Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  Billie looked down at the body he was guarding, but Hesketh put a hand below her chin, fingers fanned – he didn’t touch her, but screened her gaze. She moved her head, but his hand followed, stayed between her and her view. Mrs Mulberry blushed and began to breathe fast.

  ‘Go on, madam,’ Hesketh said.

  The minister’s wife drew back a pace, but didn’t leave Billie.

  Hesketh placed a cold hand on Billie’s wrist and squatted, pulling her down into a crouch. He used his free hand to move the sheet veiling the head of the corpse. Billie stared – for a moment she couldn’t see the total, only the dry surfaces of bared teeth, dull, like the tea-stained inside of an old porcelain cup. She thought of remedies, like baking soda.

  ‘See the gooseflesh?’ Hesketh said. ‘It’s as though his skin is still trying to raise some life and warm him.’

  The face was dusky and mottled. The man’s jacket was drawn down and his shirt had burst at the shoulder seams to reveal red patches of haemorrhage. Hesketh followed her gaze: Billie felt it – his bright eyes on her face. He said, ‘It looks as if he was the victim of assault, doesn’t it? But it was only his struggle that injured him. He was looking for something to hold on to. You see, water yields, but wins.’ He went on to say that, while the skin was rough, it wasn’t swollen and wrinkled, ‘He was only a few hours in the water. And it was cold.’ Hesketh stooped, as if to look in under the man’s partly open eyelids and, doing so, leaned a little weight on the overinflated chest. The white foam that crusted the man’s lips and nostrils burst fresh from each, exuded thickly, a white tinged with pink. Hesketh drew back sharply. Both he and Billie stayed kneeling, stunned and penitential. Above their heads Mrs Mulberry said, ‘But – this is Ian Betler.’

  Billie got up.

  ‘I think we should go have a look at the young man in the Irish tweed,’ the minister’s wife said, and beckoned, very gentle. Billie followed her. As they walked, Mrs Mulberry read out the rest of the labels.

  Henry, however, was among the living, though scarcely conscious. Billie was taken to the doctor’s house, where they found Henry wrapped in bare wool blankets, before a fire, and smelling powerfully of both liniment and brandy. Billie sank to her knees beside his couch, but found herself unable to touch him. There was something between them, it seemed – or nothing between them, an impassable barrier made of an absence.

  Mrs Mulberry carried a wrapped warm brick from the fireplace, lifted Henry’s blankets, and put the brick at his feet. A few minutes after that the doctor appeared and uncovered Henry’s chest, which was marked by a number of red, fluid-filled blisters. The doctor explained that he had injected peppermint water. ‘To help him revive.’ Billie watched the doctor warm his hands and sit on the edge of the couch. He spilled some spirits into his warmed hands and began to rub Henry’s sides, so vigorously that the flesh made a whooping, flapping sound. Henry gasped and moaned.

  ‘He did revive after an hour or two,’ the doctor said, above the sound his hands made chafing Henry’s skin. ‘But now fever has set in.’ He finished his massage and closed the blankets around Henry’s slight form. ‘Now he must be kept quiet and warm. When he wakes perhaps he might drink a little broth.’ He was addressing Mrs Mulberry now. He shook his head. ‘It’s too close and crowded here.’

  ‘Can he be moved, Doctor?’ inquired a woman.

  Billie looked up at the tall figure. The woman removed her veiled hat, looked about, and balanced it on the horned top of a big case clock.

  ‘We’ll see, Lady Hallowhulme. I don’t have room to run a hospital. It makes more sense for me to move between my patients. I anticipate five to ten serious chest cases following on from the accident. The rest – I don’t know. Any man who has not come back to himself by now I can’t hold out much hope for. I’ve a woman over here already starting to swell up – her kidneys having had a mortal shock.’

  ‘Doctor – this poor man is Henry Maslen, whom my husband has employed to catalogue the castle library. And this young lady is – I think – Mr Maslen’s sister.’

  ‘His wife’s sister,’ Billie said. ‘Miss Paxton.’

  The woman gave Billie her bony, gloved hand. She was Clara Hallow. ‘We must find out what you need, Miss Paxton, and what can be done for Mr Maslen.’

  Billie said she’d stay with Henry. She had been looking for her sister, Edith, but hadn’t found her.

