Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  Ian didn’t see Ingrid’s parents until the funeral. Clara was destroyed. ‘She’d been in full bloom, now she’s a papery flower whose colour has bled into the pages between which it is pressed. But no – that’s too poetic. It was the way she walked – abruptly old, unoiled, seized up. Whatever it is that has stiffened her, it’s not temporary, not condensation, but like the deposit of lime on the sides of a drinking glass. Lord Hallowhulme’s appearance was less shocking. He was drawn, black about the eyes, but for once his eyes didn’t shy about, as evasive as one of those shining afterimages of a poorly shaded lamp that always darts away when you look – away, away – always to one side of your gaze. All through the graveside service Lord Hallowhulme looked into faces, as attentive as a deaf mute.’

  For five letters Kiss was called ‘the sad house’. There was no more matter about Ingrid Hallow – until this: ‘She was like him – only quieter, unworldly, content to listen to a family who planned and bossed, or rollicked (Rixon), or tended ordinary motherly advice: “Perhaps a hat with a closer weave, dear, the sun has real heat today.” But still, Geordie, she was more like him than the rest of them, like the Murdo Hesketh I knew before his ruin. There was her openness, easily mistaken for simplicity; and her animal confidence, easily mistaken for vanity; and an enjoyment of luxury easily mistaken for inertia or superficiality. I thought Ingrid was a nice, beautiful, slightly banal young woman. Perhaps I thought that because she couldn’t act – neither can her sister, but Minnie is pungent with life force. I thought that – and now I think that she did walk into the water at Scouse Beach, meaning to die, and resolute in her death.’

  Then, a further three letters on, this: ‘Before Ingrid Hallow died there had been signs of a thaw, a shine of ice grown slick in the sun, but he’s now taken himself further north, and wrapped himself up in coldness.’

  ON THE steamer on his return, Murdo encountered the Gustav Edda’s surviving steward. The man delivered tea to Murdo’s cabin. He recognised Murdo and asked, ‘How do you do now, Mr Hesketh?’

  ‘Very well,’ Murdo said. ‘And you?’

  The steward said he was quite over his bout of pleurisy. The company kept him when he was ill. ‘The insurers paid our compensation in any case.’

  However, he said, he had parted ways with his former employers. He planned, by changing ships, to work his way further south before the winter. He reckoned it was see some sun, or be done for.

  As Murdo listened, and the steward made passes with the hem of his apron around the edges of the tray, Murdo remembered the fellow doing this, going around the edge of a table in the little salon where the seamen had been fed, scrubbing away, squinting at his handiwork, folding the cloth to find a cleaner patch and rubbing some more. Murdo wanted to work the talk around to a lost set of cabin keys and a basin full of beard hair, so said, ‘Tell me, did you service the cabins on the Gustav Edda? I seem to recall seeing you serving in the seamen’s mess.’

  ‘We both did everything, mess and cabins. Me and Alfred, God rest him. I was on at eight bells. Came on at five. I was still washing up in the galley when the ship reached port. That’s why I’m alive and Alfred isn’t. I was slow that day because the purser complained about the tables. It was because of the black gang. They always came to the table without doing much more than making a pass of a dirty cloth over their dirty hands – God rest them, too. By the time they finished their meal the table would be as edged with black as a widow’s letter.’

  Murdo had idly watched the steward, his furious, finicky scrubbing. Murdo should have been on the windward side, where Miss Paxton was, to see Macleod and the pilot emerge from the hold. He was sure he’d have been a better judge of what there was to be seen. He asked, ‘Was it you the Swede came to tell he’d lost his cabin keys?’

  ‘Yes. And I told the insurance fellow that I thought the Swede only did that in order to convince me he was on board when it sailed. In fact, he left the ship at Luag. He shaved off his beard, you see.’

  ‘Would you know him if you saw him again?’

  The man nodded, said that that was why the company wanted him to keep them posted as to his whereabouts. ‘They’re not bothering with the police, Mr Hesketh, they’ve just kept the disability going although I’m on my feet again. They know I’ll keep collecting as long as they don’t stop the payments. I warned them that the money might – what’s the word – scotch their case.’

  ‘Compromise,’ said Murdo.

  ‘Aye. That’s the word. I’m a bit of a sea lawyer, and that’s what I told them.’

