Eddie tried not to watch. But Maggie in the half-light, her bare legs crossed and her hair falling long against her face as she deliberated over the pictures, was beautiful, and he could not help looking. And as he cut and sanded the wood for the frames in his shed over the next days, measured up carefully for the mitre joints, glued and pinned and sanded again, he knew what he was doing was an act of love. He did not want the work to stop, and when he had finished the six, and the pages were straight and flat inside their frames, he made two more from the remaining wood, beginning the meticulous process all over again with relief.
Tamed by their home-made frames the pages looked flat and orderly. Eddie wrapped the ones for Alice in brown paper and when he called around he held the parcel in front of him against his chest, feeling the slight warmth of it where it blocked the wind. The grey corrugated-metal walls of Alice’s prefab, the iron-red door and the small windows could not be made to look cheerful even with the bunch of holly she had tied with scarlet ribbon to the knocker. The garden looked bare under a light covering of hard snow and the house next door was empty, the land around it tall with dead weeds. The granite outcrops of the moors loomed too close, as though they might tumble on to the fragile buildings below and crush them. But Alice was smiling as she answered the door, and inside the little lounge was bright and warm, with paper chains strung crisscross all ways, tinsel over the ornaments and bookcases, and a threadbare Santa propped up on the mantelpiece. There was the smell too of some thing, rum or sherry, warm and slightly musty, and Eddie felt the encircling, metallic consolation of his naval berth.
He did not sit down, but held out the parcel with stiff arms, forcing Alice to take it.
‘I brought you something,’ he said. ‘For Christmas, I suppose. Happy Christmas.’
Alice sat down and put it next to her for a moment on the sofa, unopened. She rubbed her knees with her hands. Eddie watched the way her fingers clamped into the cloth of her skirt.
‘You can sit, Eddie, if you like,’ she said, but she did not press it because his unease was obvious.
They faced each other, their glances sliding away. Then Alice opened the paper and pulled out the first of the pictures. She held it far in front of her and for a long time it was there, suspended between them, the reflection of Christmas decorations spangling across its glass. They both watched the pulse of colours.
‘Eddie,’ said Alice, at last quietly. She pulled out the other pages quickly from the paper, propping them up against the back and the arm of the sofa. There were three of them. They were all, although Eddie did not know this, from towards the end of the book. Alice knew them exactly.
‘You took it apart,’ she said, in a tone Eddie could not catch.
He giggled. ‘I had to get rid of what you’d written, my love.’
Alice ignored him and sat back from the pictures, not wanting to touch them. Her face was pale.
Eddie felt he should explain. ‘I know it’s a bit strange, when you gave the book to Florrie, to me and Florrie, for our wedding, and now things are, well, different. But I thought you’d like them, you see. I thought they were nice. And the book was doing nothing, in the cupboard, tucked away. No one was looking at it. And they are nice, aren’t they?’
Alice could not speak, so Eddie filled the quiet.
‘I could put them up for you. You can get things into the wall here, picture hooks or something, can’t you? I brought some, in case.’
He held out a pile of shiny new picture hooks in the palm of his hand. He had not brought the bent and painted ones from his toolbox but had got a new packet from the hardware shop with Alice in mind.
Alice looked mechanically at what he was holding out to her.
Eddie sat down. ‘Your decorations are lovely,’ he said. ‘Maggie used to make paper chains.’
‘Where’s the rest of it?’ Alice’s voice was uneven.
‘The rest of the book? We’ve got some, Maggie and me, around the house. She picked them out, you see, the ones she wanted. And there’re a few more pages which we’ve just put back in the cupboard. They’re all right, though – they’re not lost. It’s just a bit much to have around.’
‘I can’t believe you took it apart,’ said Alice, and she looked at Eddie for the first time. He felt like somehow he had cheated her.
Eddie flipped the picture hooks in his hand. Alice turned away from the frames on the sofa.
‘Didn’t you think it might be special? Didn’t you think, Eddie?’
‘Of course it’s special. It’s what you gave us. It’s what you wrote in, my love. It’s what brought us together again. It’s a lovely book,’ said Eddie.
