‘Keeps you limber,’ agreed Sidney Dixon. ‘Not a country boy myself, though. Prefer the countryside, do you, Alexander?’ he asked, and seemed intrigued that this might be so.
‘Sometimes,’ Alexander replied. ‘I like the sound of the sea more than the sound of cars, I think.’
‘Wouldn’t call yourself a real Londoner, then?’
‘Suppose not.’
‘Couldn’t live anywhere but London, me. Go mad with nothing but trees to look at. Give me noise and crowds any day. What about you, Mrs MacIndoe?’
‘Our friends are here,’ she said. ‘Most of them. And Graham’s job.’
‘And a certain person’s girlfriend,’ Alexander’s father joined in.
‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ said Alexander.
‘Companion of honour, then.’
‘She’s not my girlfriend.’
‘Friend number one.’
‘Like her mother is my friend number one,’ Alexander’s mother told Sidney Dixon.
‘Precisely,’ said Alexander’s father.
Sidney Dixon’s mouth convulsed into a smile, but his face was turned to Alexander and there appeared in his sunken eyes a look that seemed to Alexander a confession of desolation. And in the hallway, as Alexander’s father held up Sidney Dixon’s coat for him, Sidney looked at Alexander and smiled at his own clumsiness, and the same expression was momentarily in his eyes again. ‘Perhaps your mother would appreciate a picture, for her hospitality? Custom made. What do you think?’
‘No need,’ said Alexander’s father. ‘The pleasure was ours.’
‘But I’d like to. Perhaps you’d come along with me on Sunday, Alexander? You can choose the scene for her.’
So on the following Sunday morning, shortly before noon, Alexander met Sidney Dixon at Charing Cross and together they strolled around the West End until, an hour later, they arrived at the back of the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, and Alexander chose the colonnade as the subject of the picture.
‘Fate again, Alexander. Uncanny,’ commented Sidney Dixon. ‘Help us down, will you?’ He raised his left arm like a wing, so that Alexander could take his elbow and ease him into a sitting position, with his back against the wall. ‘You believe in fate? You look like a deep sort of lad. Think things are fated to happen?’
‘Don’t know,’ Alexander replied. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen any proof.’
‘Well, this is pretty close.’ Sidney Dixon took a small bottle of water from one pocket of his greatcoat, and an enamelled tin of watercolours from another, and a pad of rough paper from an inside pocket, in which he also carried his sheaf of brushes, held together with a rubber band. ‘You bring us here, and down the road there, fifty yards away, that’s all –’ he gesticulated towards the Strand – ‘that’s where I lost my face.’ His teeth closed on the middle finger of his right-hand glove, and pulled it off. The skin on the back of his hand was like tissue paper that had been soaked and had then dried into hundreds of hard wrinkles. The fourth and middle fingers were fused by skin that was like a thin line of water. He clamped a brush into the crook of his thumb and forefinger and began to mix a colour on the lid of the tin. ‘Puttering along on my motorbike, happy as Larry, I was. Still a week of leave left. Sun is coming up. All glittery on the river. Beautiful it was. Bombs been coming down all night, but lovely and peaceful now. This look right to you?’
Alexander compared the theatre’s wall with the colour that Sidney Dixon had conjured from the tiny cakes of pigment. ‘Looks perfect.’
‘Nearly Christmas it was. Bloody freezing. Freeze the tits off a polar bear it would. Pardon the language. No telling tales, now. You won’t squeal on me, will you?’
‘No,’ replied Alexander. ‘Of course not.’
‘No, you’re not a squealer. I can tell. Not the snitching type. Sometimes you’ve got to call a spade a spade.’
‘Or a tit a tit.’
‘Exactly, Alex.’ He touched the brush to the paper swiftly, and the colour of brick blossomed on the page. ‘So the road’s all ripped up, and I’m weaving round the pot-holes and all this debris. Then out of nowhere this bugger explodes. Too dark, do you think?’ He angled the book towards Alexander.
‘Just right.’
‘If the sun comes out we’re in trouble, but we’re OK for now.’ He charged the brush again, and dabbed it half a dozen times across the page. ‘Clouds are what you need in this line of work. It’s all about clouds and shadows. That’s why the English are good at watercolours. We invented clouds.’ He looked at the wall then grimaced at the marks he had made. ‘Where was I?’
