Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  How many more times would Billie have to break the bad news?

  She dried her eyes. She found she was looking down at someone else’s shoes, their toes pointed toward her own. It was Minnie Hallow, standing over her with an expression of pitched determination. ‘I think you need to go out and get some air,’ the girl said. ‘You need to avoid all those endless directions about where to stand – between the invalid and window, or window and fire, or the invalid and the fire – you must be worn-out.’

  Finding herself with a representative of the family, Billie said what she had forgotten to say to Lady Hallowhulme. ‘My room is very comfortable, thank you.’

  ‘Oh, hell!’ said Minnie, then, coaxing, ‘Anne Tegner and I are going out. My boy will drive. I suppose I should call him “my odd man” – Alan Skilling. Anyway – you should come with us. You can simply sit on a hillside for an hour or two and think of nothing.’

  Billie got up.

  ‘You’ll need a wrap,’ said Minnie, trailing after Billie, who was going to her room to shut herself in, away from invitations and kindness and this girl’s clear, well-bred voice. But they reached the room together, and Billie couldn’t bring herself to close the door in Minnie’s face. She collected a shawl – one of her own, washed and dried but faded a little where salt water had collected in its folds.

  In the driveway a low trap was harnessed to a short-legged, broad-backed, hairy pony. The driver was a spindly boy whose skin, hair, and eyes were all the shade of brown sugar, and whose nose was like a round bead sewn in under his skin. His shirt was too big and frayed at collar and cuffs; both shirt and skinny torso were forced together into a jacket made for a child several sizes smaller. He had the reins wrapped around his fist and raised tight, as if he thought his little horse was skittish. But the pony and cart remained motionless, even when the boy wriggled around to appraise Billie.

  Anne Tegner – one of the twins Billie had observed earlier – was already seated. She wore a handsome fur hat and jacket and carried a large jar on her lap. Minnie rearranged her easel, sketchpad, a different paint box – this one pristine – and made room for Billie. ‘Room for one more,’ she said, in a managing tone, and to no one in particular.

  ‘It’ll be you tumbling off the back if your one more has Kirsty overbalanced and dangling between the shafts with her feet off the road,’ the boy warned, darkly.

  ‘Nonsense, Alan,’ said Minnie. ‘I’ll set my back against yours, and you and I will be the centre of gravity, the pivot point, if you follow me.’

  ‘You pay me, Miss Minnie, so I follow you.’

  The boy tapped the pony with the tip of his long whip. The pony’s skin twitched, but it didn’t stir. ‘Get on, would you,’ he said. Kirsty set off at an ambling walk. Minnie made introductions. ‘Miss Paxton, Miss Tegner.’ Minnie had perched herself above them on the buckboard, her back against the boy’s. She was in some danger of displacing him with her weight and height.

  ‘Could you shift your arse a little?’ the boy said, amicably.

  Minnie made an adjustment, and the pony plunged forward a jump to keep her feet.

  ‘I can’t answer for us on the hill,’ said Alan.

  Billie offered to get off and walk behind, and earned a look from the boy which told her that, if she did, she would be robbing him of a pious cause.

  Kirsty picked up her pace. The morning was fresh. In the seven days Billie had been on Kissack this was only the second of sun. Everything glistened, the stones on the roadside, the trunks of the trees furred with refreshed moss. The trees were in late spring leaf and, with the moss, were fully green in foliage, branch, bole, as though some painter had been at work with a sadly limited palette. The harbour was nearly empty, all the fishermen still out, and from the road along the point the long stone pier seemed crowned with frozen grey smoke – the skeins of drying nets. These seemed to have a catch of shadows – old men standing behind and plying awls to mend them.

  The cart passed through the open arch of the gatehouse, which dripped on them.

  ‘Is your father at the Scouse Beach site today?’ Minnie asked her driver.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Are you sleeping here now?’

  ‘The gatehouse, Miss Minnie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am.’

  Minnie was impatient. ‘Is it comfortable, Alan? Are you glad to be able to keep your father company?’

  ‘Glad, Miss Minnie. And grateful.’ His tone was teasing.

  ‘I didn’t ask you to be grateful,’ Minnie Hallow said.

