Kissing Alice Read online

  The children downstairs burst into noise again although they should long ago have been in bed.

  ‘You’d better see to Florrie,’ said Arthur, although the child had not stirred. His voice was gentle. ‘We’ll leave the book. We’ll do it another time.’

  And it was as Queenie May bent away to brush hair from her daughter’s face that Arthur finally looked at her as she had hoped, smiling at the warmth of her in the dim room. But Queenie May, turned aside, saw nothing of this. And for the rest of the evening the book lay on the floor between them, apparently unnoticed, and through the night it was Florrie who kept them apart in the bed, writhing slightly with her baby dreams.

  Arthur packed the few things he was planning to carry to France and shook hands solemnly with those left at the railway. He rolled a stock of cigarettes and stored them in a tin. He watched Queenie May as she did the simplest of chores, trying to fix the idea of her in his head. But in the end it was still not as he wanted it to be. It was muddled and unsatisfactory, a surge of noise in the hallway with Annie and her children crying over him, and Florrie slipping from his grasp as he tried to balance her with his bundle, and Queenie May hanging back, staring at him as though he were new to her, and someone outside on the street calling to him, and nothing noble about it, just terror overtaking him at the last, so that he could not suppress the trembling in his legs. It was the irresistible sense of things being ripped away. And in all of it, Arthur had no choice but to leave the book with Queenie May without explaining, or showing her what it could mean.

  ‘Look after the book, Queen,’ he said under his breath as she was pushed to him.

  It was not all he said to her, but it was the words he remembered. Then he was gone.

  It was very quiet afterwards. Annie’s children were too frightened to make a noise, and the hum of the street retreated. Florrie slept. The fire smoked but did not crackle. Queenie May, sitting still, did not cause the floorboards to creak nor the bed to groan. Her tears were absolutely silent.

  For several days, Queenie May stepped around the book, ignoring it. Then she picked it up, wiped it quickly with the flap of her apron and, without looking inside it, rewrapped it in the length of tarpaulin. She covered it neatly and folded the edges tight. She tied it around with a piece of thick string. Then she tucked the book on the highest shelf in the room, as far up and back as she could reach, away from her. It stayed there for the duration of the war.

  Lying back against the damp banks, his feet lodged in the bend of another man’s leg, his hands quivering, Arthur would close his eyes and think sometimes of Queenie May, or of Florrie. And in time, someone wrote to him about a new baby, another girl whom they had called Alice, and the note was read to him in the birdless quiet of a spring evening. He tried to imagine his new daughter. He had the flush of her skin in his head, the softness of her, and he found himself slinking through the trenches with the thought of her hand in his, tiny and tight. He cherished the idea of her, holding her away from the devastation around him and at night sometimes, under thick stars, he thought he could hear her soft cries calling him home.

  But most often, shivering in the skeletal cold, Arthur found his mind would drift from the mud back to the dense colours of the book. This was the greatest comfort.

  ‘I wish I’d brought it with me,’ he said in the blinking fury of a battle night, leaning close to the man next to him, an Irish soldier. His battalion was re-digging skeins of trenches with the Irish, the soft sweep of their accent and their quiet mournful songs emphasizing the wretchedness of things.

  ‘Here? It’s no place for it here.’

  The ground trembled.

  ‘To look at it though, when it’s quiet. I’d have liked that,’ said Arthur.

  ‘Can you not say the words over in your head? Like prayers?’ said the soldier, sinking lower. An explosion broke, not far away, stopping time. Then the sound passed and they breathed again.

  ‘I don’t know the words,’ said Arthur.

  Later, another night, the same man found him out, sliding along to him, purposeful. That day they had stood together on a gloriously sunny afternoon shovelling the leaking body parts of their comrades into pits.

  ‘You can borrow this, if you like, instead,’ he said. ‘It’d be something for you.’

  He handed Arthur a small Bible, dirty and worn. Smoke blew thick above their heads.

  ‘Oh no, I can’t,’ said Arthur.

