A week later, when Queenie May came to wash Florrie’s skirt, she found the broken shard of china and smiled at her daughter’s odd taste in keepsakes, then threw it over the yard fence into the brambles beyond.
Arthur borrowed a spotless veil for Florrie to wear when she took her first communion, he tested her on her catechism as they walked to mass, and, occasionally, he prayed for her. But he was not bothered about Mary.
‘I’ll take her when she’s older,’ was all he said. ‘When she’s ready.’
But even when she began to walk confidently and was able to trot alongside, even when she clung to his trousers on a Sunday morning and cried to be part of the expedition, he resisted.
‘Not old enough yet,’ he maintained.
Florrie could not persuade him to change his mind, but she would take Mary aside sometimes, into a shadowy corner of a quiet room and make the sign of the cross for her, looping her arm around Mary’s body, touching the four points with a jab of her finger, making her sister bow her head. Sometimes she would repeat it over once or twice, to be sure, slapping Mary if she fidgeted. She taught her the mantra, ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son…’ and Mary lisped it after her. Then, as though it were part of the rite, they would go through to the kitchen together and Florrie would lift her sister to wash her hands in the sink, making her hold them a long time under the cold water.
They settled into a routine. When Arthur and Florrie set off down the hill to church, Queenie May and Mary crossed through the tilt-fenced back alleys to the square of park where there were two uneven swings. There were other families there, and Queenie May clustered with the mothers, whooping laughs, while Mary took her turn to ride, her hands stinging cold on the chains. They were high up, exposed, and even on fine days it was windy. But Queenie May liked to go. Alice always stayed at home. She sat at the front window watching for Florrie and her father, long before they were due to appear. When she finally saw them turn the corner by the derelict warehouse, she brushed her hair, put on her coat and hat with great care, and let herself quietly out through the front door. She always met them before they turned into their street, and Florrie always peeled away then, unsmiling.
‘We’ll just have a stroll before lunch,’ Arthur said, but Florrie had already turned from them.
Arthur and Alice varied their route. They had nowhere particular to go. They dropped down into unfamiliar streets, exploring, until they found somewhere quiet and sheltered. There they would stand or sit together, depending on the weather. Alice was always very still, but Arthur was agitated on these mornings, more than ever, trembling sometimes, his face fretful. He pushed his hands against her at first at awkward angles, pinching her skin, bruising, and even though Alice knew to be quiet she whimpered sometimes into the wool of his coat. He would mutter then, tangled in his words, and only when he had finally forced the fist of his fingers hard into her, making her suddenly stiff, would she sense the hushed softness of him flooding over them. It was always a relief. On the way back, they would walk apart, and Arthur would sometimes stop alone at the street-end pub.
On one of these outings Arthur felt the first twinges of an unwieldy pain shifting in his gut. He rested for a moment as it took his breath, leaning on Alice and pale.
‘Must have twisted myself somehow,’ he said, blinking, and for a while it was forgotten.
But he felt it again once or twice in the following days, unexpectedly sharp, and before long it had become part of him, growing. At night especially, it would bulge, waking him many times, but he did not want it to mean anything and he kept it to himself. He was unusually secure in work and they had chosen rooms in a different building, taller than the last, set high on the mount behind the barracks, with a view across the squatting town to the open sea. There was a freshness to things. So he ignored the bloating ache, presuming it would pass, or that he would get used to it.
When Florrie came home from school for the first time to the new house he was on his knees propping up the bed in a corner with the help of two bricks. He seemed cheerful.
‘Give us a hand, Flor,’ he said, looking up with a smile and handing her one of the bricks. He held the bed high off the ground for her and she slipped the support in underneath. ‘And the other one,’ he said. ‘Put that in too.’
He let the bed drop and sat hard on it to try it out. But the floor was rutted, and even with the wedge, the bed rocked noisily from side to side, slapping on the bricks as it fell back.
‘It needs something else,’ he said, ‘something with a bit of give.’