  Lady Hallowhulmes’s thin, shapely face, trying to hide sadness, looked as if she had just encountered a bad smell. She glanced at the doctor, then at Mrs Mulberry. ‘Hannah?’

  ‘Mrs Maslen hasn’t been found, I’m afraid.’

  Billie was thinking about a boat ride she’d had in San Remo, with some Italian boys. Edith had scolded and begged and tried to drag her back on the beach, but Billie took off her shoes and socks, climbed into the boat and went out with them. She was eight. The boys had wanted to touch her hair, and check the speckles on her legs. Billie sat on the seat in the bow and let them lift and drop her curls, look into her eyes, or at her ears, ‘Piccolo!’ She let them unbutton a cuff to caress her wrist, and lift her skirt to touch her ankles. But when they wanted to do more than touch, to move her about, she capsized their boat and came up underneath it to press hands and feet on its sides, her head up in the trapped air. She listened to them call and search. She watched them clumsily trying to dive down – their buoyancy a kind of leadenness – their legs’ ineffectual soft scissoring, shoes shedding bubbles, and suits ballooning. She breathed compressed air, listened to the little waves slap the wood. After a minute one of the boys finally thought to look underneath the boat, and seized her around her waist, tearing her out of her anchorage. Between them they got her ashore. She let them struggle – stayed limp, as she’d been schooled to. They put her down on the shingle and dripped on her, sobbed and prayed. It was a chilly day in May, and the shore was empty. Only Edith came – kicked the boys and cursed at them. They ran off. Edith understood that her sister was acting. She wouldn’t speak to Billie, but went off to sit on the terrace near the casino and wait for their father to come out.

  There had been light in the upturned boat, aqua light from beneath, light in the shape of a church window, the shape of a boat.

  Thinking of this, Billie said to Lady Clara and to Mrs Mulberry, ‘Even if there was any air, it would be wholly dark in there. In the ship.’

  Lady Clara put a hand on Billie’s arm.

  Billie considered the dark, the cold water – how cold? – Edith’s impediment of belly. ‘Edith’s dead, isn’t she?’ Billie said to Lady Hallowhulme.

  ‘Almost certainly, I’m afraid, my dear,’ the woman replied.

  Billie looked about for Murdo Hesketh and his men, and realised she’d come over to the doctor’s house with only the minister’s wife.

  ‘These aren’t my shoes,’ Billie said to Lady Hallowhulme, who frowned at what seemed an odd, additional remark, and at the possibly familiar footwear. ‘You look ill. You must rest.’ Lady Hallowhulme looked to Mrs Mulberry for help. ‘Hannah?’

  ‘I think it may be difficult to persuade Miss Paxton to leave Mr Maslen. What we must establish is how soon Mr Maslen can be moved to the castle.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a case of wait and see,’ the doctor told the women.

  ‘Would you like to wash your face and hands, dear?’ Mrs Mulberry asked. She got Billie up and showed her to a basin in the corner of the crowded room. Billie washed. They gave her something to eat.

  Fed, Billie went back and settled by Henry. Her hand lay next to his, but she didn’t touch him. She watched his face, at last at leisure to do so. There was no pleasure in her watching, nor patience, she merely waited, waited to be the one who had to answer what Henry’s face, even asleep, was asking – ‘Edith?’ – because he was Henry, so where was Edith?

  MURDO STOOD on the pier, above the wreck, and watched the local men diving with their rope and makeshift air hose. He recognised the Gustav Edda’s captain in the
bow of the boat that floated above the place where air occasionally came up in small batches of bubbles.

  He saw that a salvaged mailbag lay beside the captain in the bottom of the boat. The fisherman holding the end of the hose said to Murdo, ‘It’s not so good with no pump.’ He made a pumping sign, not entirely certain he had the right word.

  ‘Is it danger?’ Murdo asked, in his apt but ungrammatical Gaelic.

  The man nodded.

  ‘But divers are coming from the mainland.’ Murdo went back to English. He supposed that the locals would continue to dive themselves till the divers came. Perhaps they couldn’t be satisfied there was no one trapped and alive until they saw all the bodies.

