Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  But, on the last slope up to the Broch, having dispelled Billie’s fears for his health, Henry finally tried to explain his frown. He said he’d never thought of himself as someone with social graces, who knew what to do and say in most social situations. ‘I’m shy, and that’s a shortcoming. I’m neither wary nor obsequious to my social superiors – and that is possibly a virtue. But, unless I know someone well, I am too serious. Another shortcoming. I’m serious, but not sober – though sobriety is more acceptable than seriousness.’ Henry paused, and Billie watched his face, watched him formulate a thought. Henry was cheerful and conscientious – he thought well of the world, he was scarcely ever critical. Time and again Billie had listened as Edith was tart about this or that person they knew, and Henry, offering his opinions, encouraged Edith to be more moderate.

  Henry said, ‘Lord Hallowhulme said a number of things that I think he should have thought better of saying. But who am I to criticise?’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘We were discussing the book I borrowed.’ Henry was polite, he had borrowed the book, it had not been imposed on him. ‘A book about artificial selection. Eugenics. Lord Hallowhulme was talking about the need for accurate and standard classifications of persons.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Billie said.

  ‘I’m sorry, dear. But you don’t need to, I’m just giving a context for his remarks. I mean that his remarks followed on from hypothetical talk, they were in no way heated or personal. But he went on to say, “Man is no more capable of selecting a mate fit to be the mother of his children than are the beasts of the field.” His words. Now – his remark wasn’t directed at anyone, he was only explaining the reasoning of the theory of artificial selection. But he was speaking to a man who had just lost his chosen mate. And – worse – he went on to talk about extreme youth and unfitness, imbecility and unfitness, criminality and unfitness – then inbreeding, making a remark about the frequent unfortunate marriages between first cousins. Of course I glanced at Lady Hallowhulme. I couldn’t help myself. But she didn’t even blink.’

  Billie was laughing. ‘Oh, the poor man!’ she said. ‘His foot in his mouth.’ She squeezed Henry’s hand, told him he mustn’t mind that his employer was imperfect. ‘Who has all the virtues?’

  Both then thought of Edith, and went along in a stunned silence thinking on an angelic flawless Edith who suddenly seemed to have hidden her true human self behind their grief and need. Grief and need were transparent – and Edith had become a dazzling and magnified woman, close only by some optical trick, in fact distant, with lenses, lying lenses, glass between her and those who loved her.

  The balance of the picnic party had reached the Broch, where the servants, who’d set out earlier in the day, had laid rugs, and a substantial luncheon, on a patch of springy grass at the base of the tower.

  But Henry had one more thing to say before they joined the others. ‘Since you laugh, Billie – listen to this. This is odd. Odder than your explanations of what you see on a printed page, or fail to see. Lord Hallowhulme and I were talking about meeting people and finding things in common. And he said this: that when he meets a new person, in business or even in a social situation, someone with whom he might expect to have a conversation, he draws a sort of diagram in his head, mapping who they are, where they come from, what they know, and what they might be interested in; and what he knows, and what interests him; and then he tries to find a place where they can meet. His diagram is like a stepladder. A stepladder with steps on either side. As he climbs his side, the new acquaintance climbs theirs, till they are revealed, standing eye to eye, and can begin to have a proper conversation – one less “illogical and superficial” than most social conversation. Don’t you think that peculiar?’

  The driver applied the brake and got down to hand Henry out of the carriage. Billie and he joined the party, who were taking a turn around the Broch before eating. As they came around its great cylinder they startled some black-faced sheep, who jumped and scrabbled out over the lowest point of the broken wall and bounded down the far slope kicking up turf. A few hundred feet below the Broch was a loch, under the white half of a blue-and-white sky, and nacreous gray. ‘Ah!’ said Henry, moved, and Billie leaned into him. Then he said, ‘You didn’t laugh.’