Alice nodded slowly. ‘I had the book a long time before I gave it to you at the wedding. It’s like a part of me,’ she said, her voice suddenly old, as though a lot of her life had passed since she had last spoken.
In response, Eddie was bright. ‘And all the better you should have a bit of it back, to remind you.’ He leaned forward, soft. ‘It’ll make you think of me, you see, when I’m not here.’
Alice looked at the pictures again.
‘They make me think of my father,’ she said, but Eddie had never known Arthur Craythorne and without an image in his mind the idea of him did not stick.
It could not go on, this staccato ballet of theirs, the emptiness of the years welling between them; it could not go on without them parting, and neither of them quite wanted that yet. So they drank tea laced with whisky, and they talked, after a while, about easier things, the snow that was forecast and heating costs. Eddie felt that the awkwardness had gone. He told a story he hardly remembered about one Christmas when his ship had been anchored off the South African coast and the crew had swum in the warm sea and lit bonfires on the sand and sung ‘Silent Night’ in Afrikaans.
‘Christmas was never the same again,’ he said. ‘It was never so… well, exotic, after that.’
On and off, Alice looked at the pictures, warily, as if they might burn her.
‘Shall I put them up for you?’ said Eddie, after one of these glances.
Alice had hammer and nails of her own, but said yes anyway.
‘Where do you want them then?’ Eddie took the picture hooks from his pocket again and they twinkled in the light like more festive decorations.
‘In the bedroom,’ said Alice firmly.
For a moment, Eddie wondered if this was an invitation, but Alice padded past him in her slippers without catching his eye and when he followed her through with the pile of pictures to the little tin bedroom she was standing apart by the window.
‘Opposite the bed, in a line,’ she said. ‘Where I can see them.’
And then she left him and Eddie struggled with the mechanics of fixing the pictures to the flimsy walls. As he straightened them finally in a row, he imagined turning back to see Alice spread-eagled on the bed, waiting for him, but he heard her clanking a pan in the kitchen instead and knew his visit was almost over.
‘Thank you, Eddie,’ she said primly when he had finished. She had her hands in a bowl of soapy water and Eddie stood by the entrance to the closeted kitchen.
‘I just thought you’d like them,’ he said. They were both aware of the soft shuffle of Eddie’s hands against the wool of his best winter trousers. ‘If you’d like, for Christmas, you could come round. You could meet Maggie.’
Alice smiled at him, leaning into the bowl, the bubbles rising up her arms. ‘I don’t know, Eddie… I’m not sure…’
‘How about Boxing Day? Boxing Day at ours?’ Eddie pressed.
‘I don’t think I should,’ said Alice, resisting.
‘Oh, but after everything – surely you don’t want to let it go, Alice.’ Eddie tried to think of a phrase from the letter, to entice her with, but he had only the unsteady sense of it; he could not pin it down. Instead he stepped in closer.
‘After everything…’ repeated Alice, lifting her hands from the bowl, letting them hang there, shiny and dripping. ‘Well,
yes, I suppose.’ She shook off the suds and was suddenly matter-of-fact. ‘I’ll have to look at the buses.’
‘Or I could order you a taxi.’
‘Don’t be silly, there’s no need. It’d cost a fortune. I’ll let you know,’ said Alice.
When Eddie had gone, she went into the bedroom without turning on the light and though she could see nothing of the new pictures on her walls, she imagined every detail of them, the maddening curves she had traced with her finger when she sat with Arthur to read the poems, the threat of the familiar lines. And somewhere in what she saw were the faces of Eddie and her father, elongated, distorted, pulled tight as though reflected in the back of a spoon, but with the essence of them pungent. And above all this were the running words, the scrawled verses that pounded their unlost rhythms in her head and trampled her deeper and deeper into the soft mattress until she felt she could not breathe.
For the first time in many years, Alice’s lungs clenched within her. Throughout the night she wheezed and puffed and rasped and in the morning she was too tired to leave her bed. She lay unmoving, hungry, watching a robin singing out by her window, and gazing a long time at the pictures on the wall, flat in the early light, unremarkable even. She thought then, at last, of Eddie’s invitation.
