Kissing Alice Page 8

  Instead Florrie tapped out a cigarette from her own packet and passed it to him.

  He was surprised by the sleek feel of it on his palm and opened his eyes. He twitched his mouth. ‘Thanks,’ he said, turning from her to get a light.

  It was a long afternoon. There was a series of rowing races after the swimming, and long pauses where nothing seemed to happen. The day got hotter. The tide turned and started to churn noisily against the foot of the rocks. ‘I’m going back,’ said Eddie, to no one in particular. ‘It’s late. I’ve got to get smartened up before service.’

  ‘You should see him, girls, in his shiny buttons,’ said his friends, laughing.

  Florrie was feeling light-headed. She had not eaten and was not used to the sun.

  ‘Do you think we should, Ally?’ she said.

  Alice had no idea what her sister was asking. ‘Should what?’ she asked warily.

  ‘Go home,’ said Florrie.

  It was a relief. ‘Yes, Flor, I think we should. We’ve been here ages,’ adding, as if it mattered, ‘and the tide’s coming in.’

  Florrie nodded. ‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘All of a sudden.’ She reached for her hat.

  ‘Here, let me help, my love,’ said Eddie, seeing her fumbling with her hatpin, and Alice overbalancing trying to get her shoes back on. It was just instinctive kindness on his part, nothing more. But for the sisters, both of them, it was the minute they became sharply aware of him. When he gave Alice his arm to lean against, she felt the charge of his touch so that it almost unbalanced her again, and when he reached over Florrie’s head to steady the hat while she took the pin from her teeth and slid it through the band, feeling the scratch of it against her scalp, her cheeks blushed red, her heart thumped, and she felt the flash of the future full inside her.

  Eddie walked with the girls back up the hill to Smeaton’s Tower without touching either of them again. He walked briskly and none of them spoke, though Alice’s breath came noisily, like quiet song. At the lighthouse Florrie needed to take her own path across to the white Victorian villas where she worked. Eddie and Alice would be walking another way, towards town. They would, she realized, have time alone.

  ‘Do you want to come for tea, Ally?’ She did not have anything else that might divert her sister.

  But Alice wanted to walk with Eddie. ‘I might catch the bus,’ she said. ‘In these shoes, I can’t hardly walk.’

  ‘But you could come first, for tea, if you like. I’ve got the rest of the day.’

  Alice shrugged. ‘I’m fine.’

  Florrie smiled at her sister. There was no way for Eddie to know they were arguing. ‘Right then,’ she said. ‘Right you are.’ And the two girls kissed lightly.

  Eddie was anxious to get on. He wished he had got away once they had climbed over the rocks. They had slowed him down.

  ‘I must get back,’ he said. ‘It was nice to meet you both.’ He held out his hand.

  ‘It was lovely,’ said Florrie, taking his fingers lightly and hiding her face with her hat. Then she turned and walked away across the grass. She did not look back at them but, much later, sitting by the high window of her attic room, she tried to work out where they had been standing. She tried to picture Eddie as she had left him, though the details, even now, were vague. She held her arms about herself, as though it might be cold, brushing the swell of her breasts so lightly with her fingers that the shock of it surprised her, watching the slim blue of the horizon as she stroked the soft pad of her thumb against her skin, feeling the rise and fall of her breathing in her warm hand. Florrie cried slow, thick tears then and was sick, opening the window just in time to spit the dregs of the day’s excitement on to the roof tiles.

  Alice watched her sister go, trying to think of a way to keep Eddie.

  ‘Right then,’ he said, but Alice did not take his offered hand.

  ‘I could give you the address where my sister works. If you like. You could see her again. You could send a note.’

  Eddie saw for the first time that he might have made an impression. ‘Did she say something? Did she talk about me?’ He didn’t know when this could have happened.

  Alice smiled wide at him, encouraging, not quite ready to lie.

  ‘I never know with you girls,’ said Eddie, pleased with himself. ‘I never quite know.’

