Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  At that moment, hearing herself called, Clara’s daughter appeared – she’d been in the upper hall on her way to her room and Conan Doyle’s Final Problem. Minnie pounded down the lower flight, sailed like a swinging boom around the newel post, and landed near Murdo and her mother. ‘Mama!’ Minnie was horrified. She hugged Clara, held her as Clara’s hair collapsed and oozed out of its pins and over her face. Then, with canine alertness, Jenny appeared too – and between them the younger women began to lead Clara away.

  ‘Come upstairs, Lady Hallowhulme,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Shall we lie down, Mother?’

  Clara turned her ruined face to Murdo and whispered something, something insane, nonsensical: ‘For thousands of years, man has made a god of Chance –’

  Murdo’s hair prickled.

  ‘Mother!’ said Minnie, moved and flattered.

  Her mother patted her shoulder. ‘Then what does he go on to say – the silly man?’

  Minnie quoted: ‘It’s time man made a god of Will.’

  ‘Yes. Dreadful,’ said Clara. Again she looked at Murdo, her eyes so suffused they seemed blind. ‘Then the clever young man says: “But sometimes chance will make a god of a person – or an instrument of God.”’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Minnie.

  ‘That clever Mr Shaw,’ said her mother, with a smile at Minnie. Then, to Murdo. ‘You don’t owe me anything. But I am owed – I’m owed a life. One life. And Chance has made a god of you.’

  GEORDIE HAD an unsatisfactory leave-taking. After lunch he went to the kitchen to give away those things of Ian’s he’d decided not to keep. He sat with Mrs Deet, Cook, Ward the butler, and Robert, the footman with whom he was friendly, and talked. Jenny was with Lady Hallowhulme, Mrs Deet explained. Lady Hallowhulme was in ‘a taking’. ‘Very unlike her,’ Deet added. ‘But I expect you know all about it. Since Agnes tells us Mr Hesketh’s back – Agnes has his muddy clothes to clean – and he had some news of that strange girl, Miss Paxton, and why she ran away.’

  ‘It’ll all blow over,’ Geordie told them.

  And Robert said, admiring, that the master was human after all.

  Geordie could see they were pleased by the thought – that they warmed to the idea of Lord Hallowhulme’s human failings.

  ‘What will Mr Maslen do?’ Cook wondered. ‘Poor man. He needs to stop somewhere. And we’d all rather have him than Johan Gutthorm.’ This remark set up a quiver of consensual nodding. Then the butler said there wasn’t any point in further speculation. Mrs Deet, for one, would only be able to follow the story like a book with its middle torn out. The rest of them would be back in Edinburgh in three weeks. And London shortly after, since the Lords would be sitting soon.

  They all told Geordie he must write, visit – and he took his leave.

  He found the Tegners, mother and daughters, and they told him the same – if he was ever in Malmo. Jane thanked him for his kindness to her girls and teased him about his alternative career on the stage.

  Rixon and Elov had gone riding. Minnie – whom Geordie most wanted to see – was with her mother. He stood at the door with his bags and his coat over his arm, looking back at the empty hall, the fresh flowers doubled, a splash of colour on the silver of the hall mirror; the dark-panelled walls. Sunlight angled in the big landing window and raised more colour on the dim, carpeted stairs where dust hovered like watery midges. Yet, he thought, I’ve been happy here. What right had he to be happy where he’d come to bury his brother? But Geordie’s shame seemed rebellious, while happiness was the authority against which it rebelled. No one should ever quarrel with happiness. Geordie thought of Billie Paxton, how she’d done something quite different with her grief. He had kept up his conversation with Ian, wrote to him still, because, without Ian, Geordie wasn’t wholly himself. Over the years Ian had become not just the repository of Geordie’s private self, but the occasion of that private self. Geordie wrote to Ian to be Geordie – not Mr Betler the butler. But Billie Paxton had lost the person nearest to her. She’d been so close to Edith, and so dependent, that she’d let her sister carry her soul – or they had lived and breathed in a cloud of each other’s souls. It was as if these sisters, not existing wholly and exclusively in themselves, couldn’t be separated, or separately extinguished. Now Billie didn’t only check herself with thoughts about what her sister would do and say, she simply did as Edith would, because Edith was present to her, as a stain, a preserving medium, a benign contamination.

