Kissing Alice Read online

  It was children, mostly, at the water’s edge, splashing in and out of the low waves or collecting wet sand in buckets. One or two men, with their trousers rolled up neatly to their knees, waded in the shallows. Beyond there were the cadenced arms of a few swimmers, crisscrossing in the darker sea. Mary, eager, was already waist-deep in water, her shoulders stiff with the sudden cold. She kept her eyes fixed on the stretched horizon. Eddie was still on the sand. He looked back to where his wife was sitting. Queenie May waved at him, and he waved back. He watched Mary as she edged steadily forward. The clouds out at sea, ahead of her, seemed unfamiliarly grey.

  He took a deep breath and ran through the shallows. His feet stung. He passed Mary, and thought he heard her laugh. He pushed on until the water was high up his legs, above his waist then, a bitter tideline on the curled hairs of his chest, and he dipped into a wave, a bulge of black water that swelled towards him. As he always did, he slipped his head into the sea, but when he came up he was panting, straining for breath, his limbs numb. He had never felt such cold. And flicking his dripping hair from his eyes he turned immediately for the shore, flailing, running as soon as his feet touched the bottom, desperate for the feel of the dry sand. Dodging the children scattered at the edge, he scampered up the beach, throwing himself next to Queenie May, shivering.

  ‘Blimey, that’s the last time I’m going in an English sea,’ he said. ‘It’s not what I’m used to at all, that.’ He shook his hair again. ‘Blimey, Flor. Ruddy freezing, that water is.’

  Florrie smiled at him, disappointed. ‘P’raps it’s got colder since you’ve been away,’ she said.

  ‘Wretched weather,’ he spat, taking the towel from her and rubbing himself hard.

  When they looked again out to sea, Mary was swimming. She was keeping her head high above the water and they could see her bobbing about, not far from the shore.

  ‘There you are, Eddie, my love,’ said Queenie May. ‘That’s the way to do it,’ and just then the sun came out, too, making the water suddenly blue and slowing everything.

  ‘Not if you paid me,’ said Eddie, striking a pair of matches with desperate fingers and cupping them from the wind.

  Florrie was folding Mary’s clothes and balancing them on her shoes so that they would stay proud of the sand. She waited for Eddie to lie back again, with his cigarette secure, and then she nudged Queenie May.

  ‘Here, Ma,’ she said. ‘Look.’

  She held out Mary’s pink-flowered panties, but down low between them so they were hidden. In the gusset was a small dark spot of blood.

  ‘It’s her time of the month, Ma, look.’ It was little more than a whisper.

  ‘Mary? Not yet. She doesn’t… not yet,’ said Queenie May, but she took the knickers anyway and, a moment later, let them fall in the sand. ‘I’d better fetch her back.’

  ‘She won’t have seen, Ma. She won’t have thought of it,’ said Florrie, loudly enough now for Eddie to catch the rush of words. He propped himself on his elbow, sand blowing into his face as Queenie May heaved herself upright and pulled down her skirt. He spat it away.

  ‘All right, my love? Are you all right Flor?’

  Florrie shoved the stained knickers under Mary’s other clothes. ‘It’s Mary, she’s been in too long,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

  Mary saw her mother beckoning from the tideline and splashed towards her, smiling. But Queenie May’s face was set hard. She pulled her daughter by the arm as soon as she could reach her, dragging her across the sand until they were standing away from the families around them. Mary’s wet swimsuit left a long stain of damp down Queenie May’s side.

  ‘Mary, you have to come,’ said Queenie May.

  ‘Can’t I go back in, Ma? I’m not cold.’

  Mary’s lips were lilac and her face pale.

  ‘You’ll come back with me, my girl, and get dressed, that’s what you’ll do,’ said Queenie May, looking away over the grooved sand. ‘Swimming around like a… when there’s…’ She puffed hard. ‘I won’t have it, Mary.’

