Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘Leave them, Wilhelmina.’

  Billie sat straight again. ‘I’m Miss Paxton now, thank you.’

  ‘I worry about you, Miss Paxton. What will you do? Where will you go?’

  ‘I have Aunt, and Edith,’ Billie said. And she said that, one day, when she had enough money, she would take a boat and train to that coast. The coast shared by France and Italy. She’d arrive after dark and sit on the beach turning over smooth stones to find the ones underneath with the heat still in them. She rubbed her fingertips against the balls of her thumbs, smiled, and added, ‘Like freshly boiled eggs.’ Then she asked the reverend what time he had – the next train was at ten after four.

  IN THE sickroom at Kiss Castle Billie put the reverend’s letter down by Henry’s hand. Henry picked it up, and while he read his head lifted from the pillow. He said, ‘This fellow thinks I’m dead!’

  ‘I think he hopes you are,’ Billie said.

  Henry’s head dropped again.

  Billie told him about the incorrect newspaper report.

  ‘Well, at least it flushed out your “friends”.’ Henry was wry – was himself for a moment. ‘But we can’t have you falling into the pawses of the Vauses,’ he said, which made her smile. Then they both became conscious of his ‘we’, and Billie saw him clench his teeth to block the first syllable of her sister’s name.

  HENRY KNEW what he’d lost, but was still too weak for his grief. He lay propped on pillows and opened his mouth for the spoon. He was obedient – accepted the doctor’s orders as a duty. ‘You’ll be up before too long,’ the doctor told him. But Henry felt no embarrassment, no obligation to Lord Hallowhulme, no pressing need to get up and take care of his surviving family. He had listened, dull, and with only a few tears, to Billie’s account of the accident. He didn’t remember it. He didn’t remember the voyage – only recalled the embarkation at Luag and Mr Hesketh’s handsome offer. He did recall the sailors helping hand Edith down the ladder to their cabin. Remembered holding the instep of her boot in his hand, helping her foot to find the rungs. But nothing further.

  No mutual reckoning, Billie thought. He’d been spared in more ways than one. She had fallen in love and fought it. But they had kissed, and Edith drowned. Silly Billie – as if their kiss was a match to a fuse. They kissed and the ship sank and Edith drowned, and Billie was the only one who knew herself to be culpable. Henry, bereaved but not bereft – not enough life in him for that – was, it seemed to Billie, no longer her sister’s custodian. Edith was hers again. What would Edith have said about the kiss?

  No. No, Billie.

  And what about the kiss followed by her death? When Billie asked herself this, it was as if she’d asked Edith, and her sister was there, inside her, enclosed and suspended, and angry with the dark water. Billie felt that Edith had forgotten the kiss, too. What was a kiss to the dark water?

  8

  Scouse Beach

  A FRIDAY with wicked weather – the wind from the south, not cold, but a steady force that made a mêlée in the crowns of the trees of Lady Hallowhulme Park, a close-fought battle with casualties. The trees were knocked about and dropped their dead wood.

  Billie had gone out for a walk. She went through the garden, her shawl tight around her ears, pushed the narrow gate open, and ran along the footpath. The wind broke a little on the crest of the long, wooded promontory – the Nose – and Billie was only a little blown about herself, the breeze making constant impatient tugging rearrangements to her skirt. She couldn’t gauge how strong the wind was forty feet above her head in the gnarled and malnourished branches. Billie was headed for a clearing she could see through the dark trunks. The sun came out, and the wood became a tumult of light, of leaf shadows. The grass in the clearing appeared quite still in comparison, smoothed down by the wind, moving in long ripples. The trunks of the trees on the far side of the clearing were pale. Dark close to, but pale farther off, as if there were two forests of different composition, beech and birch, not just two sections of the same forest, and sun stopped against a breakwater of tree trunks in a grass surf.

  Above Billie came several large cracks, and a rustle. The air filled with chaff, fragments of bark and lichen, then a large tree limb landed with a crash on the road before her. She came to an abrupt stop, and because she’d stopped, her two pursuers caught her up.

  ‘Miss Paxton!’ said Rixon Hallow. ‘We were calling you.’

  Minnie panted behind him, staggered, held her chest with one hand and flapped the other at the fallen branch.

  ‘The park isn’t safe in a strong southerly.’ Rixon’s explanation was somewhat redundant. They turned Billie around, each took a hand, and they rushed her back the way she’d come. All the time Rixon craned up at the trees, and flinched as a hard gust knocked them together. They went the quick way, straight down the slope, crunching through layers of old moss-covered windfalls, and came back to the small gate at the corner of the walled garden. Their feet were wet, as were the hems of Minnie’s and Billie’s skirts.

  Rixon told Billie why the park’s trees were fragile. The man who’d had the land before his father, and who had built Kiss Castle, had brought shiploads of topsoil over from the mainland in order to cultivate a forest. So, fifty years before, the trees had had a good start, but the goodness was gone from the topsoil now, and they were slowly starving, dying back.

