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, Alexander.’
‘Where to?’
His mother smoothed his hair again. ‘Graham,’ she pleaded.
‘I like Mr Fitchie,’ he told his mother.
‘So did I,’ said his mother.
‘He’s nice.’
‘Graham,’ she repeated.
‘Where’s he gone?’ asked Alexander.
‘He’s with Jesus, Alexander. Mr Fitchie’s gone to live with Jesus.’
‘Might have,’ his father joined in. ‘But then again –’
‘Graham. Please.’
Alexander closed his eyes once more, and in his head he saw the ambulance door and waggling feet. His father picked him up and carried him to his bed in the shelter.
From this night and from other nights Alexander would remember the top of the cellar steps, where the mud-coloured boards of the hallway ended at two shallow troughs of pale, splintery wood. The material of his father’s jacket scratched at his face when his father hunched over to duck through the gate of the cage in the cellar. He would recall his mattress in the corner of the cage, and the toy truck that was wedged into the folds of the blankets. He recalled gripping the wires in a span of his hand as his father climbed back up the steps, and testing his tongue against the metal, getting a taste that was tart.
Unequivocally from this February night he remembered waking in the darkness to hear first the grinding in the sky, and then his mother’s breathing. Her hand touched his forehead and its dampness made him shudder. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘They’ll soon be gone. We’ll be all right.’ He pressed his face against his mother’s arms, waiting for the ack-acks on the Heath and the woof of the big guns. Upstairs someone knocked on the door and he heard the clang of his father’s helmet against the wall as he left.
‘You were born on a night like this,’ his mother told him. ‘Nothing bad is going to happen to you, or to any of us.’ She sang to him quietly. ‘The cats and dogs will dance in the heather,’ she sang, and soon he could not hear the planes, but only his mother’s voice and her heartbeat, and Alexander slid into sleep, imagining tiny aeroplanes flying out from under a big blue gown like the flies around the bins at the end of the road, and the men on Shooters Hill firing their guns