Kissing Alice Read online

  Maggie was born early and small, after a hurried labour. Florrie had miscarried twice already and she arranged for the baptism almost immediately, just in case. Her daughter was tiny and quiet, improbably light, and she could not help comparing her to the bodies of her brothers that she had washed and wrapped so carefully, feeling for warmth on them long after she had been told they were dead. Hour after hour she held her ear to her daughter’s face, feeling for her breath, never quite convinced by it.

  The service was held at the new church, which had been built in a wide avenue alongside the shops, square and clean, its gardens laid out with concrete steps. Maggie was lost in the white shawl, and Mary was embarrassed by having to hold the candle like that, out in front of the congregation.

  ‘There’s no one else,’ said Florrie, pale still. ‘Not with Alice gone.’

  ‘But I don’t know what to do. And it doesn’t feel right,’ complained Mary.

  ‘Someone’ll do it for Eddie, and you’ll do it for Alice. It’ll have to be like that, that’s all,’ said Florrie, not allowing regrets. But Mary’s fixed pout bulged ugly in the candlelight and Florrie said a prayer for Alice although not being sure what God might do for her sister, the intention was hazy.

  Afterwards, Florrie took the baby to Queenie May’s and they sat together, looking out at the bomb craters that pocked the land around the dockyard. Mary changed out of her best clothes and wrapped a scarf tight under her coat, even though the weather was mild.

  ‘Where’s she going?’ asked Florrie, hearing her sister leave but not looking up from where Maggie was sleeping beside her on the couch.

  ‘Mary? She’s doing the ambulances again.’

  ‘I thought they’d said she was too young.’

  ‘Not now she’s turned sixteen. And she likes it, sitting up high, hoity toity. She’s getting good with the bandages.’

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ said Florrie, shaking her head. ‘Not at night, in the dark, during a raid.’

  ‘It’s what she wants.’ Queenie May flipped a cover over Maggie. ‘It’s like that now.’

  Even though they sat together a long time, feeling the dark creep around them from the unlit city, Florrie had left with the baby before Mary came home. There had been no bombs, and Mary had not been needed for emergencies. But it had been an unexpectedly mild evening, and she had walked with a boy in the shelter of the railway banks, feeding him tales of gory wounds. He reached inside her coat, feeling the warmth of her, and when a train scuttled along the track, screeching, they both jumped, and then laughed at their sudden fear.

  ‘It’s the raids, making us like that,’ he said, drawing Mary close again. She slipped her hands into his pockets.

  ‘But it’s good too, the war. It lets us do things.’

  He huffed. ‘Not if you get bombed.’

  The city smelt of stale smoke. Burnt-out buildings smouldered weakly; demolished houses disappeared, leaving only panels of bright paper glued stubbornly to the ends of fallen walls, intimating something. But Mary was used to all this.

  ‘No, not that,’ she conceded. ‘But some of it, don’t you think, some of it’s exciting?’

  Queenie May had waited up for her. ‘It’s late, my girl, when you’ve got school tomorrow.’ She rubbed her hands with the cold.

  ‘I’ve nearly finished with school now, Ma.’

  Queenie May tried another accusation. ‘But I see nothing of you. You’re always out. And I don’t know what’s happening out there.’

  Mary hung her coat neatly on the peg and smiled at her mother. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘They need volunteers, you know that.’

  ‘You should be careful, though, my girl.’

  Mary yawned. Her breath hung opaque. ‘They say the worst of it’s over. The crews said there might be no more raids,’ she said, shivering. ‘Ma, it’s cold in here. Colder than outside.’

  ‘Really, they’ve said that, the warden and everyone?’

  Mary nodded.

  In the end, it was several disappointing years later before victory was finally announced on the radio. Only then, when the debris was cleared away and bunting hung in flapping zigzags across the street, did Queenie May take out the metal chest from under the solid enamel of the kitchen sink, where it had been kept safe from bombs, heaving it into the middle of the floor. She eased the book out and brushed off the dust she thought she saw clinging to it. It was right to renew things. The windows were cleaned, the back yard meticulously swept, the rugs hung out to blow in the tranquil breezes, and three hyacinth bulbs planted in a pot tied to the windowsill. The days were lengthening. Queenie May imagined that Alice might come back, and it was in a new spirit of optimism that she thought about getting the book restored.

