Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  The walking was easy, they didn’t have to lift their feet so high as on the bog. Billie had removed her shoes when she went into the sea to wash. Murdo watched her feet, with their long toes, high arches, and round heels. He could see now how she’d managed to split the tops of Ingrid Hallow’s dancing shoes within minutes of her march out of the gatehouse. He realised that, for weeks, he’d watched her closely – but piecemeal. He’d looked at a gesture, the way her shoulder thrust up through the pinkish red waves of her hair when she shrugged, her hands, stretching for a teacup, coming down as slowly as gulls were coming now to land on the sand beside them. Billie didn’t trust herself with crockery. But the same hands touched piano keys like a spider laying in the weft of its web. Murdo had watched Billie Paxton, plagued by everything she did, everything he saw nettling him – a pain like pins and needles, numb flesh coming back to life. He’d disliked her, he believed, the sight of her had so irritated him. She was his shame: the young illiterate woman he’d mistreated. She was his weakness: he’d jumped to conclusions as quickly as she’d jumped from ship to shore. Geordie had expressed it well: ‘You’re hasty, Mr Hesketh. And not perspicacious.’

  What would he do with her?

  He’d give her money, so she wouldn’t have to spend any of what was in her purse. He’d put her on a ship and tell her to go to Glasgow and find Geordie’s Mr Tannoy.

  Murdo had a bad moment. He thought he’d lost his pocket-book, that it was in the jacket he was no longer wearing. Then he put his hand on it, in the coat’s other outside pocket. ‘Where did we leave my shirt and jacket?’ he asked – still having his bad moment. He’d remembered the body in the tower at Ormabeg, remembered incriminating evidence.

  ‘I carried them to where I sat down. We left them where we were lying.’

  ‘I don’t want you to say that.’ Murdo was sharp.

  ‘We were lying,’ Billie insisted.

  ‘It was just a kiss, Billie.’

  She was quiet for a time, and Murdo watched the water wrung out of the wet sand where she stepped, her feet falling in flashing haloes. After a time she said, ‘Are you thinking of Ingrid Hallow?’

  ‘I wasn’t.’ She’d annoyed him again. She was in possession of the rumours and satisfied with the commonplace. What more could he expect? ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I was fond of Ingrid Hallow. I approved of her. She was the only one of them who wasn’t lazy. She liked to walk and ride. She’d always bounce up, and say, “I’ll go with you.” We climbed the tower at Ormabeg – and to the summit of Larg. James had his Austrian oak staff – perhaps he hoped to poke about at snow for hidden crevasses – God knows – but he sat down with the rest of the family and made tea and talked while Ingrid and I went on. Of course James and Minnie play furiously, but most of what they do is done sitting down. Ingrid had animal energy, and she’d lacked someone to keep her company outdoors. There are paintings of Minnie’s in which Ingrid appears, as if she’s several people, at different distances – on a far hill, on the road in the middle distance, beneath a tree in the foreground. I’m sure you haven’t seen them – Minnie put them away. I’ve always hated to sit still, except on a horse, on parade, a disciplined immobility that requires some effort.’

  Murdo glanced at Billie. She was watching him, bemused, patient.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see. You only admired Miss Ingrid. But did she love you? Are you telling me not to put any great stock in a kiss, because look where kisses got Ingrid Hallow?’

  ‘I didn’t kiss Ingrid,’ Murdo said. ‘I find you extremely exasperating, Billie.’

  ‘I’m only trying to follow you.’

  Ingrid Hallow did that, Murdo said. She followed him. No one much noticed. They were the kind of family who readily believed what was said. They were susceptible to testimony rather than evidence. James had some bee in his bonnet about Rixon. He’d come in one evening and, visibly irritated, said, ‘I suppose Rixon’s been following cousin Murdo about all day?’ After that everybody, even Rixon, decided that that was what happened – that it was Rixon who followed Murdo. Minnie took to teasing them about Murdo’s training Rix in the manly arts. ‘It was ludicrous. They seemed to feel outfaced by my shooting, riding, fishing, swimming. They were scornful because it made them – oh, Hell! – hot with admiration. On fire, and angry. They took their cues from Clara, I expect. She was always acid, from my cadetship on. I got into long pants and Clara kept trying to cut me down to size.’

  ‘But –’ Again Billie nudged him – really did nudge, pushed her body against his side, so that momentarily he was in the aura of her odour. ‘But why was Lord Hallowhulme displeased by the idea that Rixon admired you?’