  Rixon and Minnie took Billie through one set of French doors in the long wall of the ballroom. Fires were lit in all six of the room’s hearths, casting melting pools of orange across the highly polished floor. The room was empty of everything but several chairs and a piano. There were five piles of paper inside the circle of chairs, Elov Jansen and the Tegner twins sat on the floor before three of them. It was a rehearsal for Minnie’s play. Or – Minnie explained – a ‘read through’.

  The Hallows went back to their places. Rixon actually seemed eager. He took off his damp boots and slid them under a chair. Billie went to the fire, shook twigs and flakes of lichen off onto the hearth. She stood close to the flames, and a steamy wool smell came up into her face.

  Minnie was reading the part of the Patriarch’s most ardent admirer, his ‘man of affairs’. Minnie – in the part of the man – was explaining to the Patriarch’s houseguests that they weren’t, in fact, strangers, and Mr Goodwin’s invitation wasn’t just a rich man’s whim. They were his heirs. Mr Goodwin – a visionary man – believed only in monetary patrimony. It was one of his tenets that parents were the people least equipped to raise their own children. All sorts of bad habits, like timidity, or false humility, or fear – always excused as ‘upbringing’ – were what prevented individuals from reaching their fullest potential. ‘The admirer should say it as if he’s quoting Scripture,’ Minnie said. ‘He quotes Goodwin: “Money is a precious patrimony, but family culture is private doom.” And: “Character is an artefact.”’

  ‘You know, Minnie,’ said Rixon, ‘the young people who meet in the train and like each other, aren’t they brother and sister?’

  ‘Yes. But that only highlights the most obvious flaw in the Patriarch’s experiment.’

  ‘I don’t want to be scandalous,’ Anne said.

  Minnie slapped her script on her leg. ‘I want the audience to anticipate trouble all the way through. Imagine – human life organised around an idea!’

  ‘I think the Patriarch is a bit of a charmer,’ said Anne Tegner. ‘And I think that his first appearance should come before that of his “man of affairs”. I mean – should he seem bad? Or should only his ideas seem bad?’

  ‘I don’t think I can do him,’ Elov said. ‘Why did you give me the part?’

  ‘Well I can’t,’ Minnie said. ‘It isn’t a “trouser role”. I can’t walk around with one of my curls stuck to my top lip. It just wouldn’t work.’

  ‘It’s a pity Alan Skilling is still so small,’ Anne said.

  ‘Alan has the character for it,’ Ailsa finished her sister’s thought.

  ‘Alan has fa
r too much character without our cultivating it further,’ said Minnie.

  ‘No. Look,’ Rixon said. ‘To turn it all right way out – let me ask you: is Francis Galton wrong?’

  Billie was so busy listening to the young Hallows and their friends argue that she didn’t see Geordie Betler till he was beside her. She touched her hair and explained that she’d been out in the wind. Mr Betler said he’d been looking for her. And while doing so he’d had the pleasure of meeting Mr Maslen. ‘He sent me down to the library to fetch him the latest number of a periodical. I left him looking at its index as though at a menu in fine restaurant.’

  Rixon was saying, ‘They’re not called Mendel’s laws of heredity for nothing, you know. Intelligence and idiocy and criminality certainly do seemed to be passed down.’

  ‘Look, Rix,’ said Anne, ‘if Minnie meant to disprove an idea, she wouldn’t do it by showing its opposite in a bad light, would she? You don’t need to defend Dr Galton.’

  Geordie Betler spoke up then. They all turned, and froze. He said he’d always thought Mendel was discussing peas.

  They stared at him. Then Minnie asked had Mr Betler heard of Francis Galton and his Artificial Selection?

  ‘I can’t say that I have,’ said Mr Betler.

  ‘Society’s sympathy for the weak thwarts proper evolution. Since the weak are allowed to reproduce, natural selection no longer applies to humankind,’ Rixon said, as though repeating his catechism. Then he blushed, and added, ‘That’s the gist of it, Sir. And I think there’s something to it.’ He glared at Minnie.

  ‘I don’t care if it’s the eleventh commandment!’ she said. ‘It’s not what I’m on about.’ She explained to Mr Betler. ‘In our play the Patriarch believes something quite different. He believes that the only inheritance is what is taught. He believes it so strongly that he thinks children should be taken from bad parents.’

  Elov Jansen said, ‘He sent his own children away as an experiment. Which becomes rather complicated once they’ve grown.’

  Geordie Betler thanked Minnie and Elov for their explanation. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘And the point of Mr Shaw’s play is that any overarching idea, even if pursued rationally, is productive of evil?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Minnie.

  ‘This Shaw is a moralist,’ said Geordie Betler. ‘I like this Mr Shaw.’ He smiled at the rehearsal in general, then touched Billie’s sleeve. ‘Mr Hesketh has sent me to fetch you. He wants a quick word with you.’

  Billie just glared at Mr Hesketh’s messenger. Then she looked at the fire and felt the heat drying her lips. She put her tongue out to wet them.