  Mary had found varnish for her nails and was painting her toes, her bare foot looped crooked over the back of the kitchen chair. She was between shifts at the hospital where she had just begun work, and was weary. She watched her mother dreamily as Queenie May slid the chest across the floor.

  ‘I can help with that, Ma, if it needs cleaning under there. Leave it till my day off.’

  Queenie May, on her knees, looked up at her. ‘I’m getting everything straight,’ she said, holding tight to the tin box. ‘That’s all. Now it’s safe to unpack things.’

  Mary shrugged, and went back to her toenails.

  ‘And I’m getting it fixed,’ Queenie May added. ‘I’m taking it to be mended.’

  Mary nodded, not listening.

  ‘The book,’ said Queenie May, straightening up and holding the box out ahead of her.

  The varnish was clotting, thick, and Mary could not paint it straight. She huffed and reached in her pocket for something to wipe away the smudges. Queenie May left her.

  Two days later, Mary came home to find her mother sitting on the bed, the open book between her splayed legs, her head bent low over the page, her hand tipped towards the words. She was trying to read. She looked up as Mary threw her coat across a chair.

  ‘I was trying to see it, to make something of it,’ she explained apologetically. ‘But Mary, I can’t. It won’t do it. Won’t you read it to me, my love?’

  She patted the counterpane beside her, inviting, and Mary sat down with the slightest of sighs. She could see Alice’s scrawl.

  ‘What is it, Ma? Is it from Ally? Has she… ?’

  The question trailed beyond but Queenie May wanted it thrust away.

  ‘It’s the book,’ she said.

  Mary shrugged. ‘The book?’

  Queenie May snorted a breathy laugh. ‘You’re not such a scatterbrain, my girl. You remember the book.’ She smoothed the already smooth paper with her flat hand and Mary began to read what was written there. Queenie May was remembering the slow blizzard of paper scraps, poetic and majestic. ‘You do remember, Mary, how you read it to me – when you were young – or told me about it – the letter Ally had written? You remember me tearing the book?’

  There was everything in between, the war especially, dense and deep, and for Mary the elongated years of growing up.

  ‘I don’t know Ma,’ she said.

  Queenie May was unexpectedly upset. ‘Oh Mary, come on, my girl – the letter – the love letter from Alice to Eddie. The one she wrote before she went away. The one that explained it all.’

  Mary remembered something shifting and only half real, like the games she had played as a girl. She tried reading what Alice had written, to consolidate things, feeling the press of her mother’s legs against her own, but there was nothing on the page to help her; no love letter. Just something ordinary, trite words between sisters.

  ‘Read it to me, Mary,’ wheedled Queenie May.

  Mary frowned. ‘You want to hear it, Ma? You’re sure? It’s just… it’s just Ally, a long time ago,’ she said. ‘It’s not much, probably. Best left.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mary. I think it’s time. After everything.’

  Mary thought of a way out. ‘But Florrie. What if Florrie hears…
now Eddie’s due home and everything?’

  Queenie May was definite. ‘After all these years? She won’t hear.’

  Mary edged away from her mother. She spoke without looking at her. ‘It’s best left, Ma,’ she said again. ‘I’m not sure it’s quite, you know, how you remember. After all this time.’

  She closed the front cover of the book and there was quiet. Then the stutter of her mother’s tears.

  ‘But I can’t do it, I can’t do it on my own, I can’t read it, Mary. And I just wanted to know why she went, that’s all. I just wanted to know what took Ally away.’

  Mary did not understand. ‘But I don’t see… if I read?’

  ‘I wanted to be sure,’ said Queenie May, ‘about Eddie.’ And she sobbed, once, as though her lungs were cracking, and then the misery broke out of her with such force that she curled up hard, thrusting the book to one side as she clenched the bed cover tightly in her hands, her face and soon her chin and chest wet with tears. Mary held her and cried too, because she could not resist. It took them a long time to be quiet. Then Queenie May held Mary’s hand as she explained, her slow sobs still snatching the words.