  The soldier did not understand. ‘Just now, for a few minutes. That’s all. It’s not a gift. It’s my Bible; my mother’s Bible. I’m not going to give it away.’

  ‘No, I mean it’s no good. I can’t read,’ said Arthur. ‘It would do no good.’

  ‘Sure it would. Look.’

  The soldier opened the pages and began to read. He pressed his finger hard along the lines of words. Arthur watched it, the bitten black nail sloping from the ruptured skin. He heard little of what was said, but the steady rhythm of the finger transfixed him. A long time passed while the Irishman read.

  ‘You see now, is that not better?’ said the soldier when he’d finished. ‘Is that not a comfort to you, like your great book?’

  Arthur nodded and gently touched the hand that had held up the lines of reading. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  That night, for the first time, Arthur prayed with the Irish soldiers. He did not know the words of their prayers, but he bowed his head with them and said the closing Amen. He did not, just then, cross himself like they did although in time, too, this became a habit, a way of warding off disaster. And as the rain and the men fell, and the screech of battle persisted, Arthur came to rely on the intense, confident faith of the Catholic men, and to long for the comfort of their God. He looked over their shoulders at the tight-packed verses of their Bibles and in the lull of war they dragged their fingers for him beneath the words until the jumble of letters began to straighten.

  When the soldier’s chest and neck were torn apart by fragments from an exploding shell, Arthur was several yards away, tucked into a bend in the trench. He was lying still and small. But he heard the man’s cries, above the terrible noise, and in his single act of valour, or something like it, he hustled through the mud to hold the soldier in his arms. He slid the Bible from the Irishman’s pocket, and with the terror of death sticking in his voice and the thunder of the enemy pressing around him, he read three verses of the Psalms in the budding light of an unwelcome dawn. By the time he had finished reading, the man was dead. Later, Arthur found his name written neatly inside the front cover of the book.

  Arthur walked up the street slowly, with two sticks, trying not to see the black-edged cards wedged in the windows. While he was away, his family had taken different rooms. They were smaller and cheaper to keep. He noticed the tightness of the houses and waited by the door without knocking. It was only when Queenie May pushed open an upstairs window to flick out a duster that she saw him below. The shape of him was unfamiliar.

  ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Yes, sir, can I help you?’

  He looked up then. And seeing her face so close and unremembered loosened something in him. He crumpled on the doorstep.

  ‘Arthur,’ she murmured, not moving.

  It was two men from down the road who, in the end, helped him into the house. He had a stinking, thickening gash that revealed the glint of his shin bone and he hissed at them when they hurt him.

  Despite the warmth of the late summer, Arthur shivered continually, his limbs twitching. At first Queenie May sat with him, trying to understand, but it seemed to make no difference and so she went back to her work. She did not ask him about the war and Arthur watched her, bewildered, surprised at how the familiar pattern of things had kaleidoscoped out of shape while he was away. He was silent and pale and tight and Queenie May could only imagine what it was that haunted him.

  ‘Is it like they say?’ was all she asked, once, when they lay in bed together.

  Arthur pretended he was asleep.

  His secret
nagged at him. Waiting for it to be discovered made all his pains worse. He tried to find the right day to tell them, but it was never quite as it should be, the time, the light, the look on his wife’s face. There was never the quiet he needed. But it went on gnawing at him, fidgeting in his gut, and in the end it spilled out unspectacularly, without the fanfare he had envisaged.

  The girls, shy of their new father, were out in the street. There was a cold wind from the sea and the windows rattled in their frames. Queenie May cleaned Arthur’s wound and was folding the blanket over his knees so he would not feel the chill. In all this, she hardly touched him.

  ‘Can you find me the book, Queen?’ he asked.

  She reached it down from its shelf, unwrapped it, and placed it gently on his lap. He put a hand on her arm to stop her moving away.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, opening the pages. ‘Listen, Queen.’ With care he began to read. ‘“Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee, Gave thee life and bid thee feed.”’ He read haltingly but correctly, with the rhythms of the verse intact. Then he closed the book and looked up at Queenie May and smiled at her. It took her a moment to realize what had happened.

