Kissing Alice Read online

  Then there was Alice.

  It was not that he recognized her straight away. She was not what he had conjured since finding the letter. There was a limpness about her face, and slack folds about her eyes, that he had not envisaged. Her hair was cut short, and bulged into a strange loop at the back where she had struggled to reach with her hairbrush. Her dark blue dress drained the colour from her and gave her body sharp, unfamiliar angles. Nonetheless, it was Alice, and Eddie knew this the moment he heard her speak. Hearing the voice, there could be no mistake.

  She called to the waitress for her bill.

  ‘I was wondering if I could pay by cheque. Would that be all right?’

  That is what Eddie heard, at first, almost without noticing, but then something flashed inside him, and he leaned forward, waiting for her to speak again. The tablecloth crumpled hot in his hand.

  ‘That’s fine, madam,’ said the waitress.

  ‘If I could borrow a pen… I’m sorry.’

  It was such an ordinary thing, but the gravel in her voice scraped something clear and bright in Eddie’s memory and he felt himself stand.

  Alice had her hand in her bag. The waitress was bending to take her side plate. They both looked across at the slight, thin-mouthed man in the tweed jacket who had knocked his chair backwards against the wall with a clatter. The other diners looked too. It felt to them like something should happen. For a moment, everyone was still, waiting, but then the waitress started briskly for the kitchen. Eddie tasted the meat as something far away and faint, and clutched the edge of the table to steady himself.

  ‘I’ll bring you dessert, sir, if you like,’ said the waitress as she passed. ‘Ice cream or fruit salad?’

  Eddie felt the end of the toppled chair leg sharp against his calf. He stared across at the woman he knew was Alice, but she was brushing crumbs from the cloth.

  ‘No, no dessert,’ he said, more loudly than he meant.

  The waitress shrugged. She would eat his ice-cream portion later, out by the back stairs, shivering in the cold.

  Eddie could not think what to do. He could not move. He was absolutely sure the woman at the table was Alice. She was not what he had expected, but she was Alice. And he was so afraid of her now, of what she might say to reject the past written in the letter, that he was held back.

  He watched as the waitress brought the pen and Alice wrote out the cheque. Then she took her coat from the seat next to her where it had been folded, and stood to button it. She turned her back to Eddie as she did this, looking out across the heads of the other diners to the view from the window. Eddie followed her gaze. An advertising logo, painted on the side of a passing lorry, floated across the glass like a flag. Then there was just a view of the bank building opposite, its milky windows half-mast.

  Alice was in the lobby when he caught up with her. She was looking at herself in the heavy gilt-framed mirror, adjusting the buttons of her coat, and it was the reflection of him she saw first, his dark eyes wide and anxious. She remembered his eyes.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, looking hard into the depths of the mirror. His reflection caught up with her.

  ‘Alice?’

  ‘I was having lunch,’ she said, turning to him.

  ‘Yes – I had lunch. The beef.’

  ‘It was rather dry.’

  Looking at the back of her reflected in the mirror, Eddie could see her scalp through the bend of misplaced hair.

  ‘Alice,’ he said again, softly.

  ‘It was my birthday,’ she said. ‘I’m forty-eight,’ she added sheepishly.

  And of course they did not know what to do, after all this time, with the strangeness of gathering age between them. They did not know how to start.

  Eddie saw the reflection of the waitress coming through the door from the dining room. She held out a small plate to him.

  ‘Your bill, sir? For lunch.’

  Eddie did not stop looking at Alice. ‘Will you wait, one moment? Just while I… I’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ said Alice. Even all these years later, the way she said it, it seemed like an invitation.

  Eddie paid his bill in cash, leaving a tip. The waitress took his notes away again on the plate and disappeared back into the restaurant.

  ‘Come in here,’ said Eddie. He reached out to take Alice’s hand, but realized at the last moment what he was doing and put his hand into his pocket instead, where he felt his darts. He opened the door to the right of the lobby, a magnificent high door with carved panels and a thick brush seal. It opened, he knew, into the ballroom.