  But although Alice was careful in telling him the address and how the note should be marked so it would get to Florrie through the housekeeper, she still took those moments with him to heart, as her last. She could not imagine that after jogging back to the Continental in the late sun, sprinting up the stairs to his room to change, and spending long hours waiting on tables in the hot dining room, Eddie would have any idea of what she had told him. It just did not seem possible.

  When the note came, it was written tidily on paper printed with the hotel name and address, flourishing in blue and gold, making it seem more momentous than it was. The housekeeper passed it to Florrie with a smile, and Florrie trembled. Since the weather was still fine, and the days long, Eddie proposed a walk on the Hoe, first of all, and a swim in the flat round pool that dipped down to the sea. But it was several weeks before their time off coincided, and they finally met one early September evening at low tide, when the weather had changed. It was cloudy and cool, and there was a dampness in the air that was not quite rain but that made Eddie’s hair slick, even under its layer of Brylcreem.

  Eddie sat on the steps near the Drake memorial while he waited for Florrie, lifting the hems of his trousers out of the greasy damp. Other girls went by, one wheeling a bicycle, and one with her blonde hair hardly stuffed under her headscarf. He was not sure if he would recognize Florrie. All he could clearly remember was her awkward height, and the way she had flinched when he had helped her fix her hat. But when she came, a few minutes early and her cheeks flushed pink, he knew it was her and felt an unexpected jolt of pleasure.

  ‘You’ve brought your things, for the pool?’ he asked. ‘It’s not too cold?’

  Florrie had had to borrow a bathing costume. ‘We’ll see,’ she said.

  But by the time they were changed and standing together, awkward, by the tiled steps into the water, she was shivering.

  Eddie ran along the sweeping edge of the pool and jumped high, tumbling into the water with a splash. He said something to Florrie as he ran, but it was lost in the excitement of things. Florrie felt the pull of the unfamiliar costume around her legs, the brisk air from the sea and a sudden fear of the rippling water below her. She pulled her cap tight down over her ears.

  ‘Come on,’ said Eddie, swimming back to her. He stood in the shallows, holding out a hand. ‘It’s not cold. Not once you’re in.’

  And to please him, because she had to, Florrie eased herself down the steps, holding hard to the rail. She reached out for Eddie’s hand, stepping carefully, although the water hardly came up to her knees. Eddie laughed at her.

  ‘Come on,’ he said again.

  And he swam out then to the fountain, kicking white water high behind him, still laughing.

  When he looked back, Florrie was where he had left her, beacon tall among the children bobbing around her. He hauled himself on to the platform and beckoned her. And then he stepped back into the plume of the fountain and could see nothing but the blue spray and the splinters of sky and the dance of the rainbow light around him. He felt himself disappear for a moment. And then he looked for Florrie, wanting to pull her up beside him and into the stream of the shower, but he was surprised to see her still standing by the edge of the pool. She was hardly up to her waist in water. He could not understand. And because Florrie could not tell him that she couldn’t swim; because, when he came back to her, he could see the blue tinge of cold around her lips and because there was no fun to be had walking through the shallow water, they agreed it was not the weather for it, and hurried back to their towels.

  ‘Nice though, for a change,’ said Florrie, when they met up again outside. She offered him a s
tick of chewing gum, but he shook his head at it even though she had already peeled it from its wrapper. She put it in her pocket, and found it there the following Sunday, bent over on itself and brittle.

  They walked for a while, heading towards Smeaton’s Tower, a landmark. Eddie offered Florrie his arm. She was shivering still, which, for no good reason, annoyed him. The sea was quiet and grey and the patches of sand dark with damp.

  ‘Do you swim a lot?’ asked Florrie, desperate to make the trip to the pool less of a failure. But Eddie, looking out towards the breakwater, was nudged into thinking about the regatta races and the warm rock on the back of his legs, and Alice.

  ‘What does your sister do?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve got two sisters,’ said Florrie. ‘Mary, the youngest, is still at school. She’s only a maid, she’s only nine. And the other one, the one you met before, that’s Alice. She’s seventeen. She works at Cranshaws, in town. They make things for the navy, for ships. But she’s in the office, typing.’

  Eddie blew through his teeth at the impressiveness of this. ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Nice work.’

