Alice heard the rain on her umbrella and felt a damp cold around her shoulders. She shrugged up her coat and waited for him to speak again. This, she knew, was when he should declare his love for her, putting Florrie aside.
‘I should get on,’ was all he said.
Alice took a step back. ‘She’s not like me, you know,’ she said quietly.
‘Oh, I know that. She’s a good girl.’
It was a throwaway compliment, but Alice snatched at it and held it between them.
‘Is that what you want?’
Eddie looked across at her, her hair hanging limp, her nose red and her eyes narrowed at him.
‘Look, I’m sorry, Alice, if you were thinking… you’d be too much for me, you see. It’s not that you’re not… you’re a nice girl, really you are – proper nice. But…’
‘But if I loved you, Eddie…’
He flinched, as though he’d been stung. She’d said the words quietly, little above a whisper, but there was nothing soft in them. They were sharp and stiff, a threat.
‘Blimey.’ He blew through his teeth. ‘Look – Alice… I’d better get my baccy.’
‘I mean it, Eddie. I mean it. Is there something I can say? I don’t know very much about what to say,’ said Alice. ‘But I do mean it always.’
‘I know,’ said Eddie. He pulled up his collar.
‘Really, Eddie. Florrie. Think about it. Is that what you want? Is that it? Is it going to be Florrie?’
Eddie looked away to where the traffic was backing up at the junction ahead of them.
‘It’s a bit of fun, with your sister, that’s what it is, Alice. I like her. Like I say, she’s a good girl.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway…’
Alice stepped out on to the glossy pavement and dropped the umbrella low so that it hung behind her head, cutting out the world beyond. All Eddie could see was her pale face, haloed, and the rain falling fast.
‘You’ll have to choose, Eddie,’ she said firmly. ‘You’ll have to think if that’s enough. You know that, don’t you?’
But Eddie slipped out of the doorway without answering, turning his face into the wind. He did not look back. He splashed through the greasy streets, and across the road, keeping up such a trot as he escaped that his shins ached. When he got to the tobacconist’s he was panting hard. He leaned against the wall in the shelter of the awning, pressing flat and trying to swallow down the surge of panic. He waited until his breath had eased. Then he took off his cap, shook the wet from it, and went into the shop, nodding at the shopkeeper.
He stood for a moment by the counter reading the newspaper headlines, not taking them in, teased by what Alice had said. She had spiked things with urgency. The thought of Florrie seemed to have soaked him suddenly through, hot and heavy like the press of his sodden clothes, surprising. The idea that he might choose Florrie, for ever, in the way that Alice had demanded, dripped noisily into everything and he handed over his tobacco money with unsure hands.
Alice was late for work and so wet that her skirt dripped water on to the floor beneath her desk. By lunchtime there was a deep grey puddle, stained with wool dye and trickling down a ridge in the tiles towards the open corridor, and by the time she got home that evening, having got wet again in the still falling rain, her damp tights rubbing in her shoes, she felt utterly deflated. She could think only of Eddie, but not with any joy. With her hair still damp, and a chillness within her that wouldn’t shift, she opened Arthur’s book again.
It was exactly how she remembered it. There was nothing to shock or surprise her. And actually, with the gloom of her mood and the evening half-light, the plates seemed awkward, crude in places, their colours flat. But Alice hardly looked at them. It was the words she was after. Although she could have recited them without the pages to help her, she had never tried this. Since the death of her father, the poems had been lost to her. And now, starting with the first, slowly at the beginning, slightly afraid, she read each one, word by word, gathering pace as she read until she was galloping through the stanzas, leaping from poem to poem, her head full of the shapes and rhythms, her heart racing with the thrill of archaisms, odd spellings, beating sing-song rhymes and arcane poesy. She thought of Eddie still, it was true, but only the sense of him, vaguely, caught up in the words, as her father inevitably was. She did not think of the pain of him. Reading the poems, her misery left her, slipping away, and the anxiety of finding herself melted, because somewhere between the lines of them, she knew from experience, she had always known, there was love.
