Kissing Alice E-Book

Jacqueline Yallop

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2010 MCKITTERICK PRIZE Arthur Craythorne has barely married Queenie May when he is called away to fight in the First World War. When he returns from the trenches, he is a changed man and his wife and two young daughters, Alice and Florrie, strive hard to steer clear of his aggression and make him proud. Although Florrie follows Arthur into the Catholic Church, it is Alice he seems to favour, and Florrie seethes with envy of her sister as she watches them grow closer. But Arthur's attentions towards Alice prove darker than either of them can yet acknowledge, and when Arthur dies, the three women he leaves behind must each find ways to cope with all that remains unspoken between them.

Leseprobe

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.