Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

‘Please,’ he said, ‘remove yourself by a bed or two. Go and discipline your loosestrife or coddle your artemesia.’

  Olive put her secateurs in her apron pocket. ‘I’ll make up an arrangement for your room,’ she told Billie, and left.

  The Reverend Vause sat on the lawn by Billie’s chair, one leg cocked, his wrist propped on his knee. ‘We’re pleased you came, Wilhelmina, and happy you’re with us. But, I must admit, we’re puzzled by the precipitous haste of your journey – and the state you were in when you arrived. Not just your health, mind, but your attire – torn petticoats, a skirt worn over a dress, the bodice of which was – well – filthy, its stitching popped as though you’d been swimming in it. And, though your nails are now trim, they were terribly torn – as if you’d been digging with your bare hands. You must realise that all this requires some explanation. We have to know what happened to you in order to decide how best to help you.’

  Billie looked at her hands, the nails she’d torn prising a stone from the top of the tower at Ormabeg, and the still-spreading bruise around the thumb dislocated by the revolver’s recoil. She didn’t make any answer.

  ‘Furthermore, Mrs Wood is concerned that you’ve become accustomed to luxury,’ he said, and, surprised by the tension in his voice she met his eyes. She told him that Kiss wasn’t particularly luxurious. It was rather horrible. Grim and over-ornamented. She was quoting Minnie. ‘The last laird had terrible taste. Lord Hallowhulme has some beautiful things, though. Lovely vases, favrile lustering, and one which sat by the ballroom door, that glowed in the dark as though it held a smoky green genie. I only noticed it the night I went in and found only one branch of candles lit.’ Billie remembered then the song she’d begun, its opening passage. She heard it, saw what it expressed, the moon breaking free of a cloud and a road suddenly coming clear, the road that was always there, the earthly whiteness of a well-worn pilgrims’ path.

  Billie wriggled out from under the rug, ‘Come with me,’ she told the Reverend Vause.

  He followed her into his sister’s music room. Billie sat at the piano – a grand, like Kiss Castle’s. She had played this one once, but like a nervous scullery maid set to dry the best glassware – too tentative. Billie lifted the lid, said, ‘Listen,’ and set her damaged fingertips on the cool keys and played her tune.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ said the Reverend Vause. ‘Is that all you know?’

  ‘It’s unfinished,’ said Billie. She sat, throbbing with breath and smiles, tears in her eyes, because Edith had come back, rekindled, as steady as a flame in quiet air.

  The Reverend Vause sat beside her on the piano stool. He put his hand on her shawled shoulder. He said that his sister Olive had told him how she had hidden her own silver-backed brush and mirror beneath the lining in Billie’s bag. ‘When Olive read about the accident she was distraught – quite ill, and she had to tell me.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Billie.

  ‘She’s had her troubles,’ he said. Then he went on to say that his living was modest, his house dowdy – he wasn’t rich like the widow Wood – and the country hereabouts was very quiet –

  Billie put a hand on his head, pushed her fingers into his hair. His scalp was humid and the smell rising from it recalled other intimacies. He stopped speaking, and began to tremble. He took her other hand and kissed her palm. After a moment he said, ‘I must know what happened to you.’ Then, at her silence, and as a kind of guess, he quoted Scripture: ‘Put not your trust in Princes.’

  Billie told the Reverend Vause about a day they had rowed out to the Old Keep on the island at the mouth of Stolnsay Harbour. Alan Skilling took the first turn at the oars, complaining all the while how the boat was too low at its stern. The Tegners took a turn, remarkably synchronised. Minnie wouldn’t row, but gave the Old Keep’s history. In the days of its old occupation it was the custom of the laird to send a man to the top of the Keep each night to call out: ‘The O’Neil of Kissack has supped; the Princes of the Earth may dine.’ ‘It was a low place,’ said Billie. ‘What pride they must have had – Minnie said – ruling crofters and paupers, in a tiny treeless town at the edge of Europe, and practising this ceremony of precedence.’

  The Reverend Vause gazed at her, waiting.

  ‘I don’t know that I can explain,’ she said, trying to reassure him, and herself. ‘I couldn’t stay there. But, I’m afraid that, without Minnie’s talk, I’ll start to shrink.’ She stared at the Reverend Vause, very earnest. ‘I couldn’t stay, and I couldn’t take anyone away with me, and I didn’t want Henry to keep me, like his conscience, in a cottage in Port Clarity.’ While she spoke Billie left her fingers in his hair, not seeing how he marvelled at this, her detatched confidence. Instead she took the measure of Mrs Wood’s garden, its cultivated acres, its deep green fathoms. ‘This is a good place,’ she said, ‘and you’re a good person.’

