Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘She even had time to get out of her clothes while you were woolgathering,’ Murdo shouted.

  ‘Wood-gathering, actually,’ Alan was airy. ‘And I was there when she took off her clothes.’

  Murdo let go of Billie Paxton and lunged at Alan, hand raised. He was knocked sideways. Billie Paxton held Murdo’s arm and pummelled him with her knees and elbows. She threw her resilient, clammy body against him and tried to do him damage. Murdo caught her wrists and pushed them back behind her head. They were yelling at each other – or she was making a sound somewhere between growl and whine, while he yelled that he wasn’t about to let her destroy herself just because she’d lost a sister. ‘You’re alive!’ He shouted. ‘You don’t owe her your life!’ Murdo could hear himself, his voice rough with its unaccustomed volume and vehemence.

  Billie Paxton dropped her head, hung limp from Murdo’s hands. He heard her say, ‘I was only swimming.’ He let go. Alan, who had been dancing around them like a little dog around a dogfight, darted in to take her from Murdo, but then lurched back, afraid to touch, for Billie Paxton had fallen on all fours in the sand, her skin red with cold and shining through the wet cotton of her clothes. She pushed her forehead into the beach, then raised her face, sand coating her thick wet loose locks of hair, and screamed with grief or rage. She knelt, wrapped her hands, gloved and softened by dry sand, around her own back and began to rock and howl, her chin wet with seawater and with spit.

  Alan stared at her, his eyes wide, and seemed to lean in against the barrier of her noise like someone inclining on strong wind.

  Billie Paxton’s despair shoved Murdo from her, lifted him on to his feet, sent him down the beach after his horse, and then into the saddle and back past Kirsty and away through the notch in the dunes. His clothes were sodden, his flesh cold, coming back to life only to feel that something was beating him. That he had – again – been pulled hard against the bars between him and those he owed. Those he loved. Only Clara was on his side of the bars now – whole and hollowed-out and impossible to talk to, but at least silent, not a miserable, howling, damp, self-destructive wretch like that girl.

  Murdo put his head down and kicked his horse into a canter.

  AND BILLIE? Billie was asking herself, in her own way, what she was doing in the sea that had smothered her sister? Must she lose swimming, too? Edith had the world, once, Edith could read, Edith had Henry. Now Edith had swallowed the sea – was swollen with Billie’s sea.

  AFTER A long while Billie said to Alan, who was holding her, that he was far too thin. Alan answered that he was only sometimes able to eat well. He had to forage, but was good at it. He said he’d show her, and then he helped her dress, and together they kicked sand on the fire.

  He led her along the beach past the factory and out over sand and mud mixed, to a little island of rocks. Alan climbed a rock face, kept close to it even when the gulls came and made loud passes at his back. There were eggs in the gulls’ nests which the boy, suspended by one hand and dodging birds, removed one at a time and threw down to Billie.

  The eggs travelled back to the gatehouse in Billie’s skirt. She and Alan made an omelette. At dusk Billie pushed back her plate and said to Alan that that was good, now she could afford to miss dinner. She’d be off now – would let herself in to the castle where she’d be least likely to meet anyone she couldn’t face.

  In the ballroom the chairs were still in their circle, but the actors had gone. Billie opened the piano. She tried a note – it went back and forth in the room like a lark drawing predatory attention from its nest in a meadow. She tried another, and the second was like a lost voice saying the word ‘dear’ in the interrogative. ‘Are you there, dear?’ ‘Dear, is that you?’

  Henry didn’t remember the kiss. Billie wondered whether she hadn’t told him because she wanted to spare him, or because she wanted him to find his way to her again, with nothing between them – not Edith, nor guilt at their disloyalty to Edith.

  Billie played a few more notes, which became chords, the beginning of a tune, not one she’d learned, nor one she’d ever heard. It was hers, this phrase, she had only just dreamed it up, and it was her own. The music – perhaps the opening of a song – was like something winding out from her, a path or trail. Billie remembered the Chemin du Rosaire in one of the little Mediterranean towns of her childhood. A path of smooth curves, whose paving stones were almost covered by tides of silt; a path of dark culverts, surfaced with sinewy tree roots; a path of steps and landings, of shrines, the Stations of the Cross; a trail that crisscrossed the new carter’s road that ran between villas and vines, all the way up to a monastery on the flat, tonsured top of a hill. The Chemin, sometimes beside the road, sometimes diverging from it, was a way through the world that wasn’t the world’s way.