  ‘Aren’t I allowed to do something without you asking?’

  ‘You know that isn’t what I mean. You’re impugning my motives, Alan. I mean to help, not to inspire gratitude.’ She was affronted.

  ‘Don’t go on, Miss Minnie. Kirsty has enough trouble with the noise of the town.’ The boy was very reasonable.

  ‘This,’ said Minnie Hallow, rigid with scorn, ‘is not a town.’

  The boy glanced back at them, dropped his jaw, and said that those big towns must be a staggering spectacle indeed.

  ‘Be quiet, Alan Skilling,’ said Anne Tegner.

  Alan was quiet.

  Not far beyond Stolnsay, where the few pastures came to an end, there was a final stone wall along the brow of the hill, a new one, not yet settled, and as they came up the road beneath it Billie could see the sky shining through its piled stones as if they were only knotted lace. She looked back at the town and saw, in the still air, exhalations of hearth smoke going up like slack strings, which seemed to anchor the few motionless clouds. She could discern the wreck, under green water, a salvage derrick on the wharf above it. The Gustav Edda didn’t look like a ship. It looked like its own shadow, the shadow Billie had seen on the sandy seafloor as the ship had manoeuvred slowly into its berth, shortly before she went below and met Henry at the ladder, and Henry had pressed her back against the wall.

  The dogcart passed over the rise and pulled in where the road branched, turned one way into the hills and out across a vast stretch of rolling bronze bogland, and the other way down a narrow valley, crossing and recrossing a wayward watercourse that had scattered stones around itself like a trail of crumbs. This road was eventually smudged out in bracken-covered sand hills. Through these Billie saw a beach with golden sand.

  Minnie climbed down from the cart. She removed her easel, canvas, paint box, and set them on the roadside. She said to Anne Tegner that by the time they got down to the beach the tide would be well in, and they should be able to find some pipefish in the shallows along the shore. Alan would help.

  Billie got down, too, and without a word walked away onto the heath. Around her feet was thyme, and budding heather – in bloom only by stones whose radiating heat had brought some flowers on early. Billie saw thrift and clover and mountain speedwell and tough tawny grasses. The heath was a springy patchwork dotted with smooth stones, none the same composition or colour. It was all so pleasing and varied, it was as if it had been planted, planned. It was lovely, so lovely that Billie wasn’t watching her step and stumbled again and again. She waded and staggered, and then dropped down among it, and the heath buoyed up her body, and hissed in the breeze, a hiss made of the ringing of dry bells.

  Nearby, but invisible, Minnie Hallow said, ‘It’s beautiful, but none of it is tender. I like tender plants.’

  Billie stroked a stiff sprig of some herb, resinous and aromatic. Then she sat up. The cart was some way away down the road to the beach, Anne Tegner holding her hat and hunched around her jar. Minnie said, ‘I have to get my fill of tender flowers before we come.’

  She had set up her easel and was at work already, testing the tip of her brush on the sleeve of her white smock. ‘We follow the spring north,’ she explained. ‘We see it first in London, then Port Clarity, then Edinburgh, then here.’ Minnie said that Billie would have liked Scouse Beach. It was warmer than the hill. And none of the bays nearer the castle was any good. They were all stony and
cold and coated with sulphurous weed.

  Billie lay down again, sank into the low room of heath.

  Further silence. The angle of the light was such that the sky wasn’t the deep drawing blue it would be on a cold day. There seemed to be a fine and flawed white screen between Billie and the blue. She pretended she was alone. She listened to the sifted air. She nearly slept, but her body jerked, as if the ground had given way and dropped her – twice – and at each fall she snatched something, first a plaited pigskin-covered button, then the untucked tail of the shirt of the man who came onto the Gustav Edda with the Stolnsay pilot. Billie heard her sister’s voice, right at her ear, hoarse with cold and calling. ‘Billie!’ said Edith.

  ‘Miss Paxton,’ said Minnie, scarcely distinct, as though she’d waited for some sign Billie was asleep and only then addressed her. ‘Miss Paxton, we have something in common.’

  Billie sat up again and had to tear her hair out of the heath – her head was taking root.