And from the sack of things they had brought with them he took out his book. It was the right size to block the remaining gap. Its soft cover would deaden the rocking.
Florrie could not see his face, just the back of him, straining forward with his feet pressed out at odd angles, fragile and slightly ridiculous, clumsy. She didn’t know what to make of him. Without pausing, he slipped the book between the bricks and the broken stump of bed leg, nudging it fully into place with his knee. Then he got up and sat on the bed again, swaying to and fro hard to test out its stability.
‘Solid as a rock,’ he said to Florrie, grinning. ‘Come and try?’
‘Won’t you need it?’ Florrie asked, not moving, but nodding slightly at the book. ‘Won’t you want to read it, with Ally?’ Her mouth was suddenly dry. She found the words sticking.
‘That maid could read the Bible backwards,’ Arthur said, leaning back, proud. ‘I don’t need to bother with that. She’s learned it all.’
Queenie May did not notice what Arthur had done to the bed and did not know that the pain in his stomach was starting to throb, but she noticed his cheerfulness. And when it was quiet that evening, Mary stretched out asleep under the patched blanket, she spent a long time at the window, listening to the sounds her family made and watching the lights blink across the town.
‘It’ll be nice here, Arthur,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t you think it’ll be nice?’
Arthur was surprised by the lightness of her tone. Against the glow outside the window, with that spring to her sentence, she should have looked younger, like the girl she was when they began.
‘It’s better,’ Queenie May went on. ‘Being high up. I like being able to see across.’
‘It’ll be windy,’ said Arthur.
‘It’ll blow things clean. And we can batten down when it’s wild,’ she said. ‘We’ll see it coming at least, from over past the breakwater.’
‘See what?’
‘The wind.’
Arthur sucked in his cheeks. ‘It’s cheaper here, anyway,’ he said, and started to roll himself a cigarette.
‘Cheaper, and cleaner. No soot to speak of. It couldn’t be better,’ said Queenie May, looking across at her husband, wanting to touch him. It was a feeling she remembered, a surge of possibility that burst on her like light.
But the next morning, Arthur woke with the pain rumbling in his stomach and he could no longer keep it secret.
‘You’ve given your father indigestion, my girl,’ Queenie May said sharply to Florrie as she braided her hair for school. ‘It’s all your talk of leaving. Fathers miss their daughters, that’s how it goes.’
Florrie, coming up to fifteen, had been offered a place in service on the Hoe. It was something she was proud of.
‘She’s not going far,’ said Alice, who was helping Mary with the fastening to her skirt.
‘Far enough, though. Growing up,’ said Queenie May. She remembered the bitter morning smell of the first days away from home. But she wanted to be cheerful, now more than ever, with the sun streaming in the window and the breeze blowing cloud-shadows fast across the docks, and the promise of being high above the town, away from things. ‘But it’ll be nice, Flor, too,’ she added.
‘I’m only on trial, to begin with,’ said Florrie. ‘They might not like me.’
Arthur sat on the bed and groaned. The pain in his stomach was sharp for a moment. He tried to burp to rel
ieve it, but nothing would come. He was working that day and could not afford to be late.
‘Here, I’ll rub it, Da,’ said Alice and she stepped towards the bed, twirling Mary in her newly secured skirt as she did so. Mary giggled and put her arms out wide better to feel the spin. No one else moved.
‘Where?’ said Alice, and she sounded matter-of-fact, like a nurse.
Arthur lifted his work shirt and laid his hand on the pain. Alice bent towards him and laid her hand there too, circling it, pushing out with her fingers against the folds of skin. Her father’s stomach was loose now, and paunchy. Queenie May noticed that, as though for the first time. She noticed too how pale his face was. She did not look at Alice.
Alice slid her fingers under the belt of Arthur’s trousers, still circling with the pain. She looked up at Florrie, her head at an awkward angle as she continued to rub.