  ‘Men hope their sons will admire them first and foremost,’ Murdo said, in the tone of someone talking to a much younger person. She was, of course, a good fifteen years younger.

  ‘No,’ said Billie, still patiently trying to get at what she wanted.

  But Murdo had seen it already. He stopped walking and a wave poured its cold foam onto the toes of his boots and buried Billie’s feet. He heard her small sigh of pleasure before he said, ‘James thinks Rixon is my son.’

  Billie asked why.

  Murdo tried to imagine – or to follow James’s imagining. He didn’t want to tell Billie what he’d guessed – that if James had sent word to Elov, and not to Rixon, then James had wanted Rixon in that cabin with Murdo at eight bells, when almost everyone else was topside and the pilot’s boat was on hand. James had imagined it that way – people where he wanted them, each object in its appointed place, and everything running according to plan. But what had James imagined first, and why?

  Murdo’s cousin didn’t understand intimacy, and scarcely ever saw it. James was blind to expressions of any temperature, to warm looks or cold. But Murdo and Clara were very old friends. When Murdo arrived, his cousin Clara was happy to have him on the island, and determined to help him back to happiness. She was so ardent that even James was able to see it.

  ‘Rixon is so like Lord Hallowhulme – in looks,’ Billie said, fishing.

  ‘Of course he is.’

  ‘Would Lord Hallowhulme have any cause to think Rixon is yours?’

  Murdo considered, then said, ‘James did see me jealous of him. Or, at least, disappointed with Clara. Dismayed by their engagement. This was a long time ago, when Clara was married out of our grandfather’s house. Clara is six years my senior, so I was fifteen at the time. Clara had always told me everything, her plans and her adventures. But once she was engaged she chose to play the great lady. It was before his peerage, but he was already Sir James Hallow, at the age I am now. Clara enjoyed his fame. She sailed about in jewels and loud bustles and trailing trains on even ordinary evenings. And she took to calling me “Dear boy”, as James did. She meant to be droll. Maybe even to have me laugh with her at his pompous nonsense. It’s possible. Or perhaps she meant it as a provocation. I don’t know. Whatever the case, I behaved very badly. I was insolent to James, and surly with Clara. Then – it must have been the night before the wedding day, since my memories of the wedding are quite watery with hangover – I got stinking drunk and did and said I don’t know what. I remember that James forgot himself enough to cuff me. And I bloodied his nose. I remember calling him an overbearing bore with terrible taste in clothes. I was a little snob. I remember smirking at Clara as though I were terribly clever, and her looking back with thin-lipped calculation, trying to plot how to get me packed off to bed with as little noise and fuss as possible. And I remember throwing a crown of white rosebuds in the fire. The kitchen fire. I’d got into the stillroom, it was cold, and all the flowers were lying there.’

  Murdo wondered then, as he sometimes did, why he never remembered any servants present. Only Clara, in an outrage, and the heaps – the hills – of quiet flowers.

  Billie said, ‘So – Lord Hallowhulme may have thought you were in love with your cousin?’

  Murdo made a noise of assent, then said, ‘I was miserable. It
was the end of our summers, and I held her responsible. But after several dreary years I joined the cavalry and had a fine old time for the next ten.’

  Billie Paxton had put herself before him and was buttoning his coat closed. She began at the bottom, and her hair blew against his bare chest. He interfered with her buttoning – slow at the best of times – and managed to gather her hair into the coat with him. When she raised her face through the trapped mass he touched her forehead and eyelids with his lips.

  ‘I think poor, young Ingrid Hallow must have been in love with you,’ Billie said, solemn.

  ‘She said she was. And I said, “Ingrid, dear, I’m very fond of you.” Smug and avuncular. And she drowned herself.’

  ‘You thought I was trying to drown myself. At Scouse Beach.’

  He pulled her closer yet. He hadn’t quite meant to, but did, clutched her till his tired arm quaked. He heard her, she sounded deliberate and reasonable, she’d finally found her way through the tricky currents of their mismatched tides – her simplicity, his complexity. She said, ‘That’s why I asked you whether you were thinking about Ingrid Hallow. You want me not to take your kiss seriously – though I understand now that you didn’t ever kiss Ingrid. But – you see – you’re telling me I mustn’t love you.’

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t imagine you do.’

