Willie Kemp was as tall as I remembered, with that sensible length of hair and the side whiskers that extended no further than his ears, but now I noticed the steady brown eyes and the determined thrust of the jaw and the mouth that was lost somewhere between a plea for forgiveness and a smile of acceptance.
I curtsied, “Mr Kemp,” I said, finally completing the speech I had rehearsed on the weary road from the New Town. “I have come to beg forgiveness for my unwarrantable rudeness on my last visit, and to thank you for your kindness on that occasion.”
Mr Kemp bowed in return. “I assure you, Miss Lamont, that there is nothing to forgive, and no need for thanks. I did no more than my Christian duty to a damsel in distress.” When he straightened up he seemed to be looking at me with some curiosity. “But now I must ask your forgiveness for … well, you know what for.” It was then that he turned a most appealing tinge of pink, and I laughed out loud, which was perhaps not the most diplomatic of responses when standing in front of a man one had recently seen naked.
“Mr Kemp,” I stifled my laughter, which seemed to deepen his flush from pink to crimson. “I assure you that you have no reason at all to apologise. I did knock, but then I opened the door of your house without permission, and there can be no fault laid at your door for … for whatever I saw.”
We looked at each other again, neither of us quite sure what to say, but I felt that, as a gentlewoman, it was my place to take the lead. “Shall we put such misadventures behind us and start again?”
Mr Kemp ducked his head in what I took to be graceful acknowledgement. “That would be best,” he said, and opened his door wide. “Would you care to enter? I can assure you that there are no unpleasant sights inside this time.”
“There were no unpleasant sights last time, either,” I thought, and the words were out of my mouth before I realised it. Luckily Mr Kemp either did not hear or played the gentleman and made no reply, so once again I was inside his hut and sitting by that most welcoming fire.
I had not expected ever to return to Mr Kemp's rustic abode, but once in, I was not surprised when he produced a bowl of fish and some silver cutlery that matched the brush and comb I had used on my previous visit. Perhaps he knew the thief, I thought, but the food was remarkably tasty, if simple, and the accompanying claret was of surprisingly good quality.
“So Mr Kemp,” I asked, “I have heard a number of most intriguing tales concerning your activities here. Pray tell me exactly what it is you do?”
I could not have chosen a better gambit to open a conversation. Whereas I suspected that talk of fashion or scandal or the French Wars would have left him cold, those few words opened a golden doorway that I found it nearly impossible to close. Mr Kemp's face, normally so sombre and controlled, lit up with an animation such as I had seldom seen in a man, and never in a woman, unless it was on Louise when she was discussing a new dress or a fanciful romantic encounter.
“I am an engineer,” he told me, and before I could make enquiry, he explained exactly what he engineered, and how, and with what materials, and to what end. Indeed, before that hour was completed I heard more about engineering than I ever had in my life, and far more than interested me. In saying that, it is always fascinating to listen to somebody who knows his subject, so I must have learned something.
At that period, my dears, the country was not criss-crossed with railway tracks and covered with steam powered factories as it is now. If you wanted to travel, you jumped in a coach, or rode, or used a sedan chair for shorter journeys. Some people even walked wherever they wanted to go, and the sea was covered in sail powered ships. Honestly, my dears, you can have no concept of just how many sailing vessels there were; every port, every harbour, every little creek had its quota, and if you visited the coast there was nothing to see but ships and boats of every description. The French ogre Bonaparte had tried to stop our maritime trade, but he may as well have tried to Canute the tide. But apparently this was not good enough for Mr Kemp.
“You see, Miss Lamont,” he told me, all bright eyed enthusiasm and zestful for progress, “sailing ships cannot sail against the wind!”
“I know that” I said, proud of my learning.
He ignored my youthful sarcasm. “So if the wind is in the wrong quarter, they are all stormbound, sitting idly at anchor and wasting time and money while valuable cargoes rot.”
