“Yes, sir,” said Alfie.
“All right then,” said Mr. Podgett, raising a hand in the air in salute as he walked away. “Until then, auf Wiedersehen, Alfie, as our Hun friends say.”
Which wasn’t very wise of him, for three different heads turned as he departed and a man walked over to a constable and whispered something in his ear; a moment later, the policeman was following Mr. Podgett out of the station and on to the busy streets beyond.
* * *
By eleven o’clock, Alfie had shined three sets of shoes and spent a ha’penny on a sausage roll from the tea shop, which left him tuppence ha’penny up on the day so far. He’d seen a man be refused passage on the London-to-Cambridge train on account of drunkenness, and a small girl, only a year or so younger than he was, had stuck her tongue out at him as she walked past, hand in hand with an elderly lady.
A man with a bright-red mustache had put up a series of recruitment posters around the station: one showed a nighttime image of London, with Big Ben and St. Paul’s Cathedral to the foreground. IT IS FAR BETTER TO FACE THE BULLETS THAN TO BE KILLED AT HOME BY A BOMB, it said. Another showed a smiling Tommy, clean and cheerful, with a rifle on his back. FOLLOW ME! it said. YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU. Alfie didn’t imagine that many of the soldiers looked that happy in real life.
Just after noon, a young man passed by his shoeshine stand, glanced at him, walked on, and then stopped for a moment, looking up at the enormous clock on the wall. He checked his ticket before looking back at Alfie and down at his own shoes. He was about twenty-five years old and carried a cane in his left hand. As he made his way back, his bad leg dragged a little and Alfie tried not to stare. He wore a dark suit, a crisp white shirt, and a black tie, and he didn’t seem at all comfortable in any of them.
“I think I could do with a polish,” said the young man, his voice betraying a mixture of refinement and anxiety. A moment later, he laughed a little, and Alfie didn’t know why; it was as if he were sharing a joke with himself. He sat down, placed his left shoe on the footrest, and Alfie got to work.
“Busy this morning?” asked the man.
“Not very,” said Alfie, looking up. “Tuesday’s always a bit quiet. I don’t know why. Monday’s the busiest day because everyone wants clean shoes for the start of the week, but I don’t work on Mondays.”
“Any special reason?”
“We do history in school on Monday. I don’t like to miss it.”
The young man laughed. “Very sensible,” he said. “I was never any good at history. I could never get my head round the kings and queens, the battles and the wars. All those stories about the dukes in the Tower—”
“The princes,” said Alfie.
“Who was it who put them there, Richard the Second?”
“Richard the Third,” said Alfie.
“Names and numbers, that’s what it felt like to me, names and numbers. Good for you that you like it. My name’s Wilf, by the way,” he said.
“Alfie,” said Alfie, thinking how nothing ever changed; more than four hundred years later, and everything was names and numbers once again.
“Nice to meet you, Alfie. Give them a good buff, will you? There’s a good chap. I can’t show up with dirty shoes. I took them out of the wardrobe this morning and couldn’t believe the condition they were in, even though I haven’t worn them in ages.”
Alfie looked up as his hands ran a sponge dauber along the welt of the shoe. It crossed his mind that since he’d started working at King’s Cross he’d learned instinctively when someone wanted to talk and when someone wanted to be left in peace. Men like Mr. Podgett enjoyed the sound of their own voices. Others, like Wilf, seemed as if they wanted a bit of a conversation. And as far as Alfie was concerned, that was all part of the job.
“Going somewhere nice, sir?” he asked.
“Cheltenham,” said Wilf. “Nice place; not a nice reason.”
Alfie looked up and understood immediately why the young man was wearing black.
“My brother’s funeral,” explained Wilf. “My younger brother, that is. Alistair. They brought his body back this weekend.”
“I’m sorry,” said Alfie.
“Yes,” replied Wilf, the word catching in his throat a little. “Yes, so am I. Only eighteen years old, you see. The youngest of us all. And the brightest. I only saw him about a month ago. He was shipping out of Aldershot on his way to Calais. I went down to Southampton to wish him luck.”
Alfie stopped buffing when he heard that word—Aldershot. That was where Georgie had been sent for training. He’d stayed there for a couple of months, learning to fight, learning to kill, before being sent to France, where he’d written to them every week for almost two years before the letters suddenly stopped and Margie said that he couldn’t write anymore, on account of the fact that he was on a secret mission for the government.
Which, as far as Alfie was concerned, was an adult way of saying that your father is dead but we don’t want to tell you the truth.
“Alistair got himself killed only a couple of weeks after he arrived, poor chap,” continued Wilf. “I don’t know if it was a blessing for him or a tragedy. He didn’t have to spend years in the trenches like some of the other poor souls over there. He’s out of it now, isn’t he?”
“What happened to him?” asked Alfie, looking up, knowing he shouldn’t ask questions like this, but the words were out of his mouth before he could pull them back.
“Some fool of a sergeant sent him over the top in the middle of the night as a stretcher bearer,” said Wilf. “It’s a suicide mission, isn’t it? Collecting the dead. No one can survive it. There should be an hour’s armistice when both sides can go over and collect their fallen soldiers. I suggested it once, at GHQ, and the way the generals looked at me you would have sworn I was waving the white flag of surrender. All I wanted was a bit of civilized behavior in an uncivilized world. Still, Alistair wouldn’t have felt a thing, which is something, I suppose. But by God, it took them long enough to ship the body home. The funeral’s later today. The War Office gave me the day off. So it’s over and back to Cheltenham for me, and no time to spend with my family. I have to be at my desk again first thing tomorrow morning or there’ll be hell to pay.”
Alfie glanced over at Wilf’s cane, which was propped up against the chair next to him. His eyes lingered there for a moment before he realized that Wilf was watching him.
“Wondering about this, are you?” he asked. “It’s kept me out of it for the last two years. Took a sniper bullet through my femur just outside Mons. Lay in a field hospital for a week or two while they tried to save the leg. Nothing doing, of course. Would have saved a lot of time and energy if they’d just cut the blighter off the day I arrived instead of waiting for two whole months.”
Alfie stopped what he was doing, his hands hovering in the air over Wilf’s left shoe.
“Oh yes, that’s a false leg, I’m afraid,” he said. “Don’t be frightened, boy. There’s nothing to fear.”
Alfie shook his head and went back to his shoe shining. “I’m not frightened,” he said quietly.