Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  Geordie inverted the bowl of his pipe and knocked it against the rail, to dislodge the clot of cold ash. Then he went in out of the air.

  The steamer’s salon was full of solid warmth, a smell of the coal in its stove, and of tea, scalded milk, damp wool. There were only four other passengers – a mother, two daughters, and a maid, who was asleep, her back braced against a large wicker hamper. Someone had covered her legs with a travel rug. The sisters were twins, young ladies in their minority, but exactly where in that minority Geordie was unable to map, since they were stout, round-faced, swathed in shawls and perched on by fur muffs as sturdy as tomcats. These two watched him, blearily, as he took the top off the hatbox into which Meela Tannoy had insisted Cook put three brown-sugar pinwheels, two pork pies, four boiled eggs with a saltcellar, a now-fused stack of chocolate fudge, a hard cheese, several ripe pears, a knife, fork, spoon, and napkin, and, finally, a bottle of damson sherry. The box was packed like a puzzle, but Geordie had been at it, and had eaten a hearty lunch already, only because of his inability to repack it so that all fitted and the lid could close. His lunch had been at three, nearly eight hours earlier, and he was hungry again. The twins watched him eat. Their mother, a fragile, papery woman with very fine black eyes, caught them staring and spoke to them. She didn’t tell them off; she only made conversation, retrieved their attention. Her voice was low, scarcely audible to Geordie, except that he stopped chewing and found himself listening. She was speaking another language, but Geordie was sure her sentence ended ‘… poor Ingrid’.

  Poor Ingrid?

  The twins nodded at their mother, a gesture doubled, a more intense assent, and intensely solemn. Then both pursed their mouths and squirmed in their seats.

  For a moment Geordie did nothing, then he had to prise the pastry off the roof of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. He swallowed. He brushed the crumbs from his coat and crossed the salon, made his bow. Could he offer the ladies anything? He was so generously provided for.

  The lady accepted a small glass of the damson sherry. She was sorry she couldn’t open their hamper – she gestured with one tight-skinned, arthritic hand at the sleeping servant. ‘But we do have a tin of very succulent muscatels,’ she said.

  Geordie established that she was the widow of Paul Tegner, a justice of Malmo in Sweden. She established that he was the butler of Tannoy, who owned a machine works in Glasgow. They soon learned that they were going to the same place – Kiss Castle. Jane Tegner tendered her deepest sympathies. She and the twins had thought to postpone their visit on account of the accident, but Minnie Hallow was a dear friend of her girls, and very lonely for the two years since her poor sister had drowned …

  And Geordie realised that, of course, they’d been talking about the other Ingrid in Murdo Hesketh’s story – not Hesketh’s sister, but Ingrid Hallow.

  5

  Kiss Castle

  BILLIE, IN a strange place and a haze of misery, still recognised that, in leaving her and Henry alone as much as possible in those first two days of hushed peace in his sickroom, the Hallowhulme household was being kind. There was always a servant on hand, at times in the room, otherwise posted on the landing at the end of the hall, where there was a large linen press holding all the household’s sheets, quilts, bath towels, and sundry other cloudy whitenesses. The maid would keep herself busy by keeping order in the press – she folded, made inventory, and watched for Billie to put her head around the door. She was a quiet woman, near in age to Billie, an islander, soft and hesitant in her speech. She kept her distance, clearly shy of Billie’s grief, of what had happened to her.

  Lady Hallowhulme came in the morning and evening, made her own kind inquiries, and carried others’ polite ones. ‘My husband has reminded me to assure you that he still regards Mr Maslen as engaged. He says that this engagement must by no means be considered an obligation, and, if Mr Maslen would prefer to return to the mainland, he shall, all expenses covered. However, if Mr Maslen decides that the cataloguing task could prove an occupation that helps him through this sad and difficult period, then my husband will be more than pleased to hear he will stay on.’ Clara smiled at Billie. ‘That’s the meat of my husband’s message. If, when Mr Maslen returns to himself, this assurance of an imaginable future offers him some comfort, please do convey it to him.’ Lady Clara frowned faintly, her eyelids down and brows raised. ‘But I’m sure James will come and put it all to Mr Maslen himself when Mr Maslen is able to attend.’

