Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  It wasn’t an ugly town, but it looked dour and unfriendly, grown up around the long notch of a fishing port. The tide was right in and the fishing vessels moored along the wall of the inner harbour had their decks less than ten feet from the quayside. Beyond the quay there were several streets of two-storey houses. On the slope above these were whitewashed cottages, all separate, with nothing between them, not even fences of stone. Stolnsay was the biggest town on the island, but looking at it Billie could see no public buildings other than churches and a post office. She knew at once what this would mean – that there would be no retreat from indoors outdoors, no gardens, shaped trees, hedgerows, garden seats, no porches even, nor enclosed lanes. No retreat outdoors from in – and indoors there’d be Edith and Henry.

  Billie had, in the two years of her sister’s marriage, so far been able to take a hat and shawl and walk away from their private moments, their private happiness. Or there were indoor retreats, the kitchen clock’s bold, definite tick, a kettle talking on the coal range, or her songbird piping away in the tiny bedroom off the kitchen, whose walls, around her zinc child’s bedstead, were papered for extra insulation with the varnished pages of the mercantile gazette. Billie thought of her retreats, and what she was in retreat from. Edith, on the settee, turning up her petticoats to pick at loose threads, a new run in the soft cotton. Edith’s expression: smug, tolerant, exclusive. And there was the soft, luxurious look Edith wore sometimes when Billie brought her up a cup of tea in the morning. Billie had often wondered whether it was embarrassment she felt, or envy. She wasn’t excluded. Henry and Edith would each take one of her arms when they went out walking together. She sat between them in church; and Henry would always make sure to set their one good lamp so its light fell, divided but equal, on Edith’s mending or Billie’s music – while he’d lounge on the floor himself reading, his back against Edith’s chair and a foot braced on the square pilaster leg of Billie’s upright piano. When Billie would pass Henry on the stairs, on her way up with tea for Edith – who was of late sick to her stomach, or sleepy and waxing full – Henry would stoop quickly, his eyes warm, to kiss Billie’s cheek, or once, her ear, his lips catching a few wispy hairs at her temple and setting her whole scalp aprickle.

  Beside the wheelhouse, on the deck of the Gustav Edda, Billie Paxton scraped her loose hair back to look at her new hometown. Her hair pushed heavily against her cocked arms and flickered around them. She caught the two uniformed youths staring at her. They appeared to consult, to egg each other on, then they came over. The boys removed their caps, but the strong wind was only able to set up a telegraphic quiver in their cropped hair. One spoke, the other merely gazed. The one who spoke had slightly protuberant pale blue eyes, but was otherwise good-looking. He was perhaps fifteen years of age. He introduced himself – Rixon Hallow, and this was his friend Elov Jansen. He said he hoped Mrs Maslen was comfortable in her cabin. Billie nodded, speechless. She felt the wind poke a cold finger through a split seam under her arm. The boy blushed. He was waiting for something. Billie realised that, as it was this party who’d given up their cabin to the Maslens when they arrived unexpected at Luag, they might expect her to acknowledge it. These boys had been obliged to walk the deck for the ten hours of the voyage. Surprised into it – and despite herself – Billie dropped into a jerky, curtailed curtsey; she bobbed, as she’d used to do to her employers when she was briefly in service. She resented this, that she’d been reminded to show gratitude, found ungrateful, or hesitant – again.

  ‘Mr Hesketh says he’ll send your shawl on to you once it has been laundered,’ said Rixon Hallow. He was still blushing.

  ‘Thank you.’ Billie excused herself, said she must go help her sister get dressed.

  The engines had slowed. The ship was making not for the deep, sheltered water within the harbour proper, but for a berth at the sea side of the longest pier. Billie saw that the pier had been constructed as a causeway to a much older castle, a small fortress really, on what must once have been an island of rock. Nearer to, the fortress showed dilapidated, its lower walls thick with salt scum, its unglazed windows protected by bars in the form of rusty iron arrowheads.

  Billie walked between the boys before they had replaced their caps. She ducked her head and darted around the wheelhouse, watched only her step, her hand on the rope rail along the wheelhouse wall. The sea was quiet enough now for her to hear the ash smuts from the ship’s smokestack drop hissing into the waves. She glanced toward the sound and saw the water, clear and almost grass green over stretches of sand between rocks maybe thirty feet down. The sea turned grey again over the rocks, but green was the true colour of its dense transparency. The ship was backing its propellers and Billie saw wind-pushed wavelets crisscrossed by smaller wrinkles, water disturbed by the engine, the cross-hatching a border between natural wind-driven, and unnatural, submarine turbulence. Perhaps because of its colour, or its texture – this novel sign of engine’s muscle moving water’s weight – the sea suddenly seemed strange to Billie, as it hadn’t since she was a small child.

  Henry met her at the hatch. He said he’d been sent to fetch her. Edith had told him Billie had the buttonhook. Then he said, ‘Look at our new home.’

