A nightlight, set on a saucer which had a crack across its pattern of blue willow leaves, burned on the stool between Alexander’s bed and the window, casting the hilly shadow of his body across the wall. The short yellow flame, batted by the draught, nodded on the surface of the molten wax, in which tiny tadpoles of cinder swam about in circles, drifting close to flame, darting away to the edge of the pool, drifting back. Sometimes he would pluck a hair from his head and feed it into the flame to watch it become a wisp of smoke before it could enter the body of the fire, or hold his hand over the candle until the heat felt like a nail driven through his palm. Then he would lie motionless again, his arms folded on his chest, his face to the ceiling, watching the steam of his breath roll off into the room. At last he heard his mother’s footsteps on the stairs, and the creak of the floorboards as she came to the landing. Downstairs the doors were being shut, always in the same order, ending with the clunk of the kitchen door and the rattle of its tall pane. His father’s slower tread followed, becoming even slower as he reached the top of the stairs, making a louder creak. And on the nights when the electricity was off he would twice see the candlelight rise and fade under his door as first his mother and then his father went by, and then the door of his parents’ room would close with a small thump and the light was gone. He lay listening to the rustling of the gardens and the dwindling grumble of his father’s voice, keeping his eyes open until only the sounds of the wind remained.
In the mornings the glass was caked with ice on the inside, and often the night’s fall of snow sloped high up the pane. When he opened the curtains the walls of his room were the tone of chicken flesh, and clammy as the disc of white wax that the nightlight had become. On the back of the chair beside the door a clean white shirt hung in the shadowless light like a big strip of cold fat. The tin bomber that was parked on the chest of drawers looked wet, like a car in fog. Rather than get out of bed, he would often daydream of Nan Burnett’s garden, where the snow was so deep he could tunnel through it, crawling on his hands and knees into the hollow that had once been the pond, and lying down under the radiant white roof, with no idea which way the house was, and then digging on until the floor of the tunnel changed from grass to bare earth, when he would leap upright, diving up into the world again. And sometimes, lying like an effigy on a tomb, he would send himself on an imaginary walk across the ceiling of his room, around and around the twisting stalk of the lightbulb’s flex, over the bulge of plaster that looked as if it should yield like a pillow, and then stepping over the dam below the door to gaze up at the stairwell, which he could see so clearly it was as if his door were not closed.
When his mother called from the foot of the stairs he dressed and went down. ‘Rip Van MacIndoe, awake at last,’ she often said, and this was how she greeted him on the one morning that he would always be able to recall from this winter.
The smell of the previous evening’s fish was still in the room. Every windowpane was streaming, and strings of water lay in the cracks of the windowframes between the sashes. Frozen clothes were stacked against the wall at an angle of forty-five degrees, the stiff cuffs and shirt-tails resting on the floor. He picked up a shirt and bent it across his knee; it cracked softly, like the rending of a dead branch.
‘Where’s your tumbler?’ his mother asked him. She was holding the ribbed glass bottle of rose-hip syrup in one hand, while the other formed the shape of the missing glass. ‘Have you left it in your room?’
‘No,’ he replied, and his mother laughed.
‘Look at that stupid animal,’ she said, pointing out of the window.
A black cat was stalking across the garden’s perfect snow, pausing after every step and lowering its head for a moment; a robin watched it from the fence then flew away before the cat was close. Alexander looked at the track that the cat’s belly had smudged across the snow, and it made him think of the snowball fight in the street two days before, when Mrs Beckwith and Megan had passed by. ‘Go on,’ Mrs Beckwith had said, and Megan had gone over to a car that was parked nearby and wiped a handful of snow from its bonnet. She raised her arm, but before she could throw it he threw a ball that hit her on the buttons of her coat. She dusted the snow off, and turned to walk back to Mrs Beckwith, and she did not stop when another snowball fell apart on her back. He called her name, but she did not look round. ‘It’s all right, Alexander,’ Mrs Beckwith had called to him, as she patted the snow from Megan’s back.
‘Is Mrs Beckwith Megan’s mother?’ he asked.
‘No, Alexander,’ his mother replied. ‘She’s her auntie.’
It was a word that Alexander had never heard Megan use. ‘So where is Megan’s mother?’ he asked. His mother placed the bottle on the draining board and drew a chair from the table for him to sit on. Putting her hands on his legs, she looked into his eyes.
