Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘That was wrong of you, Billie,’ Edith said.

  ‘I know. But then everything settled, Edith. I was circumspect – as you’re always telling me to be. I liked talking with the other servants at the kitchen table, although I did feel that I wasn’t yet wholly one of them. And there was a lovely day when we all put our feet up and played cribbage – the afternoon of the Sunday when the roads were mired and Mrs Wood read the service and I was asked to play hymns. But they all knew each other’s stories – the family ailments and weddings and births. They had letters from brothers in Australia. I’d talk about you, but that seemed to put their backs up. They couldn’t see how come I was cleaning combs and you were a teacher. They couldn’t accept that I was – well – simple. They thought I must be lying.’

  Edith had visited Billie once when her employers took a detour to see the famous church at Hayle, within a mile of Mulrush. They dropped Edith off at the Woods’ gate. Edith went to the front door, fully conscious of where she stood in the world. She rang the bell, and asked the butler, and waited in the hall. She had no notion of the quake she caused, arriving as she did, a single tremor like that in a bowl of jelly given a sharp knock. Everything moved, but nothing altered. Billie was in Miss Vause’s dressing room, standing on a low stool, wearing the rose dress, while its hem was being put up to the right height – an inch below her anklebones. She was happy – as happy to have this assurance that the dress was hers as she was to feel that this meant she was forgiven, that at last people understood her and were making allowances for her oddness. She had heard – but hadn’t taken in – the remark of her fellow maid, the girl pinning the hem. The girl said what a good thing it was that Billie was the same height as the elder Miss Wood. Then Billie was called. The housekeeper put her head around the door, and said, ‘Wilhelmina, your sister, Miss Paxton, is here.’ Billie didn’t hear the mockery – that she was Wilhelmina, while Edith was Miss Paxton. She didn’t hear the implication; that one of them was dishonest, either Billie wasn’t entitled to her inclusion in that little tribe of maids and footmen – didn’t belong with Bronwen, Gladys, Owen – or Edith wasn’t entitled to her elevation to ‘Miss Paxton’. Billie didn’t hear. She jumped off the stool, picked up the stiff, talkative skirts of the dress, and dashed out of the room. Edith was in the lower hall, smiling, her arms held out. Edith had always been beautiful, but that day Edith’s beauty made Billie falter in her flight – she stumbled and caught the banister. Edith was breathtaking – possibly always had been, but Billie had never seen before, had never been surprised by the sight of her sister, hadn’t penetrated the haze of her own love. Billie threw herself at Edith, and they sat down together on a long padded bench with their backs to the stairs. They talked, arms around each other’s waists, Billie curved into her taller sister. Then the reverend came down the stairs behind them. He’d been up to see Mrs Wood, who was in bed with a cold. At the sound of his footfalls Edith looked back over her shoulder. She gave a faint gasp, and Billie felt her own hair moved – Edith put a hand behind her and gathered Billie’s hair together on her back. Billie became aware that she was in the rose dress, and that its buttons were unfastened, and it was open all the way to the small of her uncorseted back. But she was wearing a camisole, and Edith was being overanxious. Edith did think about propriety – in a rather fitful, startled way, for her upbringing hadn’t equipped her with what other young women of her class tended naturally to have: the art of knowing exactly what was permissible in most ordinary situations.

  The Reverend Vause went right by them. Billie said, ‘It’s all right,’ to Edith. But then the reverend reappeared with a lamp. It was gloomy in the hall. ‘I thought you might like a light,’ he said, and put the lamp down on the table beside them. The rose dress came alive. And Edith’s hair – before as dark as the old oak of the stairs – gave out its full bloody lustre. Edith got up to give him her hand, thanked him, introduced herself and asked if her sister might be let off for an hour to walk her back to the church at Hayle, where she would rejoin her employers.

  The reverend said yes, certainly.

  And Edith, droll: ‘Quickly, dear, run upstairs again and change out of that magnificent dress. And remember to tie your hair.’

  When Billie came back down Edith and the reverend were on the front steps. Edith was saying, ‘… he was a very affectionate parent, and we were never really unhappy. In hindsight I can’t hold him entirely responsible for our difficulties. It’s hard to say. You know – post hoc ergo propter hoc.’

  ‘Do you know Latin, Miss Paxton?’

  ‘It was my patrimony, Mr Vause, a patchy classical education.’

  ‘And red hair,’ said Billie.

  The reverend smiled at her.

  From somewhere overhead came the carrying sound of Mrs Wood’s tight cough, and several startled sparrows flew from the face of the house.

