Kissing Alice Read online

  ‘I’m not fretting. It’s not Florrie.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  Eddie felt the bag with the bird-table cutting into his palm and changed it to the other hand. ‘I have a daughter, Alice – I have Maggie. And she wouldn’t like it, you know she wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘But you haven’t asked her?’

  ‘No, I can’t do that.’

  Alice took a step towards him now. Her voice prickled. ‘And what about you? What do you want? Aren’t you going to stand up for me?’ Eddie blinked at her. ‘Ah, you’re a coward. Just Florrie’s sorry sop of a husband.’

  She spun away, catching the bucket as she did so with her leg and toppling it. The collection of faded weeds scattered across the ground.

  Eddie caught at her arm, pulling her back. ‘Listen, Alice, it was you who started it. It was you who wanted it. Do you remember, all those years ago, out at the reservoir – the things you said to me, the filth. And then the letter… Blimey! What am I going to tell Maggie? What am I going to say about you? I can’t tell her I fell for that.’

  He held tight to her, nonetheless, and she did not pull away.

  ‘I just wanted you for myself,’ Alice said quietly.

  They stood for a moment, unmoving, and then Eddie shook his head and let go of her arm. ‘I don’t understand. Really, I don’t understand. Do you love me, Alice?’

  ‘It’s never that simple, Eddie, is it?’ she said. ‘Not at our age.’

  ‘No, but if you love me, Alice. I can’t believe that after what you said, even so long ago, you don’t at least… but if you just tell me…’ Eddie looked away.

  And in that sidelong glance, Alice glimpsed the familiar twisted figures of Arthur’s book. She picked up her bucket. ‘You’re not the man I thought you were, Eddie,’ she said. But it did not sound like a criticism.

  Alice went inside, leaving the front door slightly ajar, disappearing into the unlit rooms. Then there was no sign of her within and no sound. Eddie felt awkward. Moving on to the gravel path he saw that his feet had left slight dark depressions in the short turf of Alice’s lawn. He had been standing very still. His bag hung loose in his hand. Beyond the small estate, the stones on the moors blinked in the sun and he could hear a curlew whooping, the call drifting away on the breeze. He didn’t know what to do next.

  5. Alice

  FOURTEEN YEARS LATER, in a semi-detached house in a loop-backed crescent of other semi-detached houses, Maggie was watching television. She was alone. She had switched on the twirling red glow of the electric fire for comfort. It was not a particularly cold day. On the screen a man in a trim blazer was valuing antiques. The programme had been recorded earlier in the year, with the summer sun high and strong, casting few shadows across the queue of visitors waiting their turn to see the expert. The lawns of the stately Georgian house where filming was taking place were parched, and every now and again the valuer took a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his forehead discreetly. Maggie waited. There was some discussion about hallmarking, and the difficulty of cleaning silver without causing damage. This did not interest her. But then, she knew, it would have to come, the moment she loved, when the man leaned forward, the camera steady on his face, and the bringers-in of attic goods held their breath in case they were suddenly rich.

  It did not happen this time. The silver was apparently patched and stained and of more intellectual than financial interest. Maggie grinned. She went through to the kitchen where she cut some cheese precisely into cubes and set it on a small plate with some cored slices of apple. She carried her plate back to the living room, kicking the door closed behind her, and she was spreading butter on a Cornish wafer when she realized what was being said on the television. It was a different expert, greyer-haired, bespectacled, but with the same guarded enthusiasm as the first. He was wearing white cotton gloves.

  ‘William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. You know it’s a very rare book, in this edition. Very rare,’ he was saying, nodding.

  The woman who had brought it to the table nodded too. Maggie turned to look at the framed picture her father had made and which she had strung by the door into the kitchen. She remembered the pile of pages in Eddie’s garden shed, the discomforting sprawl of them. She held her breath, her cracker mid-air, only partly buttered.

  ‘It just gathers dust,’ said the woman. ‘No one reads it.’