  He said, ‘I’ll be present, Miss Paxton. I want to hear what you have to say – about the Stolnsay pilot. I wasn’t there. And Mr Hesketh tells me he wasn’t paying attention.’

  He had begun to steer her out of the ballroom. She went, her wet dress clinging to her wet boots.

  At the door Geordie Betler glanced back, his face warm. ‘They’re such intelligent children. So earnest. And both uncannily like their father.’

  ‘Everyone here is intelligent,’ Billie said.

  He dipped his head to look into her face. She could almost feel the fire’s heat still radiating from him – although they were now out in the dark hall, in an unsteady light, raindrops casting crawling shadows on the walls. ‘Except you? Is that it?’ he said.

  ‘Except me.’ Then she grinned. ‘And Mr Hesketh.’

  GEORDIE COULDN’T remember ever having seen two people treat each other with such careful neutrality. The moment he let Billie into the library ahead of him she announced to him – and to Murdo Hesketh, who was waiting there – that she wouldn’t sit. Murdo nodded, then told Geordie that he needn’t stay. Geordie reminded Murdo that two heads were better than one. He heard himself, breezy, whereas they were very correct and guarded.

  Billie Paxton turned herself so that she faced both men and folded her hands against her skirt.

  ‘Miss Paxton,’ Murdo began, ‘I believe you saw the Stolnsay pilot come aboard the Gustav Edda.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He came aboard …?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Geordie wondered if Billie was being stubbornly monosyllabic, or if she was only refusing to be led. But Murdo showed no sign of impatience. He scarcely showed interest – wasn’t concealing eagerness, didn’t glance aside or slow himself down with any other business, he didn’t take out his cigarette case and tamp the end of a ready-made against its silver lid. He only waited.

  After a moment Billie said, ‘You were there.’

  ‘I do recall asking the pilot why he’d come aboard,’ Murdo said.

  ‘You said, “What seems to be the problem?”’

  ‘Yes. You have my tone exactly, Miss Paxton. You’re a good mimic – but how good is your memory? I said, “What seems to be the problem?” and the pilot then asked the captain for the cargo manifest.’ Murdo paused, then asked, ‘Why do you think he did that?’

  ‘He wanted to make sure everything was stowed securely. I believe that’s the reason he gave.’

  Murdo nodded, then his gaze became a little less neutral. His eyes – even in the soft yellow lamplight – grew blue. ‘How long were they below? Do you recall?’

  ‘The pilot and his man – we haven’t mentioned his man yet, have we?’

  ‘The man with the pilot isn’t in the pilot’s employ. He’s a Stolnsay herring man. One Duncan Macleod. His boat was in the harbour that day – owing to the weather.’

  ‘You recognised him?’

  ‘No. I made inquiries.’

  ‘You asked the pilot?’

  For a moment Billie and Murdo stood quiet, looking into one another’s faces.

  ‘Mr Hesketh is exercising discretion in his investigation,’ Geordie said, with the distinct feeling of casting a cat among birds. And then his mind strayed to those intelligent Hallow siblings, and Minnie’s problems casting the part of the Patriarch in her play. And it was as though he had run his hand along a dusty lintel above a door and found the expected key. It was all too trustingly easy – as if no one had died, and no one was responsible for deaths. Tomorrow, Geordie thought, I’ll find some way of having Minnie hit on my idea herself.

  ‘If Mr Hesketh is exercising discretion, then he can’t be secure in his suspicions,’ Billie said.

  ‘Perhaps I’m learning from my mistakes,’ said Murdo. ‘But let us continue – how long do you think the men were in the hold?’

  Billie put her head down to think, and Geordie watched her twining her fingers. She said she wasn’t sure – she wasn’t much interested at the time. She had watched them go down through the aft hatch, and saw them when they reappeared. But she wasn’t sure how long they took.

  Murdo shrugged, and looked at Geordie, then he laughed – and Geordie understood that he was laughing at his own hopes, the folly of them.

  But Billie Paxton was still thinking, and had begun to swing one foot, contemplating the moist weight of water still seeping up, dark, through the close weave of her black dress. Then she stopped jiggling and looked from Murdo to Geordie. She said, ‘He was tucking in the tail of his shirt. As he came up the ladder from the hold. That Macleod man. He came after the pilot and he was tucking in the tail of his shirt and closing his belt buckle.’

  This was rather uncomfortable, Geordie thought, any way you looked at it. Any questions proceeding from such information were likely to be more than a little delicate. Geordie didn’t care to see how Murdo handled it – he only wanted to spare Billie Paxton any embarrassment. He cleared his throat, but found he hadn’t any speech with which to follow his noise.

  Billie said to Murdo, ‘I think I’m the only one who saw.’

  ‘And what did you make of it?’ Murdo asked.

  ‘Nothing. Do you think it matters?’

  ‘We have so little to go on. Please try to think.’

  Billie frowned, then looked about her for a chair and sat down. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘if it matters
– have you thought – do you remember that the captain pointed out to the pilot Lord Hallowhulme’s automobile? It was tied down on the stern deck…’