Kissing Alice

by Jacqueline Yallop

  ‘I just want to see you, Dad,’ she said on the telephone.

  Eddie fretted about what this could mean. In the wan night hours he conjured many unpleasant explanations, he imagined disease and bankruptcy and disgrace, but, when it came to it, he was baffled by Maggie’s distress at finding the framed pages by the fireplace had disappeared.

  ‘Where’ve they gone, Dad? What have you done with them?’

  ‘I didn’t like them there,’ said Eddie. ‘They were too… they seemed out of place.’

  ‘But what have you done with them?’

  ‘Nothing. They’re around somewhere.’ Eddie held his arms loosely in front of him, wanting to hug his daughter, but Maggie clapped her hands, puffing at the damp cold and he was put off. ‘Would you like a drink? I’ve got some brisket in the oven, a nice piece. But it’ll be an hour or so.’

  It was something Florrie would have said, he knew that. It did not come from him. But he had queues of questions in his head, and Maggie had been away for so long he did not quite know what to do.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Maggie. Her edginess kept her apart.

  ‘Well, there’s nothing much else changed. It’s more or less the same, you’ll find. Even your room, you see. I’ve not been getting rid of you.’

  He laughed a little, and Maggie did, too, after a moment. Everything, she saw, was the same, except for the pictures. She would have to take her father’s word on those.

  ‘I’ll get my bags,’ she said.

  Straight after they had eaten, Eddie turned on the television and pulled his chair closer to watch. It was not a programme he liked. Maggie went upstairs. Her boxroom seemed poky and cramped. There was nowhere to put her case. She pulled back the curtains and leaned on the shallow windowsill, stretching to see down the hill towards the dockyard. The street was still and grey and shabby. It had not changed. Maggie sucked in the view of wide-bayed semis on a broken-pavement hill, with just the hint of water beyond and in between the solid ashy docks and bridges and railways, the slightly rough children in slightly unkempt, slightly stony gardens. A song came in her head.

  The framed pages Maggie had chosen from the book were hung where she remembered, in a line to the side of her bed. She took them down and sat on the counterpane to examine them. She split the dry tape on the backs of the frames with her nail file and eased out the paper, careful not to catch it on the protruding pins. Eddie had kept the curtains closed for the eleven years since she had left. There was no sun damage. She caught herself looking for the marks of etching, of hand colouring, of work to the paper and of the brown-tied librarian. She smiled at herself, embarrassed. She thought she had shaken off the defeat of arrival.

  ‘I’ve found something out, Dad, about the pictures,’ she said, when she came down with her hair tied back.

  Eddie had not been to the cinema since he was a young man, and was not surprised to find there were things he did not know about it any more.

  ‘I’ve not been for years,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not been for years, to the pictures. I can’t remember the last time. It would have been with your mother.’

  Maggie did not laugh. ‘No. No. The pictures. There.’ She waved her arm vaguely. ‘That used to be hung up. The ones that are in my room.’

  Eddie felt a twinge of something inside him and his words came out panicky. ‘You’ve found something out, Mags? What? What is it?’

  Maggie moved forward until she was standing between him and the television. Eddie saw then that she had taken the frames in her room apart and was holding the loose pages flat on the palm of one hand.

  With the excitement, Maggie did not know where to start.

  ‘I’ve found out,’ she said, ‘about the book.’

  Eddie felt his breath sink heavy within him as she started her story, as she told him what she had heard the television valuer say and what she had learned from the librarian and, finally, what kind of price the complete book might have. And when she had finished she stood waiting for him to leap at her and hug her, but Eddie was still expecting her to speak about Alice and did not know that she had told him everything she knew.

  ‘Well?’ said Maggie.

  It was only then that Eddie breathed out. It sounded like a sigh.

  ‘Well?’ he echoed, waiting.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I suppose it was bound to happen, sooner or later. You were bound to find out.’

  Maggie felt her cheeks burn. ‘You knew? You knew all this time what the book was, what it was worth?’