  Billie said she had so many tricks for managing her own weaknesses that Lord Hallowhulme’s didn’t seem so funny. She was wondering whether she made diagrams. Ever. She said, ‘I only recently met these people – and I’ve never had to think how to speak to them.’

  ‘Nothing was expected of us when we met them,’ Henry said. ‘Except tears.’

  ‘Now it’s expected that you will get on with your cataloguing for your own good. And all I have to do is remember the music for Minnie’s play.’ Billie laughed – because it seemed so easy, and she felt as if, for the first time in years, she’d been left in peace to wander in a big open space. ‘And that’s all!’ she said, sharing her delight.

  ‘Yet here’s someone who loves you,’ Henry said, and Billie was startled, because her brother-in-law was pointing at the two horsemen turning off the main road and starting up the slope. She saw the hair, like a thick concentration of the silvery northstars. Then she saw whom Henry meant, for Alan slid down from behind Murdo Hesketh and ran, his big shoes like clubs on the ends of his thin ankles. Alan ran up the road, and straight to her.

  AFTER LUNCH Lord Hallowhulme took some of his party down the hill’s far side to look at his salmon hatcheries. They walked around the edge of the loch, where there were patches of still water, water standing where bog blended with loch, like a dirty lace trim, mud-pocked by the sharp hooves of sheep. Here water lilies were growing, flowers of a modest size, but whose petals were robust, unmoved though the water beneath them shivered. The lilies were white, with yellow centres. Billie looked at them and imagined heat; she recalled the garden at Mulrush, a proper July heat, green water, sulky carp.

  Lord Hallowhulme’s hatcheries were built at the end of a steep valley, where the stream had been piped so that it ran in several strands, gently, through an underwater garden.

  The party came first upon a long waist-high tank. They stood and watched young fish appear, in motion, against its gravelled bottom, then slow and disappear into shadow and stillness, tail fins synchronised with the movement of weeds in the current.

  Hallowhulme let one of the men who ran the hatcheries answer any questions the visitors had, while he took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and set to work pounding cooked beef in water to make a paste of it.

  Billie leaned over the side of the tank. She was enchanted by the light on the gravel, and the blue-green-pink tessellated shapes of fish. They glowed with life, but played dead – it seemed to her – going nowhere, only hanging in the current like buoyant stones. She wanted to climb in and drift down the tank with them, but only slid along its edge, the smooth lip wetting the fabric under her arms and across her chest, her face so close to the water that her view was intermittently obscured by the ripples her breath made on its surface. She came to the end of the tank, where the water was deeper and there was a stretch of pale sand where the current feinted and made a fist against a weir. The bigger fish were here, more than she’d ever seen, so that her mind began to make strange comparisons – a flight of ducks against a white evening sky. But the salmon had no voyaging formation; they reached the end of the tank, pushed sidelong in the current, then came to life, accelerated, and shot back up the pool.

  Billie put her hand in the water, at the invisible line where the salmon chose to turn. James Hallow appeared beside her with a bowl of mashed meat. The twins were feeding cooked meat to the smelt, he said. What he had here was a meal made of raw beef and other, cheaper, fish. This they fed the adult salmon.

  Billie put her wet hand into the bowl, scooped out some warm, mealy matter, felt bristles of fine bones scratch her fingers and lodge in her nails. She put her hand back in the water and shook it. She watched fibr
ous gobs of mince drop away from her, to be snatched out of space by a shadow, a flash, a thick, moving curve.

  Lord Hallowhulme stood quietly beside her as she took more, repeating the process till the bowl was empty. He dipped and rinsed it, and she, cooperative, wiped its sides till all the meal was gone. He set it on its edge against the tank and escorted her upstream to show her where the spring came up through the gravelled floor of a pool perhaps eight feet deep. The spring was invisible, pure water in purity, but the stones at that place flew up and fluttered down like moths disturbed by someone crossing a meadow.