‘She doesn’t have a mother any more,’ she said.
‘What about her father?’
‘Megan doesn’t have a father any more, either,’ said his mother. Her fingers went tight on his legs. ‘It is very sad, Alexander, and we mustn’t ever say anything about it. Not to her and not to anybody. Do you understand?’
‘Why doesn’t she have a mother and father?’ he persisted. ‘Were they killed?’
‘No, they weren’t killed.’
‘So where are they?’
‘They’re not here any longer, Alexander. That’s all we need to know. We mustn’t talk about it. It won’t do any good.’ She fastened the top button of his cardigan, as if to signify that the subject was at a close. ‘It would upset Megan and Mrs Beckwith and everybody. Now, let’s find that glass.’
Alexander followed his mother to the pantry, where her slippers made a sticky sound on the painted floor. She reached for a tin from the shelf below the perforated panel of zinc, on which the dots of sky always looked white, whatever kind of day it was.
‘Will we be friends?’ he asked.
‘Who?’
‘Me and Megan.’
‘Of course you’ll be friends. Don’t you like her?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alexander replied. ‘Why doesn’t she come here?’
‘She will do. She’s a bit shy, that’s all,’ his mother explained, but he thought of the way Megan looked at him when he said hello in the corridor at school, as if she had heard some story that had made her think she should stay away from him, and he remembered her walking across the playground with her teacher and talking to her as she would have talked to Mrs Beckwith, and she did not seem shy at all.
‘I don’t think she is,’ he said.
‘Yes, she is, Alexander,’ his mother assured him. ‘Give it time. Just wait.’
Through the spring of that year Alexander waited, even when he saw Megan ahead of him as they came out of school, walking on her own. She never looked back, and he could not speak to her, because there were things about Megan that nobody could speak about, and he was afraid that by accident he might say something that would make her unhappy.
‘Hello, Alexander, how are you?’ she said to him once, by the door of the assembly room, and it seemed she was pretending to be older to prevent him from talking to her, and he smiled at her and left her alone.
And so it continued until May, and the Saturday morning that would begin in Alexander’s memory outside the shoe repairer’s, from which he and his mother had emerged to find that the rain had stopped. His mother suggested they go to the park for an hour, and a short way beyond the gates, on the path to the Ranger’s House, they met Gladys Watts, who had also worked at the plating factory when the war was on. Too big to bend, Gladys tickled the side of Alexander’s face with her black cotton gloves.
‘I’ll be lucky if he’s sweet as this one,’ she said. ‘We’ve met before, young lad. At your house. Remember?’
Alexander glanced at his mother. ‘Go on, then,’ she said to him. ‘Not far, mind. Not out of sight.’ She unbuttoned the black and white cardigan that Nan Burnett had knitted for him.
‘One word from us and they do as they like,’ said Gladys Watts, who gave him a smile as if he had said something clever, though he had not said a word.
His mother folded the cardigan and threaded it through the handles of her shopping bag. ‘Wouldn’t say that,’ she remarked. ‘Would you, Alexander?’
He would not be able to recall, even five years later, to whom his mother had been talking in the park that Saturday morning, five minutes before he first saw Mr Beckwith, but he would remember to the end of his life what happened then.
He was standing close to the roses, and a squirrel was fretting at a nut by the foot of a chestnut tree, not a yard from where Alexander stood. A bandy-legged Jack Russell hurried after its owner with a peculiar skipping motion of its hind legs. To his right, walking along a tarmac path towards one of the gates, was Megan, two steps in front of a man who looked like no person Alexander had ever seen. The skin of his face and arms and hands was the colour of the wall behind him, but it shone like it had oil all over it. The man was both old and not old. His hair was dark and thick and he kept his back very straight as he walked, like Alexander’s father did, yet he had the face of an old man. Down his cheeks ran lines like the grain on floorboards, and the lines beside his mouth were so deep it was as if his jaw had two slots cut into it. He wore no tie but the collar of his shirt was fastened and looped slackly around his dark brown neck. The trousers that he was wearing did not seem to belong to him. They hung like curtains around his legs and were bunched around his waist with a narrow leather belt, the end of which dangled down past his pocket. His arms dangled too, lifelessly, from his rolled-up sleeves, as if they were attached to his body on hooks, and although he held his head up and was looking straight ahead, he did not seem to be seeing what was around him. The Jack Russell scampered across the path, kicking up clumps of cut grass, but he did not look down. A pigeon flew low past his head; he appeared not to notice it. Staying two steps behind Megan, saying nothing, the man might have been playing a game in which she was the adult and he the child.