  THERE WAS no light in the church. They came up the path from the beach below the headland, a path they could scarcely see, sand already darkened by dew. The small uneven panes in the church windows gave back the last lemony light on the western horizon, a light that moved as they did, sinking from window to window, as though someone were climbing down from the tower carrying a shaded lantern.

  ‘Look, there’s a light,’ Billie said, with tears in her voice. ‘Will we have to speak to someone now?’

  Murdo reassured her. It was only the evening.

  He took her around to the side door and lifted its latch. The door grated across the sand used to scour the pink Tyree stone flags, then not properly swept out afterward. There was a light on the altar, wick floating in oil in a brass jar, a spot of radiance and the big, bare nave. There were no pews, only rows of rush chairs, recently reseated, the rushes still smelling sweet and fresh.

  Murdo led Billie to the low door at one side of the altar. He showed her up the full circle of a first staircase. They were in Clodel’s big square tower, its lower room full of chests and the kind of desks where – Murdo imagined – monks once sat copying out sacred texts in their best, self-effacing, anonymous hands. There was a ladder to the next level, a steep angled ladder of black oak. Partway up it Billie began to sob. The moon had appeared at an east-facing window behind her, a bright boil on the smooth skin of horizon, a gold curve, swollen and trembling through thick horizontal air and scaly window glass. Billie was looking down at her shadow, hanging on the ladder’s shadow. Murdo clambered up behind her, till his feet were only one rung below hers. He inclined against her and pressed his cheek to hers.

  After a time Billie was quiet, and Murdo put his good hand under one of her arms and coaxed her on, rung by rung.

  The tower’s top room was warm – the heat of the day had risen up into it and was trapped. Murdo and Billie lay down on a well-swept oak floor, and he fell asleep.

  Later Billie said she was hungry – so hungry. Then she told Murdo that sometimes she tried to talk to Edith. ‘It’s as if I want to pray to her. To ask her what she thinks, what she’d do. But when I open my mouth, all that comes out is: Edith, Edith, Edith.’

  Murdo nodded. She couldn’t see the gesture, so he moved closer to her. And closer. He felt her ribs creak. He said that, though the fact of the grief was predictable, its manifestations were not. Then he added, delirious, ‘It’s like a bat in the dark, blind, but somehow able to see things we can’t.’

  Billie perked up and asked what, for instance?

  Murdo blinked, trying to see her, and saw the underside of her jaw, her firm, pale throat, and the dark line dividing it, like a cut. He’d been looking at that all day, and now he put his lips against it, ran the tip of his tongue along the thin, smooth plait of her choker. He knew that it was a plaited lock of hair – the lock Mrs Mulberry had cut from Billie’s sister’s corpse. His mouth shaped a name: ‘Edith.’ He felt he was asking something. For something. But his shoulder and collarbone were aching and he dropped his forehead against the floor by Billie’s neck. He saw the faces of the dead – Ingrid, Karl, Ingrid, Ian – rush toward him, then roll into themselves, opening like smoke rings. Or like the iron rings he’d had to collect on the head of a long lance – a parade ground exercise from his cavalry days. He was falling through a series of ruptured membranes, smoke, ringing iron, the faces of the dead.

  Then the world grew steady. Billie Paxton had rolled him off her and onto his back. She had unbuttoned his coat again. He felt her warm hand run from his chest to his stomach, and rest there.

  ‘No. Don’t,’ he said.

  BILLIE WAS sure he’d not been aware of what he was doing. As she lay against his immobilised arm, as she spoke, he hooked his good arm under her, too, and leaned on his elbow and loomed over her. His pity was like a light passing through her, their atoms intermingled. He had all these griefs, it turned out, wasn’t only strong and striking, but a man of substance, solid with suffering. Billie had believed that Edith’s death was a thing she and Henry held in common, but Henry consoled himself with his unworthiness, spoke about Edith as if, in the end, she’d been spared him, and had gone on to better things. Murdo Hesketh was as sad as she was. Since Edith’s death Billie had been shown goodwill and sympathy, but this was a sadness that sang along to hers, another soul with perfect pitch.

  When he fainted onto her, Billie lay quiet for a time, breath constricted, and gauged his full weight. She found she’d moved, not to free herself, but to accommodate him differently. It wasn’t quite enough that he was with her. She wanted him nearer still, inside her, their molecules mixed, like milt and roe.

  She said his name, his first name, at last. But he was unconscious, so she rolled him off her, unfastened the buttons on his coat, and touched his chest. He was panting with pain. She moved her hand. The muscles in his stomach were held hard. He shuddered under her touch, then said, ‘No. Don’t.’

