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 he would pluck a hair from his head and feed it into the flame to watch it become a wisp of smoke before it could enter the body of the fire, or hold his hand over the candle until the heat felt like a nail driven through his palm. Then he would lie motionless again, his arms folded on his chest, his face to the ceiling, watching the steam of his breath roll off into the room. At last he heard his mother’s footsteps on the stairs, and the creak of the floorboards as she came to the landing. Downstairs the doors were being shut, always in the same order, ending with the clunk of the kitchen door and the rattle of its tall pane. His father’s slower tread followed, becoming even slower as he reached the top of the stairs, making a louder creak. And on the nights when the electricity was off he would twice see the candlelight rise and fade under his door as first his mother and then his father went by, and then the door of his parents’ room would close with a small thump and the light was gone. He lay listening to the rustling of the gardens and the dwindling grumble of his father’s voice, keeping his eyes open until only the sounds of the wind remained.
In the mornings the glass was caked with ice on the inside, and often the night’s fall of snow sloped high up the pane. When he opened the curtains the walls of his room were the tone of chicken flesh, and clammy as the disc of white wax that the nightlight had become. On the back of the chair beside the door a clean white shirt hung in the shadowless light like a big strip of cold fat. The tin bomber that was parked on the chest of drawers looked wet, like a car in fog. Rather than get out of bed, he would often daydream of Nan Burnett’s garden, where the snow was so deep he could tunnel through it, crawling on his hands and knees into the hollow that had once been the pond, and lying down under the radiant white roof, with no idea which way the house was, and then digging on until the floor of the tunnel changed from grass to bare earth, when he would leap upright, diving up into the world again. And sometimes, lying like an effigy on a tomb, he would send himself on an imaginary walk across the ceiling of his room, around and around the twisting stalk of the lightbulb’s flex, over the bulge of plaster that looked as if it should yield like a pillow, and then stepping over the dam below the door to gaze up at the stairwell, which he could see so clearly it was as if his door were not closed.
When his mother called from the foot of the stairs he dressed and went down. ‘Rip Van MacIndoe, awake at last,’ she often said, and this was how she greeted him on the one morning that he would always be able to recall from this winter.
The smell of the previous evening’s fish was still in the room. Every windowpane was streaming, and strings of water lay in the cracks of the windowframes between the sashes. Frozen clothes were stacked against the wall at an angle of forty-five degrees, the stiff cuffs and shirt-tails resting on the floor. He picked up a shirt and bent it across his knee; it cracked softly, like the rending of a dead branch.
‘Where’s your tumbler?’ his mother asked him. She was holding the ribbed glass bottle of rose-hip syrup in one hand, while the other formed the shape of the missing glass. ‘Have you left it in your room?’
‘No,’ he replied, and his mother laughed.
‘Look at that stupid animal,’ she said, pointing out of the window.
A black cat was stalking across the garden’s perfect snow, pausing after every step and lowering its head for a moment; a robin watched it from the fence then flew away before the cat was close. Alexander looked at the track that the cat’s belly had smudged across the snow, and it made him think of the snowball fight in the street two days before, when Mrs Beckwith and Megan had passed by. ‘Go on,’ Mrs Beckwith had said, and Megan had gone over to a car that was parked nearby and wiped a handful of snow from its bonnet. She raised her arm, but before she could throw it he threw a ball that hit her on the buttons of her coat. She dusted the snow off, and turned to walk back to Mrs Beckwith, and she did not stop when another snowball fell apart on her back. He called her name, but she did not look round. ‘It’s all right, Alexander,’ Mrs Beckwith had called to him, as she patted the snow from Megan’s back.
‘Is Mrs Beckwith Megan’s mother?’ he asked.
‘No, Alexander,’ his mother replied. ‘She’s her auntie.’
It was a word that Alexander had never heard Megan use. ‘So where is Megan’s mother?’ he asked. His mother placed the bottle on the draining board and drew a chair from the table for him to sit on. Putting her hands on his legs, she looked into his eyes.
‘She doesn’t have a mother any more,’ she said.
‘What about her father?’
‘Megan doesn’t have a father any more, either,’ said his mother. Her fingers went tight on his legs. ‘It is very sad, Alexander, and we mustn’t ever say anything about it. Not to her and not to anybody. Do you understand?’
‘Why doesn’t she have a mother and father?’ he persisted. ‘Were they killed?’
‘No,