  ‘Oh no, not that,’ said Eddie. ‘About Alice.’

  It took them a long time to unravel it. Maggie had to explain her story again, from the start, and Eddie had to tell her something of what had happened with Alice. But she was his daughter, and he could not tell her everything, so he just put together enough of the past to make sense of the book.

  ‘I gave Alice three more of the pages, you see, framed,’ he said. ‘It was one Christmas.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Maggie breathed.

  ‘No, but Mags, it’s all right. We stopped it after that… It was just that Christmas, at the beginning—’

  But Maggie was not thinking of that. She interrupted. ‘Then you don’t have all the pages? You don’t have all the book? You’ve given it away?’

  ‘It was Alice’s to start with. She gave it to Florrie and me, you see, for our wedding. It meant something to her, my love.’

  ‘And you’ve not seen her since?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t know what she’s done with the pages? She could have done anything. She could have burnt them. Dad! Don’t you see? We need it all, if it’s going to be worth what they said.’

  The loose pages fluttered in Maggie’s hands and because he had to find a way to comfort her, Eddie said, ‘I could ask her, Mags. I could find out.’

  And it was then, at last, that Maggie put down the precious papers and hugged him, and when it finally happened it was the perfume of a spring shower.

  But the estate of prefabs where Alice had lived no longer existed. It had been bulldozed by the council, which was building lines of white-faced maisonettes in their place. Maggie had to stop at the edge of the building site and park the car at the barrier. They sat for a while looking up at the moors.

  ‘It is the right place?’ said Eddie, knowing.

  Maggie just nodded.

  They had had such faith in Alice.

  ‘Then I have no idea,’ said Eddie.

  And though they talked for a long time about ways to track her down, Eddie, who had been through it all before, knew she would not be found.

  ‘I don’t think it’s any good, Mags,’ he said, as they pulled slowly up the hill to his house. ‘I don’t think we’ll find her. Last time it was chance, that’s all, you see. And that’s not going to happen, is it, not again. We’ll have to do without her.’

  Maggie helped her father from the car back at home. His legs were stiff at the knees and he leaned on her more than she expected.

  ‘Look, we’ll think about it. There must be a way,’ she said. ‘She can’t be that hard to find.’

  ‘We’ve lost her, I warrant,’ said Eddie, but Maggie thought her father was being old and defeated, incapable, and she ignored him.

  She waited while he fumbled in his pockets for the key.

  ‘It’s a mess, that school,’ she said, looking across the estate to the hill opposite where figures could be picked out moving around the low blocks of the campus.

  ‘They’re pulling it down. Building something new,’ said Eddie, opening the door.

  He let Maggie in ahead of him, as he always did, taking another glance at the school buildings while he waited. Maggie, in the hallway, had picked up the bottle of holy water still perched on the windowsill by the door, its plastic bleached yellow in the sun. She tried to turn the cap. It seemed stuck, but twisted open suddenly so that she lost her grip of it and it fell to the floor,
rolling against the skirting board. She sniffed inside the bottle, but it was empty.

  ‘Why do you keep this, Dad?’ she said, following him through with the bottle held out, her voice still hard.

  Eddie shrugged. ‘It was Florrie’s,’ he said.

  Maggie shook her head, surprised that this annoyed her.

  The rest of the pages were as Eddie had left them, laid flat in the bottom of his wardrobe, protected by a split polythene bag. Put together with the ones Maggie had eased out of their frames, the edges tapped straight on the dining-room table, it looked like a book again and even folded down the centre where the pinprick holes of the binding patterned their way through the paper. It was a pleasure to do this, together, and they took their time.

  ‘It looks nice,’ said Eddie.

  ‘It’ll do, until we find Alice,’ said Maggie.

  Before they had finished, Maggie noticed where Eddie had cut off part of a sheet and asked about it.

  ‘It was spoilt,’ was all he said at first. ‘I just tidied it up, you see, that’s all.’

  But Maggie put down the paintbrush with which she was softly dusting the paper, and was narrowing her eyes at him.