  Billie played her few phrases over and remembered the monastery. Edith had liked its view and would take her little sister there in the evenings, when no one was about, but before the gates closed. Billie remembered the cracked plaster on the monastery walls, the young eucalyptus trees among older olives, and vines on terraces right up to the monastery’s high defensive wall. As the light faded the sea would pale and its currents appear as smooth haloes around the nearest cape. The mountains would grow, becoming solid and featureless in the hazy air, and the lights of a certain mountain village would show faintly reflected on a cliff face. Then, perhaps, a nightingale would start up singing …

  Billie played her tune over – her beginning. A tune like a lifeline, a way through the world, but not the world’s way.

  The actors had left a branch of candles lit. Maybe they’d intended to come back. Billie closed the lid over the keys and looked at the candle flames, watched them stretch, perhaps like children eager to see, but more like animals up after rest, limbering up, indolent, gaining volume and ferocity – but with no object, no prey in sight. The flames grew slowly in the still air.

  9

  Clo Mor (The Big Cloth)

  IN MID-JULY Geordie wrote a letter to his dead brother. In it he explained how he’d managed to continue to postpone his departure from Kiss Castle. Geordie had found that what he missed most about Ian was all he’d really had of him – his letters. Whenever Geordie sat down to write to Andrew and Meela Tannoy he felt his loss. Here he was, with Ian’s cast of characters – plus a few new additions – and he wasn’t able to do them justice. He wanted to reread Ian’s letters, but had only his own to Ian. So he reread these instead, looking for clues in the questions he’d put to his brother, questions inspired by Ian’s accounts of Lord Hallowhulme’s industrious tampering; the islanders’ views of Hallowhulme; Murdo Hesketh’s long, mute, enduring mourning for his sister; and Ingrid Hallow’s character and fate. Geordie saw that he’d asked all the wrong questions, and that this Geordie Betler, Ian’s correspondent, was incurious, prim, and settled to the point of smugness.

  Yet, by the time Geordie had read his way back through ten years of his side of the correspondence, he found he was missing himself as much as Ian. It was a curious experience. It was like finding, at the back of the cupboard, the last surviving piece of a fine set of dishes. Impossible to use it. Impossible to put it out, alone, on the table again. The well-mannered, patient man who talked with warmth about Mrs Tannoy’s artists, Mr Tannoy’s health, or with passion about the rust on his lilies or the greenfly on his roses, who would hear from him again?

  Geordie decided to continue writing to Ian. He’d sort out his thoughts, tell Ian everything – then send an edited version to Andrew and Meela Tannoy.

  ‘I managed to stay on at Kiss,’ Geordie wrote. ‘More in a minute on how. It was as well I did. Our Murdo has decided to apply himself to a deliberate and organised investigation into the sinking. His investigation is now quite independent of those being conducted by the owner’s insurance company, and the more hobbyist effort of Lord Hallowhulme and his secretary Gutthorm. Despite his – and you will understand me – charismatic ingratitude‚ Murdo seems to have d
ecided to deign to depend on me.’

  Geordie’s pen paused, and he smiled. Murdo Hesketh was on the far side of the library, in the long patch of sectioned sunlight that came through one of the room’s tall windows. Murdo was writing a letter – in Swedish – to the Swedish factory responsible for the manufacture of instantaneous fuses. With Henry Maslen’s help he had located an engineering gazette with an advertisement by the manufacturer, containing a table of reliable rates of burn in its detonators, fuses, and special junctions. Murdo was still in pursuit of his fuse. Geordie could see it sometimes, a burning calligraphic line, like a signature, in Murdo’s eyes. Geordie noticed that Murdo was wearing gloves. Murdo was on his way out, but had sat down to write, quick and to the point. He’d hand the letter unsealed to Geordie – as he now did with every letter concerning their investigation. He’d forget that Geordie didn’t read Swedish. It was characteristic behaviour. Murdo was energetic, his focus fierce, but his attention was somehow delicate and depressed. It seemed to Geordie that when Murdo ignited, as often as not the concussion of ignition would extinguish him – he’d put himself out.

