Kissing Alice

by Jacqueline Yallop

  Kissing Alice

  Jacqueline Yallop read English at Oxford and gained a PhD in nineteenth-century literature from Sheffield University. She has worked as the Curator for the John Ruskin Museum in Sheffield and writes regularly for the TES, among other publications. Kissing Alice is her first novel.

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2010 by Atlantic Books.

  Copyright © Jacqueline Yallop, 2009

  The moral right of Jacqueline Yallop to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

  The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  978 0 85789 579 0

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  Contents

  1. Arthur

  2. Florrie

  3. Queenie May

  4. Eddie

  5. Alice

  1. Arthur

  ARTHUR SCRATCHED BRISKLY at stubborn patches of paper pasted thick to the wall, a skin of interweaving pink flowers, half grown and faded. The scrape of his trowel was sharp in the quiet. The sun, pouring in through the library windows, latticed the floor. Sweating underneath his overall, he paused to take off his cardigan, stretching out the pain in his fingers. It was his nineteenth birthday, and it seemed to him as though something might happen.

  In order to pull out the shelves and strip the paper behind, Arthur had to move the books. He eased them loose and carried them in piles of two or three to a clean patch of floor where he stacked them and covered them with sheeting. They breathed a floury dust. Flakes of rotten leather binding and tiny scraps of spoilt paper floated around him, catching in the wool of his trousers as he went to and fro across the library. At the end he brushed himself down, releasing the heady smell of the past. His stomach rumbled.

  Weary now, and bored by the routine of the long morning, Arthur paused, his feet in a square of fretted sunshine. Without much thought, he peeled off a corner of the loose sheeting and opened the book on the top of the pile. Church bells pealed further down the cathedral close, and Arthur felt his breath falter.

  The pages alarmed him, the gusts of colour, summer-blue flashes, swirls of pinks and reds bleeding together; taut figures, a half-dog beast, a fan-tailed bird coasting into heaven on pale breezes. Nothing was quite clear. It was light bursting through the darkness, the moon or fire; swirling branches of shadowy trees or grasping vines or fire, again, in tongues. It was serpents curled into roses; infants crouching; figures, almost human, but with wings sometimes, or haloes or auras of light, not quite man and not quite woman, but brimfull with the promise of sex. Arthur could not shift the blunt craving that made him look again and again, that made him forget himself. It frightened and sickened him. But still he fingered the pages to ease the sense of them into his skin and his greed for them was overwhelming.

  The theft was easy. He had with him, as always, a wide, floppy cloth bag, immaculately clean, in which he kept the brushes, rags and bottles of his trade. He took the book from the top of the pile, wrapped it in a piece of heavy tarpaulin that better obscured its shape, slipped it into the bottom of his bag and stacked the rest of his things on top of it, covering it lastly with his folded cardigan. He then wrapped the remaining pile of books with the dust sheet before continuing his work. At the end of the day, as the other workmen chimed saucy jokes through the open doors, he carried the bag back to his lodgings, where he sat through the dusky hours looking at the plates one by one, slowly, his face bending closer and closer to the pages as the spring light faded.

  Through the long hot summer of 1913, and the soft autumn that followed it, while other young men were swimming in the Wear under the shadow of the cathedral, jumping from stone bridges into the green water or lolling through the long evenings on the cobbled Durham walks, Arthur Craythorne preferred the quiet of his lodging room, airless though it was, hung with the stench of burnt mince, the backstreet damp creeping through the cracked window frames. He gave himself up to the pleasures of the book, blurring the edges of himself and imagining new margins.

  When the refurbishment of the library was finished, his work took him southwards, with a distinctly ecclesiastical feel, through the holy precincts of Ripon and York. Arthur was not curious about places. He did not notice the change from flood plain to limestone outcrop; from sand and clay to iron-red earth. He was not one for watching the sky, whether hanging vast beyond the coast or squeezed between the breasts of hills. He did not fly kites, wade through rapids after fish or kneel in the wet soil to turn up the caps of mushrooms. He disliked the way nature clung to him, mud to his shoes, drizzle to his hair, seeds and leaves and burrs. What mattered to him was his work. And when war broke out, the urge for redecoration had to be suppressed even among the clergy. Arthur had no choice but to go home. He began the long journey to the West Country with a new suit of clothes, a substantial sheaf of bank notes clipped to his pocket and his book safely wrapped at the bottom of his bag.

  Back in Plymouth, Arthur tried telling them about the book, about the things he had sensed emerging flutteringly from the painted pages, but there were other distractions. His family bought him beer and made him cakes, reinventing the man they remembered, and he began work with his older brother, George, lifting and carrying for the railways that smoked to the dockyard. Ships peeled out of the harbour; more and more soldiers folded in and out of lines on the quay. Urgency was everywhere, unspoken, and even the simplest tasks were rushed.

  ‘I could show you, if you like,’ he said to his sister Annie.

  She was tipped out of the open window trying to see what was happening in the waters of the Sound.