  The valuer opened it at the first page and couldn’t help smiling. ‘Isn’t it lovely? It’s in outstanding condition, really beautiful,’ he said. He rested his gloved finger lightly on the frontispiece for the camera. ‘It’s a piece of history.’

  The woman shrugged. ‘It was my husband’s, my late husband’s. It was given to him, I believe, by his godfather as a confirmation present. You can see, it’s inscribed.’

  She went to point out the faded dedication on the flyleaf, but the valuer found it first, held it for the cameras and smiled.

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Very nice. To John, May you build Jerusalem in England’s green lands. Taken, of course, from Blake’s well-known poem, “Jerusalem”. It’s a very erudite confirmation present if I may say so.’

  He made it clear he was joking with her. He smiled directly at her, leaned forward.

  ‘My husband was like that,’ she said, and thousands of viewers heard how dreary she had found her marriage.

  The valuer thought it best to press on. He started with the binding.

  ‘It’s a lovely calfskin binding, with very elaborate gilt decoration on the spine,’ he said, fingering it through his gloves. ‘Those of us who collect bindings would love it just for that, whatever was inside. It’s really very fine.’

  Maggie put her cracker down on the table. The woman on the screen was swallowing heavily.

  ‘And it’s a very fine edition too, the 1839 edition,’ went on the expert. ‘It’s the first printed edition, by Pickering of London, and it only amounted to a relatively small number of copies. It’s hard to be sure, but perhaps only a hundred in all. Blake was nowhere near as popular then as he is now. But this was a turning point, this edition. It started to get him noticed. This particularly, the Songs, this was what fascinated people.’ He read the title again. ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Blake died in 1827 – very poor, unknown – but this was an attempt by the publishers to reinstate him, posthumously of course.’

  The woman nodded. She had her head slightly on one side, pressing him. The valuer turned the pages and Maggie remembered the sweet, vegetable smell of the paper she had found in her father’s shed.

  ‘As to value,’ the expert said, and the hum around him seemed to die. ‘Well, an heirloom like this, something of your husband’s, I’m sure it’s not something you would sell. But for insurance purposes, you should be thinking around the five- to six-thousand-pound mark, I should think. Which is quite a lot, for a book.’

  Maggie knew from the short dip of silence that the woman had hoped for more.

  ‘Gosh,’ said the woman. ‘My goodness.’

  Maggie too felt deflated. It had seemed like a bigger moment than it had turned out to be.

  But then the expert went on. ‘Of course, if this had been the hand-painted edition of the Songs, etched by William Blake himself, with beautiful, watercolour plates… Well, that would have been a lost treasure, indeed. There are only perhaps thirty known copies in the world. Every major library and museum would have been interested in that.’

  His words buckled with awe. He paused, hoping the woman would ask him. She could not help herself.

  ‘And how much would that have been worth then?’

  ‘At auction, today, well… perhaps a hundred, even a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Perhaps substantially more. It’s impossible to say, but it’s a very desirable thing, very collectable. And there’s so much interest now in William Blake.’

  The camera panned back to the book on the table, small and brown.

>   ‘I see,’ said the woman tightly.

  Maggie did not know about hand-coloured plates and limited editions. She knew very little at all about books. But she trembled anyway. She stood, brushing the crumbs from her soft trousers, and reached down the picture from the wall. The glass was dusty, smeared in one corner, and the tape on the back was so dry that it unpeeled without effort. Maggie took out the page to have a closer look at it. She turned on another light. She laid the paper on her low glass table, peering down at it. She tried to remember what the valuer had said. She tried to understand. And it looked special to her, now. She could see, she thought, the smudged outlines where the artist might have painted. But behind her, the music was playing for the end of the programme. There would be no more clues. And she could not be sure. She might be making a fool of herself. She rang Eddie.

  ‘Did you see, Dad, that programme just now, on the telly, with the antiques?’