  The dogcart had gone out of sight. She had no notion how long she’d slept. Minnie was seated on the ground now, her paint box shut and propped on her knees, in use as a desk. It was covered in paper, a thick sheaf of pages, the breeze thumbing their top corners.

  Billie said that maybe she would follow the others. Minnie stopped writing and chewed her pencil. When Billie got up and moved a little her way, unintentionally, for she was groggy and unsteady on her feet, Minnie hunched over the papers. Billie saw this and looked sharp. A love letter, she thought.

  Seeing Billie looking at her pages, Minnie told her that she was making several fair copies of a play by the well-known playwright George Bernard Shaw, for her theatricals at the castle. But even the illiterate Billie, who had never heard of George Bernard Shaw, could see no printed text from which Minnie might be copying. The excuse seemed curious, too hasty to be true.

  ‘Miss Paxton,’ Minnie said, frowning at her, ‘perhaps you should go and see how they are.’

  The road was uneven, the burn that it repeatedly looped to avoid still crossed it a number of times, dropping its crumbs of stone. Billie went easy but was pleased when the road petered out into several sandy tracks through the bracken. She took the broadest of these, where the wheels of vehicles heavier than the dogcart had ploughed a way through between two dunes. But its churned sand was heavy going, and Billie left it for a narrower one, sprinkled with dry sheep droppings. This track came out on the crest of the dune, where bracken gave way to cropped grass, above the long gentle curve of Scouse Beach. Far out, the sea’s dimpled blue passed imperceptibly into the cobalt blue of the mountains of one of the Inner Isles. Closer to shore the water was placid, and completely clear.

  Directly below Billie stood the dogcart, the small pony drowsing in harness. Kirsty was snoring into her feed bag, and had blown chaff up into her eyelashes.

  At the near end of the beach Anne Tegner was up to her ankles in the water, her thick flounced skirts bunched around her thighs. She was attempting to direct Alan Skilling, who was in over his knees and treading the sand as though stamping out a vintage.

  Billie scrambled down the dune with more impetus and less stealth than she’d planned, so was obliged to go join them.

  Alan had discovered that a certain kind of sand, collected below miniature headlands of rock, had somehow, when submerged, remained infused with air. If he stamped, he sent up a fizz of bubbles. When Billie arrived he was busy speculating to Anne about how the sand had trapped the air. The water was very cold and his knees were bright red, the rolled ends of his trousers wet through.

  ‘Look!’ he said to Billie, and tramped in a circle, the water boiling about him.

  ‘All the pipefish will be up at the factory by the time you’re through,’ said Anne. She waved an arm at the far end of the beach and the construction of new, raw stone – buildings, and a breakwater. Lord Hallowhulme’s alginate factory.

  Billie sat down to take off her shoes and stockings. The bands of sunlight in the water were warm and rhythmical, a balm like a repeated caress, too subtle to be tactile, perhaps only a sound like a cat purring. Billie hitched up her skirt and waded in, away from Alan and his agitation.

  Anne said, ‘Isn’t it cold? My anklebones are aching.’ She got out. Alan invited Billie to try the bubbles. She surged his way, wetting her hem and petticoat at once, and found her feet breaking a crust of sand that wheezed, then released air. The fizz brushed her skin. Tiny bubbles caught in the small transparent hairs of her legs, coated and fattened them like a silvery mould. Billie felt a laugh behind her teeth, in her sinuses, a chortle, a snort – she shut her teeth on it and stomped about, her lower half loose, but face set. Then she stopped, ambled away, trailing her skirt. Anne Tegner pursued her, waving a small net. Anne gave it to Billie, explaining that pipefish were a sort of streamlined seahorse, without flounces or armour or a coiled tail. ‘They’re dark, brown or black, with delicate horse heads.’

  Billie went on up the beach, wading, passed a beached blob of water, wholly transparent, a jellyfish, wobbling like a stone in someone’s thirsty delirium dream. She saw a stripped fish skeleton, still cohering, bobbing about in the ripples of the crowning tide. Then she saw her first pipefish. It was drifting rather than swimming, the two rippling fans of its gills the only apparent voluntary motion. She tried to scoop it up, but it flicked away from her, pouring over the rim of the net.

