Kissing Alice Read online

  ‘Can I help, Ma?’ called Alice, once.

  Queenie May shuffled through then.

  ‘Let me do this, Ally,’ she said. ‘Let me cook for you,’ and Alice left her alone.

  Queenie May brought the plates of sausages through on wooden trays that Alice had not seen before. On each of them there was an identical pair of small blue plastic salt and pepper pots, and a paper napkin, folded. Queenie May brought each of the trays from the kitchen slowly in turn, afraid of falling, and she went again at the end for a saucer of mustard, the powder still lying dry at the edges. By the time they ate, the meal was cold. But Alice enjoyed it, nonetheless, and saved the thought of it.

  ‘That was lovely, Ma,’ she said.

  ‘It’ll keep you going,’ said her mother, as though there were a long journey to be got through. Then she took the plates away, repeating her slow procession to the kitchen. Alice heard the clatter of dishes on the draining board, and the sound of something falling. Then she heard the radio, suddenly loud, songs slipping confidently into the quiet. It seemed a long time until Queenie May came back. When she did come, she was brisk.

  ‘Are you all right, Ally?’ she said.

  Alice had to say she was.

  ‘You’re managing all right, for money? You’re eating well? Your chest’s not playing up too much?’

  The way the questions came together made each of them avoidable.

  ‘I’m fine, Ma, really.’

  ‘Right you are,’ said Queenie May, not believing.

  There was only the slightest of pauses.

  ‘Can’t you find someone?’ asked Queenie May then.

  Alice sniffed a laugh. ‘I don’t want anyone, Ma. I don’t like, you know, that sort of thing.’

  Queenie May did not laugh back. ‘But Ally, what is it? What is it that you’re after? With all the men you’ve… with all the…’

  ‘Don’t start that.’ Alice was sharp.

  ‘Right you are.’ But Queenie May had to go on. ‘At your age, though, Ally – you’re thirty, my girl – you’re on the shelf. You should settle down with someone, with someone you love. You’d see then…’

  ‘I don’t think I would,’ said Alice.

  ‘You’re too like your father, Ally, that’s the trouble. You want too much. You’ll just get yourself in a state, like he did.’

  Alice remembered the wide ridged palms of her father’s hands, but his face was faint. Queenie May sat back in her chair, wincing at the shifting configuration of her pain.

  ‘He spoilt you, Ally,’ she said.

  ‘He did,’ said Alice. ‘He spoilt me. But that’s a long time ago, Ma.’

  ‘Not to me,’ said Queenie May.

  Queenie May tipped her head back against her seat and closed her eyes. Her face was loose. Alice spread out long on the sofa. They breathed quietly together, remembering things. They were both weary. The house was still. And even though it was the middle of the day, they slept for a long time. Alice opened her eyes once or twice, dreamily, and, seeing the consoling bulk of her mother in the large armchair, sank back to sleep. When they finally stirred, the light in the room was grey and the radio pips were bleating the lateness of the hour. Alice was in a hurry to go for her bus and Queenie May was matter-of-fact again.

  ‘You’ll call by, Ally, when you get the chance?’ she said, at the door.

  Two days later, Queenie May woke in the night with unfamiliar pains twisting in her chest and a grip of such loneliness about her heart that she could not breathe. When she tried to get up from the bed, she fell, catching her foot in the trailing end of the sheet and wedging herself at an odd angle between the wardrobe and the floor, half on her knees. The draught from under the door stirred the edges of her nightdress, but otherwise she was still. From her peculiar vantage point, she noticed an abandoned handkerchief lodged under the bed, pale in the half-light, and she closed her eyes. But the faces that came to her then, leering and smirking, whipping close around her, clinging like cobwebs to her skin, had no solace in them. They were not quite recognizable, distorted and antique, the unready features of her flimsy sons, blank-faced ghouls, strangers, peering and pinching at her, mocking, menacing her with bony hands. She died calling out in the dark for Arthur, knowing he would not come.