  ‘She was good at things, at school,’ said Florrie.

  They walked about until it got dusky and the streetlights came on and out at sea the lights on the ships started to reflect dimly off the water. The air was thick and still, and as the day faded it seemed suddenly quiet. They did not talk a great deal and did not drop into town, but stayed up high on the Hoe. Eddie was stiff in his lower back from their slow pace. But although he felt that he should have been disappointed with things; although he felt it would be hard, when he got back to the hotel, to explain just what had been worth the trouble, something about the calm of the evening, the soft warmth of Florrie’s voice, the undemanding, undemonstrative ease of it, edged itself into him. He found himself holding her by the gate in the back wall of the house where she worked, and kissing her. He had to reach up and felt the bones in his neck click.

  ‘When’s your next night off ?’ he asked her.

  ‘I’ll write you a note,’ she said.

  Which she did, as soon as she was in her attic room, before she had even taken off her coat. She sat on the bed, resting a scrap of notepaper on her knee and pressing hard with the pencil. She tried to tell Eddie how much she had enjoyed the evening. She admitted then what she hadn’t been able to say, that the pool had frightened her, that she had never learned to swim. And she gave him notice of her next day off. It was the first proper letter she had ever written. It ran to almost three sides of paper and, because she did not write well, it took her a long time. Several words had to be crossed out and attempted again. Her spelling was erratic and, despite her best efforts, the soft lead had a tendency to smear. When she looked back over it, it did not seem quite right, it was not elegant, and she did not post it. She kept it folded in the pocket of her uniform, alongside the note he had first sent.

  In the quiet of the nights, reading awkwardly by the light from the street creeping through the high window, Florrie laid out her note side by side with Eddie’s. As the thought of him became smudged and indistinct, reading him brought him nearer. But her own note nagged her with its ugliness; more than anything she wished she could form her letters more gracefully. She felt she was letting herself down somehow; she felt he would not want her. She suspected she might be clumsy and stupid, coarse. It was a feeling she kept with her.

  Alice did not know that Eddie had taken Florrie out until a long time later. She thought she had lost him. She tried not to think about it. She concentrated very hard on her work. She typed quickly, kept her desk immaculate and was so quick to answer the manager’s bell that he sometimes thought she must crouch outside his door, waiting. She practised shorthand in a notebook on her knee as she sat on the bus, and, at home in the evenings, away from Queenie May and Mary, she read. She renewed her books diligently at the lending library, and in the few weeks after meeting Eddie at the regatta she finished a number of murder mysteries; several selections of poems; a book of knitting patterns; three weighty Victorian novels about love, and a political history of the American Civil War. She read every single word of every book, no matter how dull, including any acknowledgements and references. She read steadily and carefully, finishing each evening’s reading at the end of a chapter, which she marked with a folded strip of headed paper she had found at work. But she did not remember what she had read, and something about every volume disappointed her.

  She did not touch Arthur’s book. And the more time went by, the more frightening the prospect became. She could not bring herself even to brush her open hand against the soft cover. But she so wanted to sit with it again, on her knee; she so wanted to feel the dense paper in her hands and the animal warmth of the leather, that sometimes she could not sleep at night for thinking about it. And she was looking at where it lay on the table under her bedroom window, trying not to, trying instead to concentrate on the library edition of the Young Secretary’s Guide, when Queenie May called through to tell her about Florrie and Eddie.

  ‘Ooh Ally, you’ll never guess. Florrie’s been walking out with a young man. From the Continental. Eddie he’s called,’ said Queenie May, sounding almost as breathless as Alice and standing in the corridor outside the bedroom unbuttoning her coat.

  Alice put down her book and watched her mother through the open door. She could not, for the moment, speak.

  ‘They’ve been twice up on the Hoe and once out to Jennycliffe. He sent a note up to the house. Out of the blue, she said it was.’

  ‘Eddie wrote to her?’

  ‘You know him?’ asked Queenie May.

  ‘We met him at the regatta, both of us,’ said Alice.

  ‘You didn’t tell me this.’