  ‘It’s worth a look. The pictures. I could get it out later. We could show the children.’

  But with the noise from the street and the soft brush of the breeze against her face, Annie heard his offer only vaguely.

  ‘I think it’s some kind of convoy,’ she said. ‘There’re ships as far as you can see, banking up, way beyond the breakwater and round Drake’s Island. Come here, Arthur, come and have a look.’

  And Arthur, edging up behind his sister, kept the secret of the book to himself.

  Even when he met Queenie May he didn’t mention it. It didn’t seem the sort of thing she would understand. He tried it once, walking with her where the banks of the Tamar became grassy, holding her hand, but it didn’t come out right.

  ‘It’s not what I thought, being back,’ he said as they headed towards the shade. ‘It’s not quite as it should be – it feels strange.’

  He took off his jacket and spread it carefully on the short grass. She sat with her feet tucked under her and her hands wrapped around her knees.

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ she said, looking away to the other bank where some boys splashed in the shallows, a d
og swimming out beyond them into the still water.

  ‘But what if I don’t?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘What if I don’t, Queen?’ He put his arms too tightly across her shoulders. ‘What if it’s always like this, and I keep thinking of it – the things I could be doing, the decorating and such?’

  Though he did not want to, there was a girl he pictured then, smiling: a callous-handed Cheshire girl who had promised to wait for him.

  ‘Tide’s changing,’ said Queenie May, leaning back against him. His arms weighed heavy still, pinning her, so she flicked just a hand out towards the gathering swell. ‘It’ll bring the clouds in, I warrant.’

  ‘I do think of it though, Queen. All the time. I wish I didn’t but I do.’

  She squeezed around under his arms, kneeling to face him. ‘You’re just up and down at the moment, Arthur, with everything. Everyone is. It’s like that. It’s not rightly normal, with the war and such.’ She breathed a soft laugh against his mouth. ‘I’ll take your mind off it,’ she offered.

  He looked past her to the water and the birds skimming low and fast across it.

  ‘I don’t know, Queen. I…’

  But she sprang at him, bright-eyed, laying claim to him with a flush of kisses, and he could not tell her then about the book.

  They were married quickly and went to live in two rooms above Annie’s family, in a low, recently built brick house, ten minutes’ brisk walk from the dockyard. The house was entirely plain except for three panels of coloured glass above the shared front door, which, for a few minutes each morning on a fine day, sent spangled reflections across the brown-tiled hall. This was what Queenie May held on to when she thought of their first home.

  Queenie May sat with the windows open, listening to the world beyond. She could hear the trains screeching in and out of the yard, and tried to imagine Arthur then, although she couldn’t quite picture him. So she was saved from the sight of her new husband cowering under the noise and the steam, struggling with the weight of his loads, spitting smut, wishing he was back in the serene drawing rooms of the wealthy, putting down layers of paint with such careful skill that they shone. And she did not understand why he was prickly with her when he came home. She could see no reason for his anger when she was light and playful and irresponsibly warm, as though there were no war and no dockyard and no incessant rumbling of trains.

  She felt his inexplicable disappointment settling on her like wet linen.

  ‘Come on Arthur. Let’s walk somewhere.’ She smiled at him, flirting.

  ‘Not now, Queen, I’m tired.’

  ‘I know, but when you’re working always. We never get out.’

  ‘You go, then.’

  ‘I can’t go on my own, Arthur. Go on, come with me.’

  She stepped up close to him, stroking his pale face, brushing ash from the contours of his stubble. He smelt industrial.

  ‘Go on, Arthur,’ she wheedled, her body against his now. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Let me be, Queen,’ he said softly, kissing her lightly.

  And so she sat with him, many evenings, waiting for his weariness to lift, and at the first signs of her pregnancy she smoothed her stomach with tireless hands, showing him what they were doing together.

  They hung, moon-faced, over the new baby, the cradle swinging erratically between them. Queenie May saw the way her husband watched her, as she manoeuvred her daughter deftly under the blanket, something like approval in his eyes. She smiled at him, still believing they would get used to the surprising weight of each other. But they had very little time. Arthur was conscripted.

  ‘You’ll be fine, you and Florrie, till I get back,’ he said to Queenie May in the week before he left, blowing out the smoke from his cigarette, watching it swirl away ahead of them. Florrie dangled on her mother’s arm.

  ‘And when you come home, you’ll set your mind to decorating again, won’t you, Arthur?’ Queenie May said.

  ‘I will,’ said Arthur, certain.

  And that evening, he got out his bag of tools and brushes, cleaned each clean piece carefully with a cloth, turned them over in his hand, weighed them, checked them, and spoke to Queenie May about them, drawing her close to him in a new way as he explained what everything was for. Queenie May was quiet as he showed her the bag. His voice was steady and sure, his hands deft as they threaded through the hairs of the brushes and Queenie May saw how he could be, if things all came right. She kissed him fondly and gently on the curve of his ear, slowly, so that the shiver of it prickled them both. It seemed as if they were summoning a future.