‘The bugger explodes.’
‘Yes.’ He rinsed the brush before stirring a lighter brown smear on the tin. ‘All sort of happened backwards, it did. I saw this wall fall down in front of me. Sort of swooned, it did. Fell down like a fainting lady. And then I heard the bang, afterwards, and then there’s all these black bricks flying across the road, like bloody great bats, all coming at me. Get clouted on the head I do, a right whack, and next thing I know I’m under the bike, pinned. Petrol’s spilling all over the place. Engine’s hot, you see? Might even have been running still. Can’t remember.’ Delicately he wiped a veil of ochre over the top of the page. Two teenage girls were coming towards them from Drury Lane. ‘So it all goes up. Big pair of mitts on, I had. Big fat woolly things. Soaked right through, they are. There’s a flash, and my hands are like matches, and I’m smacking myself with them, making it worse. Legs are getting roasted, hair’s gone on fire and all, and all I can hear is this noise like a wind rushing, and some woman screaming.’ The girls stopped; one of them opened her handbag, while the other looked at Sidney Dixon and Alexander. ‘Then some bloke wraps me in his coat,’ Sidney continued, ‘and the next thing I know I’m on the Yellow Brick Road to East Grinstead and the great Mclndoe.’
The girls crossed the road; at the junction, underneath the colonnade, they looked back with squirming faces, and turned down the side street. ‘There’s usually one big problem with doing this kind of thing,’ remarked Sidney. ‘There’s always some nosy bugger wants to have a look at what you’re doing. Unless you look like me. That’s where I’ve got an advantage, normally. They leave me alone. Liked the look of you, though, didn’t they?’ he laughed.
‘Sorry,’ said Alexander.
‘Nothing to be sorry about. You can’t help it and I can’t help it.’ The brush’s metal collar rattled on the mouth of the bottle. ‘God, what a pair we make, eh?’ he laughed again, and Alexander heard this as a request, and knew that he would be spending other Sundays with Sidney Dixon.
He would remember a frosty Sunday morning on which they walked down a Soho street where ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ was coming from three different windows, and talking one afternoon to a broken-nosed policeman who stood in a doorway with a lit cigarette reversed in his concave palm, and the afternoon a boat collided with a pier of Southwark Bridge. Strongest of all, however, was to be the memory that began with the windows of the Old Curiosity Shop and recommenced with the grass in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, under the leaves of a young silver birch. In the undergrowth there was a pigeon with deformed scarlet feet, and there was a shroud of moss on the trunk of a plane tree close to where they sat. ‘I paint the buggers but I don’t know what I’m painting,’ Sidney cursed. ‘What’s that one?’
‘Sycamore,’ said Alexander.
‘I think I’ll do the building instead.’ He pointed his brush at the columns on the front of the College of Surgeons. ‘For a cack-handed painter there’s nothing so nice as a line of cylinders.’
Alexander regarded the scrolls of the capitals; they were like the eyes of some monstrous crustacean. He watched Sidney wash the paper with a yellow so weak that it became unambiguously yellow only as the water evaporated; he watched him create triangles of shadow with a succession of single strokes.
Then Sidney’s hand stopped stirring his brush in the water pot. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he yelled. ‘Bleeding hell! Alex! Look
! That’s him!’
In front of the columns a long black car was parked, and on the roof of the car lay a grey pinstriped sleeve and a curl of white shirt-cuff. A gold cuff-link flashed.
‘Jesus! That’s Sir Archibald!’ As though his legs were bound by ropes, Sidney writhed to his feet. He raised his arms as high as he could, wincing as he waved. ‘That’s Sir Archibald!’ he cried. The car swung out of the forecourt, away from them. ‘That’s him,’ he told Alexander. ‘The great Mclndoe,’ he said again, his voice falling as the car gained distance.
14. The cave
For almost fifty years the shop had been owned by Mr H. R. Jacklin, whose initials and surname were still on the fanlight, in letters of gilt with thick black borders. The old porcelain door handle and the brass finger panel had not yet been replaced, but the name of Jacklin the Jeweller had been scraped from the window hurriedly, leaving moth-like flakes of white paint on the glass.