  Murdo had begun to drift. He’d raised his head to stare through Henry Maslen, who was at the long teak table in the centre of the room, busy with cataloguing cards, and a felt-lined vice into which books were clamped while he marked their spines with numbers in gold leaf. Billie Paxton was on the other side of the table. She held the sheet of gold leaf steady while Henry plied his stylus. They were wearing white cotton gloves and were absorbed in their task.

  Geordie went back to his letter. He told Ian that, so far, he and Murdo had been disappointed in their efforts to interview Macleod. Macleod was out fishing every day. The weather had been calm and mild since the end of June. Geordie and Murdo had spoken to the pilot, who claimed he’d taken Macleod along because Macleod, a friend of his, had wanted to intercept the mailbag and take early receipt of a letter addressed to him, but somehow sensitive. No, he hadn’t asked Macleod about the letter’s contents, the pilot said – by this time backing into a little cave of reserve and disapproval. He said that the captain of the Gustav Edda hadn’t been sympathetic to Macleod’s request. The captain had refused to open the bag, saying that he was required to deliver it to the postmaster at Stolnsay with all its seals intact. ‘For any more information you have to apply to Macleod himself. And …’ the pilot was red and congested with anger ‘… as for the lass’s buckles and breeches story, you should look at it as some mischief of her own. I mean – what kind of woman is she?’

  That, Geordie wrote to Ian, was a question he’d returned to often over the last few weeks. Billie Paxton was industrious. She was helping Henry Maslen in the few hours each day he had the strength to devote to his paid employment. And she made sure Henry limited his work to only a few hours. She would accompany her brother-in-law on his walks, every day a little further in distance and longer in duration. Geordie walked to the town himself each day. It had become his habit to deliver his letters, and any Murdo had, to the post office. Deliver them personally – not leave them with every other letter on the tray in the lower hall. (Johan Gutthorm franked the household’s mail himself, business and personal, and passed it over to the postmaster’s boy, who came to Kiss morning and afternoon five days a week.) On his daily stroll to town Geordie would sometimes come upon Billie and Henry going slowly arm in arm by the seawall, or sitting – Henry on Billie’s folded shawl – on the long, shallowly sloping green lawn below the ha-ha. Geordie also saw Billie every day at the rehearsals of Minnie’s play, for which she was providing piano music, and in which he was to play the Patriarch.

  This was how Geordie had contrived to stay at Kiss.

  On the afternoon of the same Sunday that Billie Paxton went swimming in the cold waves at Scouse Beach, Geordie had stalked Minnie.

  After lunch, Minnie carried her easel out into the walled garden to make another attempt at painting her flowers. Geordie took a turn around the garden, then spread his handkerchief on the wall behind Minnie and sat down. After a time she said to him that she didn’t suppose he was there for the spectacle – the application of pigment to parchment.

  Geordie told Minnie that he wanted to speak to her about her play. It seemed to him that Mr Shaw had drawn his Patriarch with a little less – gusto – than he might.

  Minnie remarked how so much depended on the performance, and she, as director, had to admit there were difficulties there, since Elov lacked natural authority. But, Minnie said, was Geordie suggesting she should alter the text of Mr Shaw’s play? ‘Would you like to read it?’ Minnie asked. ‘Or read for it?’

  Geordie made a noncommittal noise.

  Minnie dipped her brush and made inky dots at the top of the petals of each blossom. She didn’t look at the flowers in front of her, and Geordie saw she’d done this a number of times. She had a firm notion of how the flowers should look. Hers were a botanical painting; those in front of her, in their pot, were flames on a hob, a thicket of green lines and linear shadows topped by hazy blue.

  Minnie said, ‘I’ll give you a script, Mr Betler. And if you like what you read you might like to – help us in a rehearsal or two. Stand in for Elov perhaps. And if you want to argue by proxy with the absent playwright, well, I’m sure I’m open to suggestions for improvements.’