  Billie said yes, she thought Henry would be glad of something to do. She fiddled with the matted fringe of the shawl that hid the gaping neck of her borrowed dress – her own surviving one was being cleaned. The one she wore was too big for her, but a good dress – the height of fashion three years earlier, a young lady’s garment, with a bustle that rustled and, as Billie walked, made passes at the air behind her as if it had its own appetites and interests.

  Clara, Lady Hallowhulme, was decent, but stiff, her manner awkward, immobile, as if it gave her pain to sit near another person, to speak and meet their eyes. Billie was feeling something similar. When the young islanders came and changed the water, removed dirty crockery, and mended the fire – all tasks Billie usually performed – she’d watch them work, look defiance at their activity, which showed up her inactivity, her uselessness. If they turned their eyes toward her, she’d look away.

  She slept in a slippery nest of two big silk-covered quilts on a daybed across the room from Henry. Sometimes she just lay and watched the rain spill from one lattice to the next, collecting against each horizontal of lead like tears on the rim of an eye. On the stone sill the tears were again only rain, the stone pitted and ominously lace-trimmed with yellow lichen. It seemed to Billie that she was in a new world, a world made of Henry’s harsh breathing, and the sickroom stink of sweat, stuffiness, and various medicines that managed fever or congestion. The room was all unfamiliar lustre and deep colour, carved wood, and ornately patterned carpet and upholstery. Billie’s daybed was covered in a fabric decorated with nut bushes in full leaf, with simultaneous blossom, fruit and fat squirrels. There were no plain things in Billie’s view, except the black lead between the windowpanes and an outdoors that – when Billie lay down and looked up – was all soft grey sky. There was no ceiling to the clouds, only a skin of still mist, through which the rain seemed to strain like whey through a cheesecloth, leaving its pale solids still in the sky.

  The doctor was in and out. He seemed satisfied by Henry’s progress. He said to Billie, to Clara, that he judged it better not to tell Henry of his loss till he’d come back to himself sufficiently to ask.

  ‘He is asking,’ Billie said. ‘He’s calling for her.’

  ‘No, my dear, we must wait till he asks rationally. Right now he has no idea where he is, or what has happened.’

  Billie held Henry’s hand and listened to him, waited for some sign that he’d begun to orient himself in time and place. She knew that she had been three nights at Kiss Castle and one in the gatehouse. But she had forgotten what to expect. So that when, on the afternoon of her fifth day, the latch clicked and the door opened and Lady Clara put her head and hand around only to signal Billie to follow her, Billie was reluctant, unready to go out into a world through which she could walk and walk and not ever expect to fall into step with her sister.

  ‘Come out, Miss Paxton,’ Lady Hallowhulme commanded.

  Billie followed her. The landing was empty, but Billie could hear soft, hurried steps going down the carpeted stairs below. Determined to find a movement to go with the sound, Billie’s eyes darted away from Lady Hallowhulme’s to follow the flight of a pair of blackbirds that started up from the sill of the hall window and dropped out of sight. Billie felt they were flying from her, these birds – and the hurrying footfalls. A door closed. The landing was still and silent. Billie looked down to find a hand closed around her wrist, a cold manacle of flesh.

  Lady Hallowhulme told Billie that they had found Edith’s body. It h
ad been retrieved by the divers from the mainland. Clara Hallow walked Billie to a seat across the hall, a red velvet love seat with two bays that, when they sat down, kept their bodies apart but pressed their knees together. Clara placed a bundle in Billie’s lap. It was a man’s handkerchief in which was wrapped Edith’s brooch of silver filigree and a cat’s eye like an iris fogged by cataract; Edith’s miser’s purse, a mesh that was clinched closed by rings, its ends weighted with red amber beads; and a third thing, a button, plain plaited pigskin over brass – a button from Henry’s jacket.

