Kissing Alice Read online

  He had not thought about it as clearly as it sounded to them both then, but he was excited from having been clasped around the shoulder by the priest as he left the chapel and Queenie May’s indignation provoked him.

  ‘You can’t just do that, can you, just change?’ said Queenie May, who had never heard of anyone choosing a God. ‘It’s something you’re born, Arthur. It’s decided for you. You can’t just go changing.’

  Arthur turned to her at least, but kept his hands flat behind him, warming them at the fire.

  ‘You can change,’ he said. ‘They told me. You can convert. It’s called converting. They can make me a Catholic, if I want.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s an oath,’ said Arthur, and then he remembered. ‘And they baptize you. With water.’

  Queenie May huffed. ‘That’s what they do to babies.’

  ‘No, to everyone. It’s what they do.’

  ‘But you’re already baptized, aren’t you? You have to be baptized, everyone does.’

  ‘Well, this would be different. New.’

  ‘And what happens to the old baptism?’

  ‘It doesn’t count any more. The Catholic one would count.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘And that’s it? That’s all it takes?’ asked Queenie May.

  Arthur did not know. He had not asked. That morning he had sat quietly in a pew towards the back of the chapel, unable to follow much of what was going on and baffled by the elegant sounds of the Latin being intoned obediently around him. He had been intimidated by the heavy canopy above the altar and the shine of the gilt. He could not see what the priest was doing, he had not sung, nor had he taken communion. Mostly, he had watched the men around him, trying to measure himself against them.

  ‘It’s a question of vocation,’ he said, wondering where the word had come from.

  Queenie May rested her arms on the bump of her pregnancy and looked out of the window, down the slope through the close houses of the alley. She could see the choppy water opening up beyond, whipped up and swirling in the cold, the snappy edges of a vast dispiriting sea. This was how, for the rest of her life, she pictured the faith Arthur was choosing.

  ‘But Arthur, what about us? What about the girls? You can’t just do that, you can’t just make us.’ She was almost shrill now. ‘And the new baby, Arthur. What are you going to do when it comes? Will you have it different?’

  Arthur tried to calm her by keeping his voice flat. ‘It’ll take a long time, Queen. It’s not sudden. It’s not to worry about now.’

  ‘But… but if we don’t want it, Arthur, what then?’

  ‘Well then, don’t do it. It’s me, that’s all,’ he said.

  Queenie May trembled with the anger of it. Arthur had closed his eyes.

  ‘And that’s what you want? To be different from us? Like them grubby navvies?’

  He did not move. ‘It’s not like that,’ he said.

  That evening, for the first time, Arthur insisted on reading the Bible instead of the Songs.

  ‘It’s only right, on a Sunday,’ he said.

  Queenie May said nothing. It was Florrie who tried to change his mind.

  ‘I like the other,’ she said definitely. ‘Your book.’

  ‘This is my book,’ said Arthur, holding out the Bible.

  ‘But I want to see the pictures. I like it when you show me the pictures. It’s a better book, Da.’

  But Arthur ignored her. He read out loud instead a letter from St Paul, which he had read several times before. He did not understand it; the words flapped loose. Queenie May sat in silence, the cadenced click of her knitting needles upsetting the rhythm of the reading as she worked on a jacket for the baby. Florrie sulked, refusing to sit on her father’s knee and squatting uncomfortably instead to one side of his chair.

  Arthur read on, beyond the first letter to the next, hardly pausing at the break of a verse or the turn of a page, because he was afraid of what might happen when he stopped. Queenie May continued with her knitting, even when she dropped a stitch, fingering the reducing ball of wool on her lap at the turn of each row. But the stitching would have to be unripped next day, all the rows unpicked and redone; and no matter how hard Arthur concentrated on the shape and sound of the letters in front of him, he could not get them to mean anything: the exhortations of St Paul splintered into nonsense. When he closed his Bible he looked down at Florrie, pouting back at him, still resentful, and he burst into tears.