‘Tell them at school I’ll be late,’ she said. ‘Tell them what’s happened.’
Florrie watched the fingers caressing her father’s skin.
Arthur was breathing hard. ‘You go on too, Ally. We can’t be late, either of us,’ he said, but he did not move from the bed and Alice did not stop the swirl of her hand.
Queenie May wished there was something to be done. ‘P’rhaps it was bad meat,’ she said.
‘What meat? When did I have bad meat?’
‘Not at the yard?’
‘What ruddy nonsense.’ But the anger in it was slack, and Arthur looked across at Queenie May for a moment as though they were alone, the two of them. He put out an arm, perhaps to draw her close, and their gaze was steady, unblinking.
The crawl of Alice’s fingers distracted them, and Queenie May stepped away from him. She looked at Florrie who was standing awkwardly by the door, unable to bring herself to leave.
‘Take Mary, will you, my dear,’ she said.
Florrie bit her lip but by the time she had found something to say the others were all crowded around Arthur, bending close to him. She pulled Mary out of the room.
‘I’ll be leaving in three days,’ she said fiercely as they turned into the street. ‘I’ll have finished with school, and left them; gone up on the Hoe. I’ll be grown then, doing things myself.’
Mary held tight to her sister’s hand and the wind spat rain at them from the sea.
Florrie took Mary to her class, and then she sat at her desk and watched the school-yard gate for Alice. She watched until her eyes were sore and she had to blink them hard. She did not mark her slate, nor recite tables. She hardly breathed. She just watched, seeing the clouds pull across and the morning darken. Two horses passed by, held on a leash by a man in leggings; a paper bag lifted in the wind from the corner of the school yard and tumbled across until it got wedged in the wall. She watched two small boys come late, scampering in from the cold with their faces drawn, and she watched the hands on the church clock opposite as they slipped through the hour. And when Alice finally came Florrie sat back in her chair, her hands damp with sweat but tense with cold, her stomach swirling sick. The teacher took her long sigh to be nostalgia for the school life she was leaving. And because Florrie had said nothing about what might have been detaining her sister, Alice was smacked hard on her bare legs with the heavy wooden ruler propped by the door for just that purpose. She went to her desk without crying.
Queenie May, too, had been watching, but she had seen nothing to worry her. The mesmeric stroke of Alice’s hand had brought some colour back to Arthur’s face and it did not look as though he were dying. And so Queenie May, still cheerful, whistled as she spread out the laundry to wash. She waved high at Alice and Arthur as they left the house, and later, wringing the washing through the mangle in the yard, she enjoyed the way the wooden barrels clicked in the sun as they marshalled the cloth. Even the yard itself looked charming to her, sheltered as it was by the high walls around and hung with a line for drying the washing away from the dirt of the street. In her head she was singing. There was something clear about the day. She could not have known that Arthur was making his way very slowly up the hill home again, long before his shift was due to finish, the wind pushing hard against his back, his trousers loosened around his waist and the pain pulsing in his stomach like some kind of animal.
The first Queenie May knew of it was a knocking at the window, an offbeat rapping that broke the steady rhythm of the mangle. She looked up to see Arthur’s pale face hung there, mouthing something impenetrable. She knew at once he had not been laid off again. And when she rushed up the stairs to reach him, his feet were trailing a thick phlegm of yellow vomit across their room. She stood for a moment at the door, one of Mary’s wet blouses in her hand and another, she knew, half squeezed and left dangling in the yard. She watched him, remembering again the day he had come home from the war, his leg dripping and rotten, his cheekbones sharp and his eyes fixed on a point many miles distant from her, the anger of it, and the disappointment. And as he stretched for the bed, his body taut, stumbling, Queenie May dropped the blouse and hurried towards him, clutching him in her damp arms. She did not know if he would have fallen, but anyway she held him tight. And for that moment, a short moment before he spewed a hot dribble of sick across her chest, Arthur and Queenie May were bearing the weight of each other with young arms, their heads touching, and Queenie May knowing he was the only man she would ever have the chance to love.
