was at the station below the road; above the grumbling of its engine he heard Mrs Beckwith say: ‘It’ll be a time yet, Irene.’ His mother put a hand on Mrs Beckwith’s shoulder again and nodded at his father, who lifted him to look over the parapet as the train pulled out.
Inside the carriages every seat was filled. Men were standing between the seats, clinging to the racks, while women were sitting on the laps of other women, and the pale blue light in the carriages made all the faces inside look as pale as peeled potatoes. A window clacked open and a man yelled up something that Alexander could not hear. Mrs Beckwith waved at the train without looking at it.
‘They’re going up to town,’ his father told him.
‘Tough work,’ said Mrs Beckwith, ‘but someone’s got to do it.’
‘Not for the likes of us, young man,’ said his father sternly, but smiling.
‘It’s bed for us,’ his mother confirmed, and Alexander watched the red light at the back of the train disappear into the darkness of the cutting on its way into town, a place he saw as an arrangement of perfectly regular streets and buildings with thousands of windows, all undamaged because town was somewhere that was always there, outside the war. It seemed to him that the passengers he had seen on the train were on a night-time mission of some sort, a mission that was to do with making things change.
His mother was always at home now, and throughout that summer he went to the shops with her most mornings, and queued beside her patiently, while the other children larked on the pavement outside. In the afternoon he would play with Jimmy Murrell or with other boys whose names he was to lose from his memory in his twenties and thirties, or he would walk through Greenwich Park with his mother, sometimes continuing right down to the river, where they might go into the tunnel beneath the water, to see the long walls that were curved and covered in tiles like frozen milk. Often, when they walked through the park, she would take him to the statue of Wolfe and sit on the slope below the bronze general, making an armchair for him from her arms and legs, and he would lie back against her chest while she sang an American song for him under her breath. Once she pointed across the river and said something about St Paul’s, something that made him think the church had somehow fought off the bombers, a scene he pictured as the dome swivelling and sending out some sort of beam to bring the enemy down.
It was an image he would always retain, though within a few years it had slipped from its mooring in the weeks between the victory days. What Alexander would recall unerringly from that interval, throughout his life, was the sight of his mother dabbing her eyes as she made his bed one morning, and on a different day dusting the sideboard as if in a daze, her eyes fixed on the wallpaper in front of her, and another day standing in the hallway with the mop planted upright in its bucket, gazing through the open door and down the front path as if she were waiting for someone, though it was several hours before his father would finish work. Many times he would stand silently beside her when she was doing her housework, as he did when they queued in the shops. And once, he remembered more completely than anything from that period, she put the mop aside and framed his face in her hands to stare into his eyes. ‘My God, you do look like an angel,’ she said, but she said it as if it were some illness that he had. She gathered both his hands in one of hers and kissed them. ‘My black-eyed angel,’ she murmured, and looked over his shoulder through the narrow window beside the door, at the pavement along which nobody was passing.
This was a short time before a Saturday on which he went with his father to the church hall to collect a pair of trestles which they put in the garden of Mrs Darling’s house, alongside a stack of planks. Later that day he made flags with his mother, holding the scissors for her as she pulled the old sheets through the open blades, so they ripped with a thrilling squeal. They cut out triangles of material and stewed them in pots of red and blue water, then pegged them out to dry on the line, and when that was done they made letters of black card which they pasted on a placard out the front, spelling the words ‘Welcome Home George’. When Mr Evans came over with Mrs Evans to see the placard, Alexander looked down from his bedroom and saw Mrs Evans begin crying as soon as she had read the word ‘Welcome’ aloud; Mr Evans steered her back through the gate, his enormous hand spread right across her back, and his shoes made sparks on the paving stones.
At the start of the party Jimmy Murrell handed out conical paper hats and Alexander was tucked into a place at the end of the table by Mrs Beckwith, facing the stage that the men from the pub had built. The air smelled special, of marzipan and hair oil and washing powder, and the sunlight made the raspberry jelly glow so beautifully that he felt sad when one of the adults spooned a divot from it and tipped it on his plate. The owner of the pub played the piano on the stage while everyone ate, and then Mr Evans made a speech and all the adults banged their cups up and down. ‘Irene, if you will,’ said Mr Evans, holding out a hand in mid-air. Alexander watched his mother climb the steps at the side of the stage. She went over to the piano and stood beside it, with one hand resting on the top of it. He waited for her to call him. The pianist played a few notes and stopped. Alexander leaned forward to find his father, but could not see where he was. His mother was looking at her shoes. Mrs Beckwith stood up and moved a couple of steps away from him, towards the stage. The pianist played the same tune again, and this time Alexander’s mother began to sing. It was the song about the bluebirds that she sang, and she sang it in a voice that was not like the voice with which she used to sing at home. Her eyes were closed as if she were singing for herself alone, but her voice was stronger than he had ever heard it, so strong that all the people around began to sing with her one by one, and when the chorus came he could barely hear her above their shouting. The pianist took one hand off the keyboard and made a scooping motion; all the adults who had been sitting rose in front of Alexander, excluding his mother from view. Hands went threading under elbows; backs swayed against backs.
Unnoticed, Alexander eased his seat back from the table. The stray was lying close by, under a tail of tablecloth. Crumbling a piece of cake on the road to entice the dog, Alexander wandered off, in the opposite direction from the stage. There was another chorus, even louder than the first, and when it was finished everyone sang it again. And as the first line began again, Alexander glanced up from the dog to see a man sitting with his back against the shelter at the top of the road. He was a thin man, doubled over as if he were made of folded card, and he had hair that was the colour of the dog’s hair. The man was looking at Alexander but he was not singing. He had eyes like the sky and a big thin nose.
Stretching his long legs into the gutter, the man put his hands on the sides of the dog’s head and looked at its face as if it was a cup that was cracked. ‘He is yours?’ he asked, in a voice that was peculiar, and sounded as though he was telling him something rather than asking. His jacket was inky blue and made of stuff like the felt Alexander’s mother put on the sideboard to stop the vase from scratching. ‘Not yours?’ the man asked, to which Alexander shook his head. ‘What is his name?’
‘He doesn’t have a name.’
‘But you have a name,’ the man responded, but Alexander did not reply. ‘My name is Gisbert,’ said the man. ‘My name is Gisbert. G-I-S-B-E-R-T,’ he recited. At the bottom of the street the piano made a booming sound and everybody laughed. ‘Now you tell me your name.’
‘Alexander.’
‘Alexander what?’ asked Gisbert.
‘Alexander MacIndoe.’ His name sounded strange when he spoke it to this stranger, as if he had been labelled like a bottle in the kitchen.
‘Where do you live, Alexander?’
He pointed to the placard. ‘The house with the writing,’ he said.
‘Welcome Home, George,’ Gisbert read, but he said the last word so it sounded like ‘judge’.
‘Where do you live?’ asked Alexander.
The man stood up; he was much taller than Alexander’s father, and the cuffs of his jacket did not cover his wrists. A bony forefinger indicated the rooftops. ‘Today I live on the Shooters Hill,’ he explained. ‘But my home is a longer way.’
‘Over the hill?’ asked Alexander.
‘Yes.