LITMIR.BIZ

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eyes flickered back and forth as they listened, as if the game were visible to them on the glass of the kitchen window.

      But the visitor whom Alexander was to remember most fully was the one whose heavy tread down the hallway made the boards creak in the front room, where Alexander was, and whose laugh – a laugh so like a scream that momentarily he thought Nan had scalded herself – raised his curiosity to a pitch that forced him out to see who this person was. It was a short fat woman, and she was sitting in the chair that Nan Burnett normally sat in. She was dressed all in black but for a band of shiny white material above her eyes, below the black scarf that covered her hair. Her skirt was made of stuff that was like a tablecloth and it came down to the laces of her highly polished shoes, which were men’s shoes and also black. Instead of a blouse or a cardigan she wore a sort of cape that hung from her shoulders down to her waist. Her arms, tightly covered in black fabric, rose from the folds of the cape as she gave Alexander her hand.

      ‘So this will be Alexander MacIndoe?’ she said. Her fingernails were so perfectly trimmed and so white and so clean they made him feel queasy. ‘Alexander the tiny, is it?’ she laughed, clapping her palms on her knees.

      ‘Don’t be shy, Alexander,’ said Nan Burnett. ‘Say hello to Sister Martha.’

      He did not speak. He looked at Sister Martha’s faintly creased pink cheeks; they reminded him of marshmallows.

      ‘Let’s take a view of you,’ said Sister Martha, resting her hands on his shoulders. ‘You’re a fine young specimen of a boy, I must say,’ she said. ‘A handsome young man. You watch out for the ladies now,’ she warned him, and when she laughed her cheeks bunched into little globes right under her eyes. ‘Are you at school yet?’ asked Sister Martha, and Alexander replied that he was.

      ‘And are there other Alexanders at your school?’ she asked.

      ‘I don’t think so.’

      ‘Do you like your name, Alexander?’

      ‘Yes,’ he replied, beginning to be troubled by the idea that his name bore some significance of which he was unaware.

      ‘And so you should, young fellow. It’s a distinguished name,’ said Sister Martha. ‘A very distinguished name. Lots of great men have been called Alexander. Alexander the Great, he goes without saying. There have been Russian kings and Scottish kings called Alexander, too. Mr Alexander Fleming, he’s a great man. There was Alexander Pope the poet, though I’m not so sure about him. And there have been many Alexander popes as well, of course,’ she chuckled.

      Alexander looked at Nan Burnett, who winked at him and passed him a sandwich she had made. The sliver of brown meat lay between slices of bread that were as grey as her hair.

      ‘There have been many popes called Alexander,’ Sister Martha said. ‘There was Mister Borgia, who was from Spain and a very bad man, it must be admitted. Not a great one at all. But then there was Mr Chigi, who was Italian and a good man, though he was very rich. And a long time before him there was a young Pope Alexander, who was made a martyr in Rome on the third of May.’ Sister Martha wiggled her eyebrows at him. ‘You look astonished. Your birthday wouldn’t be the third of May, would it, by any chance?’

      ‘No,’ said Alexander, lifting the sandwich to his mouth.

      ‘No. That would have been a strange thing,’ Sister Martha told him. Putting her fists on her hips she looked up at the ceiling and said to it: ‘And we mustn’t overlook another young Pope Alexander, one of the seven sons of Felicitas.’ Her attention returned to the boy. ‘Another saint,’ she smiled, as if to encourage him. ‘Also made a martyr in Rome.’

      When he was alone again, in the front room, he repeated to himself the mystifying phrase. ‘Made a martyr in Rome,’ he muttered, imagining something that was like being knighted, but more 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

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