  So Geordie got his part in Minnie’s play. And, though the whole cast were in on the secret, its real authorship stayed in their circle, stayed secret. Geordie sometimes believed that it was possible that Billie Paxton didn’t know. She’d never seen a play in rehearsal and thought nothing of alterations to the text without the author present. Billie seemed to have a relation to text like that of believers to God. She had faith in the presence, in writing, of the spoken word, invisible to her. And, as the players learned and refined their lines and their performances, what Billie seemed to register was the moment she was first utterly convinced by what she heard and saw. So that, after a time, Geordie noticed that Minnie would turn to Billie, behind the piano, sometimes poised over its keys, other times knitting something for Alan – Minnie would turn and say, ‘How was that, Billie?’ And Billie would say, ‘Well – that will do. But what is Elov doing with his feet?’

  (‘There is nothing essential,’ said Elov, now playing the Patriarch’s disciple. ‘We all slowly appear, in outline, distinguished in the light of our pasts.’ He jiggled his foot, then complained: ‘I cannot say “pasts”, Minnie, like a lisping Finnish sentry!’)

  MURDO PUT his letter down on the desk by Geordie’s elbow; on top of the letter was a penny for the post. Geordie said, quietly, ‘I do hope you’re not one of those people who never take because they hope to be permanently acquitted of giving.’

  ‘When I took James’s offer of employment I was able to repay your brother. Debts are damnation.’

  Maslen, overhearing this last remark, said his wife would have liked to hear it.

  The previous evening, at the dinner table, Henry had disagreed, in a mild way, with Lord Hallowhulme’s musing on ‘shiftlessness’. Was shiftlessness an inherited trait? One that contributed to pauperism?

  ‘I can’t see how it could be, Lord Hallowhulme,’ Henry said. ‘At least not strictly inherited. My wife was very dutiful and frugal, and Billie is hardworking, but their father was a wandering invalid, and not entirely honest.’

  And Minnie said, ‘The only reason people inherit a tendency to poverty is that they don’t inherit any money.’

  ‘Minnie!’ said Clara, warning.

  Minnie apologised to her father and Mr Maslen for interrupting.

  But James had, as usual, taken their dissent only as an indication that they hadn’t understood him. They didn’t agree with him; perhaps he hadn’t expressed himself clearly. He repeated himself.

  In the library, Murdo moved closer to the big table to watch Henry restore the membrane of gold leaf to its case. Henry was finished for the day. He said – to Murdo – that Billie’s young friend, Alan Skilling, had off
ered to drive them along Alesund Head, where Henry could look at the rocks. He continued to talk in his light voice about the consolation of knowledge. ‘It’s silly, I realise. But I find what I know about the age of certain rocks very reassuring. I appreciate their age – not timeless, but ancient in date. I can lay my hand on a piece of gneiss and be touching both today and a remote time – eons, inanimate eons.’

  Murdo said that Henry was a considering soul. Murdo’s voice was warm – for him – but he was watching Henry, blank of face and bright of eye. ‘Me,’ Murdo said, ‘I take comfort from the fit of this glove.’ He flexed his hand, and the leather made its accommodating creak. ‘It’s an article of faith, the fit of this glove.’

  Geordie was fascinated. Murdo and Henry were being kind to each other.

  Henry went on to say that, of course, Murdo’s was only a different kind of consideration. Less philosophical, perhaps, but no less considering.

  Geordie saw they were fencing with flattery – making some kind of competitive display of mutual respect. Murdo, talking about clothes, characterised himself as shallow and effete, and Henry said, in effect, no, no – really I know you’re a fine person.

  Billie interrupted them. ‘Mr Hesketh, have you considered that if you wear your gloves indoors, you won’t get the benefit of their warmth outdoors?’

  ‘I’d better hurry outdoors then,’ he said, and left the library.

  ‘Billie,’ Henry chided her, gentle, ‘he was only passing the time.’

  ‘Oh yes, the eons, the inanimate eons,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want you barking at people on my behalf. I’m much better, dear. I don’t need protection.’

  Billie shrugged. She was at the door before Henry and waited, meekly, for him to open it.