  Inside it was gloomy. There were no windows, only a row of skylights high in the domed roof. The room was more or less empty. The curtains had been taken down so that the stage was bare at the far end, and only a few trestle tables remained, folded and stacked against the back wall and haphazardly covered with sheets. The banks of mirrors and the glass chandeliers, the smooth pale ash floor, the gilt decorations and brass railings were all dull and lifeless. There was no hint of sparkle or glamour. Eddie was surprised. It was not what he had expected.

  ‘They’ve closed it up,’ he said, hardly moving from the door.

  Alice took a step or two inside, her heels clicking on the floor.

  ‘They dance at the Pavilions now, the youngsters, I think,’ she said. She looked around carefully. ‘It’s beautiful. I would have loved to come here. I would have loved to dance, with the band.’

  Eddie had danced, here, with Florrie. He remembered that. He remembered everything about it, suddenly drawing it from the dark, the small cream and blue flowers of Florrie’s dress, the double layer of polish he had laid on his shoes, the way they had waltzed, gingerly at first, self-conscious, and the way the crowds about them, always changing, looked always the same, looked light and poised and merry. And Florrie, sheltering him beneath her tallness, had spun with such grace that neither of them had found anything to say about it.

  ‘I used to dance in the navy. It was tap dancing,’ he said, because it was his memory alone. ‘We had a place on the ship where the floor made a good sound. I can’t remember; I think we had something for our shoes. I got quite good. I liked it.’

  Alice was surprised. ‘I’d forgotten,’ she said. ‘About you being at sea.’

  ‘Forgotten?’ Eddie couldn’t believe this. He felt she should know him better. ‘It’s what I did – for years. And even after, now, at the dockyard – I’m in the offices, working shifts. You can’t have forgotten about the navy, my love.’

  ‘I didn’t know, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘But you did, you did know. When we were married, me and Florrie, I was in the navy then. Some of them made the guard of honour at the church – you remember that?’

  Eddie was unexpectedly angry at so much of himself vanishing so suddenly.

  Alice breathed a half-smile, nearly apologizing. ‘But it wasn’t like that when I met you, not at first, was it? And I’ve always thought of you, I suppose, as I first saw you. It doesn’t matter.’

  This wasn’t what Eddie had supposed it would be like. They were prickly together, out of joint. Alice’s indifference hurt him and what he said next came out fiercely.

  ‘I found what you wrote, in the book. I found it when Florrie died.’

  His head was full of the neat close lines of text. He felt the glow of it. There was a flush to her cheeks, too, he could see, as she came towards him, as she, too, felt the crush of what she had written all those years ago.

  But it was not that.

  ‘Florrie’s dead?’ Alice said quietly, her eyes sliding from his face.

  Only then did Eddie remember that Alice had not known. ‘She was killed,’ he said. ‘She was knocked down. A while ago, now – I’m sorry, my love. We looked for you at the time, you see, to tell you, but… I’m sorry.’

  Before he had moved, she turned from him and walked away across the expanse of dance floor. He listened to the click of her heels and watched the pale patch
of her scalp. He could not tell if she was crying. There was no sound from her. He waited while she walked, watching, until eventually she took a turn around the sweep of the ballroom and came back to him. She was breathing heavily with short stiff breaths. He thought he’d better tell her everything.

  ‘And Queenie May? You knew about Queenie May, that she was dead?’

  Alice nodded. ‘Yes, I knew about Ma. I used to go and see her, at the end. I saw her just a day or two before she died. I knew about that. It was just Florrie.’

  Eddie took his tin of cigarettes from his pocket and clicked the lid open softly with both thumbs.

  ‘But they said you’d lost touch. I thought no one knew where you were. Even Queenie May…’

  ‘She never told anyone,’ said Alice. ‘Even Florrie. She was ashamed of me.’ She breathed a soft laugh.

  Eddie took out a cigarette and slipped the tin back into his pocket.