I nodded. “That is just a fact of life,” I said. “It is something that is always with us, like the poor or lawyers.”
“Not necessarily,” Mr Kemp said, and then he was off. I have never heard a man as enthusiastic as he described his plan for creating a vessel that could sail at any time, whatever the state of wind or tide, powered entirely by steam. “Some people have tried it before,” he said, “but only ever in inland waterways, the Forth and Clyde Canal, say, but I want to see a whole fleet of seagoing steam ships.”
I listened for some time as the morning eased past. “These seagoing steam boats,” I said at last, in an attempt to stem the rush of words, “will they actually work? Will they not just catch fire?”
My question only made him more animated, if anything. He began to speak of boilers and rotating paddles and connecting rods and steam pressure and other mechanical babble that could mean nothing to any civilised person, until I finally yelled at him to stop.
“What?” He said, looking all bemused and hurt.
I eased his hurt with my most amiable smile. “I am only a woman,” I reminded, playing on my feminine wiles for probably the first time. We can all do that, you know, my dears. You will practise on your father, for what daughter cannot wind a loving father around her little finger with a smile and a wide-eyed look, but it works even better with a man who has not known you since birth. It is the best weapon in our arsenal, the coy smile, the flick of the hair, the look of bemusement when you want them to close their mouths for a few precious minutes.
It certainly worked on Willie Kemp that day, for rather than explaining every detail of his devices, he said that he would show me.
“Show me?” I must have squawked in his ear. “Do you mean that you have actually constructed one of these devilish things?”
“I most certainly have.” He looked surprised at my question, as if everybody spent their life trying to make things that worked against God's own nature.
Before I quite understood what was happening, he was conducting me to a long wooden shed that stood a few yards from his own and which was concealed from the casual walker by a hedge of brambles and such like entangling vegetation. I was glad that I had not donned my best clothes for such a visitation, but resolved never again to pretty my face before meeting Mr Willie Kemp. Not, of course, that I had any intention of doing any such thing.
Mr Kemp seemed to be trembling as he hauled open the door of this second shed, and he lit a series of lanterns that illuminated the interior most elegantly.
“Well then,” he said. “What do you think of her?”
I looked, and shook my head. It was like nothing that I had ever seen before. Indeed I suspected that nobody had ever seen the like. Sitting on a sort of wooden trestle was a weird contraption with the hull of a boat, but rather than a mast, a great cylindrical chimney, for the entire world like a top hat, thrust up to the wooden ceiling. Behind this chimney was a great metal box, apparently called a boiler, and connecting the two was a mass of pipes and levers and metal bits and pieces the function of I could only guess.
At the back of the hull was a huge wheel, with flat bits of wood set at right angles to the circumference.
“What on earth,” I began, and then I looked at Mr Kemp's face.
It was then that I fell in love with him. By now you must have guessed that was going to happen, or I would not have spent so much time on his ridiculous foibles, but it was when he looked on his creation and I saw the expression of total devotion on his face that I realised here was a man with a passion that did not begin, centre and end entirely on himself, or on hunting and
shooting. Suddenly I wanted a man to look at me with the same rapturous expression as he did with his mechanical devices, and not just any man, but this man, this dirty-fingered Willie Kemp.
Now I can hear your thoughts already, although I am probably long gone and you may never even meet me or at least in my dribbling dotage. A mechanic, you are thinking. How on earth can a gentle woman fall in love with a mechanic, how can you cross the great divide of culture and class and position and money. Well, let me tell you ladies, that when you experience love, such things do not matter; it happens, you can do nothing about it and that is that.
So I was in love. I did not quite know it yet, but the seed was well and truly planted, and all it needed was fertile soil and a decent watering of opportunity. How we would live, of course, I had no idea, for I had no intention of spending the reminder of my life in a shed beside a muddy loch. But we cannot tell the future, thank the Lord, and all things are revealed in time.