Alexander followed them for a minute, keeping to the grass beside the path. ‘Megan?’ he said, when he was about ten feet from them. She looked up and quickly turned her face, as if she did not know who he was. Her left hand went back towards the man, and for a moment he touched her fingers as she led him to the gate. The man followed Megan out into the street, not even glancing at Alexander and his mother, who was now beside him, on her own. Preventing him from following, his mother’s hand came over his shoulder and pressed in the centre of his chest.
‘Who’s that with Megan?’ he asked, and she told him it was Mrs Beckwith’s husband.
‘Why wouldn’t they stop?’ he asked.
‘It’s nothing to concern yourself over, Alexander. Sometimes when we’re together we don’t want other people barging in. Isn’t that so? Even if they are friends. Some things are private.’
‘But they weren’t talking to each other,’ Alexander observed.
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I do. I was watching them. They didn’t say anything.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t be so nosy, Alexander,’ said his mother, refolding his cardigan. She looked towards the gate through which Megan and Mr Beckwith had departed. ‘The thing is, Alexander,’ she went on, ‘that Mr Beckwith is poorly, and you don’t really want to talk much when you’re poorly, do you?’
Alexander looked at the gate, where the trace of the brown-skinned man appeared in a dark flash, in the way a shape of light would appear inside his eyes after he had glanced at the sun.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ he asked.
‘It doesn’t matter. He needs to be left alone for a while, that’s all. He’ll be well again soon.’
Several times that summer Alexander saw Megan and her uncle, and Mr Beckwith never seemed to be well. The next time he saw them was at All Saints church. From the parade of shops he watched Megan walking down the path from the church door, as if testing an icy track for Mr Beckwith, who walked two steps behind her, with his arms as loose as lengths of rope. Then on Vanbrugh Hill he saw her standing on the kerb and beckoning across the road to Mr Beckwith, who lifted his head and looked at her and squinted as if she were too far away to make out clearly who she was. Megan crossed over and took his hand to lead him to the pavement, where she let it go and his arm swung back onto his leg as if it had gone dead. Once he saw them crossing the Heath, on the horizon of the hill, as if pretending to be Indian scouts in file. And once again, allowed to roam away from his mother for a while, Alexander saw Mr Beckwith and Megan in the park, and followed them again, but from a greater distance than before. For a quarter of an hour he followed them, down the broad path past the hollow oak tree, back up the slope, on the grass. Now and then Mr Beckwith would stop and stare up into the branches of a tree, or stop and look down at his feet, like a clockwork toy that had wound down, and Megan would crouch at his knees and gaze up at him, and brush his hand to make him walk after her again. Mr Beckwith never spoke, nor did he look at Megan, except for a moment, when, standing underneath a plane tree in a spread of light that turned his white shirt the colour of lime juice, he threw aside his cigarette and touched her on the back of the head, and Alexander saw her smile as broadly as she had smiled in the hallway of Nan Burnett’s house. Fascinated by the strangeness of it, Alexander stood wondering, until Megan came hurrying towards him, leaving Mr Beckwith to continue his walk without her.
She held out her hands as though pushing something invisible. A couple of yards from Alexander she stopped and pointed a finger like a gun. ‘Don’t stare at him,’ she demanded.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘You always stare.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Alexander repeated.
‘You always stare. Do you think nobody can see you? Standing there gawping. Don’t stare at him.’ She pushed her hair out of her eyes and glared at him before turning back.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.
‘You’re so stupid,’ she shouted over her shoulder.
When she and her uncle had gone from sight he returned disconsolately to his mother, pausing on his way under the plane tree, where he retrieved the stub of Mr Beckwith’s cigarette.
This was the last occasion that Alexander spoke to Megan Beckwith that summer, and it was not until one morning in late September that he spoke to her again. He was sitting on the step that had sparkling bits of mica in it, watching the cricket game, when Megan came clambering over the wall from the girls’ playground. She pushed him on the shoulder to move him along, sat down beside him and asked directly: ‘What are you thinking about?’