  Geordie would see Billie soon. He and the Tannoys would help her. The thought kept him buoyant. He was carrying something away with him – the intimacy of Kiss – which was a kind of intimacy he’d never known before. Geordie had confidence that, in the course of his life, he’d have further civil conversation with Lady Hallowhulme, and young Rixon, and friendly conversation with Minnie, but he had Billie to care for, to set on her feet, to pass over to the kind patronage of the Tannoys. Ian was gone – but he’d still be Geordie. He’d be Billie Paxton’s Geordie.

  Alan Skilling was sitting on the gatehouse doorstep. He got up and wrestled one of Geordie’s bags out of his grip. ‘I’ve got nothing to do today. It’s the Sabbath. I’m just waiting,’ he said.

  ‘Waiting to do something?’

  ‘To be asked to do something. And for my father.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘At Southport, I expect, looking over the cannery.’ Alan went with Geordie around the harbour, both hands on the bag’s handle, while it banged on his legs. Once Geordie tried to retrieve it, and Alan growled, ‘I can manage.’

  When they got to the ship, Geordie put his bags down at the foot of the gangplank and searched his pockets for a shilling, and for paper and pen. He wrote out the Tannoys’ Glasgow address and told Alan that, when he was a little older, and if he had his father’s permission, he could come and ask for a job. ‘If I’m not there, tell the people Mr Betler wants you.’

  ‘Thank you, I might, too,’ Alan said. ‘But I don’t like to leave the island.’

  Geordie raised his eyebrows at the boy.

  ‘Father let our croft go – it’s all over bracken now. But when I’m old enough to recover it, I’ll ask Lord Hallowhulme for it back. I remember that I liked it – though I was too little to be much use. When my mother was alive, we’d put in the barley, then take our cow up to the sheiling to cut peats, then father was on his cousin’s boat, after herring, then we’d harvest, and put by everything we’d need.’

  Geordie looked down at Alan’s thin, tense, sober face, and said that whatever Alan chose, he was sure he’d do well.

  ‘Before you go, Sir, was there any news of Billie?’

  ‘Billie,’ said Geordie, smiling, ‘is in Glasgow with my employers.’

  ‘Oh – that villain,’ said Alan, darkly.

  ‘Lord Hallowhulme?’

  ‘No. Not him,’ Alan said. Then, ‘Well, Mr Betler, give her my love. And my thanks. And tell her that she shouldn’t fret – no one has to remember to feed Alan Skilling.’

  Geordie reached in his pocket and gave the boy another coin. Then he went on board.

  At dusk, when the ferry sailed, and Geordie had already installed himself on a padded bench in its small salon, Murdo Hesketh appeared. Murdo threw his one bag into the netted rack in the corner farthest from the stove, his astrakhan on top of it, and sat down well away from Geordie. Geordie kept his eyes turned toward the man, waiting, and eventually Hesketh turned and gave Geordie a look shockingly like the look Geordie had been given by a mangy lion in a damp brick cell in Glasgow Zoo, a look of impotent, weary hatred. Geordie looked away.

  At midnight, when Alesund Head was well astern, shrinking, losing all its naked distinction, and the two women nearest Murdo got up to take a turn around the deck, Geordie took their place.

  Murdo didn’t open his eyes. Geordie could see that the bruise on Murdo’s forehead had spilled its yellow into the nearest eye socket. But Murdo knew Geordie was there. He said, ‘I am going wi
th you.’

  ‘Did you see Minnie? Alan?’

  ‘No. I left Alan some shoes. I lost them for a time, but when I retrieved my horse I found them. They were a present from Billie.’

  ‘Thoughtful girl.’

  ‘She is. I’ll go with you to see her settled. Like Mr Maslen with his “cottage in Port Clarity”. Settle Billie. Soothe the baby and go back to the book.’

  ‘What’s your book, Murdo?’

  Murdo opened his eyes and smiled. ‘Job, apparently. “I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.”’

  WHEN THEY got to Andrew Tannoy’s Glasgow house, Geordie and Murdo found that Billie wasn’t there, and hadn’t been heard from.