  Edith began to stroll toward the gates, and the reverend followed. She told him that she’d had the opportunity lately of polishing her Latin. Or rather her Latin had been buffed up some in the course of the general polishing going on in the Lees’ household, where Mr Maslen was preparing the boys for Eton. And it turned out the Reverend Vause had gone to school with Henry Maslen. ‘And it wasn’t Eton,’ the reverend said. Edith told the reverend about Henry’s cataloguing, his love of systems, and the reverend said he could recall Maslen’s enthusiasm for memory palaces – the medieval memory system, where facts are made to live in an imaginary ‘palace’ according to their rank.

  At the gates they went different ways, and the reverend said that Edith must say hello to Henry from him, then, to be correct – Billie supposed – to the general ceremony of parting, he shook her hand, looked at her boots, and said that it was good to see her suitably attired for a long walk.

  ‘Oh – the dress,’ said Billie.

  ‘Billie just sometimes forgets herself,’ Edith said – explaining. They walked off their separate ways, Billie already chattering to Edith about the sheet music she’d bought with just a little of this quarter’s pay, and how she was being given that gorgeous dress.

  In Billie’s experience all situations improved once Edith had explained her. After Edith’s visit, Billie relaxed. She was cheerful and forthright at the below-stairs table, and fearless going about the house, about her work. She was trusted, it seemed, and given the better tasks. For instance, she carried a letter to the rectory. She waited while the Reverend Vause wrote his reply, and drifted some as she waited, toward the piano, the piano itself – not the picture in pride of place. The reverend looked around, got up, and came across the room to pick up the photograph of a girl with a thin face in a nimbus of fine blonde hair. They had been engaged, he said, she had tuberculosis of the bone. She’d wanted to break off the engagement, had thought she was being generous, but he thought it was possible to have a too finely developed sense of duty. Billie – who had only intended to stroke the keys – recognised this confidence as complimentary somehow, and confided in her turn. Her father had died of his lungs. The same disease. But his sense of duty was questionable. ‘He usually kept enough back to feed us. He was a gambler. Sometimes he won, then we lived like royalty.’ She smiled at her memories, of new clothes, fine meals, fireworks. Then she did stroke the keys, and said she liked his piano. She told him she’d bought some new songs – couldn’t wait for her Sunday off, when she’d be able to try them out on her own piano. It took her such a long time to puzzle out a tune from a song sheet. She sighed. The reverend wanted to know why, and Billie told him that she found those sorts of things very difficult. ‘My father used to say I was a stone. Impervious. In every way but one.’

  ‘What on earth did he mean by that?’

  ‘No, my mistake. I mean, sir, a stone in every way but one. I never sink.’

  It was then that the reverend asked if Billie would like to come sometimes and try her songs on his piano.

  ‘If Mrs Wood can spare me,’ she said.

  He finished his
letter, she ran back to the house with it, and, that evening, she asked the housekeeper how she might best approach Mrs Wood about the Reverend Vause’s kind offer.

  Billie said later to Edith that she thought the important thing was to remember to use the word ‘kind’ of the reverend’s offer – to show gratitude.

  The following day Billie accidentally knocked a box of loose face powder off Miss Olive’s dressing table and onto the floor. Miss Olive was angry at first, then she laughed, because her terrier, who had been lying on a dark blue rug by the dressing table, and who had leapt up and run, emitting pinkish clouds at each leap, had left a dog-shaped silhouette on the rug. Billie cleaned up. But that afternoon she was called to the housekeeper’s room and informed that Mrs Wood was ‘letting her go’ – would pay the balance of her wages, but was letting her go. Billie asked why. Because, the housekeeper said, her work wasn’t satisfactory. The woman counted out coins and made Billie sign the ledger. Baffled, shamed, and angry, Billie picked up the cash and went upstairs to the attic room she shared with another girl. The rose dress was hanging from a hook on the rafters. Billie had been finishing its hem, to her height. Billie hauled her bag out from under her zinc bedstead and hurriedly packed her possessions. Then she bundled the dress and pushed it in on top.

  She carried her bag downstairs and had to find the housekeeper again – in the kitchen – to ask her for information about the trains. She listened, committed times to memory, then stared for a long moment, her eyes peering, at the blank, seamed face of the clock. ‘Is that the right time?’ Billie asked, and the butler pulled out his watch, and said, ‘I have a minute more. It’s a quarter after two.’

  Billie left the house. She was at the gateway when the butler and a footman came up the gravelled drive at a rasping run and stopped her. The butler wrenched her bag out of her hand, and both men turned her and marched her back to the house. She was taken to a drawing room and asked to wait. The footman, Owen, waited with her. ‘I’ll miss my train,’ she said to him.