‘I’ll not go,’ she said, out loud resolved. ‘I’ll let her have him.’ She turned on her side, breathing heavily still, and closed her eyes. But the picture of Florrie and Eddie, together, was fixed there now; it would not shift. And Alice screamed out at it, broken-breathed, pushing herself up in the bed, slapping her hands hard into the pillow, screaming and pummelling, the echoes stinging from the corrugated walls. Only her exhaustion quietened her.
Alice took her time coming up to the house. She stood for a while by the open gate, without entering, apparently taking in everything there was to see, the sweep of the Tamar Bridge, the low flat school being built high up on the open fields opposite, the bungalow across the road with all its curtains drawn. She walked slowly up the path, taking each step purposefully, gingerly, as though the game she was playing would punish her for stepping on the crazed edges of the paving. And she spent a long time on the doorstep, quietly, deciding something. Maggie, who was waiting by the convector heater in the hallway, thought she must have gone.
But when she opened the door, Alice was there, looking back at her, unsurprised.
‘Oh,’ said Maggie, knowing already she had failed.
‘I’m Alice.’
‘Yes.’
‘Your – aunt.’
‘Yes.’ Maggie had expected to feel sorry for Alice, or ashamed of her; she’d pictured someone shabby and dented. But now, with her aunt in front of her, she felt a skitter of fear.
‘I’ve come to see your father. Well, and you too, if you’re Maggie.’
Alice smiled a tense smile, fading flat. It brought Maggie to herself.
‘Yes, of course, sorry. I am Maggie. Come in, won’t you?’
Alice wiped her feet unnecessarily thoroughly on the brush mat, and stepped just far enough into the hall for Maggie to close the door behind her.
‘You’re one too, then,’ she said, as if it were funny, and when Maggie turned she saw that Alice had taken the small plastic bottle of holy water from its niche on the windowsill by the door, had uncapped it and was sniffing it.
‘It’s—’ began Maggie.
‘Holy water. I know. It says.’ Alice read, ‘“Holy Water from Lourdes.”’
‘There’s some in the little dish, too, if you want to, you know, bless yourself,’ said Maggie.
Alice peered at the grey drips in the dish.
‘It was Mum’s,’ Maggie said. ‘She was Catholic.’
Alice turned sharply away with a snort and Maggie decided that everything she had heard about her aunt must be true.
Just then Eddie came down the stairs beaming, his best jacket brushed and buttoned, his tie tightly knotted. His eyes were shining and both women were surprised by how charming he looked.
‘Good then,’ said Eddie, generally. ‘Good. Would you like a drink Alice?’
He pushed open the door to the lounge, ushering Alice and Maggie inside ahead of him and letting out the thick warm smells of the nearly cooked lunch.
Alice was disturbed by how much of Florrie was in the house, in the nasty mustard of the thick winter curtains, in the unabashed exuberance of the carpet, the twee pictures, the plastic, the cheap antimacassars crumpled in the corners of the sofa, the knitted doll propped drunkenly against the veneer of the electric fire, the crucifix tied from Palm Sunday reeds. It was exactly how she had always imagined her sister’s home to be. It made her ashamed of Florrie, even now. She took a deep breath, tasting the beef that would come later, and Eddie handed her a glass of sherry, syrupy and dark. Maggie squeezed through the corrugated partition to the kitchen. There was quiet for a moment, just the sound of the meat spitting in the oven.
Alice did not drink from her glass but she held it tight. She looked at the cased pages hooked above the fireplace, picturing Maggie’s plump hands tilting them straight. She wanted to tear down the frames and pull them to pieces, to gather up every last shred of her book and take it home and make it whole. She wanted to show Eddie what he had done, splintering her history into parts; show him how wrong it was, how absurd. She wanted to prove how differently she could do things. But she couldn’t get started.
‘It’s just like her, like Florrie,’ she said, gesturing around.
Eddie shrugged.