  ‘It’s to do with Alice, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s nothing, my love,’ he said.

  She put her hand on his arm, and squeezed.

  Eddie wanted to resist. ‘Oh dear God, Maggie,’ he said.

  But Maggie would not let him be annoyed. ‘The more pages we have,’ she said evenly, ‘the better it will be.’

  ‘But Mags…’

  ‘Do you know where it is, Dad?’

  Eddie nodded.

  The page, Maggie saw immediately, was different from the others. It was worn at the edges and one of its corners had a crease where it had been turned. It bore the stains of use. And she had not expected to see the scrawl of handwriting, the web of deep blue ink on the paper. The writing, when she saw it, surprised her, and what was written took her breath away.

  ‘My God, Dad, it’s disgusting,’ she said. ‘It’s filthy. Did she write that? Alice? To you?’

  Eddie nodded.

  ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe someone would write that.’

  ‘It was a long time ago…’ he began, without at first realizing this was a mistake.

  ‘It doesn’t seem that long,’ said Maggie. ‘I remember her, being here. I remember that Christmas. She was very quiet. But I heard all sorts about her.’ She shook her head. ‘Even so, Dad, I wouldn’t have thought that she could write such things.’

  ‘No. It was before that, long before that, Mags, that it all…’

  And then Eddie realized, because there was a look on Maggie’s face that he had never seen.

  ‘What do you mean, “before”? Did you meet her before? Was there something before? Before, even, before Mum was dead?’

  The ‘befores’ lost their meaning like that, multiplying with Maggie’s panic, flattening time. She grasped hold of the sheet, looking as if she might tear it, and Eddie took it from her, fumbling. The words he needed twisted away from him.

  ‘No, Mags.’

  ‘No what?’

  There was a moment then when anything could have been said. But the way Maggie looked at him, the pleading in her eyes and the unforgiving darkness there, behind, gave Eddie no choice.

  ‘No, Mags, not when Florrie was here. It was nothing to do with Florrie. It was before that Christmas when you met Alice, that’s all, a few months before. Nothing else. And in my mind it seems a long time, the time we spent together that autumn. But it was just a few weeks – really.’

  Maggie did not reply straight away. She flicked her hair from her face and ran a hand then down one cheek. Eddie waited to see whether she would say she believed him.

  ‘Right then,’ she said. ‘Sorry. It’s just…’

  Eddie finished it for her. He had the words now. ‘It’s just a lot, my love, I know that. For you to find out all at once, about the book, and then about Alice.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Maggie.

  They got on with finding a way of reconnecting the letter to the rest of the book without using tape or glue or clips that might snag the paper. They worked on it as though it were like the other sheets, and Maggie did not read again what was written.

  ‘I think all we can do is fold it in, and let them sew it or something,’ said Maggie.

  Eddie had presumed he would be putting the book back together himself. ‘I can sew it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got tarpaulin needles in the shed, and I saw how it was done when I took it apart. It’ll cost an arm and a leg to get someone else to do it, my love.’

  ‘Dad, this thing’s worth a fortune. We have to do it properly. No bodging.’

  ‘I don’t bodge.’

  ‘No, I know. I didn’t mean that. You’d do a good job, I’m sure. But we need a professional. We need to take advice.’

  Eddie picked up the nearly book and turned some of the pages. ‘Do you really think it needs to be there, the extra sheet, the letter?’ he said.

  ‘We’ll ask someone,’ said Maggie. ‘They’ll know. We need to keep it as complete as we can until then.’

  ‘It seems a shame, that’s all.’

  ‘We’ll ask,’ Maggie said again.

  The letter was still on Eddie’s mind as they waited a few weeks later in the library. They were early for their appointment with the librarian, so they were sitting together on the bench by the counter. It was the afternoon and the sun was pouring through the stained-glass windows at the far end of the reading room, making the air glow warm and the crafted fittings shine. Eddie could not believe that his daughter had come here the first time, alone, unafraid. It was the kind of place the navy had kept for better men than him.