  ‘I’m sorry you didn’t know,’ he said. ‘You should have been told. You should have been there at the funeral.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have gone anyway.’ Her quick anger was surprising. Eddie thought she might flounce away, abandoning him, but she took his arm, pressing her fingers into the fabric of his coat. ‘So you’re on your own, Eddie. After all this time.’

  Afterwards, Eddie thought he should have mentioned Maggie. He should have told Alice that Maggie was taking care of things, filling in, but she smiled at him with such sudden vehemence that he was flustered.

  ‘I found what you’d written, all those years ago, in the book,’ he said instead, feeling Alice’s arm rested on his.

  Alice showed no surprise. ‘But Florrie? She never found it? Never read it?’

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ said Eddie. ‘I don’t think so. It was in a pile of old stuff.’

  Alice was quiet. In the echo of the disused ballroom the years peeled away from her; the confusion of Florrie resounded everywhere like the shatter of breaking glass, kindling a desire that she had presumed was dead. She looked at Eddie, dazed, and smiled again.

  Eddie pushed the door with his shoulder and the brush seal swooshed open. There was an elderly man with a walking stick making his slow way through the lobby. He did not seem to notice Eddie and Alice as they left the hotel, dowdy and unremarkable and with something inside each of them like fireflies.

  They spoke on the telephone that evening, when Maggie was in the bathroom washing her hair. They agreed to meet again the following weekend. Neither of them could drive.

  ‘We could catch the bus into Cornwall, to Looe,’ Alice suggested.

  ‘In November?’

  ‘We could play the slotties,’ she said. Eddie had no better suggestion.

  Since it rained hard all day, they played the machines in the arcade many times over, changing their notes for half pennies at the booth and watching them trickle away. Alice won once on the one-armed bandit, a meagre win that rattled into the tray faintly, but Eddie soon ran out of coins. He went out of the shimmering darkness to look at the sea. It was grey and choppy, the horizon shrunk. He felt Alice behind him.

  ‘Would you like tea?’ he asked, because they had to do something, and they went to a lace-windowed café tucked up behind the harbour. Alice ordered a scone with clotted cream. Eddie was suddenly uncomfortable, watching her eat, and Alice, looking across at him, took her time with the thick cream, fingering the crumbs, tempting him. He could not tell if she knew what she was doing.

  After tea they wandered for a while in the rain, Alice keeping him at bay with the twirl of her umbrella, the spray dripping from the peak of Eddie’s cap. They looked at the fishing boats in the harbour, moored up for low tide and they watched a child throw an apple core to the screeching gulls. They did not talk much. It was as if they could not risk it. Going home on the bus, crossing the new bridge back into Devon, when Eddie wanted to say something about what might have happened to them, he just watched instead as the great steel hawsers marked time outside the window. And when he got home that evening, he found he hadn’t enjoyed himself in the way he’d expected. He felt as if he’d lost something.

  They did not arrange to meet again. And even though Eddie had Alice’s address now, and a phone number, he did not contact her. He found he could put her out of his mind. He did not read the letter.

  But then Maggie found the loose pages of the book.

  She had gone out to the shed to look for a screwdriver to tighten the handle on a saucepan. A large spider, thin-legged and quick, had scuttled across the bench in front of her making her stumble backwards, panicky, a scream tucked in her throat. She had knocked things, a spade and a bottle, and in the confusion of grabbing hands she had pulled the cloth from the pile of unbound sheets stacked in the corner of a low shelf. She was surprised at what she found. She brought one of the pages back into the kitchen, holding it gently by one edge, the screwdriver in her skirt pocket.

  ‘What’s this, Dad?’ she called through.

  She yanked back the edge of the corrugated plastic partition that pulled across between the kitchen and the lounge, a mucky bone colour. It squeaked on its runners.

  ‘Look. This. From the shed.’

  Eddie knew what she had found. He was surprised to feel his heart racing. ‘It was Florrie’s,’ he said, not looking. ‘A book. I found it when I was clearing the things.’