He would always remember what he was thinking about. The night before, listening from the top of the stairs on his way to bed, he had overheard his father talking to his mother. He had heard the words ‘Marshall aid’ and something of an explanation, from which he had arrived at a picture of men like military cowboys, patrolling the towns of Europe and handing out money to the grateful people.
‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ said Megan, circling her knees with her arms. ‘It’s a man’s name. He’s an American,’ she stated firmly. ‘My mum says that America is the country of the future,’ she said. ‘It’s amazing what they have there. In America they’ve seen UFOs. That stands for Unidentified Flying Objects.’
Megan peered up into the sky, wrinkling her nose; Alexander mimicked her gaze. She looked at him and sighed an adult sigh. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, in a tone that sounded like his mother’s. ‘About my father. It’s all right. Mum talked to me.’
A teacher appeared in the doorway and called out: ‘Megan Beckwith. Come here. This instant.’
‘Caught,’ she muttered, and she shook his hand. ‘I’m sorry I was angry with you, Eck,’ she said, using for the first time the name she was always to use.
The teacher, after shepherding Megan into the corridor, asked him: ‘Exempt from exercise are we, Alexander?’
‘No, miss,’ he said, but he returned to the step as soon as she had gone, to sit where Megan had sat.
His mother would take his hand to cross the road and, pointing towards the shops, begin gaily: ‘Now what do we see?’
And he would quickly respond: ‘We see a queue.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘We join it.’
‘And when do we join it?’
‘Straight away.’
‘We join it now, without delay,’ his mother agreed, concluding the singsong exchange that she and Mrs Evans had made up as the three of them walked along the same street on another Saturday morning.
There were always five or six women outside the shop, whichever one they stopped at, and another woman halfway through the doorway, with her foot against the bottom of the door, and a dozen more inside, packed tightly like on the bus. ‘What’s today’s special, girls?’ Mrs Evans might ask as they took their place at the back, and sometimes she would answer herself: ‘Whatever it is, it’ll be worth the wait.’ Once, however, a woman in a black coat with huge buttons turned round and said sharply, ‘I don’t know what you’re so cheerful about. The war’s not over yet.’ Then another woman said, ‘You’re right about that,’ and thus Alexander conceived a dread of the day when the bombers would come back, a fear he kept to himself until the day, five weeks later, on which a dormant mine, excited by the tremors of a nearby demolition, exploded in the garden of a house two streets from where he lived. That night he told his mother what he thought about every night, and he would always remember standing beside the bath that evening, gazing at the ebbing bathwater as his mother explained that he had misunderstood, while rubbing the towel on his hair as if to scrub off his foolishness.
An hour or more they sometimes queued, but Alexander’s patience was constant, because no pleasure could exceed the pleasure of at last entering the shop. Nestled amid coats and skirts, he would breathe in greedily to take hold of the scents that came from the women. An elusive aroma of lemons arose whenever one particular woman stepped forward, a woman with soft white arms and bracelets that clinked when she handed her money over. There was a woman who sometimes had a thin black line down the centre of her bare calves, whose clothes gave off a perfume that was like roses when they begin to wilt. Often she was with a friend called Alice, who had beautiful fingers and a perfume that remained mysterious until the day his father brought home a pomegranate in a stained paper bag.
Every sense was satisfied in these crowded shops, and a dense residue of memories was left in Alexander’s mind by the mornings he spent in them. Forty years later, looking at the maritime souvenirs that filled the window of what had been the grocer’s, he could hear above the traffic’s growl the crunch and chime of the ancient cash till, and he saw again the brass plate on the front of the till, and the comical bulbous faces mirrored in its embossed lettering. He saw the counter of the chemist’s shop, with the dimpled metal strip on its front edge that looked like a frozen waterfall. His fingers touched the window as he remembered how he would stroke the old wooden drawers by the chemist’s counter, sweeping his fingertips slowly across the varnished scars that looked like the script of an unknown language. The scurf of stinking pink sawdust in the butcher’s shop returned to him, and the sun shining off the slanted glass that covered the white trays of kidneys in their little puddles of brown blood. And standing before the Cutty Sark, gazing up through its spars at the coalsack-coloured October sky, he sensed the elation that arose instantly in him one morning, when he arrived at the head of the queue to see, displayed in a wicker basket, a heap of fat oranges that had come from Spain.