Queenie May had to call the doctor. She found Alice lying on her bed, slumped back against her pillow, her face pale, her eyes closed, and her struggle for breath so violent that her whole body heaved with the straining of her lungs. Arthur’s book was lying open beside her but was turned over, the pages hidden.
‘Mary! Mary, get a doctor. Run for a doctor,’ Queenie May shouted through to the kitchen where Mary was aimlessly cutting patterns in blank paper with a pair of nail scissors.
Mary shouted back, protesting. ‘In the rain? Ma!’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake, my girl. Go and get him. For Ally. She’s bad.’
This made Mary curious. She could not have hoped for a genuine emergency. She came down the corridor and saw Queenie May with Alice propped against her, rubbing her chest.
‘Can’t she breathe?’ Mary would have liked to be ill too, if it meant she could be part of it.
Queenie May didn’t turn. ‘Mary, will you run. Go now and run. I don’t know what to do.’
Mary heard the urgency but still hung at the door, watching.
‘Mary!’
When Mary had gone, Queenie May peeled away from Alice and reached for the book. She turned it open on the bed, and looked for a moment at what was there, then she stacked it with the other books on the shelves. She did not look at Alice but she came back to her and held her. And it seemed no time at all until the doctor was there, easing Alice from her tight arms, trying to get her daughter to stand.
‘Get her to the kitchen, if we can,’ he said, and between them they shuffled her down the short corridor and sat her heavily in one of the wooden chairs. Her breathing rattled. Mary pranced behind them, bobbing, but they did not notice her. The doctor was busy all the time, not looking at the mother. He was fitting a syringe. ‘Has she had attacks before?’
‘She has wheezes all the time. But not like this, not an attack.’ Queenie May was frightened of the word.
‘Get the kettle boiling and pans, if you can, on the hob. We need steam.’ He was rolling Alice’s sleeve and holding the needle in the light. ‘And a wet blanket even, in front of the fire. Whatever you can.’ He pierced her arm and injected her.
‘What’s that then?’ said Mary, who was hovering by the door. Queenie May had not seen her.
‘Mary, get the pans boiling. Make yourself useful my girl,’ she said, but the doctor answered her as if she mattered, as if her question were a good one. Mary remembered that.
‘It’s adrenalin. It’ll help her. Give her a boost,’ he said.
But it didn’t. Alice continued to slump on the chair, the edges of her face tingeing blue, the room gradually filling around her with steam and the doctor sitting across from her, just watching. She heaved, wide-eyed with the effort of breathing.
‘She’s not getting any better,’ said Queenie May at last from the stove where she was re-filling the pans with water.
‘It doesn’t look like it,’ said the doctor, not moving.
‘Isn’t there anything else?’
‘Just give her time,’ he said, but Alice’s arms were limp now by her sides and the contours of her face slipping and it was only a couple of minutes later that he opened his bag again and took out a small glass bottle. He emptied the grains from it on to the palm of his hand. ‘Morphine,’ he said, looking at Mary before she could ask.
And he gave the grains to Alice, with water, and sat back again and watched.
Queenie May kept the p
ans boiling hard. She filled a glass with water and let it trickle slowly down the grey blanket that was hung in front of the fire. She did not dare touch her daughter until the doctor gave permission and so she circled, finding things to do. She even breathed out hard herself, noisily, to charge the air with more of whatever it was that Alice needed.
‘Is she the only one in your family that has asthma?’ asked the doctor.
‘There’s just me and three girls now,’ said Queenie May. ‘And she’s the only one.’
‘You don’t get wheezing that wakes you up? Or a cough?’ he said, turning to Mary, and although she would have liked to say yes, she had to shake her head.
‘Good. Well then. And how old is she?’
‘Eighteen,’ said Queenie May.
‘Sometimes, you see, they grow out of it. But maybe not, in this case.’
He bent forward towards Alice, as though looking for something, and then shook his head. Queenie May felt the horror of it.
‘It’s a nasty business,’ said the doctor, leaning back again.