  It was then that Arthur got out the book. He opened it slowly, and felt such a jolt when he saw the familiar colours that he looked a long time at the page before speaking.

  ‘Are you coming to see?’

  Wrapped in tarpaulin, slipped in at the back of the shelves where they stored the odds and ends of bedding, the book had always seemed unnecessary to Queenie May, ballast from her husband’s past. She bent away from him to fold the covers over Florrie, murmuring nonsense to their daughter, cheerful and rhythmic.

  ‘She’s dribbled,’ she said. ‘She’s made her covers proper damp.’

  Arthur stood for a moment watching her. He saw the top button of her skirt undone for comfort and the folds of her belly pushing over the waistband. He caught himself wishing for something else.

  ‘Haven’t you wondered about it, Queen? Don’t you want to see?’ But he could not be sure, even then, that she deserved to see it, and his questions kept her away. She fiddled with Florrie’s covers a while longer.

  Arthur hardly sighed. ‘Forget it then.’

  He began to turn the pages without her. He did not invite her again. And although she wanted to move across to him, to take his hand and be part of it, something in the bristling quiet stopped her.

  For several hours, Arthur looked at the book and Queenie May found things she could do, sweeping around his feet and along the length of the house, washing baby clothes in the sink. She hummed while she worked. They did not look at each other. But nonetheless they seemed strung together in a kind of rite, the flick of their movements tugging between them. Every sudden gesture landed like a slap. Arthur’s going away to war had a momentousness that had to be marked somehow, they knew that, and the book was the only thing they owned that could act as some kind of token. So in the end, because she could not think of anything else to do, Queenie May went to stand behind him, her hands hanging still over the back of his chair, her eyes straining to see the details on the paper. She was not sure what she should be looking at. She tried to make a story from the pictures on the pages, but it didn’t make sense. She waited for a clue from Arthur.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful, Queen?’ was what came. She didn’t like the soft reverence she heard in his voice.

  ‘It’s muddled,’ she said, her West Country vowels yawning. ‘It don’t make sense. Not to me. P’raps it’s put together wrong.’

  She moved away from him and went to sit on the bed. Arthur took it as a rejection, and did not look at her. They could hear Annie’s children playing a noisy game below. One of them screeched and there was a clatter on the stairs.

  ‘They’ll wake the maid,’ Queenie May said, glancing at the cot, but knowing Florrie was used to the noise and wouldn’t hear it. Still Arthur didn’t speak and she watched him again with his book. It was getting quickly dark and he held it up at an angle to the window to catch the last of the light, his face turned away from her. She wished she hadn’t been so quick with him. She wanted another chance. Looking across at him in the dim light, he seemed already to be floating away, the essence of him drifting apart, the familiar fall of his hair, the worn threads of his collar, the form of him, dissolving. It was then that Queenie May had a glimpse of what the war might mean to them. She put the thought aside.

  Arthur was intent on the book. He did not look up. Just a glance from him then, just the slightest of smiles, would have been enough for Queenie May to
go to him again and hold him. But Arthur kept apart and she spoke to him from across the room, the words sharper than she had meant in the velvet of the dusk that hung between them.

  ‘Where d’you get it, any road, something like that?’

  Arthur did not look at Queenie May as he answered her. ‘It was in a house that I was working on. Way up north,’ he said. Then, as if that was not provenance enough, ‘It was a Church house.’

  Queenie May pulled her feet up on to the counterpane. ‘They gave it you?’ she said.

  ‘I took it,’ said Arthur quietly, without a pause.

  He raised his face to her, but in the almost dark Queenie May could not see what he meant. ‘Is it a Church book?’

  ‘No. It’s poems,’ said Arthur, forced now to put the book down, either by the fading light or by Queenie May’s persistence. ‘Rhymes,’ he added, not wanting to puzzle his wife unnecessarily.

  Queenie May thought about this. ‘Have you read them, then?’ she asked. ‘How do you know, Arthur?’

  ‘’Course I’ve not read them. You know I can’t read them. I just know. By the shape. It’s what rhymes look like.’

  ‘Like what?’ Queenie May thought of the pictures she had seen over Arthur’s shoulder.

  ‘Like – this.’ He gestured at the book on his lap.

  And then they were quiet for a minute. It was Queenie May who began again.

  ‘What was it doing in a Church house? Are they religious, the rhymes, like hymns?’

  That the pictures might be in some way religious had never crossed Arthur’s mind; he would never have dared steal a sacred book. The thought of it now sent a shock of heat to his face.

  ‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘Nothing like that. It’s not about God.’

  ‘But if it’s a Church book?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I didn’t say it was a Church book. I said it was in a Church house. It’s not the same thing. They have all sorts, those people. It’s not holy. It’s not like that.’

  Queenie May giggled. ‘That’s what I thought, seeing it. It couldn’t be a Church thing, could it, looking like that? With them in the nuddy almost. That’s what I thought.’