Kissing Alice by Jacqueline Yallop

Author:Jacqueline Yallop [Yallop, Jacqueline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857895790
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Alice was not at the beach. She was in London, in the heavy quiet of the library, pushing her trolley of books through the narrow lanes of the stacks. The dusty silence comforted her. Of the jobs she had tried since leaving home – behind the counter at a haberdasher’s, typing again and, briefly, because she had to, cooking at a department store canteen – she found this was the one that reconciled her to the clamour of the capital. After almost a year among the high banks of shelves, away from things, trying to memorize the erratic configuration of the Dewey Decimal classification and accustom herself to the half-light, she felt settled. She knew the clicks of the heating pipes and the varied tones of slammed doors, far away. The other staff were used to the idea that she preferred the most tedious of jobs, deep among the disciplined lines of off-prints and periodicals, and they rarely spoke to her. She thought of her mother now only in passing.

Alice’s hair had grown long, splitting at the ends where she tried to tie it back with an elastic band. Her shoes were scuffed and worn at the heel. In the netherworld of the library basement she had little physical sense of herself; she never bothered now with lipstick. When she found a card in her locker from her manager, Malcolm Whitcroft, to mark her twenty-first birthday, she found she had forgotten the date.

‘I looked it up in the staff files,’ he admitted, waiting for her that evening at the back door, his keys twirling in his hand. ‘Happy birthday.’

She smiled wanly.

‘If you wanted to, you know, celebrate, we could go somewhere. If you liked,’ he went on, but Alice only blinked at him and shook her head.

She caught him watching her sometimes, waiting to take the morning register, his arms folded, his hair slightly damp, close cut. Once or twice he came down into her basement territory and loitered, fingering the medical periodicals. But he did not speak to her again, except on routine matters, and when, almost a year later, he proposed marriage, it came as a surprise.

He leaned forwards across the table in the milk bar, the unromantic glint of chrome hardening his solemnity, his hands fixed together in a tight arch, and she thought he was going to reprimand her for some irregularity. She felt the sting of disgrace before he spoke. So that when instead he asked her to marry him, there was the relief of escaping something and she took her time before replying, picking up a glossy grain of sugar with her nail and rolling it with her fingertip along the bevelled edge of the table before letting it fall into the metal ashtray where Malcolm’s cigarette smouldered.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said at last, pushing her glass aside, ‘I can’t.’

His expression did not change. ‘Is there someone else, Alice? I thought not. I thought you were available, but I’ve never asked, so if there is someone else… well, then I would understand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.