  Eddie had been dozing. He had been retired for three weeks, since the day following his sixty-fifth birthday, and he felt he had been slumbering ever since.

  ‘Well, er – some of it, my love.’

  ‘Did you see the book, Dad?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I saw the clock. With the green face.’

  Maggie didn’t know what to say. ‘Never mind. I just wondered, that was all… Never mind.’

  ‘Right you are then.’ And Eddie just put it down to something else that had come between them, warped by the miles, and was sorry. He dropped back in his chair.

  Maggie wiped her fingers on the arm of the sofa and picked up the page again, holding it close to her face, squinting. She remembered the stiffness of the paper. It was not ordinary paper, she knew that at least. It was old, perhaps rare; the kind of paper people might collect. There was a page number at the top and of course the illustration, two figures crouched in something like a cave, recoiling from the brilliance of the light. There was nothing else. She knew this, even though she turned it over to make sure.

  Maggie was surprised at the way the excitement skipped inside her; at the way the thought of the book clung to her. By the time she got off the bus in the city the next morning, with her page in a large brown envelope under her arm, she was feeling lightheaded, as though she hadn’t slept. She would be late for work, that was obvious, but she had not bothered to ring in. She wondered what she would say to them afterwards, when she had found out about the book. She wondered if she would tell them that she was rich, and no longer needed to type.

  Usually, as she went past the library, the blue-uniformed porters were pinning back the iron gates. She had never taken much notice. There were blankets, sometimes, or boxes, left by whoever had spent the night on the wide steps, and there was a police car once parked on the pavement and an officer talking into his radio. But the shadowed red sandstone walls sank away from the traffic, and the building, despite its magnificence, seemed hidden. Maggie had only remembered at the last minute that it was a library, belonging somehow to the university, a place filled with people who made it their life’s work to know about books.

  Maggie climbed the long flight of stone steps that led up from the galleried entrance hall, counting them in her head and expecting any minute to be stopped and turned away. But no one came, and she climbed steadily upwards until she emerged into the corner of the reading room, a great stone hall, dim and slightly unreal in the grey light that slunk through the high windows. In front of her was a long wooden counter, imposingly tidy, and she presumed the man there would be able to help her. But he did not even allow her to open the envelope, simply asking her to take a seat on one of the low benches that hugged the walls. Maggie waited. The grand vaulted ceiling, the shivering stained glass, the rows of statues, and the dense city silence, induced in her the need to pray, but she could not conjure anyone to pray to. Feeling uneasy, she fidgeted. She slid along the bench, the cold stone stinging through her skirt. She shifted her envelope to her knees. She imagined the pomp of a white-flowered wedding in the splendid nave. She wondered about taking off her high heels, so that she did not damage the close-wedged patterns of wooden flooring. She watched the man behind the counter sharpening pencils.

  The librarian, in the end, came down a twisting flight of steps in the dark corner of the library and Maggie did not see him until he paused at the counter. Then he looked in her direction, a man with a brown tie, soft shoes and white cotton gloves. She stood up. He was hurried and, although he tried to conceal it, bored.

  ‘Won’t you just come this way, to one of the alcoves,’ he said.

  Maggie followed him into a dim niche and he turned on a shell-shaded lamp.

  ‘Right then,’ he said, when they were seated next to each other at the heavy carved desk. ‘And what is it you want to show me?’

  Maggie took the sheet from the envelope. ‘I want some advice,’ she said. ‘About this book.’

  She held the page towards him, her hand flat beneath it. The tremble of the paper betrayed her. The librarian spoke first without looking at it.

  ‘It’s not a book, though, is it? It’s a page.’ Deliberately slowly, as if punishing her, he took the sheet from her hands. He glanced at it, to make sure that it was nothing, and then he brought it close towards him and looked at it again. He looked a long time and the texture of his face thickened.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ He was unexpectedly fierce.

  ‘It’s mine. Well, my father’s really. But I have this one at home. He gave it to me.’