  A young man surfaced, first appeared as a watery mirage, man-shaped, against the ship’s black side, then turned his wide face up to the light, and broke through. He was pink-skinned, chubby, wheezing with cold. He was hauled into the boat, and immediately wrapped. The rowers set out for the pier, and the young man was helped into a topless tent where women with steaming kettles were filling a small zinc bath. The man stripped, his friends closing the tent with a blanket, which, once he’d dipped and washed himself in the warm water, they folded around him. Since he had emerged he’d been shaking his head. The rope he’d carried into the wreck was still taut between the pier and the depths. When the man got his breath he said he’d managed to open the engine room door. He had a body on the rope but couldn’t shift it back through the hatch. He’d not had enough breath.

  ‘Can you see the boiler? Does the rent let in light enough?’ the captain asked.

  The man nodded. Coal and coal dust had settled on the bottom of the engine room, he said. ‘On one wall, really, like treacle in water. I could see everything. The boiler is whole. There are three bodies in the engine room. And I saw a woman wedged behind the ladder –’ He shook his head again, perhaps trying to dislodge water in his ear, it was so abrupt a movement. He blinked and blinked, and glared at his friends, and then began to sob. He said that he’d seen a baby hanging within her skirts.

  Murdo walked away, walked back around the harbour and along the promontory to Kiss Castle.

  AT DINNER James Hallow asked whether his cousin had remembered to write to Mr Betler’s kinfolk. Murdo lied. He hadn’t been able to finish the letter. He’d felt he needed to know more about the cause of the accident. ‘The locals who have been diving into the wreck found the boiler intact.’ Murdo thought that might deflect his cousin’s interest. It seemed to, but not in the way he expected. He’d imagined that his cousin would begin to speculate, would launch a flotilla, a fleet of theories about the sinking. But James said, ‘Indeed.’ And then attended to his food.

  Murdo was forced to understand that he’d run out to look at his suspect and had forgotten his duty. He excused himself from the dinner table before dessert was served and went to his room to write his letter, only one, to Geordie Betler, Ian’s older brother.

  On his bed Murdo found a parcel, wrapped in brown paper. Brushes and combs, macassar, soap and shaving tackle, a pig’s bristle brush, a razor and strop. He sat on his bed and handled the gifts – then carefully laid away the razor. His razor had been an object that, for the last several years, would sometimes shine at him a steely invitation. Murdo considered his hopelessness. Considered the silence of his room, a silence not only of privacy, but of neglect. He saw Ian beating up shaving foam in a cup, Ian’s care, his hand testing the bathwater, his form crouched at a hearth laying a fire in a humble room, his figure wrapped in blankets on the far side of the fire and near the picketed horses. Murdo saw Ian sleeping, sleeping and there, his apt attention, his ready ear.

  Murdo covered his face with his hands.

  4

  The Elder Betler

  IT WAS Meela Tannoy, his employer’s wife, who stopped Geordie Betler. When he reached for the door handle she leaned forward and placed her hand on his arm. She gently pressed him back beside Tannoy and put up the heavy leather blind that covered the carriage window. It was around ten in the morning, and the sun was out, but mist still pushed against the blind arches of Carrick’s Folly and poured over its rim.

  Meela Tannoy told the men that she would take the footman – to beat off thieves, or curiosity-seekers – and walk up to the high street. Her eyelids were heavy and her look droll. She said that since she was in Oban she might as well take a look at its little shops. She opened the door, and the footman was there, folding down the steps before her stout boots. Quayside idlers stirred and stared. Mrs Tannoy fished two folds of her silk sari out of the collar of her long Paris coat and drew them up over her head. She paused to look back in, not at Geordie, but at her husband – a quick look that carried several clear instructions, and her confidence in him. Then she left, the footman following her figure in its weird mix of nipped-waisted wool and amber gossamer.

  Andrew Tannoy raised the other blind and a long halt of sunlight ran through the carriage. The dust looked lively.

  Geordie and his employer regarded the ship. It was still taking on cargo and signing new crew, three of whom had paused, canvas sacks on their squared shoulders, facing the cargo that was still waiting its turn, a collection of empty boxes that had to go on top, couldn’t take too much weight, or sit too close to other goods and contaminate them. Contaminate with bad luck, for the cargo the new crew stood and eyed waited stacked in four hearses – coffins for Stolnsay, whose own coffin-maker hadn’t enough seasoned timber to house the Gustav Edda’s eighteen dead crewmen and passengers.