A ship’s wheel was the centrepiece of Sidney Dixon’s display. To one side of it stood a wooden telescope, with a cutlass dangling from its tripod, above a china shepherdess and a matching pair of Toby jugs. In the other half of the window was set a globe that was marked with greasy patches all over Europe, and close to the door, behind a rattan-sided crib, there was a brass diver’s helmet on top of a pedestal, which sometimes caught the sunlight in such a way as to give the shop’s interior the tone of sunset in the morning.
Inside, a long glazed case that had been made for Mr Jacklin stretched down one side of the shop. In the course of the year it would fill with brooches, medals, pens, watches and rings, but on this day there was nothing in it except the casing of an anti-aircraft shell and a compass that was as big as a cake tin. On the opposite wall, above shelves of miscellaneous books, a trio of photographs showed Metcalf’s smithy and Chapel Farm in Eltham, and a line of hansom cabs at the top of Tranquil Vale.
‘Take a good look at that one,’ said a voice. Sidney Dixon was sitting in a leather armchair behind a roll-top desk at the end of the shop, beyond the rectangle of light that came through the door. ‘The blacksmith. See the sign? “Smith & Farrier” it says.’
Alexander put a knee into a space on a bookshelf and leaned forward to scrutinize the faded picture. ‘I see it,’ he said.
‘There’s a chap in a cap, working on the horse on the left.’
A crouching, bandy-legged man, wearing a leather cap and a leather jerkin over his white shirt, clamped a massive hoof between his thighs. ‘I see him,’ said Alexander.
‘That’s my father, that is.’
‘Your father was a blacksmith?’
‘My father was a shoe repairer. He was playing the fool.’ Sidney turned the switch on the green-shaded desk lamp and beckoned Alexander like a priest summoning a penitent. ‘Come and sit down,’ he said, and clawed a dining chair towards him with a white-gloved hand. ‘Sit down,’ he said.
‘Are things going well?’ asked Alexander.
‘Do you see any customers?’ Sidney responded, without sharpness, as though the shop were not his.
Alexander looked around the shop, and noticed that the picture propped against the accordion behind the long case was a watercolour of the Freemasons’ Hall, which Sidney had painted one Sunday afternoon.
‘I have a proposition for you,’ said Sidney, straightening his legs gradually then drawing them gradually in again. ‘I’m doing all right. Ticking over. I’ve got good stuff here. People will pay good prices for it. But I’ll be straight with you, Alexander.’ He paused to await the decision of a man who had stopped to inspect the objects in the window; the man put his face close to the glass, looked towards them, and moved on. The skin around Sidney’s mouth bent stiffly into a smile. ‘There you have it. I’m not getting any casual trade. People stop but they don’t come in. Not many of them, and them that do don’t tend to linger. And it’s because of me, with a lot of them. I’m a good businessman, don’t get me wrong. I’ve got a head on me, and I know my stuff. But I’m not good for business. Not as the front man.’ He regarded his feet, as if finding fault with his choice of footwear for the day. ‘Folks come in, Alex, but they don’t hang around, not once they get a butchers at me. Not all of them, mind. And I don’t blame them that scarper. But a lot of them go squeamish. You can see them struggling with themselves, and off they go.’
‘That’s bad.’
‘It’s a shame all right. And it’s your father’s money.’
‘Not really his,’ said Alexander. ‘He’s the man who hands it out.’
‘Not how his boss will see it, if I can’t make a go of things. He’ll be responsible, and I’ll be responsible for him being responsible.’ He moved the desk lamp an inch farther from him, then put it back where it had been. ‘You see what I’m getting at?’ he asked.
That morning Alexander had attended an interview at a branch of a building society in Greenwich. He pictured the office in which he might be working, with its desks jammed together like dominoes, under lights that were the same as the lights in his classroom at school. He heard the jangle of the telephones, and saw again the eager, hopeless face of the woman who had taken his name.
‘I need a better face to greet the punters,’ Sidney went on. ‘And I couldn’t get a better face than you.’
‘I’d have to give it some thought,’ said Alexander, looking out into the street.