  ‘Your sister was wearing the brooch and purse,’ Clara Hallow said. ‘The button was in her hand.’

  Billie asked Clara if she could see her sister.

  ‘We think you shouldn’t,’ said Clara.

  ‘I think I should,’ said Billie. Then, very plain, but desperate, ‘I must stop wanting to look for her. Don’t you see? I keep wanting to walk out and find her.’

  Billie was taken out of the castle, told to ‘at least cover your hair’ – she thought of the church, but Jenny and Lady Hallowhulme had only meant that her hair was a fright.

  THEY MADE their way to the church again, through a crowd of people, bright sunshine, the stones still wet, a street full of reflected light. Billie shaded her eyes and followed Clara Hallow into the church, into gloom, and points of light – candle flames, and those flames reflected in the eyes staring at her. The church smelled of beeswax, bad meat, and the perfume of some branches of wilting wild azalea that lay on the pews near the door. Clara paused, took something from one of the women lining the aisle, and passed it back to Billie – a small gauze sachet of the sort used to scent stored clothes, this one full of thyme and lavender. Clara put the sachet in Billie’s hand, then applied Billie’s hand to her nose.

  There was a line of coffins on the floor below the altar, all sealed. Two empty coffins inclined upright, like tired sentries on either side of the sacristy door. Billie followed Lady Clara down the steps between them, through the short passage, which was full of people, it seemed. Billie didn’t so much see Murdo Hesketh as sense him, right beside her, a change against her skin, the temperature of moonlight. Billie looked and saw him press back against the wall and turn his head hard sideways to avoid meeting her eyes.

  A man removed the lid of Edith’s coffin – and there she was, so changed that it wasn’t strange to see her there. (Billie and Edith’s father, after his final illness, had merely looked tired and uncomfortable, his broad shoulders pushed together in the incommodious crate that was all his daughters could afford. His shoulders were raised; he’d seemed to shrug, hapless, careless, as nonchalant as ever, wedged in his last bed.) Edith’s hair was Edith – even frosted with salt, a red so dark that it was black in the deep curves of its curls. Her face was dark, too. The first diver had disturbed her so that she’d spent two days with her back pressed against the bulkhead but facedown in the water. Edith’s hands were livid, but her face was fat and a cyanotic blue. Billie stooped nearer – she thought she saw something else, that her sister held something like tiny scraps of paper in her hands …

  Clara held Billie back, gripped her hard under the arms, and braced one foot forward so that she trembled with effort. Billie was hauled around sideways, but not before she saw what Clara had seen, and had recognised sooner, that the ‘scraps’ were Edith’s fingernails, coming away from the tips of her fingers. But Billie wouldn’t unbend and hadn’t finished, for instead of Edith’s bump there was a bundle. A neatly wrapped, damp bundle lying in the hollow of Edith’s lap.

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ someone said, very firm. Arms circled her waist, then pulled her back a few steps, still doubled over.

  ‘It’s the baby, dear,’ said Lady Hallowhulme. She sounded breathless.

  ‘It’s too sad a sight,’ said the man who held her. She straightened against him and turned to glare. He was just her height – Henry’s height – little and wiry, neat and grey.

  ‘What kind of baby?’ Billie asked, then, explaining herself, ‘Henry will want to know.’

  The man looked around, inquiring. Billie heard Mrs Mulberry, the minister’s wife, say that the baby was a boy. Then she heard someone laugh, a short, stifled, unhappy laugh. She was sure that it was Murdo Hesketh, though she had never heard him laugh before.

  ‘Come away now,’ said the man. He released her, but kept his arm up, a barrier between Billie and the coffin.

  Mrs Mulberry asked Billie would she like a lock of hair? Billie said yes, and watched the minister’s wife bend, lift a long red rat’s tail of hair, and cut it with a pair of embroidery scissors. She laid it across her knee, fetched thread from a pocket in her apron, and bound the hair at its severed end. Billie received it, remembered to say thank you, as Edith would have reminded her, and let herself be led away.