  ‘Well,’ she said at last. ‘Who’d have thought.’

  He felt further away from her than ever.

  ‘Oh, but Queen, I can read almost anything. Not just this. Newspapers, letters, anything. It all comes the same in the end. And you see what we can do, once my leg has healed, now I can read? You see what chances there’ll be?’

  Queenie May did not quite see. It was too new a phenomenon for that. But she liked the way he put his arms around her waist and pulled her to him, breathing in the clean cotton smell of her housecoat and glowing with what might have been love. She was happy to sit with him while he read through the book, even though mostly he was quiet, reading to himself, absorbed.

  Now he could decipher them, the words surprised him. The sense of them was startling. So once or twice, just to be sure, he tried things out on her.

  ‘Look here – about a chimney sweep, a little chimney sweep.’ He read more. ‘And here, Queen, it’s flowers, roses and sunflowers – and lilies. You like lilies, Queen; you’d like it.’

  There was so much of it, clamouring.

  ‘Songs, they’re called. Songs of Innocence and Experience,’ he said at the end, as though this might help fathom things.

  ‘To sing? With music?’

  Arthur felt he should know. ‘Ah, no,’ he said. ‘Not like that. Different.’

  And then Florrie came in holding out grazed hands, barely bloodied, and Queenie May was never to know that he couldn’t explain.

  ‘Go to your father,’ she said, having examined the damaged hands. ‘He’ll kiss them better.’

  And although it was not much – two tiny hands held sheepishly towards him – it was something. Arthur placed his lips on Florrie’s cold skin with extravagant ceremony.

  ‘Good girl,’ he said, looking over her head to Queenie May.

  Despite his new reading skills and an unshakeable belief in a Catholic God – two things that he believed would save him – Arthur woke many times in the long nights, dripping with sweat, his teeth clenched and a taste of blood bitter in his mouth. He smoked determinedly and his speech stumbled and stuttered, tormented. He had moments, in plain daylight, in the middle of the street, when he wanted to sit on the kerb and weep. His prayers were desperate.

  ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand, Queen. I thought it would be better. I thought it would be all right now I can read.’

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  ‘But with knowing the words like that.’

  ‘I can’t see it’s such a good thing, Arthur,’ she said firmly. ‘Look at you.’

  There was nothing much to see. His leg was slowly healing and he had put on weight. Arthur looked down at his bandages thinking it was that.

  ‘I’ve prayed for it, Queen. I’ve prayed for everything. But still…’ He could not explain. He put a hand out to her. ‘It just takes time. That’ll be all it is, I warrant,’ he said.

  But Queenie May could not get used to Arthur’s strangeness. And she could not hide her prejudice of his embarrassing faith; when he said he wanted to continue with the Roman form of prayer, and to attend the chapel daubed on the end of the dockyard buildings, she knew it would wedge between them.

  ‘You’ll be like them, like the Irish,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Queen. There’s people all over the world as is Catholic.’

  ‘But the ones you know, the ones at the yard, they’re all Irish, aren’t they?’

  Arthur didn’t answer.

  ‘And you should stay apart from them now, now you’re home. Like before. It’s not… it’s not decent.’

  Arthur understood, for the first time, the settled strength of her. ‘It’ll do no harm, Queen. It’s just a way of praying.’

  But Queenie May never prayed. ‘You don’t belong to them, Arthur,’ she said.

  ‘It’s new to you, Queenie May, that’s all. Like it was to me. That’s all. Take a week or two to get used to it. Come with me, if you like. See it for yourself.’

  ‘I’m not going to no ruddy Irish circus.’

  Arthur slapped his hand against the glass of the window. The pane shivered. ‘For pity’s sake, Queenie May. You don’t understand. It’s made something of me. I can read now. I go to church. I’m a better man – I can see how things should be.’ He struck the window again, and a cobwebbed crack appeared. He turned away from it, defeated. ‘They’re good soldiers, Queen,’ he said softly.