  Florrie did not find Queenie May until two days later, already rotting, her stench deep in the boards of the house and mice shredding her clothes for their nests. It meant that even in the end, Florrie did not hold her mother, retching instead across the thick folds of the corpse. She left the windows of the house wide open to clear the smell. Once or twice children in the street held competitions to see if they could throw stones through into the rooms. A cat climbed in. The slice of new moon shone cold on to the furniture. Florrie sat at home, waiting for things to clear. And when finally she went back to the house, the landlord pressuring her to empty the rooms, she found that small things had been neglected: dishes left unwashed in the kitchen, a pile of mending tucked behind a chair and a pot-plant rose, wilted and brown, unwatered. She was angry with her mother for surrendering in that way. She also found the book, wrapped and pristine, settled comfortably among Queenie May’s stockings and yellowing vests. She recognized it immediately. She thought of it as Alice’s; she did not remember that it was hers. And she left it on the floor while she tidied. It was at the end of the day, addled then by the creeping sadness of touching her mother’s things, that she put it on top of the box that she was taking home. She did not think to mention it to Mary.

  At Queenie May’s funeral they looked, of course, for Alice. They stood on the open ground of the new cemetery extension huddled around the close-packed button of yellow flowers at the foot of the open grave, and each of them, in turn, swept a gaze across the mounds and headstones, right up to the boundary fence, across to the new estate of houses packed against it, and away then to the low grey film of sea. But Alice was not there.

  ‘She must be dead then, too,’ concluded Florrie, and Mary, taking her sister’s arm tightly in her own, nodded in confirmation.

  But Florrie could not shake the sadness of this. Her prayers fractured into little more than just the brooding repetition of her sister’s name, and when she thought of her mother’s funeral, as she did often over the coming years, she sometimes suspected she saw Alice there; sometimes obscured by a tree, or the parked bulk of the hearse; sometimes at the edge of the small crowd, tucked far back, but unmistakeable. The look in her sister’s eyes transfixed her.

  ‘Did you hear, Mum, what I said?’ persisted Maggie.

  They were cooking together, making trays of angel cakes for the church bazaar. Maggie was mixing the butter icing, pressing the fondant hard with the back of a wooden spoon. Her mother was supposed to be cutting the cakes, but she was still, her knife suspended above the board.

  ‘What, Mags? Sorry.’ Florrie shook her head and the picture of Alice dissolved, quivering. It was almost ten years since Queenie May’s death, but still the ridged sweep of the cemetery was fresh-coloured in her mind and Florrie felt as though she were grieving for something.

  ‘I’ve got some things for the bring and buy,’ Maggie repeated, unspectacularly. ‘I looked them out, a couple of prayer books from when I was little.’

  Florrie was still distracted. ‘Prayer books, Maggie?’

  ‘The ones for children. There’re two of them. I don’t know where they came from.’

  Florrie began again cutting wings from the sliced lids of her buns, her knife strokes steady. ‘I got them at church, at my first communion,’ she said. ‘A long time ago.’

  Maggie sensed she might have made a mistake. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I just thought… If they’re special, I can keep them, of course. They don’t take up room.’

  ‘You don’t use them though,’ said Florrie.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  Florrie spooned out the butter icing on to the cakes and stuck the wings in at angles on their tops. Maggie set a
cherry carefully in each. They were quiet, concentrating, but over her shoulder Florrie could feel Arthur, bending over her as he had done on her communion day, his breath peppery. She could feel the swirl of the borrowed veil on her shoulders and the smoky breeze from the dockyard unsettling her hair. She could feel her father’s hand light on her shoulder, the warmth of it through her thin blouse, and the sanctity of the prayer books clutched in her hand. She finished the buns and turned away to the sink. Maggie brought the slender books down from her bedroom. They looked fragile and outdated, the colours on them sugary.

  ‘Here, Mum, what do you think? Shall I keep them?’

  Florrie shook her head. ‘Put them with the tins,’ she said. ‘We’ll give them to Mrs Morimer for the bring-and-buy, like you said.’

  Maggie hesitated.