Florrie was the only girl to leave school that week, and she got special attention. The very young girls wanted to hold her hand, or, better, have her pick them up. The older girls, her friends, touched her too, as if to make certain that she had existed. She was happy in the chattering tumble and she delayed the moment when she would have to step beyond it. Alice hung back through it all, watching, and when Florrie had finally made it to the gate she appeared at her sister’s side. They walked home together for the last time.
‘Ma’s made you something, for going away,’ said Alice.
It was supposed to be a secret. Florrie couldn’t bear to spoil it and pretended she hadn’t heard.
But Alice persisted. ‘It’s a little case,’ she said. ‘A purse. It’s pretty.’
‘I’ll need to pack my things tonight. I’m allowed to take a bag,’ said Florrie, listening to Alice’s squeaky breathing. ‘Still, I’ll be home sometimes. When I’m given a day off.’ She pulled ahead of her sister so that she could hear nothing more of her going-away present. But at the top of the hill, she waited, watching a ship moving slowly past the breakwater.
‘It’s tomorrow I go, Ally,’ she said when they were together again.
Alice concentrated on her breathing and said nothing.
They stopped again at a bend in the road before the final climb up to the house. Florrie was desperate for her sister to speak. She waited longer than was necessary, watching the ship, which had now pulled into the open water and was turning. Alice looked out too, seeing a seagull circling closer to hand. It dropped on to the dark slates of a roof.
‘What has she made then, Ally?’ asked Florrie at last, not quite meaning to.
Alice caught her breath to speak. It made what she said next seem hushed and reverent. ‘It’s a case,’ she said. ‘Embroidered. The prettiest flowers.’
‘A case for what?’
Alice had to guess. ‘Hairpins, I should think.’
‘Oh,’ said Florrie. ‘Well, I’ll have to be neat, I suppose, if they’re to like me.’ It got her thinking of things. ‘And Da? Has he said anything?’
Alice shrugged. ‘I don’t think so.’
The gull lifted suddenly from the slates, squawking.
‘But you’ll be all right, with me gone? You don’t want to come with me? I could keep us both,’ said Florrie, quite suddenly.
Alice laughed. ‘On a housemaid’s wage? Don’t be stupid, Flor.’ She wanted an end to it. ‘I’m fine, I’m not ready to go.’
Florrie couldn’t look at her. She felt her face burning. ‘But you’re his daughter, Ally. Like me.’
The girls arrived home ten minutes apart and busied themselves with things. Arthur was well enough, that final evening with Florrie, to sit up while they had their tea. He even thought about taking a slice of the fruit bread Queenie May had made in celebration but something about the sheen of it turned his stomach. The girls were not put off, however, and Mary danced around the table with her mouth crumby and her sticky hands swishing through the warm air.
‘It’s the best day ever,’ she said, but no one agreed with her and so she didn’t repeat it.
Instead, later, when she was finally asleep and Arthur was sitting pale by the empty fireplace, Queenie May sat with her oldest daughter looking out at the lights on the hump-backed rail bridge. When Florrie started crying, Queenie May held her tight for a long while.
‘I’ve something for you to take,’ she said at last, pushing Florrie’s head gently off her chest so that she could reach in her pocket for the embroidered case.
It was, even by the dull light in the room, as pretty as Alice had said it would be. The knotted, curling petals were laid in pink satin thread over a piece of brown velvet cloth that, Florrie knew, was not a scrap from any piece of clothing ever owned by the family. And even though it had been made with Florrie always in mind, Queenie May was sorry to let it go.
‘It’s beautiful, Ma,’ said Florrie.
‘It’ll be something nice for you, when you’re on your own.’
Florrie traced the forms of the flowers with her fingers and felt something hard and ridged within the case. The thought of hairpins in such a beautiful bag was sad, and she did not want to look inside.
Kissing Alice Page 6