Ghost MacIndoe. Jonathan Buckley

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       7. The Bovis stove

      The afternoon was so hot that Alexander’s father took a chair from the kitchen and carried it out into the garden, where Alexander, propped on his elbows in the middle of the lawn, was turning the pages of the old atlas.

      ‘Would I be disturbing you, son and heir?’ his father enquired, in the butler’s voice he often used when he was joking. ‘I would not? Well and good. We shall study together,’ he replied to Alexander’s smile, and he placed the chair on the patch of concrete to the side of the kitchen door, under the honeysuckle that grew across the wall that year. He went back inside and emerged again with a sheaf of square-ruled paper and the big tin tray, which he laid across the arms of the chair to make a desk. ‘This is very agreeable,’ he remarked, examining the point of a pencil approvingly. He unbuttoned his collar and slipped his feet out of his broad-strapped sandals.

      Askance Alexander watched his father working, drawing graphs and reckoning figures across the gridded paper, placing the completed sheets neatly upon the pile underneath the chair. His mother brought a pitcher of lemonade and poured a glass for each of them; his father kissed her fingers and his mother made a curtsy, holding out the hem of her dress so the shape of a leg showed through the red and white checks, as Alexander would remember.

      ‘Alexander, come inside when you’ve finished your drink,’ she said.

      ‘He’s fine, Irene,’ said his father. ‘Quiet as a monk, aren’t you?’

      So Alexander continued to roam the pink expanses of the maps, measuring the distances between names that seemed to have been invented for their melody, tracing systems of rivers that looked like roots. From time to time he turned to the first page of the atlas, where his great-grandfather’s name was written in a script that resembled blades of grass, with ink that was chestnut brown and gave the book an aura which the name of Duncan Manus MacIndoe deepened with its ancient, clannish sound. With a forefinger he stroked the loops and limbs of the writing, as if to encourage a visible presence to rise like a genie from the paper.

      Occasionally his father broke the silence, stopping his pencil and enquiring quietly, without looking up: ‘Eight times thirteen?’ or ‘Twenty-two nines?’ or some other sum. Alexander would give his answer, and whenever the answer was correct his father would say, with pretended briskness and still without looking at him, ‘Carry on,’ then get back to his work.

      Late in the afternoon the clouds began to cluster on the city side of the sky. Alexander watched the sun fall behind them, turning parts of them to tangerine foam as it sank. The white shirts on the neighbours’ washing line, hanging with arms raised in the breezeless air, took on the tint of skin. As if soaking a dye from the horizon, the clouds became tangerine right through, a colour that brought to Alexander a sensation that seemed a foretaste of the pleasure he would have at the funfair that evening. It was a sensation so strong that for many years this quality of sunlight in a cumulus sky would elicit a moment of anticipatory happiness, and sometimes he would glimpse the tomato-red metal panels of the merry-go-rounds under loops of electric bulbs, and hear the jubilant, malicious music of the steam organ above the hum of the generators.

      Following his father, he passed between the caravans that formed a wall around the fair, and stepped onto grass that had been mashed into arrowhead tracks and heel shapes. Beside the Hall of Mirrors there was a coconut shy, where his father handed his jacket to Alexander before hurling three wooden balls into the netting behind the coconuts, and close by was a stall at which his mother threw two black rubber rings at hooks on a wall that was painted with red fish, then handed the third ring to Alexander, whose throw struck a hook and bounced off. They bought toffee apples from a man with blurred tattoos of a dagger and a red snake on his right arm. Standing by the test-your-strength machine, Alexander raised his half-eaten apple in the direction of the Big Wheel.

      ‘Can we go on that?’ he asked.

      ‘You’re not getting me on that, I can tell you that right now,’ said his mother to his father.

      ‘Can I go?’ Alexander asked his father.

      ‘You wouldn’t like it,’ his father told him.

      ‘Have you been on one?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Then how do you know I wouldn’t like it?’

      ‘I СКАЧАТЬ