  ‘I looked.’

  He touched her cheek. ‘You must be tired, dear. And cold. Have you been up here without your shawl?’ His hand was warm. Billie tilted her face momentarily into his cupped palm. Then she went by him and let herself down the ladder into the gloomy passage.

  Edith was upright on her bunk, with her face clean, and an unpinned hat perched on her damp hair. Her feet were in her shoes but unfastened. The cabin stank of vomit, sweat, and distress. Billie crouched at her sister’s feet and got the buttonhook from the bag at her belt and began to prise the kid-covered buttons through their stretched holes. Edith’s feet were swollen, were fat and tender to the touch. ‘Please God don’t let me have to spend the rest of my time lying down,’ Edith said. ‘I’m afraid they’ll have to carry me off the ship. What an embarrassment.’

  ‘It’s Lord Hallowhulme’s cousin whose cabin we’ve taken,’ Billie said. ‘There will a carriage for them, surely.’

  ‘But we were expected at Southport, Billie,’ Edith said. ‘On Thursday.’

  ‘I mean, we can take their carriage as well as their cabin.’

  Edith smiled. She drew her foot away from her sister’s hands. ‘Leave it a little undone at the ankle, or I’ll be crippled. My feet are all pins and needles.’ Edith showed no sign of moving. She said she’d wait till the ship was at a complete stop.

  Billie went to find Henry. She was concerned that they would have to carry Edith between them. Henry met her under the hatchway, and they paused in the now-motionless square of light by the foot of the ladder. Henry said that the sailors who had carried his writing case, microscope, and leaf press onto the ship could be trusted to carry his burdened wife. He took Billie’s hands and told her to stop fretting. ‘It’s unlike you.’

  The Gustav Edda quivered as its anchor chain played out.

  ‘You must compose yourself a little,’ Henry said. ‘I think I saw Hallowhulme himself on the pier. Waiting for us. Wearing a frown.’

  ‘He’s waiting for his cousin and the boys in uniform,’ Billie said. And then she burst into tears. ‘The water looks so cold,’ she sobbed. ‘And where are the trees?’

  Henry tried to make her raise her face. He pressed her shoulders softly back against the timber wall, then touched her chin. ‘Love?’ he said. ‘My poor girl.’ He cleared a tear away to kiss her gently under one eye.

  Billie turned her head so that their lips brushed. Henry started back, a fraction of an inch, broke contact. They exhaled together, and their breath mingled and encased their faces, warm and moist like summer in the south. Henry stared at her, his face pale and shining, then moved nearer again. He touched his mouth to hers, parted his lips, and something passed from his mouth to hers.

  The mooring lines were made fast. Billie heard
– registered hearing – an order about the gangplank. She pulled away from her brother-in-law, shoved him aside, and swarmed up the ladder. She stepped once on her own hem, fell into the opened hatch cover, and heard stitches part. Henry caught her ankle. At his touch Billie felt a crippling spasm somewhere inside her. She jerked her foot free and stumbled onto the deck, her legs clumsy, the space between them filled as if something there had swollen to twice its normal size.

  The cold wind burned her face.

  Billie plunged through the four gentlemen. One of the cadets staggered, his cap fell and rolled on its brim. A hand caught at her arm – Hesketh, incensed, and implacable. She threw her whole weight back to break his grip, and fell on her hip, sucked air and a whiff of the tar between the timbers on the deck, then sprang up again and ran.

  She made for the gangplank, which two seamen at the rail were still guiding into place. The plank’s far end was yet clear of the stones, a foot both ways, a foot beyond, a foot above. Billie wanted to get off the ship. She wanted to get off the shore, too, Henry’s ‘home’, a town without trees or fences. She wanted to jump as if the ship and shore were both stepping-stones with some firmer place beyond them, some viable future. Billie vaulted up between the men, then past them. Her feet came down neatly in the centre of the gangplank – and the men dropped it. For a second it hung on its hinges as the Gustav Edda edged by stately inches toward the pier, then Billie leapt again, the gangplank depressed and tilted, a hinge broke, and the plank’s end jammed against the lip of the stone pier. The whole thing splintered. But it was behind Billie already, the plank, the shouting men – the stone was only inches under her feet. She gathered herself to land and to run some more.

  Then, instead of arriving, touching down, or being snatched back, Billie felt a hard blow. Some force shoved at her whole body. Her hair flew in front of her face, her legs jerked wide, and she flipped over, flew forward, eyes wide-open. She saw the pier, its slabs of green-grey stone abruptly beneath her head. She glimpsed splinters of white-painted wood, pieces of the gangplank, passing under her inverted crown, pushed across the stone faster than she’d ever seen thrown daisies sucked under the weir at Crickhowell. Then she saw rope webbing and jute-covered bales beneath her, and she put out her arms and fell into them.