“What do you think?” Mr Kemp asked with that expression of adoration on his face, and I had not the heart to tell him that it was the most ridiculous looking contraption in God's creation.
“It's beautiful,” I said, and that was the first lie that I ever told him. Now lying is an art, dears. You must never lie about anything important, and you must never lie to hurt, but to keep a marriage or a man it is sometimes better to lie than to be brutally honest. Men are fragile things, you see, and bruise easily, so one must constantly smooth their lives with praise. I tell you these things so your own lives can be easier and you can control your own marriages, and not because I want you to lie all the time. You lie only when you must and never to your great-grandmother or she will lace you so you needs sleep on your face.
“Do you think so?”
I nodded enthusiastically, all the time wishing that I was somewhere else, to examine the plethora of mixed feelings that I had never experienced before. Love is like that also, you see, it is a powerful emotion that can sometimes be difficult to handle. Better in small doses at first, until you are used to it, and then it takes over and you are under its influence in whatever you do. There is no help for it my dears, for it as powerful a drug as religion or laudanum.
“Does it work?” I asked foolishly.
“I don't know yet,” he said, with surprising honesty for a man. You see men always exaggerate their own capabilities and attributes. They do that in every capacity, my dears, so do not be disappointed when the crucial moment arrives.
“Oh,” I said, as if I were disappointed.
“But we can try her out,” he said, and there was such excitement in his voice that I knew I could not hurt him. I also noticed, with some dismay, his use of the inclusive 'we' so I was involved in whatever he had planned.
Being quite a skilled engineer, and no mere mechanic, Mr Kemp had rigged wheels onto the wooden trestle, and had created a roadway so the whole contraption could be run from the shed into the loch. I expected there to be a great deal of huffing and muscle wrenching, but instead it ran smoothly as any custom-built coach.
Within twenty minutes Mr Kemp had opened two great doors at the loch end of the hut and had wheeled the trestle and its ugly boat into the water, where it floated in an ungainly, but apparently safe, fashion.
“There we go,” Mr Kemp grinned at me, still with that animated brightness in his eyes. “Would you care to join me?”
I would have much preferred to remain safely on land, even when the mud was again threatening to ruin my boots, but somehow I found myself clambering over the low gunwale and standing inside that weird contraption. I could feel the boat rocking from side to side, and immediately regretted my action, but of course I would not admit to my fears.
“You just sit there,” Mr Kemp said, “while I get up steam.”
There were three seats, or rather benches, set in front of that great circular wheel in the stern, that's the back end of the boat, and I perched as gently as I could in case the thing should turn over and drown us both.
Mr Kemp had no such qualms, for he bustled about with coal and shovels, lighting a fire, which seemed an immensely dangerous procedure on board a boat, and doing things with levers and rods that I did not understand then and still do not understand now. However, whatever he did must have been effective, for the engine began to make strange sounds, dirty smoke eased from the chimney, or funnel as Mr Kemp called it, the great circular wheel began to turn around and within the hour we were moving.
I gave a little scream and held onto my bonnet, but I need not have worried for I could have walked far faster than that boat sailed. The wheel or paddle wheel as it was, moved about a dozen times, just enough to propel us into the centre of the loch, and then stopped.
Mr Kemp said a very ungentlemanly word.
“Mr Kemp!” I said, pretending to be shocked but actually quite enjoying this display of genuine emotion from a man who on our first meeting had appeared so guarded.
He apologised at once for he was genuinely contrite at having sullied my innocent ears with such foul language. Men have a strange idea of women; perhaps they think we live within a glass bottle and only come out on their invitation, like some eastern genie. However, I accepted his apology and asked whatever could be the matter and why ever have we stopped? Perhaps we have reached our destination?
“Oh no,” Mr Kemp explained, quite concerned that I should be aware of every movement of his machine. “The connecting rod has disconnected.”