Only if his friends took him off to play would Alexander leave his place. ‘Bad news I’m afraid, Mrs MacIndoe,’ Eric Mullins joked, twirling the horns of a phantom moustache as he brought his heels smartly together. ‘We need your son.’ The company behind him – Lionel Griffiths and Gareth Jones and Davy Hennessy, whose leather-trimmed beret would last far longer than any other aspect of his appearance in Alexander’s memory – nodded their regretful confirmation that this was so. ‘Beastly business,’ said Eric, jamming his spectacles tight to the bridge of his nose with a forefinger. ‘Sorry and all that.’
‘Very well. Dismissed,’ his mother replied solemnly, lowering her chin, and they ran around the corner to Mr Mullins’ pub.
Entering by the door marked ‘Private’, below the white plaster unicorn with its scarlet crown, they bounded up the back stairs to the empty top floor, where each of the rooms had no furniture nor any curtains or carpets, but had a washbasin with taps that did not work. The rooms were connected by a corridor that curved like the tunnel under the river, and up and down its lino they would smack a tin of snoek wrapped in a sock, using cricket bats for hockey sticks and aiming for the swing doors that led to the stairs. Or in their stockinged feet they would skate along the lino rink, and their feet would make a hissing noise that Alexander, looking down the corridor at the two blind eyes of the windows in the doors, once imagined as the building’s breathing, an idea that so absorbed and unsettled him that he was startled when Lionel Griffiths, slithering to a stop behind him, shouted in his ear: ‘Wake up, Alex. Park time.’
In the park, at the side of one of the hills, there was a miniature valley in which the grass grew long between untrimmed bushes, and there they would stalk each other, descending the slopes on their bellies. When the others had gone home Alexander would stay for a while in the overgrown gully, and lie unseen within earshot of the path and listen to the talk of the people trudging up the hill towards the Heath. And when there was time he would then go to the place he called the Doodlebug House and continued to call the Doodlebug House even after his father told him it was not a doodlebug that had wrecked it but incendiaries and a broken gas main, many months before the flying bombs arrived.
A flap of corrugated iron, daubed with Danger – Keep Out in wrinkled red paint, was the door to the ruin. The four outer walls still stood to the height of the gutter, framing a square of sky, and within the walls were piles of debris, embedded with fractured joists and floorboards and laths that were like the ribs of a scavenged carcass. Against one of the walls leaned a huge tent of roof tiles, protecting a mantelpiece that had not been damaged at all. A perpetual stink of damp plaster dust and cats and scorched wood filled the Doodlebug House, and silvery ash was in every cranny. Low on the walls were stuck little rags of ash that vanished when he touched them. A book with leaves of ash trembled under the block of the toppled chimney. A skin of ash, pitted by raindrops, covered the door that lay flat in the middle of the house. Lumps of ash like mushrooms lay around the sheltered cradle of broken boards in which Alexander would recline and watch his portion of sky, hearing in his head the doodlebug’s misfiring snarl and then the thrilling moment of silence before it plummeted, a silence that excited him like the moment before he let himself drop from the empty window into the pool of torn bedding and sodden clothes at the back of the Doodlebug House.
Ash as slippery as sleet coated the joist by which Alexander would climb to the window at the side of the house, to sit between the battens that had been hammered crosswise into the empty frame. There, hidden from view, he would watch the people in the street pass by, or take out his Tales from the Bible, and read the story of the walls of Jericho or the Tower of Babel. Every time he came to the Doodlebug House he would go up to the window, until the day that Mrs Darling walked by and, without raising her head, called out ‘Be careful up there, Alexander’ and waved her hand behind her as if fixing a headscarf that had become unknotted. In later years he would often recall his lookout in the Doodlebug House, but most frequently he would revisit the part of the building that had once been the kitchen. Beached on a hummock that bristled with fractured pipes, there was a bathtub in which he sometimes dozed, and ten feet or so from the bath, wedged into the stump of the stairs, there was a wardrobe door that had a mirror fixed to it. The mirror was cracked from top to bottom, and the door was set at such an angle that, as Alexander neared the top of the hummock, he would find a place from which the mirror showed the wreckage to his left and to his right, but did not show any image of himself. Perched on a raft of wallpapered plywood, his arms held out like a tightrope walker, he stared in fascination at the reflection of the ruin, experiencing the smells and sights and sounds of the Doodlebug House, while apparently invisible. And he remembered that as he squatted on a beam and surveyed the rubble, a sadness seemed to flow through his body, a sadness that seemed to strengthen and purify him, to raise him out of his childhood for as long as it lasted. He was the guardian of the house’s relics, and such was his care for them that fifty years later he could draw a plan of the craters and barrows of the Doodlebug House, mapping the resting place of every item. Behind the bath there lay a washboard with barley-sugar glass rods that had not even been chipped by the blast; beside it was the brown canvas camera case that had been chewed by mice, and the cookery book with the spine that was a strip of bandage clogged with brittle glue. Closer to the wall there was the black iron mincer with its heavy crank attached, and the mangle with hard blue rubber rollers, and the soggy cartons of bandages and rusting nails. Some days he would touch one of the relics or raise it on his open palms and close his eyes, and Mr Fitchie would sometimes appear and look at him, as if across a river.