  ‘I thought – I didn’t know – oh, poor Ally – she’s been gone so long. And I wanted to see – I thought if it was Eddie – if she was in love with Eddie – then she would have left because of that. I thought that was it.’

  Mary nodded, not understanding. She squeezed her mother’s hand but there was no response.

  ‘Because if not,’ Queenie May went on. ‘If not – then I thought it was something else – me – or Arthur – I thought she left because of something else. And I couldn’t bear… it had to be Eddie.’

  Mary wrapped both her hands around her mother’s, dipping her head over them, burdened by Queenie May’s distress and the way it excluded her. They sat for a long time together on the bed, tired, huddled, not even moving with the dark. Every now and again a heavy sob would surge out of Queenie May’s past and Mary would touch her briefly on the shoulder, reassuring. She didn’t read to her mother.

  ‘It’ll be all right, Ma,’ she said at last. ‘I promise.’

  So Mary wrote the love letter to Eddie, as Alice might have done, making it true. It was not easy. She sat for a long time, trying out lines on scraps of paper, and practising the twist of her letters. She tried to imagine how Alice might write, but all she could think of were the tight-packed pages of shorthand she had sometimes watched her sister concocting, a mystery to her. She thought about love and tried to describe it. But when she read back the words they were stilted and strange, quaint. She did not like the sound of them.

  She continued to practise. She tried out phrases in her head; whispered them to herself to get them honed. And the words, in time, began to sink deep in her, playing their sounds out as she slept. Sitting by the window on the bus, watching the city; sweeping out the ward; standing on the corner by the cinema arches looking out across the dockyard, and, in the twilight, waiting for boys, the thought of the letter seemed to lift her from things, making the world around her swollen and tremulous, and only herself sharp-edged, knowing. Day by day, and word by word, she began to understand. And in the end, when she tore Alice’s writing from the front of the book and wrote her own letter there instead, she pushed the words breathlessly to the limit of the paper, scrawling quickly, the pen tingling in her fingers, her thoughts scattered, and only the tincture of love hot on the page and within her, writhing. At the end of it, Mary sat back, blotting the sheet with an old rag. She did not read again what she had written. She set the book open on the floor by her feet until she could be sure the dark ink was absolutely dry and she stretched out, content.

  Mary’s work was finished just in time. Less than a week later Queenie May packed up the book and took it into the city, to a bookseller’s not far from the town hall. The shop’s original premises had been bombed, and it was cramped now into two small rooms piled high with muddled shelves and boxes of books, stone dust falling from the ceiling on to the paper covers. The shop girl, gawky and thick-lipped, reassured Queenie May with her open clumsiness and lack of pretension.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, when Queenie May showed her what remained of the book. ‘What a shame it’s so spoilt. Was it a raid? We get lots of books from raids.’

  Queenie May nodded. The girl turned the pages gingerly.

  ‘I don’t know what you can do, but if you can fix it somehow, some of it. It belonged to my daughter,’ said Queenie May. It sounded so much like the making of a memorial that she was embarrassed.

  The girl looked carefully at the binding and the stitching. She glanced at Mary’s letter, but did not, just then, read it. She bent the cover back and forth. She pressed the pages between her thumb and finger, as though testing their ripeness. After that, she did not know what to do, and was no clearer as to how the book might be repaired. She looked again at its configuration. Queenie May waited, trusting her.

  ‘You see, it’s in two parts,’ said the girl at last. ‘From here, where it says Songs of Experience, that’s a whole new section. And the damage is all before it, here. It must have been the way it was lying. But there’s just these first few pages, which are still all right, and then scraps and tears, and then…’ She flicked through to make her point, her confidence growing. ‘Perhaps we could start again, with this bit, the end, and make a new book.’

  She did not know if this was possible, but it sounded reasonable and she smiled up at Queenie May, waiting for an answer.

  ‘Half of it then,’ said Queenie May.

  ‘More or less. The good half. We’d save whatever we could – the cover, of course, trimmed back, and the page she’s written on. It would be in a good state.’