  She pressed her palms to his pectoral muscles and stooped over him, her face to his. It was experiment and calculation – Billie had remembered how Henry had mixed his breath with hers.

  Murdo said they had another five miles to walk in the morning.

  ‘Mr Hesketh, I can’t follow your thinking,’ Billie said.

  ‘You mustn’t expect to, Billie. Only follow my lead for a few more hours.’

  She smiled at him, but he seemed not to see it. She asked him was he in much pain?

  ‘You are leaning on my ribs, though I find they’re bruised, not broken as I feared.’

  ‘Should I not lean?’ Billie said, sweet and obtuse.

  ‘I’d be obliged if you didn’t. But that’s not what I mean. Move your hands, too, please. We can’t forget ourselves. Tomorrow you must take a ship to Luag, then Oban. I’ll pay your passage. You must go by train to Glasgow and find Geordie Betler’s Andrew Tannoy. I’ll send our friend Geordie to you, Billie. I have to go back to Stolnsay to take care of Clara and Rixon. You’ll do very well with Geordie – since you seem to feel you really must run away from Henry Maslen, just because the poor man won’t continue to flatter you with kisses.’

  He was in pain and impatient. He was trying to put her away from him.

  Billie said, ‘I didn’t run away from Henry, but from Lord Hallowhulme.’

  Murdo Hesketh was silent.

  ‘He kissed me,’ Billie said.

  ‘Did he?’ Murdo said, expressionless.

  Billie didn’t reply. Instead she moved, lay down beside him again. He turned his head, waiting.

  ‘I’m so very hungry,’ she said. Then, after a pause, ‘I always was hungry. I used to steal f
ruit from trees. I was still doing it even when the Reverend Vause drove me to the station after his sister dismissed me for theft.’ She stretched up her arm into the dark volume of air that was the penultimate room of the church tower at Clodel – the room directly below the bells. She plucked something from the air – black cherries, three on one stem. ‘The Reverend Vause is a man who believes women are naturally immoral, never able to see the garden wall if their eyes are on the fruit.’

  ‘You enjoyed it,’ said Murdo Hesketh.

  He meant Lord Hallowhulme’s kiss. Billie could feel his sluggish fury. He lay next to her, low in the water – it seemed – a boat very nearly swamped.

  ‘I enjoy so many things,’ Billie answered, and enjoyed a moment of self-congratulation.

  Murdo shoved her away from him and struggled up. She seized him by his coat and held on, as he yelled at her to get away from him. ‘Little animal,’ he shouted. Billie clung till he toppled. She pulled him down, laid him out, and clambered up him. He gathered himself. She felt his anger and his strength, but she’d somehow tied him up, and he couldn’t hurt her. She pressed him down and put her face in easy reach. Billie took a deep breath, and turned seaward to wait for the big wave.

  SHE HAD run away from her enjoyment. Murdo understood now. He would make her admit it. First he tried to close her wrists in his one hand, to stretch her arms up above her head. She easily freed herself. She had control of her hands – but he warned her not to touch him. He shoved and sifted through her skirts with his good hand, while leaning on the bad. The scabbed injury on his collarbone had cracked and was bleeding. Billie had blood smeared on her chin. Despite his warning she raised her hands, held him off, or perhaps only supported his weight, as a timber props the sagging ceiling of a mine. He found her ready, oily, hotter than he was. The moon was below the window, making webs on its lower mullions. Murdo saw Billie’s surprise, her eyes turn dark with trouble. He stopped. She shut her eyes, and he put his mouth to hers though he’d meant not to. She pressed up with her hips, with all her robust muscularity, till she had him entirely, his first since that cowardly woman he’d hoped to marry – Stockholm quality of a recent provenance, a good girl of good family, with scruples, tears, generous concessions: I love you, I love you, she said, but her skirt was pulled down straight afterward, and she wasn’t interested in benefiting from his experience, was strangely undismayed, but miserly and then so swift to run when they met outside the courthouse during Karl Borg’s trial. His first since – and he hadn’t wanted to help himself again. Hadn’t because, although the doctor and nurses had pushed him aside, he’d nevertheless seen them packing cloth swabs to stem the blood gushing between his sister’s legs. He’d seen the colour leave Ingrid’s face and throat and chest – a sunset on snow, night climbing a mountain.