  BILLIE PRESSED her cheek to the window, smeared the pane with oil from her forehead and nose, her ears and hair. She rubbed her head back and forth across the glass, felt the lead dig in against cheek and browbone. She waited for Henry to wake.

  There had always been someone to do the difficult things for her, to speak for her. There was always an advocate: Aunt, or Edith, or Henry. Now the hard task was hers alone.

  Henry still ran a fever. That morning she’d had to mime gathering a skein of rope, a cable he said, in which he was tangled. ‘It’s holding my legs. It hurts,’ he whispered. Billie stood over him, her arms out, baling a cumbersome invisible rope. He thanked her, his eyelids drooping and, before he sank and lost his shape again, disappearing into his hot ground-mist of fever, he turned his head to look at the other side of the bed, where there was an empty chair, and said, ‘Where is Edith?’ But then he was under, and Billie didn’t have to answer him.

  The question was harder than ever to answer. Perhaps tomorrow, after the funeral, Billie would only have to point at a patch of ground: ‘There she is.’ For, until she was found, Edith had receded only in time – unseen for five days, dead, yes, but a dead Edith. Billie had had to look, she’d had to see, but the altered Edith had stolen Edith’s possibilities. The substituted changeling horror in the church wasn’t Edith. Billie felt that her sister could only be Edith again in Edith’s grave.

  Through the window, waxy with oil, Billie saw the colours become more solid; the waving stems of marshmallow, fuchsia, and vetch flowering in an angle of the walled garden were eclipsed by a more animal motion. Billie found an unclouded pane and looked out.

  There were five young people in the garden, two round-faced bosomy young women, a slight dark-haired girl, and the two cadets from the Gustav Edda, now in civilian attire. One of the stout girls had a notebook and pen. She and the one who looked like her sister walked about, looking at this and that cluster of flowers and making notes. The boys had gone further, swinging their rackets, onto a lawn, where one cast up the fletched cone of a shuttlecock and they began to bat it back and forth. The other girl set up an easel, positioned a blank canvas on it, and balanced a paint box across the top of an urn full of drooping anemones. Then she waited. After a moment a servant came out of the house with a pitcher of water. The girl took it, set it by her feet, laid her extra brushes on the grass, and began to dip a brush, and mix paints.

  The plump sisters – so alike that Billie decided they must be twins – tired first, and one slipped the notebook into the pocket of the painter’s apron. The other craned over the painter’s shoulder and made gestures of appreciation. Then they barged the boys aside, wrestled for the rackets, won not by use of force, but by touch. The boys seemed disconcerted to be jostled by hips and breasts and backed off, blushing. The twins began to whack the shuttlecock about, less nimbly than the boys. It was retrieved from a tree, then from a green pond. The lace trim on the three-quarter sleeve of one girl’s white dress dripped, mucky. The boys idled, then, as it became overcast and still, began to shrug and twitch, bothered by insects. The twins, when they paused to catch their breath, shrieked, began to slap their own necks, then ran indoors. />
  After an hour, when Billie looked out again, only the painter remained, absorbed, her canvas flowering with forms and colours something like those before her – but without the fat glow of sap and green ichor. The blues, yellows, and reds of flowers with scent and substance were, in her picture, Billie saw, transformed into paper lanterns, transparent, a light behind them perhaps, but paper still.

  Billie watched as the girl stepped to one side, her arm over the easel, to look at the flowers. Then she caught up her brushes, washed them together, and flicked the cloudy water across the grass. She regarded her picture once more, sidelong, then inclined at the waist, leaned gradually and delicately till her hip connected with the easel and it collapsed. The picture lay faceup on the grass and the girl swayed over it, looking at the flowers. The real flowers. Then she swooped on a stand of flag irises and embraced them, gathered their thick stalks together so that their yellow and purple crowded up around her neck like the flaring frill of a lizard. At that moment it began to rain. Billie watched as the girl released the irises, snatched the easel up by its ankles and the painting by its edge, and ran indoors.