  The Reverend Vause promised that he wouldn’t press her, he’d give her time.

  THE FOLLOWING day, when Billie was again installed in the wicker chair in the purple corner of the garden, Mrs Wood came to her with a sewing basket and ‘a few bits and pieces’. She might as well keep her hands occupied. Billie edged a square of cambric, used a crochet hook to make rudimentary lace.

  Mrs Wood looked in on them in the late morning, indoors now – it was hot – and topped up Billie’s tasks. A pair of her evening gloves had lost one button, she said, but that only afforded her the opportunity of making a change she’d meant to anyway. Could Billie replace the round buttons with flat?

  Over lunch Mrs Wood asked Billie how she was getting on. ‘William is expected this afternoon. He will, no doubt, make claims on your attention.’

  ‘I’ll finish the gloves while he’s here,’ Billie promised. Though, she said, one shouldn’t hurry a needle through kid, which too readily tore.

  When the Reverend Vause was with her, Billie was glad of the gloves. She didn’t want to say anything more to him. She felt as though her talk had, so far, managed to make a safe way through a reef. She had mentioned Lord and Lady Hallowhulme, Minnie and Rixon Hallow, Alan Skilling, Geordie Betler and the Tegners – but she’d steered clear of that submerged rock. She answered the reverend only as politeness required. Then Mrs Wood arrived in the drawing room, where Billie and the reverend had been alone for half an hour. Mrs Wood pointedly settled with her embroidery basket on her knees. Olive followed her sister. Olive had lost a lot of ground between Billie’s sixteenth and twentieth years. Her complexion was so dingy that, until she sat with them, her expression was illegible. But Billie thought she saw Olive smirk at her brother.

  For another half hour the room was quiet, but not peaceful. It was the silence of suppression – all vulgar noise excluded, and all sound, too, including speech. Then, outside, at the front of the house, came a swelling, clattering, popping racket, succeeded by an audible flurry – the racing footfalls of a number of servants – and a door banging.

  The family sat as though stiffened by insult. No one looked at anyone else. A maid thrust her head around the door, her face radiant. It was an automobile, she said. Then the butler appeared behind her, in better order, pushed the door wide, and said that a Mrs Tannoy had come to make inquiries after Miss Paxton.

  ‘Put her in the music room,’ said Mrs Wood. And the reverend demanded of Billie, ‘Who is this person?’

  Billie cast the gloves from her, and got up so quickly she upset the sewing basket. She leapt across the spilled needles – a frost star on the carpet, time stopped with a shock. She ran to the music room. No Mr Tannoy was mentioned. Mrs Tannoy wouldn’t travel alone. Billie got to the music room a moment after the butler and the visitors. No one’s heels had cooled. The family had followed her, Mrs Wood saying, ‘Wilhelmina! You forget yourself!’ But the woman in the dusty dustcoat, veiled like a beekeeper, a woman with dark skin and a coiled white plait, turned around and laughed with pleasure as Billie hurled herself at Geordie Betler.

  ‘LONDON. LONDON like an obstacle,’ Geordie com
plained to Mrs Tannoy. They had to stop in London to rest. Mrs Tannoy said they had to be reasonable – meaning that Billie was still a convalescent. They stayed at a hotel. Billie, in a dream, and never too used to luxury – though Mrs Wood had worried – was exhausted by the long corridors and their carpet’s cardinal glory. At breakfast in the hotel dining room the small party was discreetly eyed. Meela Tannoy, wrapped in yards of rosy silk, read her newspaper at the table like a gentleman, not folded, but fully open and a barrier between herself and the others at her table. It was a pity, Meela Tannoy said, that they couldn’t stay a day longer. She’d like to see this play, Man and Superman. But Andrew had telephoned to say he was having trouble keeping his hand on Mr Hesketh.

  ‘Billie, you’re to eat that egg,’ said Geordie.

  In the train, Mrs Tannoy’s big private compartment, Billie lay in a bed that smelled of eau-de-Cologne. She heard Geordie at the door asking, ‘Is that child asleep yet?’