  ‘That’s nothing to do with me,’ he replied.

  Mrs Wood arrived, with Miss Vause and the housekeeper. The ladies seated themselves, Mrs Wood on the sofa, and Miss Olive erect in a small Queen Anne chair. They talked about time. It would take ten minutes for the message to reach him. He’d drive over. He’d be here any moment.

  Mrs Wood produced her handkerchief and wiped her eyes and nose. She said that times like these brought her loss sharply back to her.

  The Reverend Vause arrived, pale and winded, and the court was in session.

  Billie’s bag was opened and the rose dress burst out, in a gleaming foam, like a silk scarf from a magician’s top hat, striking, especially when one has expected three broken eggs and a mess of shells and slime.

  Olive Vause stood up on a slow intake of breath.

  ‘You said I could have it,’ Billie told her. Then she looked at Mrs Wood, and said, ‘Miss Vause gave me the dress.’ Yet her first thought wasn’t to defend herself. She wanted to say, to Olive Vause, ‘You went up to the attic the moment I was gone.’ How else had Olive known the dress wasn’t still hanging from the rafters?

  ‘Olive?’ said the reverend.

  ‘It is true that I said to Wilhelmina, sometime in May, that if she were good, the dress might be altered for her. I should, of course, suppress these whims of mine, but – Wilhelmina – you have known since Friday that you were making the alterations for Miss Deborah.’

  Billie shook her head. She told the Reverend Vause that Miss Olive told her that she must make the alterations in her own time. ‘Why would she ask me to do it in my own time if she didn’t mean it to be mine?’

  ‘I said it was worth the reward. You knew I meant to put a little extra in your pay.’

  The Reverend Vause asked his sister Olive whether it was possible there was a misunderstanding?

  ‘Oh – I suppose it’s possible,’ Olive said. ‘It’s so hard to know, William. With good diction one expects acuity, but –’

  ‘And why on earth was Wilhelmina dismissed without –’ the reverend began.

  ‘Without asking you, William?’ Mrs Wood said. ‘Dear – while I value your advice, particularly in an awkward situation of this sort, I’m quite capable of seeing to the day-to-day management of my own house. Including letting go a servant who – after all – was only in her trial period.’

  ‘This “awkward situation” might have been avoided if you’d come to me with your complaints about Wilhelmina before dismissing her.’

  ‘And have you try to talk me out of it? I have no intention of changing my mind, or my course of action. Why should I let you make me uncomfortable for it? Really, William, you force me to remind you that you aren’t on your own ground.’

  ‘At least let her work out her pay period. She’s due home for a holiday in two weeks. If you send her back when she is not expected, she’ll be humiliated.’

  ‘She was paid till Saturday,’ the housekeeper put in. ‘I told her I expected her to work till Saturday. And she went straight upstairs, hid Miss Olive’s Paris dress in her bag, and walked out of the house.’

  ‘You told me to go. I asked you about the trains.’ Billie interrupted at last.

  ‘Where on earth did you hope to wear the dress, Wilhelmina?’ Miss Olive asked, almost compassionate.

  And Billie went wild. She grabbed the bag, turned it upside down and shook it so that the rose dress spilled, with an explosive rush, onto the carpet. Of course everything else came out too, her good shoes, her hairbrush, socks, drawers, camisoles, the stays she left off whenever she could – they unrolled with a flap and whipped at Miss Olive’s feet with the ends of their laces. Everyone but Olive drew back. Olive Vause leaned forward a little, anticipatory as, after a pile of unironed handkerchiefs, the little illuminated Scripture book, and the bag’s own felted lining, Olive’s silver-backed brush and mirror fell on top of the pile, the mirror landing faceup and angled so that Billie could see the Reverend Vause in its glass. She thought she saw a smile – but his face was inverted, and after a moment she read his expression correctly, as distress.

  Mrs Wood was aggrieved. She was reproachful. This was far worse. This was theft, outright. Was it, she mused, a matter for the police?

  ‘Just let me go!’ Billie yelled. Billie wanted to be where she’d be believed. Edith would believe her. Billie saw she’d been outmanoeuvred, she saw a confidence trick, the words with double meanings, statements that seemed candid one-to-one, but ambiguous when there were witnesses. She saw she’d been practised upon, taken in. She had helped her father do these things to other people – but her father’s ‘marks’ were usually gulled into their own good nature, their better nature, and his game was always for material profit. Billie understood that she’d been fooled – but not why.

  ‘A matter for the police?’ Olive took up Mrs Wood’s remark, turned to her brother.