  ON THE last day of July, when Minnie’s play was due to be performed, Murdo arrived at Luag. He spoke to the foreman of the warehouse that briefly stored James’s factory and exchange equipment. He spoke to the stevedores who had loaded that cargo. He learned nothing new.

  Several hours before his sailing Murdo delivered the package of tweed to Gutthorm’s aunt. He found the old lady weeding her window boxes. She asked him to please carry the packet indoors for her. ‘I wouldn’t want to sully it,’ she said, looking with cupidity at the brown paper as much as its contents. She asked, ‘You will take tea, Mr Hesketh?’ then went away to wash her hands and rouse her girl.

  Murdo was tired, and happy to be fed. He polished off three scones and three boiled eggs and let the old lady work her way around to the subject of the relative worth of Murdo Hesketh and Johan Gutthorm. She was proud of her nephew – Lord Hallowhulme’s man of business, at work, or play. Obviously Gutthorm had managed to communicate to his aunt his opinion – that Kissack and Skilling was play, whereas London, Edinburgh, and Port Clarity were business. She clearly thought of Murdo as the manager of Hallowhulme’s island estate, but not a manager who had to do with practical matters like land in pasture and tonnages of wool. Her nephew Gutthorm, on the other hand, closely involved in the affairs of a great man, was himself great by proxy. He must be, since only greatness could compensate his aunt for his increasing neglect of her, his only relative.

  Murdo, tranquillised by tiredness, by tea, flour, and butter, was still able to detect this complaint in the old woman’s boasting. Now and again, to console herself, she patted the rolled bolt of tweed. Her nephew had remembered her. She told Murdo that she’d had a supper to celebrate her seventieth birthday. She hadn’t meant to put Johan out – after all he had been in Luag on business. The plan was that he’d come to supper – stay the night – and set out in the morning overland to Dorve, to meet Lord Hallowhulme’s English cataloguer and that cataloguer’s wife, and see them safely from Dorve to Southport, then overland to Stolnsay. ‘You see, Johan expected them to wait out the rough weather. The man’s wife was in an interesting condition,’ the aunt added. ‘Her comfort was an important consideration.’ Johan had been, from boyhood, quite unusually precise in his habits, punctual and reliable. But on her birthday he had arrived late. A whole forty minutes late. The old lady gestured at the clock on her mantelpiece, a clock from a previous century, with a crazed porcelain face, once yellow perhaps, now browned like mustard left out too long in the air. The face was hand-painted, with hunters and harvesters, with girls a-maying and a snowy village street – the four seasons, in fact. Murdo contemplated this clock and remembered Minnie’s play, which she said she’d chosen with him in mind – with him, too. What could the girl be meaning to try to tell him? Or did Minnie only want to cheer him up – in her father’s way – with something uplifting and inspirational. Then Murdo thought of Billie Paxton – how deliberate she’d been, how dignified, determined only to get him to do what she wanted, to run her message.

  Alan’s shoes! Murdo started from his chair. ‘Is that the time? Are all the shops closed?’

  Gutthorm’s aunt gasped and reeled back, her corset crackling in counterpoint to her breath. She got up. ‘Yes, as I said, that clock always keeps correct time.’

  ‘There’s something I must do,’ Murdo said. He hurried to the door. Gutthorm’s aunt followed him. She snapped her fingers at the maid who dived fo
r his hat.

  ‘I was sure you must have finished your business before coming to me,’ said Gutthorm’s aunt, as if she stood accused of wasting Murdo’s time.

  ‘I had another favour not connected to my business. It slipped my mind. Please excuse me.’ Murdo took his hat, coat, and gloves from the maid, a mousy girl whose bobbing curtsy was more like a flinch. Murdo thanked Gutthorm’s aunt and hurried out.

  The shops were all shut.

  IN PREPARATION for the performance Billie had only to put on her best clothes and dress her hair. An hour before curtain she came downstairs carrying the six boards, stiff with glue, on which she had mapped out, in her personal code, her cues – thumbnail sketches of scenes, or sometimes of only a gesture, all underlined in coloured inks.