  ‘I believe so,’ said Meela. ‘She’s still a little febrile.’ Then Meela’s voice changed; she’d been using the voice in which she spoke to servants, ‘Everything is perfectly satisfactory, thank you.’ A beautifully modulated, clear, calm voice. Now it was warmer. ‘Don’t go yet, Geordie. We want to speak to you,’ as if someone else was present, and awake. But of course Mrs Tannoy meant her husband – they had been talking on the telephone and were of one mind. She asked what Geordie intended to do with Billie? Then she said that it seemed to her that he regarded Miss Paxton and Mr Hesketh as singular creatures of a similar sort – rare, beautiful beasts. He wanted to keep them. ‘You want to settle them somewhere peaceful to see if they’ll breed.’ Then, when Geordie made a noise of protest, ‘Come now, isn’t that what you want?’

  Geordie said he was sure he hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  THEY ARRIVED in Glasgow late, and Billie went straight to bed. It seemed to Billie that Mrs Wood’s house, in all its summer finery, rich with flowers, had been not much more than an interval between trains, one of those waiting rooms in which Billie had wilted. The Tannoys’ town house was on a sensible scale. Billie was back in clothes that were clean, and which fitted her – reunited with her first good mourning dress. She had breakfast by herself, then Geordie took her to meet Andrew Tannoy, a well-turned-out, wizened, jaundiced man. Murdo was there, too, in the room, by the window, a shape as hard for Billie to keep in focus, as shimmering, as an ice sculpture.

  Mr Tannoy spoke kindly to Billie, made her welcome. Then he looked at Meela, and both Tannoys looked at Geordie, and Geordie looked at Murdo – then Geordie and the Tannoys left the room. No one said, ‘Well, Billie, here is Mr Hesketh.’

  A clock ticked, a clock with a marble case, with a pediment and pillars, like a public building.

  Billie said to Murdo that he might as well have been invisible.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are they unwilling to have you here?’

  ‘No.’

  She crossed the room and took his hand, peered up at his face, still in its livery of bruises.

  He said he was tired of lying awake thinking about the dead. Thinking and thinking on various absences as if there was a solution to be found by thinking. It wasn’t work to which he was particularly suited. Let someone else do it.

  Billie said, ‘I want to lie down with you.’

  But they just stood there together as though it had been raining, and they were out on the heath, and everything was wet. They looked about them, at the sofa, the hearth rug and, in the shallow grate, the neatly stacked coals of a frugal summer fire. Then Murdo stooped until their foreheads touched. He said that he wanted to keep her. Then, warning her, ‘But I’m no good for anyone.’

  Billie took his face in her hands and, because she was moved, she made one of her nonsensical replies, a feint at a logical response. Her hands were meanwhile doing, in their small way, everything they knew how. She had the silky, plump cartilage of an earlobe between thumb and index finger and was stroking it. She said, like someone with poor understanding, and with no great faith in words, ‘What is good? What good is it?’

  16

  Port Clarity

  BILLIE AND Murdo lived quietly for a year on the Tannoys’ Ayrshire estate, the reserve Geordie chose for them, where Murdo would walk about on summer evenings with Tannoy’s gamekeeper, their guns carried broken over their arms and brass knuckles in their pockets. He and Billie lived in the gatehouse, and their first child was born there. When Tannoy entertained the men with whom he did business – English, French, German – he’d have ‘my Mr Hesketh’ in to listen. Murdo could speak German fluently, and French well. Tannoy would fret to Geordie, ‘If he isn’t bored, he should be! I’m going to take him up to town to that meeting I have with the men from the union.’ And Geordie would warn, ‘Just don’t use him as Lord Hallowhulme did.’

  But Tannoy was good with people, and eventually he made better use of Murdo’s qualities than Hallowhulme had. He’d refer to Murdo as ‘my secretary’ but, as one old friend of Tannoy’s confided to his butler, ‘There are people who look at Mr Hesketh more in the light of a protégé.’

  ‘They’d be mistaken, sir,’ said Betler the butler. ‘Though perhaps not mistaken in Mr Tannoy’s wishes. But Mr Hesketh doesn’t care a fig for patents on, and production of, heavy machinery. He’s Mr Tannoy’s ornamental armament, like a dress sword, polished, but still capable of doing its business.’