Sensing that he was winning, Sidney leaned back and placed his hands on the arms of the chair. ‘You’d be very good with the public. I know it. You’re easy to talk to, apart from anything else. And if I had you here, that’d give me more time to go buying. Auctions, and all that. Auctions are a different proposition. Tend to get the soft hearts there. Folks don’t like to bid against me. Reckon I’m a war hero.’
‘When would you like me to start, if I said yes?’ asked Alexander.
‘Whenever you like, Alexander, whenever you like. Tomorrow would be perfect, but I can wait.’
‘I’ll let you know by the end of the week.’
‘That would be good. Now, pick that up for us, will you?’ Sidney asked, indicating a covered chamber-pot on the floor by the door to the back room. Alexander lifted the lid, and took out two bottles of stout and two glasses.
He became Sidney Dixon’s assistant within the fortnight. On his second day he was entrusted with a key and instructed as to how the mark-up should be calculated and how the books should be kept, and then he was left alone. There was almost nothing to do in the first few months. On a Saturday a dozen people might come through the door, but on a weekday he sometimes saw nobody at all, other than the friends who called to see him after school or after work. Every morning he dusted the shop and cleaned the windows; he might take a message on the telephone once or twice a day; and some days he unloaded from a van the things that Sidney had bought at an auction or from someone’s house. And Alexander was quite content, while the pendulums of the long-case clocks maintained their quiet debate, to leaf through Sidney’s reference books, learning to recognise the styles of Lalique and Mackintosh and many others whose work he knew he would never see. He was content to sit in the oxblood leather armchair and view the changing picture of the street as the light and the shadows moved and the shoppers dawdled by. An old man with long grey hair, whose name Alexander never learned, walked his dog up the street every morning, and returned with a newspaper under his arm; the postman passed the shop at ten o’clock and three o’clock; at ten-thirty and four o’clock Maureen Doherty stepped out of the shoe shop to smoke a cigarette; once or twice a day Mr Beckwith might drive past, delivering another batch of cards or headed paper from Johnson the Printer’s. The days were so alike that time did not seem to pass.
John Halloran was working in a garage in Deptford, and on days when he finished early he would sometimes visit Alexander. They would sit in the back office, where there was a framed photograph of Bert Johnson leading the Charlton team onto the pitch between two lines of kilted girl pipers, and a print of William Innes,
standing in his buckled pumps on the turf of the Royal Blackheath Golf Club, shouldering his iron daintily, as if it were a parasol. Alexander would always remember the superior Mr Innes, and the windmill in the background, and the rough-faced caddy in a tricorn hat, with a corked bottle in one pocket, and John Halloran looking at the picture as he rolled a cigarette between his fingers.
‘Sid want to sell this?’ he asked.
‘Don’t know. It’s not in the book.’
‘Pity. The old man might like it.’
‘I’ll ask, if you like. Sid might take an offer.’
‘Yes, do,’ said John, and he handed the cigarette to Alexander. ‘Big brother’s back in town,’ he said, sprinkling a line of tobacco into the folded paper on his palm. ‘A changed man, I tell you.’ His lips made a whistling motion, and he blew out a long breath.
‘Six months, isn’t it?’ asked Alexander, positioning his chair so that he could see the empty shop.
‘Long enough, mate. Long enough.’ John tapped his cigarette repeatedly on the back of his hand, as if enacting the passage of the months. ‘You should see him. Hair you couldn’t hide a gnat in. Like having Desperate Dan around the house. Half a bloody pig for breakfast and a bucket of tea. Mister human bloody dynamo. Up on the roof he was this morning, fixing the tiles. Bloody lunatic.’ He sent a jet of smoke ceilingwards and shook his head in disbelief. ‘I tell you, square-bashing isn’t doing that to me. I’m going to be a layabout, mate. Follow your example. You wait till you see him,’ said John, passing the ashtray. ‘Mister bloody ramrod.’
But he never did see James Halloran again, because James joined the army as soon as he had done his National Service, as did his brother, whom Alexander was to see for the last time in the autumn of 1960. Years later, he would strive to remember their conversation, but succeed in recalling only that John had been serving in Egypt, that his face and bare forearms were tanned, that he was to be posted to Germany later that month, and that he looked over Alexander’s head at the clock above the chemist’s window before announcing that he must be going, and when Alexander looked back at the clock, after John had strode away, he saw that the clock was not working.
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