Alice was spluttering, but when the coughing passed she was stiller. Her eyes were wistful and her face pale, but she seemed to be straining less to breathe.
‘You see, she’ll be all right, won’t she, now?’ Queenie May was accusatory.
‘Yes. I reckon so.’
‘With what you’ve given her, and the steam and everything. She’ll be all right.’
The doctor nodded. Queenie May reached for the back of the chair to steady herself and held out an arm to draw Mary to her.
‘It’s like drowning, isn’t it?’ said Mary.
As the rasp of Alice’s breathing calmed, the doctor began to pack away his things.
‘Can I take them off the boil now?’ asked Queenie May, looking towards the pans. The windows were dripping with condensation.
The doctor nodded. ‘She’ll be fine.’
‘She’s getting colour back, I can see. She looks better,’ said Queenie May, though the difference in her daughter was faint. ‘Will it happen again, like this, an attack?’
The doctor shrugged. ‘It’s hard to say. If this is her first, then it may just be one of those things. She may have been over doing it, or getting in a state. It can be nerves, you know, that brings it on.’
He looked closely again at Alice. He brought his face up to hers, peering, searching for something there. Even when she looked straight back at him, he kept his gaze on her.
Alice could smell the blunt peppermint on his breath, and the close scent of tobacco behind.
At last, hardly turning, he spoke to Mary. ‘I came with a coat, but it was wet. So I left it in the hall. If you could fetch it for me, my dear.’
Mary skipped away, important. The doctor kicked the door so that it swung to behind her, and spoke again, his voice low now, spitting with distaste.
‘The other thing that has an effect,’ he said, ‘is sex. Especially for women.’
Queenie May felt her cheeks blush red but Alice was still pale.
‘It’s a way of the perversion escaping. It’s a sign. Dirty mind, dirty hands; you know the kind of thing. It has to come out somewhere.’
He was close to Alice again now but she looked back at him, undaunted. The unspent squeak of her breathing challenged him. Then there was a rustle in the doorway and Mary, standing unnecessarily still with the doctor’s coat held high. He took it from her and slid his arms in slowly. He seemed to fill the room.
‘Call for me again,’ he said, ‘if it happens.’
Mary showed him out and the kitchen door clicked shut behind them. Alice closed her eyes for a moment and then lifted a hand towards her mother. Queenie May didn’t take it. Instead she went to slide open a window. The steam curled away. Alice stood up though her legs were unsteady and her head thumped with the effects of the drugs. There was still a clamp on her lungs.
‘Don’t let him come again,’ she sighed. She held herself stiff by the table.
Queenie May looked at her daughter’s drawn face, and was surprised by what she noticed there, suddenly. ‘You should be careful, Ally,’ she said.
‘I’ll just take a few steps, go to my room. I’ll be all right.’
‘Ally, you know what I meant… after what he said…’
Mary came back into the kitchen, beaming. ‘He says I’m to keep an eye on you, Ally.’
‘There’s no need,’ said Alice, but Mary, full of herself, winked at her mother.
Alice could not speak again. She edged slowly back to her room. When Queenie May and Mary went to bed not very much later, they saw her there, still fully dressed and sitting propped upright against the wall. She was reading a small library book in a tatty blue cover.
‘That’s what does it,’ whispered Mary to her mother when they had pressed their backs to each other in the cold bed. ‘Too much reading. It’s bound to.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Queenie May, unconvinced. She shivered and reached over to lay an arm across Mary’s shoulders. ‘You shouldn’t be surprised, my love, about what happens to Ally,’ she went on quietly as she felt her daughter shift beneath her.
Mary grunted, sleepy now as the bed grew warmer. Queenie May couldn’t shake off the way the doctor had looked. His face loomed in the speckled dark, his eyes bulging at the thought of Alice’s corruption. She would have liked to swat it away, but she had no authority to do that. So she buried herself deeper under the blanket. ‘I think we might have lost her, my girl,’ she said, but Mary was already asleep.