  It amused Murdo to go about after Tannoy, whom he enjoyed and admired. It amused him to be set to the task of quelling the people who still persisted in trying to keep Andrew Tannoy in his place – hobbled like a carriage horse, forelegs strapped to hind to shorten its stride. If Andrew was rough, if Andrew’s wife wasn’t pukka (though at least they had no children to further vex society wives with scruples about whether or not to include them in invitations to soirées designed to form marriages), still there was Tannoy’s ‘secretary,’ a minor aristocrat, who – the wives were in possession of the rumours – had actually been in the hunting lodge at Mayerling when the infamous ‘accident’ occurred. It was easy to believe, for those who saw Murdo standing behind Tannoy, blond in his favoured black, like a well-fed – thus good-humoured – Arctic bear. (For several winters he had a coat with a white fur collar and a number of rich men’s wives used the ‘bear’ code among themselves, in letters, with excitement: ‘Bear seen!’ or in disappointment: ‘Bear barely seen.’ Meela Tannoy followed all this with amusement. Meela was in possession of a lady’s maid so charming that she was always in receipt of the gossip.) Murdo was completely indifferent to his effect on women. He liked to make their husbands uncomfortable. He enjoyed it enormously. And most of all on the occasions when he sat behind Andrew at some meeting and, on the opposite side of a table – a surface of magisterial darkness – was his cousin, mute and cowed, and, behind James, the perplexed Henry Maslen. In fact, Murdo’s enjoyment of these occasions was so savage, and Murdo so disturbed afterward, that Geordie would wonder as well as worry.

  Geordie never worried about Billie. The Heskeths bought a house in Glasgow, and when Geordie was in town with the Tannoys he would visit. He spent his days off with the family, and went sometimes in the evening, too – in time to kiss Billie at the door as she rushed out to her own job, playing the piano at a cinema. He’d catch her in the hall when she was pulling on her blue velvet tam-o’-shanter, and he’d embrace both the woman and the score she carried, one of her own colour-coded scores with thumbnail sketches – washes in Indian ink – of Mary Pickford and her New York Hat, or Chaplin having trouble with a revolving table. Sometimes Geordie and Murdo would take the children to watch films, and their mother, hunched over a chase, or testing her reflexes on the turns of a sword fight – gawky, effective, engrossed – the rhythmonome moving its pointer over the score in time with the action on the screen. And on some Sunday evenings, Geordie would arrive at the Hesketh’s to find Murdo reading to the children – looking, in the firelight, like an advertisement for C
larity soap – while Billie and the musical director of the Majestic pored over the studio’s cue-sheet and argued the different merits of ‘The Dance of the Skeletons’ or ‘The Hesitation Waltz’.

  THE WAR came. Rixon Hallow was killed on the Marne at the age of twenty-six and two years out of Oxford. Minnie was at the Slade, painting peaches as faceted as cut gems. When Rixon died she left art school and went back to her mother at Port Clarity. Less than a year later Clara followed her son into the grave. It was a big funeral, big enough to absorb Geordie and Billie and Murdo. Sitting in the cathedral, Geordie had the strangest feeling that he shouldn’t be seen. Lord Hallowhulme was behaving quite unlike himself, looking at each speaker with attention, and casting his eye around the cathedral for faces – or a face. Hallowhulme found them eventually, looked for a long moment at Billie – thirty-three then and as striking as she’d been at twenty. Then he looked at Murdo. Geordie, glancing sidelong at his friend, saw Murdo shake his head, not in mockery or provocation, nor sympathy and sadness. The gesture was, ‘No, I won’t’ – not a refusal, but an agreement.

  That spring Geordie’s master died. Andrew Tannoy had helped the army – in secret – with the design and manufacture of tread, steel belts of clawed plates that wrapped around wheels. He designed the tread for earthmoving machines, but it appeared first on the first tanks. Andrew Tannoy had plotted the course of his working life. For decades he had known what he wanted to do, what to make, and what he wanted to be remembered for. He’d imagined his machines clawing out cuttings for the better, straighter roads required by automobiles. He’d imagined roads built and rivers dammed. He saw his life as a man-made lake, a reservoir of blue water behind a wall of cement. But his earthmoving machines paved the way for tanks, and he read newspaper reports of men trapped and crushed in their trenches. ‘The enemy.’ It killed him. He had a series of strokes, first losing the power to articulate his complaint: that he’d made the terrain possible for monsters. Those who loved him could see that even his capacity to feel had diminished. It wasn’t as if he was losing the world but – as Geordie said to Murdo – as if a world was being lost in him. The world. It was like watching a world end.