perhaps. Next week perhaps.’ Then he smiled so widely that the gums showed above his back teeth.
‘Is it like here?’
‘No, not like here,’ said Gisbert, and he petted the dog as though the dog had asked the question. ‘There are big mountains, big forests, big lakes. Everything green. Not like here.’
Alexander would always remember Gisbert’s name, the fabric of his jacket, his chilly eyes, and these words that conjured for him a scene in which Gisbert walked over the rise of Shooters Hill and down a long slope to a vast green forest, a forest he imagined as being just beyond his sight when, some five months later, his father and mother took him past the crest of the hill for the first time.
‘Here is something for you, Alexander MacIndoe,’ said Gisbert as he reached into his jacket. He extracted a button, breathed on it and rubbed it on his sleeve. Alexander extended a palm to receive the gift. Raised on the button was a wonderful and mysterious sign, a pair of wings with no body. Holding it by the little loop of metal on the other side, Alexander breathed on the button too, and slipped it into his pocket. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘You are welcome,’ said Gisbert. ‘But I think you must leave, Alexander,’ he added, in the same moment as Alexander heard Mrs Beckwith’s voice.
‘Away, Alex,’ she shouted. ‘Come here. Come away. Here.’ She tugged him towards her and bent over to get close to his face. ‘You mustn’t talk to him,’ she said. Alexander looked back to see Gisbert shrug his shoulders at him and raise his left hand. Mrs Beck with tapped the boy’s chin to make him turn.
‘Why not?’ he asked.
‘Because I say so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you shouldn’t be talking to him, that’s why. He’s not one of us,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘Don’t be contrary, Alex,’ Mrs Beckwith told him.
‘One of who?’ Alexander persisted.
‘Us, Alex. You and me and your parents and your friends,’ she stated. ‘He shouldn’t be here.’
At the table she pushed the chair into the backs of his knees. His mother was moving towards him, cradling a dish of custard. Alexander craned his neck to see if he could see Gisbert, but he had gone back to the hill. He repeated inwardly the letters of Gisbert’s name, the first name he ever made an effort to remember.
Five hours more the party lasted, but only one moment from those hours was to endure in Alexander’s mind as long as Gisbert’s name and Gisbert’s forest. It was at the end of the night, and he alone was left sitting at the table. He was inhaling the tangy smoke from the candles that his mother and Mrs Beckwith had blown out, when he heard the sound of a footfall he recognised as his father’s. A firework slid up the sky with a shush and sprayed new stars on the sky. His father leaned over him to pick him up. ‘Little Lord Weary,’ his father said to his mother. Alexander watched a red dot of burning tobacco chase around the rim of his father’s cigar. He looked at the fire below the flower of grey ash and then he saw his father kiss his mother on her mouth, which he had never seen him do before.
The hedge at the front of his grandmother’s house was so high that even his father could not see over it, and instead of a front gate she had a proper door of dark wood, around which the leaves grew in a solid arch. The metal numbers on the door – 122 – were held in place by screws that had gone furry with rust. A spoon-shaped thumb-pad protruded through the keyhole on the right side of the door, and when it was pressed the catch always screeched. Inside there was a slab of greenish concrete on which the underside of the door would scrape, then three steps made of red bricks that had crumbled into a shape like a half-filled sack. From the steps a path of crazy paving zigzagged across the grass, passing a rose bush that grew so few flowers it looked like a ball of wire on which the shreds of a small pink scarf had snagged. Down the length of the garden ran a washing-line held high by a stick 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