  By the middle of the following week Arthur’s kitbag had been taken from the doorstep, and he felt a relief and an immense sadness at the passing of the man he had once hoped to be. Nothing more was said about his conversion. He continued to go to the Catholic chapel every Sunday morning, but the habit was so entangled with his starting work back in the ashy steam of the trains, the clatter of the yard in his ears, in the dark, that it seemed painful, even to him. No one talked about it. Arthur did not read again to his family from the Bible, but nor could he bear to open the stolen book. Instead, to keep up his reading, he brought home a heavy directory that had been thrown out at work. It listed railway stock in a tiny practical print. It was not conducive to family recitals and Arthur read alone, practising the sounds over and over. Queenie May and the girls got used to him being there, in the corner by the window, resting the heavy blue book half against the wall as he read; they found other things to do and did not disturb him.

  The girls, eager for the bright colours of the Songs and the peculiar figures that frightened them, learned to stand on a chair so they could reach it down from its shelf. They took turns to hold it, because it was heavy, and as soon as they heard a noise on the stairs or in the hall below they stuffed the book back on to the shelf, half wrapped in its tarpaulin. It was an adventure. In their own minds it was the naughtiest thing they had ever done. So when Queenie May caught them at it, she surprised them by putting down the bundle of washing she was carrying, and sitting with them, holding the book firmly on her knees and turning the pages slowly. They squealed at some of the pictures, drawing back from the stretched shapes and strange landscapes even as they fingered them, laughing, wriggling close to their mother. And afterwards the girls would get the book down even when Queenie May was there. Puffing with the heaviness of her pregnancy and shuffling through the preparations for the new baby, she rarely stopped her work to sit with them again, but she liked to see them together, huddled around the pictures, pointing and giggling and making stories, and she smiled at them, encouraging.

  The birth of Arthur’s first son was raw and exhausting, and the baby whimpered for many weeks afterwards.

  ‘Is he supposed to be like that, Queen? Red like that?’ Arthur asked, but his wife just shook her head at him.

  Arthur poked a long finger at his son, speculatively, and turned away. Queenie May picked up the baby and pressed him close, but he would not hold still for her. She felt his wriggling as evidence of discontent and she pinched his tiny ear, making him squirm even more.

  The baby remained red and somehow unfinished, demanding something that Queenie May could not fathom. She felt the shakiness of things and when another boy came, barely a year later, she was ferocious with her husband.

  ‘You can’t keep getting laid off, Arthur. You’ll have to get other work. Look at this house, now. Look at where we are.’

  ‘I'm trying, Queen,’ he said. ‘It’s not just me, you know.’

  ‘Well, try ruddy harder. If you’d still had a trade—’

  The babies howled and he did not hear her finish.

  The girls were delighted with their brothers, spinning scraps of cloth to catch the light for them, but Queenie May could not love the crimson ridges of the boys’ skin. The turn of their mouths accused her and their feeble unremitting wail shut out the world from her. Arthur was nagged by their resolute frailty.

  ‘I want them baptized,’ he said at last. ‘I want both the boys baptized.’ He tried to find a way of explaining how uncertain lif
e had become. ‘It’s no good, going on like this, with everything muddled.’

  They were pushing the pram out in the weak sun of an early spring afternoon. Queenie May had her mind on shoes for Alice who was clattering ahead over the metal bridge that crossed the railway. She did not answer.

  ‘All of them. All the children. They should be coming to church with me now, Queen,’ pressed Arthur. ‘Do you hear? We can’t have them going on like this, like everyone, ordinary. We’ve got to do something. Otherwise what’ll it be, what’ll happen?’

  ‘Oh Arthur,’ she said, as if he were being eccentric. It irritated him.

  ‘I mean I want them coming to mass with me, being baptized properly, being brought up properly, Catholic,’ he said. ‘That’s something, at least.’

  ‘Sssh, Arthur. Not here, out loud, in the street,’ said Queenie May, flapping her hands at him.

  But Arthur wasn’t going to be put off. ‘Where then? Home? All right, then let’s go home. Come on, Queen. I want to have my say out. Let’s go home, talk about it there.’