  ‘I’m going!’ Billie threw herself at her belongings and began piling them together and shovelling them back into the bag. She pushed the dress aside and it unrolled with a lazy, conclusive hiss like the only big wave on calm day. The mirror spun on its back across the rug, the hairbrushes, Olive’s and Billie’s own, made off in the opposite direction, skittering on their bristles across the parquet. Billie got up, but stepped on the hem of her own dress and pitched down facefirst – as she’d done countless times.

  Mrs Wood then, disgusted and peremptory: ‘Please pick her up, Owen.’

  The footman helped Billie to her feet. She was crying.

  ‘Waterworks,’ said Olive Vause.

  Billie didn’t often cry, but when she did her tears were copious, also copious was the thin salt water her nose made. Tears stung the carpet burn on her chin. Owen steadied her.

  ‘Give her the bag,’ said Mrs Wood. ‘I’m afraid, Wilhelmina, that in my letter to your aunt I really am obliged to mention the theft.’

  ‘Let me speak to her.’ The Reverend Vause didn’t mean Billie’s aunt. �
��In order to learn to – to resist cupidity, she has to repent her – her defiance.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Olive said. ‘Well, of course, it’s your duty to set her on the right path.’

  ‘You could accompany her to the station, William.’ Without waiting for her brother’s answer Mrs Wood gave some instructions to the footman for the groom – the Reverend Vause had ridden over, but would like to see Wilhelmina to the station. He’d take the trap.

  ‘No,’ said Billie. Bag in hand, she walked out of the room.

  THE REVEREND Vause caught up with her a quarter of a mile from his sister’s gate. He was alone in the trap. Billie kept on along the road, her bag banging on her shins. He turned the horse to bar her way. Billie stood still, and stared through the horse at the road ahead. She waited for him to get down and relieve her of her luggage. He put his hand under her elbow and asked her to climb up. She obeyed him.

  As they went, the Reverend Vause said she must see how important it was for her to maintain a good character. He saw her difficulty. How hard it was not to covet what she couldn’t have – to be surrounded by beauty and expected only to keep it in trim.

  Billie said, ‘I took the dress because they turned me off.’

  ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘No more of that nonsense about a promise.’

  ‘I was led into it,’ Billie said. ‘She was kind, then unkind. I was anxious to please her.’

  ‘Olive?’

  Billie didn’t answer.

  The reverend went on. He said ‘accept our lot’; he said ‘know our place’.

  Billie raised a brow at his ‘our’. She said, ‘There is so little I can do. Aunt and Edith support me.’ She put out her hand to pull an apricot off a tree whose branches overhung a wall by the road. Then she laughed at the look the reverend gave her. ‘It isn’t theft, it’s foraging.’ She thought for a moment of ‘knowing her own place’ and laughed again at what came to her – what usually came quickest – the memory of motion. ‘Edith would say I haven’t learned how to be careful. That caution hasn’t been cultivated in me. She believes our father made bad choices, and was the helpless victim of his habits. Well, of his gambling. But I think – I think I now know – that he found life dull when he wasn’t in danger.’ She told the reverend that she had laughed just then because she’d remembered how she and Edith and their father had caught a boat in a bad swell. The boat put into Corniglia, but couldn’t land. A man on shore threw the line right back at the deckhands. But Billie’s father had seen a man who owed him money, and he was determined to get himself off. He bullied the sailors, and they took the boat back in, but not far enough to endanger it. Mr Paxton pushed his daughters up onto the bow. The bow was going up and down, straight up six feet and down four in relation to the pier. Mr Paxton took Edith by her waist and tossed her off on the downward roll. Edith dropped only three feet, but with some propulsion. She twisted her ankle. Billie remembered detecting the limp as Edith moved out of the way. The stone was surging past, up and down. Billie’s father picked her up and jumped, at the beginning of the upward pass so that they were tossed up almost level with the pier and right onto it. ‘How dark the water was,’ Billie remembered. She saw it still, the shadow of the boat’s sharp prow like the chopper at the end of the ‘oranges and lemons’ poem. ‘Father was owed far more than five farthings,’ she added, nonsensically. ‘You see,’ she explained to the reverend, ‘Edith thinks of our father as a desperate man, driven here and there by bad habits and bad planning. And, in a way, she’s right. There was some of that. But he just did dangerous things without thought and without fear. Like breathing,’ she said. But her description seemed inadequate alone, so she added, ‘Like breathing or swimming or sucking the stone clean.’ She threw her apricot pit back over the wall and into the orchard. ‘Do you want one?’ She asked the Reverend Vause, and stretched out to catch at the next cluster they came upon.