  Queenie May shook her head at him. ‘That’s as may be. I don’t say they’re not. But you’re back with us now, with me and Florrie and Alice. And what’ll everyone say? Think of that, Arthur.’

  ‘I’m a respectable man, Queen. I’m good at my trade. That’ll not change.’

  It was the first time since coming back that Arthur had touched on his decorating. It crumpled Queenie May’s resistance.

  She sighed. ‘Leave it then, till after you’re back at it; till after you’ve begun again on the decorating,’ she said.

  Arthur nodded, grateful for the concession. He pressed his finger on the broken window, leaving a smear of blood on the glass.

  In the evenings, after tea was done, they read the poems. Arthur sat with his damaged leg high on a chair in front of him and the children piled as best as they could on his lap; Queenie May always stopped what she was doing to listen. They imagined the pictures of the book together, lulled by the rhythms of Arthur’s monotone reading, preferring it to the torn-backed Bible he had brought home from the front. It was because of this that Florrie, when she remembered her childhood, always thought about the readings in the long dusk, the slight smell of pus and disinfectant, and the way the book sat so securely in her father’s hands.

  When Arthur tried to go back to decorating it didn’t suit him. The fumes of the paints and solvents sickened him, the rawness of his hands depressed him, and the slight shift of the wooden ladder in the gusting wind made him tight and frightened. After barely two months he screwed up his overalls into a bundle and threw them into a hedge. They caught on a branch of reddening hawthorn and half unravelled, but he did not bother to untangle them. When he got home, he emptied everything out of his floppy kitbag, flapped it inside out to make sure it was clean, replaced his brushes and jars carefully, wiping each with a thick cloth, closed it up, and left it on the front doorstep. Queenie May brought it in out of the autumn drizzle.

  ‘Leave it, Queen,’ he said. ‘It’s for someone to have. I’m going back to the railways.’

  ‘But Arthur, I thought you promised.’

  This pricked him. He missed more than anything the feeling that there was a meaning to life, and that it had something to do with wallpaper well hung and paint well applied. He couldn’t understand why things had changed.

  ‘It’s not the same, Queen,’ he said. ‘It’s not what I thought. It’
s, I don’t know – brittle.’

  ‘It’ll just take getting used to, Arthur, that’s all. I’m sure that’s all,’ said Queenie May, but he made her put the bag back on the step.

  It was still there, untouched, on Sunday when Arthur went for the first time to the Catholic chapel at the dockyard, and introduced himself to the priest there. When he came home, his face glowing, he stepped neatly over it, and Queenie May, watching from the window, was more angry than she could ever remember.

  ‘What d’you do then?’ she asked, trying to control the way she spoke to him.

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘You walk all that way, on a Sunday, for not much?’

  Arthur was cold from the stiff sea wind, his cap and coat were damp, and he pressed closer to the fire. Florrie and Alice watched him, wary.

  ‘We pray, of course. And there was mass. It’s sailors mostly, and men off the shift.’

  ‘Irish?’

  ‘Not all.’

  ‘You can always tell a Sunday morning ’cause the Irish are sober. That’s what they say,’ said Queenie May.

  ‘You’re set against them for no good reason, Queen. You don’t know.’

  ‘But you’re one of them now, are you, saying their prayers, labouring at the yard like a navvy for a few ruddy sous when you’ve a perfectly good trade of your own?’

  Arthur hung his coat behind the door so that he could turn his back to her. Still, though, she talked.

  ‘You’re going back on your word, Arthur. You promised. You were going to be a decorator. Once you were fit again, that’s what you said, you were going to go back to it.’

  ‘It makes no difference, Queen,’ he said quietly. ‘It makes no difference. It’s just the same – one thing or another.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Queenie May, meaning everything. ‘Now there’s another baby coming, I thought you’d set to it. You promised, Arthur.’

  ‘I’m going to be a Catholic,’ said Arthur.