  ‘But Ma, everybody’s swimming. Look.’ Mary swept her arm across the sea, but still her mother would not look up from the sand. ‘I’ll just be a minute, Ma, that’s all,’ and she went to pull away, but Queenie May slapped her then, in front of everyone, her broad hand smacking against Mary’s wet cheek with the sound of winter waves. Mary took a step back. She felt the side of her face with cold fingers. The wind was making it sting.

  ‘You’ve had enough, my girl. I said.’

  Queenie May turned and began to walk back to their clothes. Mary, bemused, dragged up the beach behind her mother. Florrie had been watching them, and as they got near she peeled herself away from the rock and bent over Eddie.

  ‘Come with me, Eddie, for a bit of a walk,’ she said. He did not move. ‘It’ll warm you up.’ She touched his arm very lightly and he looked up at her, still against the moving sky. ‘Come on, Eddie, put your trousers on, and your shirt. You’ll feel better.’ She moved her hand up his arm, feeling the prickle of the sand and the chill of his skin beneath, and ever so gently, because it was new to her again, she touched the rise of his chest.

  Eddie sat up. ‘Oh, come on then, Florrie,’ he said contentedly, and he winked at her as he pulled his still damp skin into his clothes.

  When Queenie May and Mary got back to the cove they were alone. Queenie May kicked at Mary’s dress and shoes piled on the sand. Then she bent down to find the panties, turned her back on the expanse of public beach behind her, and exposed the smudge of blood. It meant nothing to Mary.

  ‘Haven’t I told you, my girl, to be careful? Haven’t I told you it would come? You should look out for yourself now, now you’re growing up.’

  Mary, shivering, wanted to get dressed. She was still aggrieved that they had stopped her swimming.

  ‘You just can’t be like this,’ said Queenie May. ‘You can’t be so loose, my girl,’ and she threw the knickers to the floor, kicking two or three big showers of sand over them until there was just a scrap of white cotton poking through, unidentifiable. Then she brushed down her skirt and stalked quickly out of the cove leaving her daughter alone, surprised, bleeding very slightly as she recovered from the cold.

  Queenie May walked first to the water’s edge, but she did not like the way things flattened there, exposing her, so she turned along the sea and walked to the cliffs instead, still moving fast. She strode along the broken line of coves and inlets, cutting across their tops so that she did not disturb the families clustered inside them, dodging around the weed-pooled rocks that jutted out and ducking once through a stone arch with puddles trapped around its base and closed anemones bulging orange from its sides. She covered the edges of the beach quickly, her feet slipping sideways in the dry sand and she hurried on, but still it was as though something were chasing her. She could not understand it. And seeing that she was nearly back at their own patch of sand, where Mary was sitting now, dressed, her legs up tight against her chest, Queenie May pulled across the bay towards the rock, striding out as though with a purpose, seeing nothing of the games skimming around her.

  On the other side of the rock, the sand was narrow and the cliffs taller, leaning over the bay. It was more secluded, dark almost in the dull light. Young couples slunk away and groups of boys clambered on the sharp promontories in the search for something extraordinary. The dampness from high tide lingered. Queenie May sensed the sand colder on her bare feet, and slowed. She could hear the blood thumping in her ears but the panic in her head seemed flat now and far away. She felt suddenly awkward. She went to turn, thinking that the others might be waiting. She thought Arthur should be there, to laugh with her, and she looked up at the rock at her side, craning her neck to where patches of pink thrift clung to the short turf, overhanging. For a moment she closed her eyes and then she started back.

  The couple she saw then, tight up against the base of the rock, entangled, did not notice her. It was only a moment, anyway, and she was past.
Even for Queenie May it was an impression, as much as anything, a sense of things. She could not see the faces, not fully, the girl having her head tucked into her lover’s neck, the boy’s hair hanging low. But there was something about them, about the girl especially and the way her skin shone in the shadowy light, and Queenie May was out beyond the rock, on her way across the open sand, when it struck her that it was Alice there, so close. She stopped again. A shriek of something, children or gulls, slid off the cliffs above her, and it felt for an instant as though the whole world were cheering. She felt a smile come and her legs buckle. She bit hard on her lip. She filled herself with breath, ready, lifted her hands towards them and went to hold her daughter. For a moment, blinding, it seemed that things would come right again and she reached out to draw her family back together, whole, untarnished.