And when Queenie May closed her eyes something strange happened to the doctor’s face, and to Alice’s slim body, heaving with the effort of breathing, and to the way they came together, writhing and clutching and scratching, the doctor’s teeth deep in the folds of Alice’s skin, her taut limbs tight around him. And for a long time, even though Queenie May peered hard into the thin darkness of the room, she did not see them part. All she saw was a confusion of arms and hands, the doctor’s wide mouth, the steam from the kitchen shining bright on Alice’s hair, on the down above her lip and in the dip of her breasts where her blouse had been loosened. All she saw was the swell of movement, deep and full, like the surge of a pool at the edge of the tide, but resolutely silent. And when she finally went to sleep it was with the conviction that Alice’s nature had finally become known to her.
Alice could not go to work, and a week after Christmas she was sent a curt, impersonal letter of dismissal, with a reference enclosed, thinly typed. After that, she stayed in the house, sitting mostly on the bed, her back propped with pillows, not seeming to feel the cold that clung to the walls and floor, and eating only when Queenie May prompted her to. She tested herself daily on the spellings of long words, scratching them out invisibly with her finger in the damp air, and when Florrie called around to flaunt the shallow-set stones of her engagement ring, she was in the kitchen practising her shorthand by taking notes from the wireless bulletins, her head bent low, her pencil blunt.
When Alice saw the glint of cat’s-eye jewels on Florrie’s finger she went to the bedroom and closed the door. Outside, there was celebration, a squeal of excitement from Queenie May, tears, Mary circling and Florrie skidding off to show the neighbours. It was several hours later before she knocked and called through the peeling panels to her sister.
‘Is it your chest playing up, Ally?’ she asked, pushing the door. It swung open. Alice was standing at an odd angle, interrupted. She was naked. Florrie could see the stain of dark blood running down the inside of her legs.
‘Oh dear Lord, what have you done, Ally?’ she hissed, sliding into the room and closing the door firmly behind her. She looked around for something, a knife, a blade, a shard of glass. But there was nothing.
‘Ally? Are you all right? Are you hurt?’
‘It’s just my time of the month,’ said Alice dully. The sound of her voice was a surprise to Florrie. They had not spoken in a long time.
‘But don’t you want to… ?’ Florrie reached i
nto her sleeve for a handkerchief and held it out, crumpled, for her sister to take.
‘Leave it,’ said Alice.
‘Right you are.’ Florrie put the handkerchief on the bed. She saw then that there were stains on the cover where Alice had been sitting, dark flowering patches of blood seeping through the cotton fabric. There was nowhere else to sit so, like Alice, Florrie stood.
‘Look, Ally, take this…’ She bent for Alice’s blouse that was crumpled on the floor, shook it out and held it towards her sister. Alice backed away and Florrie was left with the pale shirt dangling between them. She tried to lean back against the support of the door, but with her height she was awkward and she held her sister’s blouse stiffly away from her with clothes-peg fingers.
‘I came to say about Eddie,’ she said.
Alice flinched.
‘I came to say, I don’t know, to talk about him.’ Florrie looked away from her sister’s insistent nakedness. ‘I thought it’d be nice. He’s joining the navy, to wait on the officers. He wants us to be married, he says, before his posting comes through.’ She could not help but turn back, smiling. ‘It’ll be hardly no time, Ally.’
She looked around for somewhere to put the blouse but there was just the spoilt bed. So she folded it as best she could and put it on the floor near her feet.
Alice ran her hands flat down her thighs, feeling ridges of goose pimples. ‘How did he do it?’
‘How did he ask?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just quietly really. Nothing flash. He was getting worked up about something, I could tell. He was far away. And that’s what it was.’
Alice frowned. ‘Did he have the ring there, with him, ready?’
‘We was out the back, by the gate. And there was something he wanted to say, I could see that. And I asked him, thinking there might be something I’d done, and out he came with it.’ Florrie brushed her hair back from her face. ‘He didn’t go on one knee, though, not there, in the wet. Not in his new trousers.’
‘But did he have the ring, when he asked you? Did he have it there?’
Kissing Alice Page 10