  ‘But we’ve only just started, Arthur. I thought we were walking. I wanted to see the primroses,’ said Queenie May, but Arthur had already turned, setting off hard through the twists of lanes and alleys as though the sea were flooding up across the dockyard towards them. Queenie May thought about letting him go, but did not quite have the courage. So she called the girls to her, and they followed him, more slowly, sorry to be turning back. They made no effort to catch him.

  Standing on the pavement, waiting, Arthur was struck by the shabbiness of the house. He looked at it for a moment with a decorator’s eye, noticing the brutal wear to the window frames, the gaps where they needed filling, the thin flakes of paint. He noticed the dark rot bleeding upwards on the front door, a stain spilling from under the roof tiles where the gutter was split. He blew a sigh through his nose, kicking a loose stone hard against the wall so that a tiny puff of brick dust hung scarlet for a moment in the air. He wondered how he had come to live here, in such a house. He remembered other houses, other rooms, places he had lodged and worked in, long ago and far away. The details came back to him: the neat set of a door, the hue of a slip of paint, floor planks crossed at an odd angle, the twist in a tiled fireplace, the scent of polish. He had not thought about these things for a long time. He had not known he could. And even now, as they came tumbling from his past, breaking upon him like a sudden rainstorm, it was a physical pain to tweeze the images from somewhere deep inside him. He felt himself splitting, his old wound reopening, his flesh smarting. He wanted to cry out. Perhaps he did. And once the pictures were there, plain and new and clear in his eye, he could not bear to put them aside, even though they throbbed with the weight of loss. He lost himself in the swirl of them.

  When Queenie May arrived he could not see her. But she spoke to him, to bring him back, and would have slapped him too if she had not had her hands full yanking the pram over the front doorstep. The blankness of his face annoyed her.

  ‘Well then, Arthur, here we are. You can tell them,’ she said from somewhere in the dark hall.

  Arthur heard her and his past dissolved. He was left with only his grief. He wanted to run, but Queenie May had parked the pram and was at the open door again, watching him, her arms folded hard. Her voice was edgy.

  ‘You made us come back, Arthur. You’ve made the children come back. What is it you want to say?’

  And it was something in her tone that hardened him, and something in how small he was feeling, and how sad. So that his argument for the baptism of the children was stiff and dark and terrifying. He followed his wife into the corridor, picking Alice up from where she was loitering on the step, half in and half out of the house, uncertain. He held her tight in his arms.

  ‘We’re going to be baptized,’ he said. ‘As Catholics. All of us. We’re going to go along to the church and let them put water on us and make them have us, as Catholics.’ He spoke without breathing, clutching at his daughter. ‘I know what it’s like, I’ve read what it’s like, the place you go to – the hell. It’s fire, all the time, always at you, and everything dark except for the flames, everything burning, smoke in your eyes worse than ever at the yard, all around you, all the time, with the noise of the damned screeching and screeching till you go mad.’

  His hand was in Alice’s hair now, pulling through the tangles with long strokes. She tried to shake him off but he was too strong for her.

  ‘It’s for ever,’ he went on, ‘every minute of every day, for ever. There’s a pain in you that you can’t imagine, that’ll never shift, knowing there’s no way out, no use of repenting, and the flames at your feet and at your hair and crackling your skin, burning everything, over and over, for ever. For ever, Queenie May.’

  He looked across at the blistered horror on his wife’s face. There was the clatter of voices outside in the street.

  ‘And it’ll have to be us all. Every one of us. I can’t do it on my own, or they’ll never take my worship as true worship. It’s important to me,’ he said. ‘The maids are too young to understand. But they’ll see, one day. And you’ll see, too – it’s important, Queen.’

  All Queenie May could do was raise her eyebrows at him, disbelieving. So he softened his voice to talk to his daughters.

  ‘You’d like to be baptized with me, to come to church and see it all, wouldn’t you?’ Arthur held his hand flat now on Alice’s head, unmoving. She leaned away towards her sister, and Florrie, being the elder, thought it must be her duty to answer.

