over the porch and flowing inwards to the door. Once a month, on a Sunday, Alexander and his parents would visit Nan Burnett, and if the weather was fine his father would be certain, at some point in the afternoon, to lean aside and look down the hallway from the kitchen, remarking: ‘Things a bit wild out front, aren’t they, Nan?’ or ‘Had problems locating the entrance recently?’ or ‘Found any Japs this week?’ And whatever the joke, Nan Burnett would pat the back of his father’s hand and call him a treasure, and his father, standing behind a chair to grasp the topmost rung of its back like the handrail of a captain’s bridge, would order all MacIndoe hands on deck. ‘Action stations!’ he commanded, opening the door from the kitchen to the backyard, which was nothing but a small rectangle of glazed grey bricks, with a tiny shed where Nan Burnett stored the stepladders and the shears, and a gate opening onto an alley that had a crest of grass down the middle and lumps of black glassy rock on its verges.
Alexander would follow his father back through the house, bearing the shears blade-downwards past the coat-stand and the oval mirror and the line of Nan Burnett’s shoes, with their toe caps turned up like heads, watching the goings-on in the hall. When his father had rolled his sleeves up above his elbows and loosened his tie, Alexander would present the shears and then stand back in attendance, while his father sliced long cords of ivy from the wall and lopped hanks of foliage off the hedge that separated the garden from the street.
‘Remove please, toot sweet,’ his father said, glancing back over his shoulder first at his son and then at the tangle of cuttings, which Alexander scooped into his arms and carried out to the yard, where his father would burn them. If ever he was left alone to keep an eye on the smouldering leaves, Alexander would step into the blue, stripy smoke that streamed from the fire, so that his clothes that evening would be soaked with a smell that had come from Nan Burnett’s garden.
On days when Alexander’s mother had to go up to town or do something else that she had to do without him, she would usually take him to Nan Burnett’s house, and often another visitor would arrive while he was there. Sometimes it was Dot, whose surname he never knew; she lived somewhere further down the street, past the newsagent’s shop, and from time to time she would hand him a twist of paper in which four or five boiled sweets were wrapped. Or it might be Mrs Solomon, Nan Burnett’s neighbour, who brought one of her cats with her in a wicker basket, and had a hairy mole in the centre of her cheek. On a Wednesday it was likeliest to be Beryl Stringer, a woman of his mother’s age, whom he was to remember only for her turquoise woollen bonnet. If he were at Nan Burnett’s on a Saturday he might see Nurse Reilly, who had violet hair and thick legs that had no ankles, and always brought two things with her: a paper bag full of wool and knitting needles, and a small bale of magazines, tied up with rough yellow twine. Always Nan Burnett would place the magazines on a stool beneath the table before taking her own piece of knitting from the basket on the shelf above the oven, and then the two women would sit on opposite sides of the table and the only sounds would be the ticking of the big clock beside the hall door and the jittery clicking of the needles. And once in a while the caller would be Miss Blake, whose name perplexed Alexander, as Miss Blake was no younger than Nan Burnett. Neither her name nor any feature of her appearance lasted long in Alexander’s mind, but one image of her presence did persist, in a scene in which Nan Burnett and another old lady were seated at the kitchen table, each with one elbow on the tabletop, each facing the window that looked onto the yard. There was a pot of tea between them, under a knitted tea-cosy, and they were listening to a tennis match on the radio. Alexander was listening too, but intermittently, for what engrossed him was the intentness and pleasure of the two old women, whose eyes flickered back and forth as they listened, as if the game were visible to them on the glass of the kitchen window.
But the visitor whom Alexander was to remember most fully was the one whose heavy tread down the hallway made the boards creak in the front room, where Alexander was, and whose laugh – a laugh so like a scream that momentarily he thought Nan had scalded herself – raised his curiosity to a pitch that forced him out to see who this person was. It was a short fat woman, and she was sitting in the chair that Nan Burnett normally sat in. She was dressed all in black but for a band of shiny white material above her eyes, below the black scarf that covered her hair. Her skirt was made of stuff that was like a tablecloth and it came down to the laces of her highly polished shoes, which were men’s shoes and also black. Instead of a blouse or a cardigan she wore a sort of cape that hung from her shoulders down to her waist. Her arms, tightly covered in black fabric, rose from the folds of the cape as she gave Alexander her hand.
‘So this will be Alexander MacIndoe?’ she said. Her fingernails were so perfectly trimmed and so white and so clean they made him feel queasy. ‘Alexander the tiny, is it?’ she laughed, clapping her palms on her knees.
‘Don’t be shy, Alexander,’ said Nan Burnett. ‘Say hello to Sister Martha.’
He did not speak. He looked at Sister Martha’s faintly creased pink cheeks; they reminded him of marshmallows.
‘Let’s take a view of you,’ said Sister Martha, resting her hands on his shoulders. ‘You’re a fine young specimen of a boy, I must say,’ she said. ‘A handsome young man. You watch out for the ladies now,’ she warned him, and when she laughed her cheeks bunched into little globes right under her eyes. ‘Are you at school yet?’ asked Sister Martha, and Alexander replied that he was.
‘And are there other Alexanders at your school?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do you like your name, Alexander?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, beginning to be troubled by the idea that his name bore some significance of which he was unaware.
‘And so you should, young fellow. It’s a distinguished name,’ said Sister Martha. ‘A very distinguished name. Lots of great men have been called Alexander. Alexander the Great, he goes without saying. There have been Russian kings and Scottish kings called Alexander, too. Mr Alexander Fleming, he’s a great man. There was Alexander Pope the poet, though I’m not so sure about him. And there have been many Alexander popes as well, of course,’ she chuckled.
Alexander looked at Nan Burnett, who winked at him and passed him a sandwich she had made. The sliver of brown meat lay between slices of bread that were as grey as her hair.
‘There have been many popes called Alexander,’ Sister Martha said. ‘There was Mister Borgia, who was from Spain and a very bad man, it must be admitted. Not a great one at all. But then there was Mr Chigi, who was Italian and a good man, though he was very rich. And a long time before him there was a young Pope Alexander, who was made a martyr in Rome on the third of May.’ Sister Martha wiggled her eyebrows at him. ‘You look astonished. Your birthday wouldn’t be the third of May, would it, by any chance?’
‘No,’ said Alexander, lifting the sandwich to his mouth.
‘No. That would have been a strange thing,’ Sister Martha told him. Putting her fists on her hips she looked up at the ceiling and said to it: ‘And we mustn’t overlook another young Pope Alexander, one of the seven sons of Felicitas.’ Her attention returned to the boy. ‘Another saint,’ she smiled, as if to encourage him. ‘Also made a martyr in Rome.’
When he was alone again, in the front room,