  But then when she stepped further she could see the grip of the boy’s hand under a cotton skirt, and the way he was nuzzling, squirming close, here, in public, on the beach; she saw the way their legs were twined indecently, the sand blown all over them, and the rude flick of the girl’s fingers as they tunnelled in the damp below the rock. Another couple, walking like Queenie May, respectable, muttered something sternly. The clouds closed across. Queenie May felt the catch of nausea hot in her throat, and she stole away, turning her back on them. She faced out to the sea, the breeze on her face, and in the smell of it, of the damp-sand salt air, memories of other places pressed in on her, dusky rooms and quiet shadows and the never quite knowing her husband. Everything seemed spoilt. She kicked hard at the sand.

  Further up the bay she saw Eddie and Florrie, hand in hand, and she waved, waiting then until they came up to her. They walked on together. Back at the cove Mary was curled up, asleep, her wet costume hanging limp from a tooth of rock, but they woke her to share the sandwiches. The clouds brushed apart and the sun came through again. Florrie and Eddie sat close, and after lunch they took Mary along the ripples of small pools.

  Queenie May was alone then. She stared back towards the rock, to where she knew her daughter was, hidden, and she thought of the doctor and everything he had said to her. She closed her eyes against the glare.

  On the way home she was quiet. The others put it down to the weariness of the day and let her doze, curled uncomfortably against her youngest daughter. Eddie and Florrie held hands again, and watched the city grow back around them. Mary felt the weight of her mother’s head tipped against her chest, bumping slightly with the uneven road. It was sore. But there was something about it too that made her newly aware of her taut skin and a soft pleasure swelling beneath it, and a warmth there under the ache, and she did not complain.

  Alice was not at the beach. She was in London, in the heavy quiet of the library, pushing her trolley of books through the narrow lanes of the stacks. The dusty silence comforted her. Of the jobs she had tried since leaving home – behind the counter at a haberdasher’s, typing again and, briefly, because she had to, cooking at a department store canteen – she found this was the one that reconciled her to the clamour of the capital. After almost a year among the high banks of shelves, away from things, trying to memorize the erratic configuration of the Dewey Decimal classification and accustom herself to the half-light, she felt settled. She knew the clicks of the heating pipes and the varied tones of slammed doors, far away. The other staff were used to the idea that she preferred the most tedious of jobs, deep among the disciplined lines of off-prints and periodicals, and they rarely spoke to her. She thought of her mother now only in passing.

  Alice’s hair had grown long, splitting at the ends where she tried to tie it back with an elastic band. Her shoes were scuffed and worn at the heel. In the netherworld of the library basement she had little physical sense of herself; she never bothered now with lipstick. When she found a card in her locker from her manager, Malcolm Whitcroft, to mark her twenty-first birthday, she found she had forgotten the date.

  ‘I looked it up in the staff files,’ he admitted, waiting for her that evening at the back door, his keys twirling in his hand. ‘Happy birthday.’

  She smiled wanly.

  ‘If you wanted to, you know, celebrate, we could go somewhere. If you liked,’ he went on, but Alice only blinked at him and shook her head.

  She caught him watching her sometimes, waiting to take the morning register, his arms folded, his hair slightly damp, close cut. Once or twice he came down into her basement territory and loitered, fingering the medical periodicals. But he did not speak to her again, except on routine matters, and when, almost a year later, he proposed marriage, it came as a surprise.

  He leaned forwards across the table in the milk bar, the unromantic glint of chrome hardening his solemnity, his hands fixed together in a tight arch, and she thought he was going to reprimand her for some irregularity. She felt the sting of disgrace before he spoke. So that when instead he asked her to marry him, there was the relief of escaping something and she took her time before replying, picking up a glossy grain of sugar with her nail and rolling it with her fingertip along the bevelled edge of the table before letting it fall into the metal ashtray where Malcolm’s cigarette smouldered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said at last, pushing her glass aside, ‘I can’t.’