  James Hallow took Billie back downstream to the smaller tanks to watch Geordie – less fastidious than the twins, who only looked on – pinch little portions of boiled beef and drop them through a timber grille, which pressed a grid of glass rods down in water only a little dimpled by a gentle current. Among the glass rods, and batches of eggs still opaque, or spotted with life starting, were tiny translucent fish, salmon smelt, some still attached by umbilical cords to their egg remnants, their transparent bags of provisions. Billie could see the food in their digestive tracts, their spines, their brains behind their eyes – the only wholly solid features emerging out of glassiness, a whole glassy world where everything seemed liquid, water in more forms than she’d ever imagined water could take.

  Billie’s sleeves were soaked, so she unbuttoned them. They dangled, and dripped as she followed the others along the path to the smallest tanks, and a table on which the man who’d hitherto been their guide was setting a flat vessel, a low zinc pan, half-full of water.

  Geordie said, ‘What’s this?’ sounding, for some reason, uneasy.

  Billie was nearly asleep in the heat and the silence. She wasn’t in need of any kind of information. What this was, for instance. She got it though.

  ‘The primal moment of pisciculture,’ Hallowhulme said, tense and husky. He made a joke as he plied the net over the tank. He was the spirit moving on the face of the water. But he didn’t have any luck, though the fish were confined, so he passed the net to his assistant and called Billie to him. This was something he could teach her, James Hallow said, something she could be taught. Besides, it needed hands, and hers were wet already. He had her lift her arms and rolled her sleeves for her. His assistant had netted a fish. James extracted it from the net, very delicate, and held it carefully, head up and tail down over the pan. He gripped the fish with his left hand and began to pass his right down its length. It was important to apply an even pressure, he said. A grainy transparency appeared under his hand and dribbled into the pan where it gelled and slopped, tiny beads of water in water. James cleaned the salmon’s belly of the strings of eggs and put the fish back in its tank. His assistant had another fish ready. James took this one, too, by its head, and held it over the blistered water. He called Billie to his side and set her hand on the creature. She felt its scales, silkiness one way and rough opposition the other. She felt James Hallow’s warm, cushiony palms pressing the back of her hands. James said she mustn’t be afraid of hurting it. She should be firm, her pressure consistent. His hand guided hers, down the fish’s belly, squeezing. This was a male fish. Billie saw the milt, white and creamy, pour from the pouting slit near its tail.

  The fish was returned to its tank, and James had Billie stir the pan with her fingers. ‘Gently,’ he said, ‘for a few minutes, until it’s fecund.’

  Billie found she enjoyed the sensation of the slight glutinous globes of eggs brushing against her fingers. She had a sudden memory of eating milk-drowned tapioca with her fingers. This led her to a recollection, very rare for her, of her mother. Billie’s mother pulled her hands out of the pudding and wiped them with a cold flannel. Her mother put a spoon in her fist, Billie’s baby spoon with its mother-of-pearl handle. Billie could see the spoon quite clearly, but couldn’t see her mother, who stood behind her chair. Turn around and look up, Billie said to herself. At the same time she took her hand out of the water, roe, milt, and put the tip of one finger in her mouth. The taste of salt burst on her tongue as the egg’s membranes ruptured, and she was recalled to the moment, so that when she did turn around and look up she saw not her mother but James Hallow, his flushed, fair, expressive skin – like his cousin’s – his startled hazel eyes, his gaze wavering away from hers.

  Then Geordie Betler thrust his face between them. He was standing behind them, tilted forward from the hips to crane, absurdly, into the small space between Billie and James Hallow. ‘How interesting!’ He said, ‘Do you now place the fertilised eggs in the tank with the glass rods?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lord Hallowhulme said – and didn’t elaborate.

  Billie went to the stream to rinse her hands.