  In the ballroom Billie found Minnie, Rixon, the Tegners, and Elov. Minnie and Rixon were in costume, the Tegners were greasy with unblended paint. Elov was dressed, and drunk. He was sitting on the floor, his boots unlaced. The others were trying to get him up and out into the garden, where they hoped the cold air would revive him. Billie thought ‘revive’ was the wrong word – Elov wasn’t inert, but resistant. And he was loud. He shouted that he would not, could not, say that line. ‘How can you expect me to just stand up and throw it in his teeth?’ He flung out an arm, striking Ailsa Tegner in the chest. ‘Minnie thinks she can do any mortal thing she chooses,’ he said. He turned to Minnie, overbalanced, and came down on his elbow. He complained, ‘You’re just like him.’ Then, in a false, declamatory tone, not at all like his delivery in the rehearsals, but perhaps as he thought Minnie really intended it, he said the line, scornful, self-righteous, and amplified: ‘Goodwin’s hospitality is only a pretext for propaganda.’

  Geordie came in behind Billie, said, ‘Oh dear,’ and sent her out for some bread and milk from the kitchen. Something to soak up the brandy. As Billie went she saw that, despite his age and slightness, Geordie was stronger than the young people. He got Elov up and led him out into the garden.

  WHEN NOT onstage Geordie had waited behind the black gauze of Minnie’s secret entrance. He’d been able to watch the audience.

  Lord Hallowhulme began the evening with an intrusive appearance of attention. He didn’t like to sit still and listen. He liked to make himself felt. His attention was so positive it was almost participation. ‘Hear! Hear!’ he cried once, at a speech about the need for a society led by energetic enthusiasts. He chortled and squirmed. He suppressed his urge to interrupt insofar as he remained in the auditorium and in his seat. But in several of the play’s quieter moments Geordie could clearly hear James Hallow’s loud, dry sniffing.

  It was a mannerism Geordie had noticed on a number of earlier occasions. Compelled to listen, Lord Hallowhulme would sit and sniff. At first Geordie had supposed that his nose was bothering him and he’d forgotten he was in company. Finally, he realised it was only Lord Hallowhulme’s way of saying, ‘I could add something here’ – ‘I know more than you do.’

  Hallowhulme squirmed and sniffed and laughed as if meaning to lead the laughter. He never did – he was always a beat behind the more moderate amusement of others – but laughed louder, and longer.

  Two-thirds of the way through the play, after a sad passage of Billie’s music, Hallowhulme fell quiet. He stopped attending to the play and watched only Billie, who sat with her hands folded and head raised to follow the action onstage, ready for her next cue. Billie’s face and hair were lit by the branch of candles that stood behind her, low enough for their flames to cast a clear light on her music, but make no shining haze in the air through which she might have trouble seeing the stage. In the candlelight Billie wasn’t a Rossetti or a Burne-Jones – specific, ornate, wholly apparent, features and costume and background all equal in weight – she was an old devotional painting, softly luminescent,

  After the applause Hallowhulme set up his camera and photographed the cast, onstage, Billie sitting on the edge of the stage between footlights and the skirts of ferns and heather. Then the actors posed in tableaux vivants of several key scenes, and the second-class rail coach was reassembled from cardboard walls and curtained windows, its leather seats salvaged from Hallowhulme’s automobile. Hallowhulme emerged from the black skirts of his camera in time to see Billie led out of the room by Henry. He called after them, ‘Remember that there’s a supper, Mr Maslen.’

  The Mulberrys were making their excuses to Clara – they couldn’t stay. They thanked the players and, as they left, they remarked to Hallowhulme how proud a parent he must be – such a good performance of such a creditable play. The Mulberrys left, and Hallowhulme said to Geordie, who was nearby, ‘One would imagine a minister more sensitive to the social uses of the word “good”.’ The remark was self-confidently dismissive, but Hallowhulme had that look he often wore, the strained expression of someone hard of hearing, or poor in understanding.

  Minnie appeared and took Geordie’s arm. ‘Come in to supper, Mr Betler,’ she said, a brisk hostess for the benefit of her mother. Then, quieter, ‘I know what the caption will be for the group photograph: “Fortune and the Four Winds, by George Bernard Shaw. Kiss Castle, summer, 1903. My house party, who number twelve individuals.”’ She said, ‘Did he listen, do you think? I don’t think he did. When he listens he always shows his top teeth. Look’ – pointing at her father’s strained expression – ‘he’s listening now.’