  The librarian looked at her as though she had done something wrong. ‘You know what this is?’

  His tone annoyed Maggie.

  ‘No, not really. That’s why I brought it to you. I thought you might know,’ she said, trying not to bait him. ‘I thought I saw something about it, on the television, but I wasn’t sure.’

  The librarian leaned back in his chair, then after a moment he got up without saying anything to Maggie and went behind to a cupboard, from which he took out a blue velvet cushion and a string of white beads. He took a long time arranging the cushion on the table and the page upon it, weighing down the edges with the beads, although they hardly curled. And by the time he had finished, he had forgiven Maggie for surprising him.

  ‘It’s really very beautiful,’ he said softly, and for a moment, leaning over the page, he was alone with what he saw there.

  Then he stepped back slightly, and made Maggie look. He talked about things she did not understand, about incunabula and folios and fugitive pigments. He showed her the way the etching had left shadow lines pressed into the paper but sheepishly, as though he knew she was just pretending to be ignorant. He read the lines of poetry to her, as though they were familiar to them both. He went away and came back with another book, a thick, plastic-bound catalogue of some sort, and he showed her the list of the existing known copies of Blake’s masterpiece, each slightly different, each given an identifying letter and locked away in one of the world’s great libraries.

  ‘They’re all complete,’ he said, ‘all of them. There’s none of them missing an odd page like this. Your page isn’t some kind of loose sheet that’s gone missing. It’s another book entirely, a clue to another copy that’s been lost, broken up. It’s a version we didn’t even know existed.’ He paused, but did not raise his eyes from the paper. ‘There are perhaps just a few pages, like this one, remaining. But what you have here proves, at least, that it once existed. It’s a page from Songs of Experience. Very beautiful, and very important. There’ll be a lot of interest, even in this one page.’

  He shook his head at the wonder of things.

  ‘No, but you see that’s just it,’ said Maggie. ‘We have the book. All of it. But just broken up, like this, to make pictures. They’re not even very nice pictures. I don’t like them really. They’re too…’ She couldn’t explain. ‘Anyway, then I saw a programme about it on television and I thought our book might be something, and I wanted to make sure.’ She felt giggly.

  The lib
rarian narrowed his eyes at her, not allowing himself to understand. ‘You have the whole book? Every page?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. My dad took it to pieces years ago in his shed.’

  The librarian gurgled. He shook his head again.

  Maggie pressed on. ‘So what should I do?’ She did not dare mention value.

  ‘Do?’ It was all he could manage.

  ‘With the book. If it’s, you know, important, like you say.’

  The librarian took the page from its cushion and put it back in Maggie’s envelope with great tenderness. ‘If you really do have all the pages—’

  Maggie interrupted. ‘We probably have the cover too somewhere. Dad never throws anything away.’

  ‘Well, if you have everything, then bring it all, together, and we’ll have a look,’ said the librarian, not able to resist thinking about the marvel of this.

  ‘And it would be worth something, then?’

  He smiled at her. ‘Each page is worth something, of course it is. But if you have everything, then the value would be greatly increased. Yes, it would be worth something.’

  ‘Good,’ said Maggie, pleased she had come.

  The librarian was still tidying away his tools into the cupboard when she left. He shook her hand. The man behind the counter was still sharpening pencils. The unravelling excitement that was filling Maggie’s head with thorns did not ripple the library’s careful calm, and it was a relief to break out again into the dust and traffic and late rush-hour noise and whoop her joy, discreetly, into the dense hurrying crowds. When she arrived late at work, she took the plastic cover from her typewriter without stopping first to explain herself at the supervisor’s office and when he called her through later to account for her uncharacteristic lack of punctuality, she could not stop smiling.

  Maggie wondered how she was going to tell her father about the book. It couldn’t be done, she decided, over the phone. It was too momentous. She wanted to watch his face as she told him. So she arranged to visit, but gave no reason.