  Alice took a deep breath. ‘It didn’t seem anything,’ she said. ‘He walked with us up at the Hoe, that was all. He was in one of the races.’

  ‘What a hot day that was,’ said Queenie May, folding her coat over her arm. It was all she could remember about it, the hottest day of the year. Then she thought again about Florrie. ‘Oh, that girl,’ she squealed and as Alice came out to her she was almost lifted off the ground by the force of her mother’s embrace.

  They went through to the kitchen. Alice began the preparations for their supper, turning her back on Queenie May’s storytelling.

  ‘He’s at the Continental Hotel, you know. That used to be the Albion,’ said Queenie May again.

  ‘I know,’ said Alice, cutting bread, each slice identical to the last.

  ‘And he’s got a good position there. He earns a good wage. He’s smart, Florrie says, being a waiter and all.’ Queenie May pressed her back hard against the kitchen chair, stretching out the pain in it, and wiggled her feet loose from her shoes. She was still wearing her outdoor headscarf. She waited for Alice to say something. ‘Ally?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Aren’t you pleased, for your sister? Having a young man?’

  Alice did not look around. ‘It’s just three times, Ma. It might not come to anything.’

  ‘Still,’ said Queenie May, confident.

  The water for their eggs came to the boil. Alice took her time dunking them in, letting each one sit in the bowl of the ladle until it had filled with water before she rolled it finally into the pan. She put one aside for Mary and flicked over the timer. They both watched the sand.

  ‘He sounds such a nice young man,’ said Queenie May as Alice brought their eggs to the table. She took off her scarf then, and put it on the floor under her chair, fluffing up the hair on the crown of her head with open fingers.

  ‘And Florrie? What does Florrie say?’ asked Alice.

  ‘I can’t get much out of her,’ said Queenie May with a shrug. ‘It’s like she doesn’t want to… Alice!’

  Tapping off the top of her egg with her spoon, Alice had swung into it with such force that the shell had splintered, the egg cup had fallen, and a paste of bright yolk was splattered across the table and high on to Alice’s cr
eam blouse. There was a moment’s sharp silence, and then Alice left the room, slipping her arms from the spoilt blouse as she walked.

  The bus engine churned, clouding the pavements with smoke. Alice dabbed at her nose with her handkerchief; the tip of it was raw and split where she had rubbed it over and over, anxious. She sucked in the fumes. Waiting for the day to start she called to mind everything Arthur had taught her about love. It was all she knew.

  Florrie got on first, carrying the picnic carefully and choosing a seat halfway down the aisle by the window. Eddie allowed Alice on ahead of him, too, and, because it was polite, another woman with a baby. Florrie looked up at Alice as she came down the aisle and did not smile. Alice said nothing and went to take the seat in front of her sister, but by then Eddie had caught up and was close behind her.

  ‘Sit with Florrie, if you like. I’m fine by myself. I can stretch out, have a smoke. It’s a long ride,’ he said. ‘Best have the girls together.’

  Alice, who was already halfway into the seat she had first chosen, hung on tight to the cold metal edge along its top to keep herself half standing. She was very still. She felt heavy and sleepy now the day had come; her thoughts were splayed.

  ‘Aw, won’t you sit with me, Eddie?’ sidled Florrie, holding out a hand above the mound of the picnic basket.

  ‘Later, my love,’ said Eddie, and he took the seat on the other side of the aisle, sliding in sideways with his back to the window and his legs half bent over the seat beside him. He was puffed with the prestige of being seen with the sisters and he took his tin of cigarettes from his jacket with an unaccustomed flourish. Florrie’s hand was still there, inviting, but he ignored it.

  Alice slid down in her seat, very quietly, and watched out of the window while an old lady with a stick was helped up the front steps of the bus. And they travelled all the way, the three of them, apart, even though the bus filled up quickly and a young mother with red hair sat down heavily next to Florrie, her daughter in front, alongside Alice, sucking a vivid pink lollipop on a stick. And though it was lost in the chatter, in the faint chorused songs that oozed from the back seat, each of them, for some reason, was angry and Florrie flicked away tears as she watched the thick hedgerows roll by.