important, and very pleasing to the people who saw it happen.
He enjoyed sitting on the kitchen floor and scanning the pictures in the magazines that Nurse Reilly had brought. He might pass an hour bowling a ball at a line of milk bottles in the alley out the back, or shunting his Dinky van around the streets defined by the cracks between the bricks in the yard. Most of all, however, he enjoyed being in the front room of Nan Burnett’s house. The room had a rich and sleepy smell, a smell of varnished wood and old rugs, a smell that no other room had and was always the same. There were pictures in every corner of the room, hanging on nails midway up the walls, attached to the picture rail by slender brass chains, displayed in cardboard frames that stood on the sideboard, on the china cabinet and the mantelpiece above the fireplace, which had not been lit in years. To the left of the fireplace the miracles were gathered: The Loaves and the Fishes, The Bath at Bethesda, The Wedding at Cana, The Woman of Samaria, all in shades of cream and brown. To the right was Moses, tipping a dog-sized calf off its pedestal, standing aghast before a burning bush, dividing a sea that curled back onto itself like drying leaves. The pictures on the cabinet were photographs of his mother’s father and two other men, all in tones of brown and cream but with a chalky finish that made it seem as if everything in the pictures – the men’s skin, their jackets, the walls behind them – were made of the same stuff. Alexander once asked Nan Burnett who the other men were, expecting to hear that they were relatives, but they were friends of her husband, who had died with Stanley Burnett at a place Alexander never forgot because Nan Burnett swore when she said it. ‘Wipers,’ he would repeat as he regarded the dead men. ‘That bloody place,’ he would whisper, echoing his grandmother’s curse, and sometimes he would take the red glass stopper from the perfume bottle that Nan Burnett kept with the china and put it over one eye while he looked at them. And having looked at them, he would draw the thick brown curtains all the way across the window, then take the wide cushions from the brown velvet armchairs and lay them in front of the fireplace. Lying in the silence that seemed to come out of the walls of Nan Burnett’s front room, Alexander would close his eyes and see the handsome women balancing the pitchers on their heads, the men with smooth beards and the children in striped gowns, walking down roads that were strewn with stones shaped not like real stones but more like miniature boxes. As clearly as if his eyes were open he would see The Last Supper, with the figure of Jesus looking straight at him, and the picture of the nameless woman holding her chest on a crumpled bed, her head thrown back as if she felt sick, and the rigid faces of Stanley Burnett and his two dead friends.
‘What on earth do you do in there all day?’ he would recall his mother asking him, as he rubbed his eyes in the hall.
‘The boy just likes to be quiet,’ Nan Burnett answered for him.
‘Odd thing for a boy,’ said his mother.
‘Don’t fuss, Irene. He’s a happy lad. Aren’t you, Alexander?’ Nan Burnett asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, blushing, because he did not know if he was telling the truth.
Nan Burnett would never call him from the front room until his mother returned, but sometimes she called him from the yard to run an errand for her. He was on an errand when Megan arrived.
‘Take this round to Mrs Solomon, will you, pet,’ said Nan Burnett. She gave him a piece of paper full of numbers, with a drawing of a pullover on one side.
Mrs Solomon was putting a saucer of milk at the top of the stairs; one of her cats sprinted between Alexander’s legs and the banisters; he stroked the cat a few times, handed over the pattern, and no more than five minutes after leaving he was back in the hall of Nan Burnett’s house, his hand outstretched to open the door of the front room. Startled to hear his mother call his name, he jumped and looked to his left, and saw Megan for the first time.
His mother and Mrs Beckwith were advancing towards him down the hall, pushing the girl before them. Her eyes were the same colour as Gisbert’s had been, but they were wider and brighter, like marbles, and her hair was red, exactly the red of the stain under the tap in Nan Burnett’s bathroom. More than fifty years later, Alexander would be able to describe to Megan the outfit she was wearing: the white cotton blouse with the scallops around the neck; the blue-checked pinafore; the sandals with the pattern of petals cut over the toes. His mother said: ‘Alexander, this is Megan. She will be living with Mrs Beckwith now.’
The girl looked at him as if she was the one who lived in the house and Alexander was the one who had never been there before.
‘You’ll be friends, Alexander. That’ll be nice, won’t it?’ said his mother.
Megan held out her right hand like a man. ‘Hello, Alexander,’ she said.
‘Come on, say hello,’ said his mother.
Alexander stared at the girl. Silently he repeated her name. The word had a taste and a texture, a bit like toffee.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Megan, jerking her hand as if she were already holding his.
‘Come on, Alexander,’ his mother chivvied, but still Alexander stared. ‘Buck up, boy. Show some manners.’ Over his mother’s shoulder, Nan Burnett made a mock frown at him; she wagged a finger and mouthed the words ‘bad boy’. And then Alexander kissed the girl, who took a step back and put a hand to the place where his mouth had touched her. ‘You’re an impossible child,’ said his mother, taking hold of an arm.
A few minutes later Alexander and his mother were at the door, ready to leave. ‘Next week,’ she said as she reached for the handle. Alexander took one last look down the hall. Nan Burnett was standing in the kitchen with her hands on Megan’s shoulders and smiling as if the girl’s arrival were a treat she had arranged for him.
That was the face Alexander saw on the day on which, three years and five months after this one, he came back to Number 122 with his parents, to say goodbye to the house. His mother and father went upstairs, up the bare staircase, past the three white rectangles on the wall. He heard their feet on the floor above him, and when they moved into the room that had been Nan Burnett’s bedroom he pushed open the door of the front room. As the door gave way to his touch, he heard his mother’s voice in the hall say ‘Alexander’ softly, and he saw his grandmother in her kitchen, alone, but smiling as she had smiled when she had stood on that spot with Megan in front of her. A cold terror doused his body; he flinched and sucked in a breath without meaning to, and she was no longer there. And then it was like putting a finger in water and expecting it to be very cold and feeling it very cold when in fact it is warm, as it quickly becomes. He was not frightened, he realised. He had the sensation of being absolutely alone in a pleasant place, like a big garden that everyone else has left.
His mother saw a tear on his cheek. ‘Are you all right, Alexander?’ she asked him. ‘We are a pair,’ she said, and she put her handkerchief to the corners of her eyes and then to his.
‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’ asked his father.
‘Yes,’ said Alexander honestly, but he knew he must not mention what he had seen.
A nightlight, set on a saucer which had a crack across its pattern of blue willow leaves, burned on the stool between Alexander’s bed and the window, casting the hilly shadow of his body across the wall. The short yellow flame, batted by the draught, nodded on the surface of the molten wax, in which tiny tadpoles of cinder swam about in circles, drifting close to flame, darting away to the edge of the pool, drifting back. Sometimes