  His expression did not change. ‘Is there someone else, Alice? I thought not. I thought you were available, but I’ve never asked, so if there is someone else… well, then I would understand.’

  She did not know how to answer this. ‘I am, as you say, available,’ she said, after a while. ‘But it makes no difference, to me. I couldn’t marry you, really. I’m sorry, Mr Whitcroft.’

  ‘But you do like me, Alice?’ he pushed.

  She had not thought much about it. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Of course. Of course I like you. It’s just… it’s very unexpected. I never thought… I never imagined marrying you.’ She thought of the way he sat at his desk, unbending, stacked like one of his books into a niche by the entrance. ‘And anyway, I wouldn’t know what to call you,’ she added, clinching it. ‘Mr Whitcroft wouldn’t do, would it?’

  He considered this, sucking the remains of his drink through his straw, swirling it then through the froth that clung to the sides of the empty glass.

  ‘Well, never mind, we’ll see what happens,’ he said.

  By the time Alice got home, walking the long way around from the bus stop, matching her strained breathing to the rhythm of her steps, she had more or less forgotten Malcolm and what he had said. It did not seem important. When she tried to remember, it slipped away from her. All she could picture was the girl behind the counter who was polishing something, over and over, with a green cloth, and the desperate stillness of Malcolm’s hands. Before many more weeks had passed she had changed jobs.

  ‘It’s just one of those things, an opportunity,’ she said, when he asked her. ‘It’s a law firm, advertising for a clerk. It’s just down the road from me – much nearer.’

  She was embarrassed by the pucker of his mouth. But she kept the gift he gave her, an Everyman edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and she arranged it on her bookshelves alongside her growing collection.

  Her new office was crowded and noisy. The traffic burred outside and the telephones were shrill. The other girls tried to claim her and were offended when she kept apart. Alice sat at her desk, marking ledgers in her tidy longhand, juggling hard-edged legal papers, waiting for something. She bit her nails, making her fingers bleed.

  One Sunday morning she woke early to find the street covered with snow. She walked for a long time, along the packed roads where she lived and towards the river, the trees conspicuous, the aspiring lines from wheel ruts and tram tracks marking the city into close grids, the statues veiled. Clumps of grass hung heavy in the patches of wasteland, and the street signs were mysterious. Coming out into a wide square boundaried with white-porched houses, she walked around every side of it, keeping to the railings and watching the birds in the central gardens rummaging in the brown c
orners below the bushes. She was upset by a scruffy boy, coming in the other direction, who flicked off the perfectly balanced hoods of snow from each pike of the fence. The calm of the city troubled her.

  Later, after war had been declared, she found herself back in the genteel square, stripped now of the snow, its railings pulled up. A doorman at one of the buildings approached her.

  ‘Do you want anything, miss?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Alice, composed. She did not realize how long she had been standing on the pavement. ‘I was just wondering how things were going, you know, out of London, in other places.’

  He sucked through tight lips. ‘Badly,’ he said.

  Alice nodded. ‘I suppose so.’ Then suddenly. ‘Do you remember the snow? I came here last winter, in the snow.’

  ‘It was my day off, miss. I was in bed,’ he said.

  ‘I’d never seen snow before, in the city.’

  ‘Well, I s’pose you’re not from round here, from the sound of you.’

  ‘Oh, I am now,’ said Alice.

  But when she got home there was something on the news about the Devonport dockyard and she picked up the wireless before the article was finished and threw it against the door. It crackled and the back board lay in pieces. She did not get it fixed. So the rest of the war arrived first-hand, encroaching from the air and blasting change into the landscape. She spent the nights in the cupboard under the stairs, the door propped open, reading by the light of a torch. She could not sleep. She had the gnawing feeling of something forgotten or hidden somewhere, or lost. And in the dim yellow glow, all she could think of was the snow that day, and the way the boy had flicked it from the railings, not seeing that it was beautiful.