  THERE WAS no breeze at all in the shelter of the Broch, but the sun was too high and hot for midges, and Murdo dozed, roused now and again by the thump of the hoof of one of the grazing horses, telegraphed through the turf, or by a squeaking as Minnie rubbed the corner of a page, preparatory to turning it. He heard the whisper of cloth, a woman’s skirt brushing through the seeding grasses. Minnie made no acknowledgement, so it was only her mother, back from a turn around the Broch. Murdo felt his face shaded. Clara didn’t stand over him, but she did put her parasol down beside him, so his face was in its shadow. He heard her canvas camp stool creak as she sat back down. He opened his eyes. Clara was behind him, the parasol between him and her. He looked up at its spokes, and the thick streaks of slub in the silk. It was bronze silk, as bright in its way as the unscreened sun.

  Murdo asked Clara if she ever thought of their boat.

  ‘I haven’t thought about it for a long time,’ she said.

  He heard a flurry of movement, thick female clothes adjusting between body and ground – that was Minnie writhing around to look at them, at last diverted from her book, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But Minnie wouldn’t be able to follow them; they’d spoken in their mother tongue.

  CLARA AND Murdo had been beyond reach in their boat on the pond at Ulna. As a small boy Murdo hadn’t liked being on the water. On his family’s regular North Sea crossings his father would settle him below – they always had a cabin nearest the centre of the ship. ‘The vessel’s gimbal, its pivot point,’ his father would explain, ‘where there is the least movement.’ Murdo had learned to associate his sickness with being afloat, rather than in motion. He had no such trouble in his grandmother’s phaeton. One summer his cousin Clara undertook to cure him of his aversion to water. She was at a confident and crusading age – twelve. Murdo was six and in awe of her. Clara made him a bed in the flat-bottomed boat on the pond at Ulna, their grandfather’s country house. Clara had him lie down, his head pillowed on the padded stern board, and rowed them out into the pond’s centre, the only place where the water was its true green, not striped by the reflections of the birches that all but surrounded it. Murdo wasn’t sick. The young Clara was very pleased with herself, flattered by her cousin’s obedience, his attention, and his gratitude at her patronage. Her own brother was a nuisance, but Murdo was a pet.

  Summer after summer, Clara – a secretive, irritable girl – would abdicate from her affectionate family, from a mother to whom she was always ‘darling’, and a father who called her his little star. She’d go into exile, sometimes all day, afloat in the centre of the pond – often with her retinue of one. Clara would read to Murdo – books he’d find too difficult to tackle himself. He would lie draped across the stern and Clara’s arrangement of borrowed cushions, and the brocaded curtains she’d stolen from a trunk in the attic, the finery of a former era. Murdo would lie facedown, peering at the green water, his breath making two separate dimples on its surface. Sometimes they would drift from the pond’s centre, and he’d find himself facing the perfect reflection of birch trunks and would imagine he and his cousin were in their grandfather’s library, faceup on its floor, with the tiered shelves towering above them, thick with books, gilded, calf-bound, sectioned spines – continuous columns of spines, like stands of bam
boo. Then he’d doze, with the world going around and around the boat: a forest, a library, another forest.

  When Murdo was twelve himself, and Clara eighteen, he arrived at Ulna for his usual summer visit to find the furniture moved out of rooms, rugs airing on ropes between the elms, and every sideboard covered with silverware in a condition of high polish. There was to be a ball. Murdo’s aunt said Clara was confining her own preparations entirely to her toilette. She was out in the wood, picking wildflowers to supplement the hothouse blooms she’d selected for her posy holder. ‘They are all the rage at her school. The girls gave each other books on the subject. The language of flowers.’ Clara’s mother chortled. Other adults joined in. There was quite a crowd of them – all family, all people Murdo recognised. They were speaking English, out of politeness to the clumsy young man, Murdo’s other cousin James Hallow, whose father owned a grocery, but who had himself made a fortune in soap. The family were laughing now at cousin James’s wit – at the notion of Clara performing ‘a sort of floral semaphore’. James seemed surprised that he’d made them laugh.