  ‘What will they do then, Da, if you take us to church? What will they do to us?’

  ‘They’ll baptize you,’ said Arthur. ‘With the Holy Spirit.’ Florrie thought about this, and didn’t like it. ‘I don’t think that sounds very good,’ she said, trying not to disappoint her father.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt. It’s a good thing,’ said Arthur. He looked for a way to explain. ‘It makes you a child of God.’

  This sounded worse. ‘Can’t I still be your child, and Ma’s, instead?’

  ‘Look, that’s enough,’ said Queenie May. ‘Enough for now, Arthur. You’ll frighten them.’

  ‘It’s nothing to be afraid of,’ said Arthur. ‘It’s only—’ But Alice interrupted. ‘Why are you doing this, Da?’ She did not mean to accuse him. She did not understand what had been said. But it sounded, even from a six-year-old, like an accusation, and she could feel his rage tightening in his arms even before he flipped her down on to the floor and, holding her hard by the shoulder, smacked her, over and over, taking no notice of her surprised and then her pained shrieks, whipping his cold hand against her legs, his face suddenly so furious that Alice thought he was going to bite her.

  Arthur used all the strength he had built up in the dockyard to hit his daughter. He felt a joy in it, at first, a release, and the softness of her in his grip made something surge inside him. He did not see what he was doing. He looked over Alice’s squirming head to Queenie May, and he met her eyes, and his blows came harder and stronger. And they looked at each other, the two of them, without once dropping their gaze, and Arthur struck out the words they could not find on Alice’s raw flesh. So that even when his daughter was cowering, curled on the floor, trembling, and Queenie May, eventually, had pulled her away, and the boys had begun to cry, Arthur sat on the stair and continued to wave his arm, as if beckoning her.

  That night, with the children tucked around them at odd angles, Arthur lay very still alongside his wife. The night was bright and moonlight slashed squarely across the floor. They lay together, listening to each other’s breathing, and neither of them slept. But just before dawn, when the moon had sunk away, Arthur reached across and laid a hand on Queenie May’s stomach and the gentle pull of his fingers electrified them both. And as the days passed, they were fierce, engrossed, feeling the flicker of each other’s presence on the stairs, the invitation of a glance. The girls could not work out what was making their parents so silent; they felt left out and
unnecessary. Alice, nursing her bruises, was not at all sure that violence might not break out again. And when the passion finally erupted, coarse and brutal, with Arthur and Queenie May so furious in the bed that the children were piled, shivering, on to the floor; when Queenie May cried out with such ferocious exaltation that the dust showered through the dark from the shelves above them, the girls were afraid of whatever it was they were witnessing and huddled together in the long silence that followed, wrapped in a blanket and whispering in the corridor.

  ‘It must be my fault,’ said Alice. ‘Do you think, Florrie – do you think it’s my fault?’

  Florrie held her sister tight, protective. ‘I’ll ask him. I’ll find out about the baptism. It’ll make things better,’ she promised.

  She chose a quiet morning as she walked with Arthur part of the way to the yard, to collect her mother’s ring from the pawnbroker’s. She asked him what it was like at his church.

  ‘Peaceful,’ said Arthur, checking his stride. ‘Peaceful to hear them all, chanting and singing. It makes you think of – I don’t know, Flor – coving or skirting boards, something clean. You wouldn’t understand.’

  Florrie tried again. ‘But God, is he there, Da?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Arthur, ‘not God. Just ordinary people, like you and me. God is different.’

  He tried to explain about the Holy Trinity but could see that it baffled her.

  ‘But there’s other things there, that God would like,’ he offered, ‘candles and incense from a big swaying urn. And everything in a special language, in Latin, that takes your breath away sometimes it’s so strange.’

  ‘Latin?’

  Arthur quoted: ‘Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi. Like that, all the time, hanging loose in your head for days.’

  Florrie was tempted. ‘You could take me, Da, if you like,’ she said.

  They were at the corner by the pawnbroker’s where they had to part. The streets were busy with men making their way to work. But Arthur, nonetheless, kissed her, bending to touch his lips to her hair.