  ‘The wind is sharp,’ said Andrew Tannoy. ‘Parky.’ He didn’t say, ‘You need not go yet, Geordie. We’ll wait here till you embark.’

  Geordie felt comfortable with this restraint, for Geordie Betler was a butler, and a model of propriety. Well – it was axiomatic, all butlers were proper, but Geordie had been seven years with Tannoy and the rules of Tannoy’s house were relaxed and informal. Informal, not unnatural; relaxed, but not lax. Andrew Tannoy put no stock in the niceties that had often worked to exclude him even as he made his fortune. He didn’t oppose, but ignored them. Tannoy was an educated man. The son of a poor parish minister, he had starved his way through a degree in mathematics and a pinchpenny post in a Glasgow firm of engineers. Then he went to India and built bridges on a Himalayan railway. Tannoy had retired at thirty-eight, his health imperilled by a fever. He came home to Scotland with a yellow complexion and an Indian wife. ‘I was on the bones of my bottom,’ he’d once told Geordie. ‘But we rented rooms, and I used my little bit of money to build my first steam shovel, then I put in for the patent.’

  Andrew Tannoy now had a factory in Glasgow, and a big house in Ayrshire, a tender liver, and his white-haired, soft-spoken Meela. He had friendly tenants and a few good friends – enough for a busy shooting season. He had a well-paid, comfortably housed butler whom he was loath to lose. And he knew enough to be worried.

  Geordie could see that his employer was trying to think how he could coax his butler to talk. Andrew Tannoy was concerned – and in need of reassurance. Geordie was fond of his employer, but he was also curious about him. Tannoy was an original, and Geordie wanted to see what he’d do, how he’d manage both his anxiety and the impropriety of fussing over a servant.

  Andrew Tannoy rubbed his forehead. Then he blurted, ‘He’s no idler.’

  This was a novel approach. Geordie turned in his seat, and looked attentive.

  ‘Well, of course, I am. Played out. Or, I play as men do when they’ve made a fortune and want a quiet life.’

  Andrew Tannoy was talking about Lord Hallowhulme. He was making his foray into Geordie’s near future – but on his side, as a segregated stallion, who must watch his mares and keep pace with them along his side of the fence. Geordie and Andrew Tannoy were servant and master, but for Mr Tannoy the barrier was more of a ha-ha than a fence – a recessed, stone-lined ditch that stops sheep and cattle from wandering into the garden and eating up tulips and grape hyacinths, hellebores and honesty, a barri
er invisible from the parlour, a barrier that presents no impediment to the view.

  Tannoy went on. ‘Of course, some of what Hallowhulme does is a kind of play. But it takes a great deal of wealth. He’s no Mellon or Carnegie, but –’ Andrew Tannoy blushed. He fiddled with the fringed pull on the leather blind. It swung back and forth before the view, a hypnotist’s fob watch. Geordie focused on it and was again able to lose sight of the stacked coffins.

  ‘Meela and I were invited to Port Clarity once,’ Andrew Tannoy volunteered. ‘You know, Port Clarity, Lord Hallowhulme’s model town? The town he built near his soap factory in Hull. It has workers’ cottages, all plumbed, two up, two down; it has a library, museum, observatory, swimming baths; it has parks, schools; a hospital, and an employees’ health plan. A marvellously progressive project.’ Mr Tannoy mused. ‘He’s an enlightened man.’

  ‘So you’ve met him?’ Geordie said.

  ‘Yes.’

  The undertakers were waggling the end of the first coffin to ease it out of the hearse. Andrew Tannoy watched them, then said that they could do with some recessed rollers along the bottom of that vehicle. ‘But they’ll think of it themselves,’ he added in a strange, cold voice. Then he said, ‘Forgive me. I’ve wandered rather from the point. Betler, I am sorry that I never met your brother. You kept up a regular correspondence, I believe?’

  ‘Yes, weekly. Ian liked to get letters. Liked to write them, too. I’ve been hard put to it sometimes to keep him entertained. I have enough to do, but my life is quiet. Ian had rather more colour and incident in his. But he never forgot me, he always reported to me. When he was a boy and I was a big lad he’d come out to meet me when I was on my way home from school. Sometimes I’d find him three or four miles from home. This was when he was only seven. I learned not to dawdle. I’d go on as fast as I could so that he wouldn’t come too far.’