  ‘Everyone got one,’ said Florrie plainly, wiping her hands. ‘In those days, everyone got one when you made your communion. They’re nothing special. The nuns dished them out at the back of the church, I remember.’ Then, for the moment, there was a question. ‘But there’s nothing written in them, is there, Mags?’

  Maggie flicked open the books. ‘No. Nothing,’ she said and she put the books with the pile of things to be taken to the bazaar.

  Later, packing the box to take to church, Florrie held the prayer books in her hand. They seemed very small. She read a rhyme from one of them, but it was childish, so instead she took her rosary from her pocket and recited a brisk decade, flicking the beads quickly through her fingers. Still, though, the prayer would not hold the past away. It was swelling back now, inexorable, and there were still traces of butter icing around her nails and flakes of hard flour in the creases of her wrists when she took the lid off the box that held, unsorted, her dead mother’s things. There was not much of any interest. In less than half an hour she had sorted through the heirlooms and set most aside, unsentimentally, for the forthcoming bazaar. A small green glass vase she put away for Maggie and she took Alice’s book downstairs and put it on the dining-room table. She noticed how light it felt, and as she unwrapped it she saw how dull it was, how ordinary. It was just Alice’s odd wedding present, neglected.

  The new binding was tight. The pages clung together, and so Florrie had to ease back the front cover. The letter surprised her. She knew Mary’s handwriting immediately. It was slightly twisted by the format of the page, slightly askew, as though she were using a broken-nibbed pen, but Florrie recognized it nonetheless. So although she saw Alice’s name there, she was not fooled. And when Florrie first read the letter, she was so busy puzzling over when Mary could have done it and how Queenie May could have let her, that she hardly took in the words. So she read the whole thing again, slowly and clumsily, the peculiar passion her sister was speaking to Eddie only gradually becoming real to her.

  At first she thought about it quite clearly. She saw what Mary had done as a child’s thing; a dare. But the clearness did not last long, because there was Alice’s name, and Eddie’s, there was the throb of lust, and there were the words combusting the past. And Florrie could not help thinking then about Eddie and what he might have done and how he might have betrayed her; about the way her sisters had plotted against her, uniting in their rancid desire for her husband; about the million possibilities that might shame and defeat her. And within a few moments all she had was her anger, vast and unlandmarked. Dressed as she was in her apron, her hair straggled and unpinned, Florrie stuffed the book high into the back of the airing cupboard where no one could chance upon it. Maggie heard the click of the front door as her mother left the house.

  Florrie cantered down the hill as a light rain began to fall, but she saw nothing of the puddles gathering around her, and never stepped aside to avoid the spray of passing cars. She did not see how people looked at her. All she could see was Eddie, the beautiful man she had married, and, clicking through her vision like stuttering frames of film, the moments he might have spent with Mary or Alice, the looks he might have flashed at them, the evidence of betrayal. She saw when it might have started, at the wedding or before, Alice’s dramatic treachery bold in the scenes, and always the rest of them circling away from her, leaving her, because she could not keep up with them. She ran faster.

  It seemed to Florrie that Eddie had let her down. She was disappointed. It was Alice, perhaps, or Mary, who had deceived her. It was perhaps the two of them. But it was always Eddie. As though she had been waiting for it from the first, she accepted it, but it stung her nonetheless. It did not seem right that she should be discarded. It did not seem just. Her anger welled up from the past, where she was gauche and ignorant and clumsy, where Arthur was turning from her. They had written a letter that stunted everything.

  When Florrie trotted out into the road that led down to the dockyard, and was hit hard by a delivery van coming from the city, she was trying to decide what she could do. Her pace had slowed; she was no longer running. This is what, in the end, killed her. Had she been running still, the van would have slid past her, honking. But things were becoming clear to her. She was feeling the dribble of rain for the first time on her neck and reaching behind to pull her collar tight. With the cool of it on her skin it was as though, suddenly, she could see what the future might be. The radiance of it made her stop, and it was then that she was hit. Spinning up into the air, light for a moment, warm, she saw her reflection in the wide windscreen, askew slightly but sharp, her face firm with the expectation of freedom, and she was surprised.