“Can you replace it?” I asked sweetly, while the wind played on our boat and a few passersby on Princes Street stopped to watch. I toyed with the notion of waving playfully to them, but thought it beneath the dignity of a lady.
“I can try,” Mr Kemp said, and he dived head first into his machine, clattering and banging with a variety of tools and making the very devil of a din that must surely have scared the horses for half a mile in every direction.
It took another half hour to get the boat moving again, and we both cheered when the paddle wheels began their circuits, churning up the water to a creamy brown froth and pushing the boat crab wise. Notice I said crab-wise, not forward or in reverse, for we skidded back and forth across that infernal loch all morning, with Mr Kemp tinkering with his engine and half the population of Edinburgh lining Princes Street to mock our progress. I swear that I used up my stock of patience long before noon, and I had enough of Mr Kemp's excuses and promised that “just one more turn” of some tool or another would sort out all the problems in the world.
“Mr Kemp,” I said at length, “please take me back.”
“Are you not enjoying yourself?” He seemed genuinely amazed that I was not in raptures when sitting in a freezing boat in the middle of a loch in January while half the population of Edinburgh gawped at us.
“I would rather be back on dry land,” I said, as tactfully as possible.
To give him his due, Mr Kemp did turn his boat around and returned me to the wooden trestle, and he jumped into the water without a qualm and hauled the thing back inside without asking for any assistance. Of course I watched, and when it was obvious that he was struggling I could not help but slid into the water and push the infernal thing up the ramp.
“That was how I got so wet this morning,” he told me, as the water again dripped from his face.
“I can imagine,” I replied, although I had not totally immersed myself and was wet only up to my poor knees.
He began to laugh, and I had to join in and we both stood there in that wooden shed, laughing together while the boat dripped water and a long sliver of weed was wrapped around my left leg.
“We'll have to get you warm again,” he said, “you're shivering there.”
“Yes,” I said and, leaning forward, I kissed him.
That was the first time that I ever kissed a man, save for duty kisses in the family, and it was probably the strangest experience in my life. I do not know what made me do it, save for the turmoil of emotions within me, but it surprised me nearly as much
as it did Willie Kemp.
It was not a long kiss, but pleasant, but he recoiled after just a couple of seconds, staring at me in something that I took to be horror.
“Miss Lamont,” he said, with one hand on his mouth and the other holding on to his boat for support.
“Oh my Lord,” I felt myself colour up. “Oh my Lord, Mr Kemp, I do apologise, I really do; I should not have done such a thing…”
“No,” he stepped back slightly and for a moment I wondered if he was going to walk out of the shed and into the loch in his desire to escape from such a forward miss as I was proving to be. And I had blamed Louise for such behaviour only the previous day; what a lot I understood now, and what a lot we had to talk about that night. I felt a feeling of warm affection for my misunderstood cousin.
“No,” Mr Kemp repeated. “You should not have done such a thing.” He moved slightly closer. “I should have.”
If my kiss had been only slightly more than a peck, then Mr Kemp's was something far more substantial, and far longer lasting. Without touching any part of me other than my mouth, he bent over me and kissed me soundly. I did not resist, my dears, for I wanted nothing else and nobody else. I had felt the first pangs of love before our loch voyage, but now it was confirmed. It deepened and strengthened during those few moments, or was it an hour or an eternity?
Some things are timeless, my dears, and some memories deserve to last forever, and that kiss was one such. Although only our lips met, it was if our souls merged together and we were indeed one, although there was nothing physical and no promises made or accepted.
I just knew, as simply and surely as I know that God is in heaven or the stars are far away. I had neither proof nor need of proof, I just knew, and that knowledge was so solid that nothing else was needed.
Damn you, Willie Kemp, for tying my heart in so secure a knot, and bless you, Willie Kemp, for that day on the loch. It is a treasure of a memory, one that shines in a filament of laughter, and one I needed in the days to come, as you will hear by and by, if you have read this far, my dear ones.
The Handfasters Page 6