Maggie was dressing the table for the meal. Standing in the kitchen, pressing her back against the warmth of the oven, she realized that what had passed for festive the day before with her father – a candle he had taken from the naval stores and a paper cracker each – would not do. There was something demanding about Alice. So she knelt on the floor and reached into the back of the low cupboards, taking out boxes, moving jars and bottles, unpacking parcels tied in greaseproof, until she had found three more or less matching tissue doilies, like limp snowflakes, a packet of red paper napkins, the rest of the box of Christmas crackers and four solid cake-top figures (three snowmen and a Santa). Reaching in the cabinet above the fridge, where Florrie had kept the first aid, she also took down a whole roll of cotton wool and a small handbag mirror. While her father and aunt were talking, she was manoeuvring these into a simple vision of arctic life, and by the time the roast potatoes had browned and Eddie and Alice were called through, she had pulled out the dining table to its furthest extent, laid three neat places with the doilies and the best bone-handled cutlery, and created a small winter pond in the centre with the snowmen perched on cottonwool hills. On the handbag-mirror pond Santa idled perilously. It felt to Maggie like a grander Christmas altogether, and she expected someone to praise her for her inventiveness. But when her father and Alice edged around the loaded worktop into the cramped dining room there was burning air eddying between them and they did not notice, or did not mention, Maggie’s decorations.
Maggie was awkward with the silence of the meal and after lunch, convinced that her aunt was rude and unreachable, she went upstairs. She had a small boxroom at the front of the house, just large enough for a single bed, a hanging rail for her clothes that her father had concealed with a curtain, and several bookshelves on which there were no books. Its window took up almost all of the outside wall, and so light poured in even on a dull day. Maggie stood for a while, looking out. Two children rode by on bicycles, Christmas-new and shiny, but otherwise the street was quiet. She listened for her father and Alice downstairs, but they were quiet too. She lay back into the thick panel of sunlight spread across the bed, her feet hanging loose over her pillow and she closed her eyes, heavy from her lunch and sleepy. She lay a long time, feeling the sun on her face, floating just outside of sleep, trying not to cry.
Eddie and Alice did not miss Maggie. They were standing close together in front of the low sink; they were moving so harmoniously with the ebb and flow of the plates fro
m one side of the draining board to the other, that it was as if they were dancing. Alice’s flourish of the checked tea towel flagged their rhythm and the hot water, spitting from the small boiler above the sink, syncopated the beat.
But as Alice bent to pick up a knife from the draining board, the chrome nozzle below the boiler suddenly spewed steam and hot water sprayed across her hands and face. She leapt back from the sink and squealed (a noise that Maggie heard vaguely in her half sleep) pressing the damp tea towel close around her face. As soon as the momentary shock had passed, she knew it was not serious, but Eddie was alarmed. He dropped the pan into the water and caught Alice by the shoulders, pushing her back until she was wedged against the fridge, at the same time hush-hushing reassurance. He trembled as he went to prise away the tea towel she was still clutching to her face, perhaps because he was frightened of seeing the raw-red blotches of a serious scald, and, for the briefest of moments, he could not look directly at her, seeing instead the way her blouse tucked down around the dimple in her neck. But then, when he did look after all, there was just a sprinkling of faint red freckles across one cheek and the ridged markings from the pressure of the tea towel, and the provocation of unspoken words in the way she held her mouth.
It was not a tender moment. Eddie’s kiss was not gentle; there was no caution in the way he held her. It was rushed and fumbled and anxious, teenage in its brutality, and even before he had drawn back, Eddie felt awkward and slightly ashamed. Alice felt the walls of the years collapsing. This is what she had been waiting for, to have him come at her like this, to have him choose her. It was not a surprise. But all she could taste was the lingering mustiness of wet tea towel, the tang of soap and the stale sweetness of regret.
The look of Alice, the light on her face, the tense-drawn passion around her eyes, disturbed Eddie because it was not Florrie. Florrie would have laughed him away, struck out at him perhaps with the cloth. Alice wanted him still, wanted more of him, wanted to curl the dark edges of Christmas around them both until they were forgotten. He stood back from her, dull.
Kissing Alice Page 19