  15

  Maintaining a Good Character

  BILLIE FINALLY fell asleep on the train from Oban to Glasgow. On the water some involuntary fear had kept her aroused and awake. When the pilot’s steamer came out of the reef into the tail of the Wash there was a faint shock against the port side. Billie was able to reason that away – it was only an adjustment – but she couldn’t sleep. The train carriage didn’t roll, it jostled. And she was done in. She woke in the outskirts of the city, looked out on sooty brick and – on a bridge – through the undulations of iron girders. She discovered that she’d lost Edith. Had she left her sister in the sea? Or was it that she was doing something of which her sister would not approve?

  Billie began to talk to herself. She talked herself off the train and through into the echoing concourse of the station. ‘Don’t sit like that, Billie,’ she said first, then, ‘What were you thinking?’ And, arguing with her sister, and her sister’s ideas: ‘I’ll not go where I’m not wanted.’ She raised her hot, sticky eyes to the August sun coming through the station’s lofty glass ceiling. Pigeons crossed above her, dancing a quadrille in the air, some flying from a discharge of steam on a near platform, others from the complicated metal wrenching of carriages coupling.

  Billie found a lady with two girls, all in straw hats and white summer gloves. She stopped before them, put down her bag, and dug in her purse for a paper. She asked could madam please read this letter – she’d forgotten its directions. The timetable too? She would commit it to memory. No, she wasn’t able to read – it was a defect, a kind of disease, ‘congenital word blindness’. Madam said that, of course, the Express left from Edinburgh, Billie should buy a ticket to Edinburgh. She and her girls were going there, second-class, since it wasn’t a long journey. There was the ticket office. Billie had ten minutes.

  On the train Madam and the girls shared their sandwiches and, at Edinburgh, Madam stood by Billie as she bought her ticket to London – a space in the sleeper car. Madam took Billie to the tearooms and sat her at a table facing the window, and a clock at the end of the platform with the thickest traffic of porters. Madam said that before Billie left the train at London she must ask a steward for further directions. Madam had, of course, glanced at the paragraphs preceding Reverend Vause’s instructions and knew that Billie wasn’t running away but taking up an offer of sanctuary. She ordered Billie tea and scones, wished her good luck, and – girls in tow – walked away into the crowd.

  The tearooms were noisy, and all the noises were sharp. A boy at a table near Billie kicked the leg of his chair, and someone behind her tapped their spoon on their saucer. Billie drank her tea, but left her scones. Her throat hurt, and it was difficult to swallow. She felt dry, and exposed, like a stretch of sand from which the sea has retreated. After a time she went out into the din and waited under the clock, then, when the flow of people on her platform began to include passengers, she found her coach and her seat.

  Inside her a tide was going out. Appetite departed first – before the train – then, as whistles were blown up and down the platform and, ahead, the engine began to twitch the carriages into place, twitch and tighten and apply its different rule of inertia, the tide took Billie’s vitality, and her lucidity. She sat with her head nodding and knocking against the window while time tried to untangle itself from her day, gently, as though not to awaken her, pushing its yarn back through loosened knots, unravelling, following its own thread and rolling her out of its skein as it went.

  Billie was hot. Sweltering in the trap on the final slope to the Broch. Henry was telling her about Lord Hallowhulme’s stepladder. Then she was on the ladder, and opposite Lord Hallowhulme. He was asking her about herself, in search of a common ground for conversation. But his kindness was lost on her, because her side of the ladder was in the green water under Stolnsay wharf, and she was Edith, hair trailing upward and her fingernails drifting above her like fallen plum blossom suspended on the surface of a pond. She was cold, not drowned, but draining water on a stone tower top in the rain, with Rory Skilling lying on her, heavy and stifling.

  Billie woke up when the illumination increased. The scenery was shining in her face – a river mouth under a white sky. She went out into the corridor where a man noticed her confusion and said, informative, ‘Berwick upon Tweed,’ and ‘The dining car is open.’ Then, to show he meant nothing by it, he shook out his paper and hid his face. Billie watched the attendant make her bed, then lay, aching in every joint and gently jerked about all night.