  He turned to her then and held out his hand for the page. Maggie slipped it to him before disappearing behind the partition to deal with the crackles and spits from the stove. The paper was crisp and heavy, but not damp. Eddie held it up to the light from the wide bay window, looking for mushroom-brown spots or the stain of watermarks. It looked no different than the day he had dissected the volume. Nothing had affected it.

  Maggie came into the lounge having turned down the heat. She took the page from her father and looked at it again. The forms and colours were strange. Creeping fronds of something, a tree or a vine, slid dark into the head of a snake. The page held her, but she did not like it. There was something brutal about it.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said nonetheless. ‘Was it really Mum’s? I’ve never seen it before. She never showed me.’

  She handed the page back to Eddie, not wanting to think about Florrie with it. For a while they were both quiet.

  ‘I never knew,’ Maggie said at last, shuffling. It was the first time the memory of her mother had let her down.

  Eddie felt sorry for her. ‘Nor did I, my love, nor did I. It wasn’t just you. It was hidden away in a cupboard, you see, at the back. She’d probably forgotten all about it.’

  ‘But where did she get it, something like this?’

  Maggie couldn’t help touching it again and she fingered the page. Eddie watched her.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He hesitated. ‘It was a wedding present, I think. I remember it, vaguely. Someone gave it to us. It’s a bit strange, a book, but there you are. I suppose they thought it’d be a change from mops and dusters and what have you…’

  There was a sudden spat in the kitchen and Maggie hurried through. She was gone for some time, and their meal was ready and sitting on the plates on the high counter when she asked her father more about what she had found.

  ‘It’s not a book, though, is it, really? It’s just pages. Separate pages. Why would someone give you that?’

  ‘It was a book, before, when I found it,’ said Eddie, bending to take the plastic bottle of sauce from the flip-doored cupboard beneath the counter. ‘Just like a normal book.’

  They carried their plates into the small dining room alongside the kitchen, little more than a large windowless cupboard. Eddie laid the page between them on the table.

  ‘Why did you take it apart then?’ Maggie slid in between the wall and her chair, knocking her knee, as she always did.

  Eddie looked hard at the bacon chop on his plate. He cut a slice and chewed it, and while he was chewing he looked around. He had to think of something other than the letter, but Alice was there suddenly in t
he leaping shadows of the page in front of him, pert and provoking, and he could not look at Maggie or think of any answer for her.

  ‘Dad? Why? Why take it to pieces?’

  There were two side-by-side prints pinned to the wall above Maggie’s head, their frames split at the corners and their colours faded, even in the dusk of the dining room. Eddie, surprised to see them, and not quite sure whether they had always been there, held on to their anonymity.

  ‘I thought of making them into pictures, making some frames for them, perhaps,’ he said, not quite looking at his daughter and aware of heat rising from the page on the table. ‘They’re handsome, I thought. It seemed a shame to keep them hidden away. Your mother would have liked it, you see; something of hers to have around.’

  Maggie wiped her hand on her skirt and picked up the loose page again. She was wary.

  ‘They’re odd, though, don’t you think? Are they all like this, the other pages?’

  ‘More or less,’ said Eddie, realizing he could hardly remember anything of them. ‘But if you don’t like them… it was only an idea, my love. I haven’t done anything yet.’

  Maggie thought she would not like them. Something about the pictures disturbed her. They warped the way she thought of Florrie. But she could not disappoint her father.

  ‘No, it’s a good idea. It’d be lovely. We could have them in the lounge, above the fire, if they’re pretty ones. I could have one in my bedroom. How many are there? How many are you making?’

  ‘Half a dozen I suppose, while I’m at it,’ said Eddie. ‘I could get the wood from Harper’s – just a bit of half-inch, nothing fancy.’

  ‘I could stain it though, or paint it.’

  ‘If you like.’

  Later that evening, taking a torch, Maggie brought in the pile of pages from the shed and sat on the floor in the lounge with them spread around her, their colours repeated in the brazen swirls of the carpet. They were very fine things, in their way. She tried hard to admire them, and she chose the ones that did not offend her, swapping pages in and out as she made up her mind. She resisted thinking of her mother.