  4. Eddie

  WHEN EDDIE FIRST found the book, going through the things at the back of the cupboard almost two years after Florrie died, he could not think what it was. It was wrapped in torn white paper that was blotched and stained along one side, browning with age, and when he felt the weight of it he could only think it might be some kind of album, photos perhaps that his wife had kept of Maggie when she was growing up, or an unfinished collection of something. Even when he unwrapped it, it still meant nothing. He did not recognize the soft brown cover and, although it seemed old, he could not remember it.

  And he got distracted for a while by a scarf that caught his eye, dark sprigs of thorns on a deep red ground; the same scarf Florrie had worn, he was sure, when she had stood up high on the Hoe in the squalling rain, waiting for a glimpse of his ship returning after the war. He had seen the colour of it vivid in the crowd, he could remember that, and he could remember the thump in his heart at the first sight of her, just the scarf and a wisp of hair and the half-familiar way she held her head, high over the other women but dipped down, askance. He remembered trying to be sure of who she was, in those moments before they touched, but it never came to him, and there was just the scarf, tickly on his skin, and the smell of land, the warm, damp nylon, the scent of hairspray and cigarettes and the musk of the city, the strangeness of Florrie, a smell that sickened him. Kneeling on the narrow landing, he held the scarf to his face now. It smelt only of the cheap wood of the cupboard. He put it to one side, for a jumble sale. He had no use for it.

  Eddie was disappointed to find the book did not bulge with photographs, or cigarette cards, or stamps, or even scraps from family outings, stuck down with sticky corners. He could imagine that Florrie might have found pleasure in collecting odds and ends, to mark her place in time, and he would have liked to see the things she chose to save. But it was just a book, with nothing personal about it. And Eddie put it to one side while he continued to tidy the cupboard. He found other things: the thick plait of Maggie’s hair cut off when she left primary school and laid in a shoe box; Christmas cards; an old dog licence; a neatly rolled newspaper celebrating the Queen’s coronation six years earlier; a small brown velvet purse, faded and much worn, empty, and the letters he had written home from his tours, bound with a dry elastic band that crumbled away the moment he went to unwind it. He read one or two paragraphs but somehow they rolled by him, without burrs to catch his attention. There seemed to be nothing there. And Eddie cried, for the first time since he had recei
ved the call at the dockyard offices telling him that his wife had been killed.

  By the time he looked at the book properly it was late and he was tired. Maggie had come in from work and was upstairs in her room, playing records. He could hear the faint noise of her moving around, perhaps dancing. He unwrapped a mint sweet and twisted the empty wrapper deftly into a bow. He had come home from one of his long navy tours with almost two thousand of these bows, which he had fashioned into a rug, pulling the papers through a square of sacking with a crochet hook. This one he balanced on the edge of his metal ashtray; he would later throw it away. He opened the book and sat back in his chair with it spread wide on his lap. He had to force the binding, which was tight. He pushed it open at a page towards the back and sat with it for a long time. He finished his sweet and then rolled a cigarette with the tobacco from his tin and lit it, knocking the mint wrapper to the floor and sprinkling a few dark fibres of tobacco on to the pale pages. He did not know what to make of what he saw, odd distended paintings splashed around, almost over, poems that were more like hymns; the resonant blues of tropical waters, swirling orange where they lapped the sands; sun-deep greens sweeping into gold. He read one or two lines of verse, and he ran his fingers over the pages. They felt thick and warm, like dark flesh dripping from the sea.

  Eddie stubbed out the wet paper end of his roll-up and tried to concentrate. He turned back to find the information given at the beginning, to get some idea of what he was looking at, at what it was that Florrie had hoarded. It was then that he saw a different page at the front, densely covered in blue-inked writing, a looped stretched hand that he didn’t recognize. There was something alluring about it, about the boldness of it, the letters tangled and intense and when Eddie picked out his name there, clearly, he felt it for a moment like a spell.