  Queenie May thought about it, unsatisfied. ‘It’s better than nothing I suppose.’

  ‘It’ll still look nice – and old,’ said the girl, hoping this would clinch it.

  The thought of it looking something like the same was very tempting.

  ‘How long will it take?’ asked Queenie May.

  The girl breathed heavily in the direction of the piled boxes. ‘We’re very busy. Just at the moment. I think it may take a while. It’s a specialist job. But if you leave your address we can write to you when it’s ready.’

  Queenie May gave the name of her street. ‘And then,’ she asked, ‘I would need to know how much it might cost.’

  The girl puffed again. ‘Hard to say,’ she said. ‘Just now.’

  Queenie May, frightened of making a scene in such a seat of learning, left without an estimate.

  The letter arrived several months later, informing Queenie May, in the most polite way, that the job had been satisfactorily completed. It said nothing about cost, nor did it tell Queenie May that the book had been re-stitched with intimate care by an experienced binder, a Polish refugee, who savoured the feel of the paper, like bird’s wings in his hands, and who kept the discarded pages for himself. Florrie read it out loud to her mother when she called by with Maggie. Eddie was coming home after the war and there was such a rush to make things right for him, that everything else brushed lightly by her, but still the letter made her start.

  ‘What’s this, Ma? What book?’

  Queenie May bent to wipe Maggie’s runny nose. ‘Alice’s book,’ she said, seeing no way out of it.

  Florrie pulled Maggie to her so that her mother had to look up. ‘What book, Ma? The book? The one from the wedding? That one?’

  Maggie whimpered at the tightness of her mother’s grip on her bare arm, and Florrie slapped her. They listened for a while to her tight sobs.

  ‘It got damaged,’ said Queenie May at last. ‘I thought I should have it put right.’

  ‘We don’t want it, you know, Eddie and me. We don’t want it, not even as a present, not after…’

  ‘No, best not,’ said Queenie May flatly. ‘But still, it wasn’t right to let it spoil. It might be worth something one day.’

  Florrie huffed. ‘You sh
ould have ditched it, while you had the chance,’ she said. ‘It’s not worth anything; it’s not worth any trouble.’

  ‘Well, it’s done now,’ said Queenie May.

  ‘We don’t want it,’ said Florrie again.

  ‘No, I suppose not. I’ll keep it,’ said Queenie May.

  Florrie waited on the Hoe for Eddie’s ship to dock. Maggie pulled hard on her hand, wanting to be put up high on her shoulders, wanting to see, but Florrie resisted, her eyes fixed to the battle-grey vessel that was emerging so slowly from the far edge of things. She recited the rosary in her head, trying to be calm, but the routine prayers leapt and soared, refusing to be still, and the crowd pushed around her. A thick drizzle smudged the distance and then she saw the ship, sleek and terrible, and, eventually, the bright battlemented rows on the deck that only became figures at the very last moment. She looked out for Eddie, but she did not see him, not until the sailors had landed and everyone was at the dock, shouting and whistling and reaching out. And when she did see him, she was suddenly, unexpectedly shy. He looked brawny and tanned. So although she had planned to run to him, to throw her arms around him, to kiss him, of course, she found she could not do that. She held back. And then she picked up Maggie and held her out like a gift. And the other things she had brought with her in her basket – the bottle of beer and the cigarettes, the packet of lemon sweets – she kept hidden and on the way home, even though it was still raining, she took off the new red headscarf she had been wearing and slipped it into her pocket, sorry that Eddie had not noticed it.

  With everything going on, Florrie forgot about her mother’s arrangements for the book, and so no one knew when it was, exactly, that Queenie May went into town to collect it. The girl showed her what had been done.

  ‘Can you read me something then?’ asked Queenie May.

  The girl blinked. ‘They’re just the same, the poems. We haven’t done anything to the pages, just taken out the damaged ones and rebound it,’ she said.

  ‘But if you wouldn’t mind… just a line or two. To make sure.’

  ‘I don’t read very well,’ said the girl, sheepish. ‘Not out loud.’