Neither would he forget the only time he ever took anyone to the Doodlebug House. Mrs Evans was with them, wearing the big silver brooch in the shape of a sleeping cat, and her green felt hat with a pheasant’s feather tucked under its band. They were at the butcher’s shop, and Mrs Evans made up another rhyme: ‘What a peculiar thing to do, to spend all day in the butcher’s queue, and all for a sausage, or sometimes two.’ When a man behind them started swearing, Mrs Evans cupped her fingers over Alexander’s ears. ‘For what we’re about to buggering well receive may the buggering Lord make us buggering grateful,’ said the man, and from the sly way Mrs Evans looked at Alexander he could not be sure if she had not meant him to hear. Then Mrs Beckwith turned up with Megan, who was holding the shopping bag in front of her, gripping its handles in both fists as if carrying the bag was a serious undertaking.
‘Why don’t you two go to the park?’ said Mrs Beckwith.
‘We’ll come for you in an hour,’ said his mother. ‘Shall we see you by the pond?’
Megan submitted the bag to her mother without saying anything, and the idea occurred to Alexander that he should take her to the Doodlebug House. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he told her as they entered the park. ‘It’s like being in a big well, or a castle. The walls are as high as that tree, on all four sides, and there’s nothing in the middle of them.’
‘How far is it?’ Megan asked.
‘Can’t tell you,’ said Alexander. ‘But we won’t be late back. Promise.’
Megan looked at the tree to which Alexander had pointed. She made her mouth and eyes slightly smaller, as though she doubted what he said, but then she followed him to the Doodlebug House.
‘No one except me has ever been in here,’ he told her. He pulled up a corner of the corrugated iron sheet so that she could crawl in. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone,’ he said.
Megan stood on a small rectangle of clear floor in the hallway, swatting the dust from her dress. Rising behind her, the walls seemed higher than ever, and the movement of the clouds that were edging over the Doodlebug House made the bricks seem to teeter. Alexander began to climb the joist to his window, but was stopped by Megan’s voice. ‘This is a pile of rubbish, Eck,’ she said, looking about her as if someone who had annoyed her was hiding in the ruin. ‘It’s nothing like a castle.’
He could not think what to say. He rested one foot on the fringe of floor that stuck out from the wall and held out a hand, though she was a long way below him. ‘Look from up here,’ he said.
‘Don’t be stupid, Eck,’ Megan told him. ‘It’s dangerous. I’m going.’ She licked a finger and turned her attention to a mark on her dress.
Despondent and resentful, he followed her away from the Doodlebug House. ‘You won’t tell anyone?’ he pleaded, when they were back in the park.
‘Of course not,’ she said.
‘Promise?’ he persisted.
‘God, Eck,’ she snapped. ‘Don’t be so boring. Why would I tell anyone? There’s nothing to tell.’
Alexander returned to the Doodlebug House many times afterwards, and the echo of Megan’s voice was always there. He could no more rid the atmosphere of her irritation than he could get rid of the smell of cats. With his arms crossed he would sit on the lip of the bath and scan the shell of the building, as if waiting with diminishing hope for a friend to answer an accusation. ‘A pile of rubbish,’ he heard her say, and he could no longer bring himself to see it differently. Finally there came the day on which he found that he was in a place that felt like a copy of the Doodlebug House, and he resolved that he would never visit it again.
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