  The librarian was early too. He had been waiting for his visitors for almost three hours, during which time he had done nothing but imagine what they might be bringing him. Now, as he took them up a flight of stone steps to a panelled room where he had laid out, on a long table, an immaculate white cloth, he walked with quick steps. He gave Maggie and Eddie pristine pairs of cotton gloves and swallowed firmly.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘I’m very pleased you’ve come back. I’m very pleased you’ve found it all. That is what you’ve come for? You have found the rest of the book?’

  He leaned towards them as he asked, looking as if he might snatch their bags.

  ‘Not quite all,’ said Eddie, but Maggie nudged him. She noticed how his accent twanged.

  ‘I’ll show you what we have,’ she said, and the librarian edged as close to her as he dared.

  ‘This is the kind of thing that happens once in a lifetime,’ he murmured, but Maggie presumed he was exaggerating and just smiled.

  They spent a long time unpacking the sheets and laying them out in order. The librarian fussed, nudging pages so that they were not near the edge of the table, sliding overlaps apart, checking page numbers. He put the letter to one side, on a smaller table. Eddie found he wanted to stand there, near it, and moved around the room until he could feel the corner of the table sharp in his thigh.

  ‘It’s a beautiful treasure,’ said the librarian, standing back from the display when all the pages were laid out and rubbing his eyes, as if to make sure of what he was seeing. ‘It’s beautiful. And to think you didn’t know.’ He chuckled. ‘Isn’t it funny how these things happen?’

  ‘It’s an heirloom, I suppose,’ said Eddie.

  ‘It is, sir,’ said the librarian, leaning low over the table.

  He had a pile of reference books on a chair at the end of the room, including the fat blue directory that Maggie recognized from her first visit. In time, reluctantly, he left the pages spread on the table and began looking things up, cross-referencing quickly, nimble with the indexes. Eddie looked across at his daughter and raised his eyebrows, impressed with such a rite of knowledge. No one spoke. Then, finally, the librarian looked up.

  ‘I think I see it,’ he said. ‘If you
would care to look. I think I have it.’

  He held out a page to them, and Maggie tried to make sense of it, but it seemed to her a jumble of letters and dates and she gave up.

  Eddie helped her. ‘Would you explain?’ he asked, unashamed. ‘I’m not… if you could explain.’

  The librarian smiled. ‘Basically, every known copy of Blake’s Songs has been assigned a letter. Here you see…’ He ran his finger down the page. ‘Everything from A to Z, as a means of identifying them. So, for example, copy A here, at the top, we know was printed by William Blake in 1795 and is in the British Museum; copy B is an earlier version from 1789, also in the British Museum, and so on. They’re all listed.’

  He looked up to be sure they were following.

  ‘Now then, that’s straightforward,’ went on the librarian. ‘But the trouble was, with Blake, he was printing all sorts of different versions at different times. He was always making changes: printing it sometimes one way, sometimes another; sometimes producing the complete Songs, sometimes just Songs of Innocence, sometimes just Songs of Experience. For a bibliophile it’s fascinating, of course, but a minefield. Really, a complete minefield.’

  His fingers flicked over the open page as he talked.

  ‘So how do you know which is the right version?’ asked Maggie.

  ‘Oh no, that’s not it. There isn’t a right version. They’re all versions by Blake, you see; they’re all original versions in their way, just different ones. They’re all equally valid.’ The librarian found a mote of dust on his sleeve and brushed it down vigorously, talking still. ‘And then sometimes, later, to make things worse, a collector or a dealer who already owned a copy of Songs of Innocence might buy someone else’s copy of Songs of Experience and bind them both together. And so create a whole new version. You see?’

  Eddie nodded again but was not sure.

  ‘So it’s unpredictable,’ said the librarian. ‘More than with perhaps any other book there are variables, variants. And a lot of what we know has to be conjecture; detailed, vigorous academic conjecture but still… it means there’s room for surprises. Like this.’ He nodded towards the table. ‘This really is a surprise. An untraced version.’