  At London the train she wanted left from another station. A porter put her in a cab. Another – she paid them well – set her on a seat on the right platform with only an hour to wait. She jumped up once when she saw her father, Edith, herself, hurrying back into the clamour of the main concourse. They’d got off at the wrong stop. Beyond those doors was not the port, but Genoa’s old town, where the buildings leaned together so that their shadows could climb them, and flower, and bear fruit. Billie heard her father promising his girls that it wasn’t far to walk. The doors flashed, and they were gone.

  Someone asked, ‘Is this your train?’ Billie peered about. It was her train. A train from which she saw the sea several times, and on which she was asked was she unwell? Yes. But she was nearly there – in her zinc bedstead under the slope of the roof.

  ‘Miss? Miss?’ She had to change trains. She splashed her face in the washroom and combed her hair, twisted it into a thick knot at her nape. Four hours, the stationmaster said, and that there was a quiet parlour in the pub on the high street. But Billie took a seat in the station and watched the line back the way her train had come, a canted curve. The oak trees were dark now, in August, but lightening, leaves brown at their limbs’ ends. Billie had missed the trees, their temperate confidences, volume, their stayed stirring.

  A slow train on a branch line. Billie lay down on the timber slat seat. Then, at her journey’s end, she had a little bit of luck. She heard herself saying it – ‘A little bit of luck’ – just as her father had used to, making excuses for the heartless chance to which he was devoted, his luck, every time it turned back for a moment to trifle with him again. Billie even coughed like her father, her voice caught on something as she tried to get it out quickly, when she saw that, at the same time that she had alighted, so had the Reverend Vause. Billie croaked his name, and began to cough. He dropped his bag and started toward her. He caught her. She drooped in his arms, coughing. He called for water, and the train was delayed while its tufty-eared ticket-taker talked to the stationmaster and the Reverend Vause. Indeed, he’d noticed her, but not that she was sick. The Reverend Vause held a glass to Billie’s lips. ‘Why didn’t you stop somewhere? Were you short of funds?’

  ‘I still have my forty pounds from Aunt Blazey. Henry kept Edith’s. Henry’s alive – but you know that.’

  ‘Mr Maslen survived?’

  Billie remembered that Lord Hallowhulme had looked over the letter – dictated to Clara – before posting it. She said to the reverend that maybe she was meant to disappear into Lord Hallowhulme’s deep pockets.

  The Reverend Vause said – very worried, and falsely bright – that here was Owen, sent to meet him with Mrs Wood’s trap. ‘You remember Owen.’

  Owen: ‘Wilhelmina.’
r />   Reverend Vause: ‘I’ll carry Miss Paxton, Owen.’

  A LITTLE over a week later Billie was allowed out, on a wicker lounger placed in a sheltered corner of the garden. Olive Vause arranged a rug on Billie’s legs, then put on an apron and gardening gloves, took secateurs in hand, and walked into a frozen fireworks of summer greenery. She began dead-heading. The foxgloves were only standing still for their seed, she explained, tapping it out of the rigid brown rods.

  Billie watched. The coneflowers were wilted, their ears laid back. The nearest unfinished thing was the mallow, a pink almost white, a plant that had grown well in the walled garden at Kiss. Bumblebees and cabbage whites worked what was left of the garden.

  It was Olive who had cared for Billie. Or rather, it was Olive who supervised the doctor’s and servants’ care. Nothing had been said about the past. Olive and Billie were engaged in a silent tussle where each meant to make it evident to the other that they were forgiven. Billie was too tired to feel offended.

  Billie was tired – but the garden wasn’t.

  ‘I wasn’t much use to Miss Minnie,’ Billie explained to Olive. ‘But I suppose that, if I’d offered myself as a lady’s companion, she’d have taken me on.’

  ‘Well,’ said Olive, ‘that would be a step up in the world.’

  Billie laughed because, when the heroine of Minnie’s play talked about ‘steps up in the world’, the hero said he had stature himself, of himself, and didn’t need a box to stand on.

  The Reverend Vause appeared. He came across the lawn, removed his hat, said good morning to Billie, and waited for his sister to leave. He eyed Olive, turning his hat by the brim. Billie hadn’t seen him since her arrival. She had been too sick.

  She still felt queasy and colourless.

  ‘Olive, I’d like to speak to Wilhelmina.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Olive.