  Billie saw Alan’s raggy shadow before she heard him. He came up beside her, and they began together to herd the pipefish, with water, into Anne’s big jar. Billie saw that her hands were red after only a moment immersed.

  She asked Alan Skilling if people ever swam here.

  No, they only paddled. But Mr Hesketh had been seen to swim last summer. And young Mr Rixon’s friend, Elov Jansen, tried only yesterday. But they were Norsemen. It warmed up a little by July, and in the hot weather – if there was any hot weather – folk did go in the sea for a dip. No one swam. The island’s fishermen made a point of never learning. It was considered bad luck, futile, for after all, if they fell in off their boats, or if a boat capsized, the water was so cold that they wouldn’t stand a chance. ‘Better to go quickly, than to tread water and freeze,’ said Alan Skilling. Then after a moment, he said, ‘I do know that your sister drowned. I don’t mean to cause hurt, only I was so keen to tell you about us that it slipped my mind.’

  Billie looked up at his young, tense face and said not to worry. He was clutching the jar where the pipefish flowed about then, confused by how its whole sea had become an all-round surface, impenetrable except to light, it stiffened and became a streak of black wax dropped into cold water.

  ‘Would you like me to teach you to swim?’ Billie said – and then she straightened and shaded her eyes with her hands.

  There were men at work on the site of the factory, several unloading lumber from a dray, others busy with trowel, mortar and brick.

  ‘If there’s ever no one about,’ she amended.

  ‘Everyone keeps the Sabbath,’ Alan told her. ‘Even the Castle must because of its servants. Stolnsay’s congregation is stricter than their minister – they always have been.’ Then, in an outbreak of astonishment, ‘Can you swim?’ He followed this with an apology, or an explanation. ‘I’m a Catholic, you see. We are of Skilling – my father and me.’

  Billie looked at the water; at this temperature she’d likely be breathless after ten strokes. The bands of sunlight flowed, bright gold over green gold, the water an icy paradise, compressed, a dense medium, but it seemed more habitable than the air, the steep treeless hills behind her.

  ‘I mean,’ said the boy, uncertain as to whether he’d made himself understood, ‘Stolnsay is strict about the Sabbath, but I’m not expected at church, and maybe you’re not either. And I’d like you to teach me to swim.’

  Billie stood peering at him, the net dripping on the dry upper part of her skirt. She didn’t say yes or consent to arrangements. She didn’t know if the boy was being kind, by giving
her something to do, and she should resist his kindness, or if he was only hungry for advantage, the advantage any skill would earn him. She did ask if Anne Tegner would be content with only one pipefish.

  ‘One will do, though I think she means to paint it as two. Paint a picture of it. But anyway it’ll be me down in the cove at all hours of the day and night fetching fresh seawater so that her fish won’t stifle.’

  Billie gave him the net to carry – and some advice: he should charge Miss Tegner for running around after her fish, surely Miss Minnie’s money didn’t cover that? Then she set off back up the beach to collect her boots.

  Anne Tegner plonked down beside Billie to put her own on, and Alan arrived on her other side, so that she was flanked, as Henry and Edith had always seemed to flank her. Billie had taken it as kindly shepherding, but now she wondered, did this boy and girl think she was in danger of breaking out, running mad?

  THEY COLLECTED Minnie, who, Billie saw, had concealed her papers and was packed, ready and waiting for them. But once they were all aboard and the cart was hurrying the poor little pony down a dip – Alan’s knuckles white on the brake handle and the brake squealing – Anne asked Minnie, ‘How is the play?’

  ‘If you and Ailsa could make another two copies,’ Minnie said, ‘we’ll be closer.’ Then to Billie, ‘We always put on a play. I mean, we have most summers we’ve been here. My brother makes a fuss as a point of honour, to save face with his friends, but really he likes it, too.’ Minnie paused, then went on, her tone airy. ‘This year we’ll put on a very little-known work by George Bernard Shaw, titled Fortune and the Four Winds. It’s about a man’s first meeting with his grownup children.’