  THE SHEET of newspaper from which Billie had cut the outline of Alan’s feet was from an Edinburgh paper, dated 4 June. It was part of an article about the sinking of the Gustav Edda. In it Henry had read – around the holes – that a passenger who had embarked at Luag in the company of her sister and her sister’s husband had been seen to jump from ship to shore only moments before the explosion that sank the vessel at its moorings. Henry read that this person had declined to speak to journalists.

  ‘Lord Hallowhulme declined on my behalf,’ Billie told Henry. ‘I wasn’t aware that a newspaper wanted to speak to me.’

  They stood at the seawall below the long lawn. The evening was overcast. It was after nine, but the sky was the even white it had been since morning. From this angle the town appeared compact, low, no land visible behind it. Built on a spit, spiked with gabled roofs, chimneys, and steeples, Stolnsay looked like a ‘mariner’s elevation’, a drawing on white parchment, flat and diagrammatic, and all exaggerated horizontals. Billie stared at this belt of buildings and streets. She didn’t want to look at Henry. Her hand stole into her pocket and closed around the plaited pigskin button she carried – always carried, transferring it from garment to garment when she changed her clothes. She said, ‘Do you remember now, Henry?’

  ‘I guessed, dear. I don’t remember.’ He touched her sleeve. He said, ‘We were always together, Billie. All of us.’ Henry said that for weeks he’d hoped to remember. He felt that, if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be much help to her. ‘It’s been more your burden than mine, Billie. What actually happened, as well as its aftermath. And, because you remember, you must feel that we are at fault. But, Billie, please listen –’

  She shied away from him. He touched one finger to the raised mound of bone on her wrist, and she stopped still.

  ‘It was a mistake. A mistake easy to make. It seemed only natural. We were always together. We were together, and we kept to ourselves too much – you, me, and Edith. Your remedy was company.’

  ‘Yours was Edith,’ Billie said. Henry was being kind, and his kindness was inadequate.

  ‘Please tell me if I’m mistaken!’ Henry begged. ‘What did I do? I need to know. I think I know myself, and what I would do. Is it something worse?’

  ‘Worse than a kiss?’ Billie said. Edith, drowning, had clung to her husband, and he’d torn himself out of her grasp. Billie had kept the button in order to share it with him. Day after day she’d touched it with her hand and told herself she was sparing him. But she had only been waiting to spare him no more.

  Billie took her hand out of her pocket, the button clos
ed in her fingers. She stepped up to the seawall and threw it. It was light even in its flight, more like an acorn than a pebble. It made a splash, then bobbed up in the centre of its ring of ripples and floated. Billie told Henry that it was a hazelnut she’d had in her pocket. ‘Too stale to eat,’ she said.

  The evening was beginning to seem very strange to Billie. It seemed that only what was harmful had any weight, that truth was money, kindness only a token in money’s shape – like the tokens Billie’s father had bought her and Edith to spend on the rides at a carnival in Marseilles. The tokens were only for the rides. Edith would rather have had a fringed silk scarf, but couldn’t buy back her money.

  The button was harmless now – impossible to exchange. Billie watched it bob in the slight current of retreating tide. She remembered how Mr Betler hadn’t let her unwrap the bundle in the coffin with Edith. Without looking himself he’d known what it was. He’d put his arms around her to hold her back, because truth was knowing, but kindness was knowing better than to tell.

  Billie gave Henry her hand – he’d asked for it. As they walked slowly back up the lawn Henry told her that, although they’d spend the coming winter in Stolnsay, Lord Hallowhulme had asked him if he’d like to replace Johan Gutthorm. Mr Gutthorm had given his notice. ‘Family responsibilities, apparently,’ Henry said. Then, ‘I’m assured it’s all on friendly terms.’ It was a great opportunity, Henry said. All his life he had schooled himself to accept work of little – or incalculable – influence. He was a teacher or a cataloguer. But, as Lord Hallowhulme’s secretary, he’d have work that was varied and challenging, and a more worldly life than he had ever dreamed he’d have. ‘I’ll live in London and Edinburgh. I can see you settled somewhere comfortable, like Port Clarity. And, Billie, you can meet people, make a broader acquaintance. You can choose who to befriend.’