When there were parties, when there were people in the house, it seemed Alice became invisible to her mother, and had no place in her own home.
People always stayed the night after the parties: drunks, or those who didn't want to drink and drive, or some who had come from other towns. And then Dorothy would say to Alice, casually, in the full ringing confident voice that went with being so successfully in control of this great gathering of people which had made the whole house - not to mention the street - explode with noise and music for hours and hours, "Alice, you'll just have to give up your room. Can you go down the road and sleep with Anne?" (Alice's best friend during most of her childhood). "No, why not? Oh, go on, Alice, don't be difficult. Then you'd better bring your sleeping bag into our room."
Alice always protested, complained, sulked, made a scene - manifestations that of course scarcely got noticed, so many other things were going on by that stage of the party: women guests in the kitchen washing up, intimate conversations between couples up and down the stairs, the last tipsy dancers circling around the hall. Who could possibly have time to care that Alice was sulking again? Sleeping in her parent's bedroom made her violently emotional, and she could not cope with it.
Four in the morning, and she was in her sleeping bag on a foam-rubber pad along the wall under the window. Cedric Mellings, in his dashing pyjamas, dark red, dark blue, was drunk or tight; at any rate expansive. He loved his wife's parties and was proud of her. He always did the drinks, hired the glasses - coped with all that. Dorothy Mellings wore one of the beautiful things she used for sleeping in, a "Mother Hubbard" perhaps, or a kimono, or a kanga from Kenya wrapped around her in one of innumerable ways. She was tight, not much, but did not need to be, for she was high, she was exalted, she was floating, she could not stop smiling as she slid into bed by Cedric and lay there groaning theatrically, "My God, my feet."
He would put his arm round her, she snuggled up - a glance, a quick reminder from one or the other that Alice was in the room - some sleepy kisses, and they would be off, asleep. But Alice was not asleep. She lay there tense, in the - at last - silent house, in that room which was far from silent because... how much noise two sleeping people did make! It was not just their breathing, deep and unpredictable, coming regularly, then changing on a gulp, or a snort. Cedric tended to snore, but, apparently becoming aware of this himself, would turn over on his side, and thereafter sleep more becomingly. Not silently, though.
That breathing of theirs going on up there in the dark, she could not stop listening, for it seemed that something was being said that she ought to be understanding - but she could not quite reach it, grasp it. The two different breathings, in and out, in and out, went on and went on, had to go on - yet could stop unpredictably for what seemed like minutes; though of course Alice knew that was nonsense, it was only because she was straining her ears with such fury of concentration that time slowed down. While one of them, Dorothy or Cedric, was in lull of breath, the other went on breathing, in and out, keeping life going, and the silent one took a breath and came back into the dialogue that seemed to be going on between them. A conversation, that was what it seemed like to the child listening there, as if her parents talked to each other still, not in words now, but in a language Alice did not know. In and out, in and out, with many little halts and hesitations and changes of pitch, they might have been questioning each other - and then (and Alice waited for it) the stage where the breathing became regular, deep and far off, further away every minute.
Those two people there, the two great powerful people in that large bed which was the other focus of the house (the great table in the kitchen being the first) - why, it was like sleeping in the same room as two creatures that were hardly human, so alien and secretly dangerous did they seem to Alice as a child, and then growing older, at eleven or twelve, and then older still, at fifteen or so. She changed, grew up, or at least grew older, but it seemed that they did not. Nothing changed. It was always the same, that scene after the party, with the two of them, her parents, sliding into that bed of theirs, arms around each other, and then willingly sliding into the sleep which took them so far from Alice that she was always lifting herself up on her elbow to strain her eyes through the dark of the room towards the two mounds, long, heavy, that were her parents. But were not now her parents, had become impersonal, had gone away from her. Could not be reached. Not unless she crept out of her sleeping bag and went to touch one of them awake. At which Cedric, or Dorothy, would indeed come awake, return to being himself, herself; as if impostors, dark and frightening and mysterious, had inhabited those sleeping bodies but had been chased away by Alice's touch. But then Dorothy, or Cedric, would say, sleepy and startled, "What is the matter, Alice? Go to sleep." And they would have already turned away from her, have gone swiftly off into that other country - and the impostors were back, not Dorothy, not Cedric. And then Alice would lie awake, listening to the breathings, the snufflings, thick inarticulate mutterings coming out of that sleep that was going on above her, on the plateau of the bed; and listening to her own blood pumping and swishing through her body, and thinking how gallons of blood were swirling around up there in those two bodies.... She could not sleep; or slept, coming awake with anxiety, and, the moment there was any light behind the silent, listening curtains, which hung there all night, witnesses with her of the absence of Dorothy and Cedric from their bed, their room, their home, their children, she crept out of the room. The house, of course, was in chaos. Everywhere in it people still slept, so that she could hardly dare open a door for fear of what she would see. But in the kitchen it was safe, and there she worked away. She would have liked some help - her brother, Humphrey, for instance. But he was only too happy to accept his parents' invitation to find some other roof to sleep under, and he was seldom there.
After the age of about twelve, Humphrey was less and less at home, staying not just down the street for a night, but with friends all over the country, sometimes for weeks at a time. To Alice it seemed that it was the parties that began this process. Feeling the way she had done (not that they had ever talked about it, but she just knew), like some small sea creature clinging for dear life to a rock but then being battered and bashed by great waves and washed off, he had drifted away. As she had done, later. But separately; they scarcely saw each other. Asked whether she had brothers and sisters, Alice had to remind herself she had a brother.