  BILLIE LIFTED her face from the pallet of musty hemp. Her left ear was ringing, but into her right ear rushed the sound of the sea. The sea was filling her head, and was screaming like steel on stone. Billie looked back, and saw the funnel of the ship, its black barrel trained right at her. It spat out a cloud of smoke and burning embers. She felt two dozen light touches, then lancing pain. She scrambled up – she’d lost a shoe – shook her hair and clothes, shook off the coals before they caught. She couldn’t walk straight, but crawled and clambered out of the smoke.

  The next thing Billie saw was a woman in a red cap, her mouth stretched wide. The woman was standing, shouting, but – Billie thought – not putting out much sound. The woman was looking at the bulk of an overturned carriage, two horses down and struggling in tangled harness. They were squealing with pain and fright. The noise was appalling. But it was worse seaward. Billie watched as the Gustav Edda’s stack impacted on the pier and collapsed. It unrolled like a collar that had popped its stud, then it was dragged out of sight. A cloud of steam came up, ragged and dissolving fast in the wind, a kind of quick smoke. Through the steam Billie glimpsed an impossibility – the ship drifting backward from the wharf propelled by the water boiling in its stack. She saw a mooring line snap at the pier and recoil to flick a figure off the perpendicular starboard deck. The port deck was underwater, the ship rolling over at its berth, water boiling around it and flooded with jets of fire. There were people in the sea. And there were people hoisting themselves over the starboard rail and onto the gleaming side of the ship. Billie watched as two seamen clambered, slithering, toward the bow, and then slid into the sea and struck away from the rolling hull as fast as they were able to swim. Fishermen were running to their boats, but these were on the harbour side of the pier. The pier was solid stone and couldn’t be passed under.

  There was a group of men on the ship’s flank. They struggled to keep their hold on the steel, but the ship was still rolling. The man in the astrakhan coat, Mr Hesketh, turned against the slope and pushed the two boys up it before him. Their feet made catches in the smooth slick of water running on the hull. He paused, straddled the keel, and put a hand back to his servant. Shouts rose above the howling of steel and a horrid roar of water filling the ship – a roar that rose in tone as water displaced air. The Gustav Edda shuddered. It shook Hesketh’s servant off into the water and then began to roll, serenely at first, then with a sudden rush, down upon him. Hesketh, still dry in his beautiful coat, leaned into the roll, after his man, for only a moment, looked into the churning sea as his man was ploughed under it, then flung himself the other way, tumbling down the far slope of the hull even as it was reversing its aspect. Billie didn’t see where he landed. She couldn’t see Henry at all. She just watched as the ship spun right-way up for a moment, its deck swamped and white water rushing out of its galley and wheelhouse. It seesawed briefly, then plunged into a roll again and pushed its way down into the sea, with an awful muffled roar, giving up air at every aperture, air whitening the water, and steam whitening the air.

  The small boats that had rounded the long pier made quickly for the spot, and the quickest had to stand off out of the suction and explosions of flotsam. They circled, and men with gaffs pulled people from the water, some bodies lively, and some limp. There was a crowd on the wharf. No one seemed to know who was in charge, but things began to happen, things that looked like order and action, succour and good. Billie stood and stared. Something pulled at her neck and hair – blood, drying already. Her unshod foot was very cold. She limped to the pier’s edge and looked down at the boiling sea. There was less air to escape now, and the water was slowly coming clear. The black side of the ship was perhaps only ten feet under. It was still alive, exhaling.

  Billie waited for something else to come up.

  Then someone clasped her and drew her back, a woman whose hands smelled of fresh herring, and who wrapped Billie in her own harsh woven wool shawl, and gargled at her soothingly in an unknown language. Other women came to help, and they made to lift Billie between them. Billie tried to free herself. She said her sister’s name. Then that name was the only thing in her universe – her whole life collapsed into her cry – it was all she could recognise. ‘Capital E,’ Edith had said, ‘is always easy to recognise. It looks like the head of a garden rake.’ And she wrote, on Billie’s slate: ‘Edith.’

  ‘Edith!’ Billie screamed. ‘Edith! Edith!’

  2

  Stolnsay

  MURDO HESKETH wasn’t capable. They skinned him before lifting him. They left his sodden coat like a skin in the bottom of the boat and carried him into the shelter of some wool bales, out of the wind. There weren’t enough blankets, although even from the shelter, and with only one ear, Murdo thought he could hear a sound very like stones pouring down a wooden sluice – people in pattens hurrying down the stone streets of Stolnsay to the harbour to help. A herring-boat man at Murdo’s side used his knife to slit a wool bale open, then pulled greasy fleeces out to tuck around Murdo and Rixon, his cousin’s son. The man worked tenderly and, despite the cold, Murdo felt himself catch fire, a half-drowned man in a nest of fleece like a coal in dry moss. Kindness often enraged him. But this was an impartial kindness, it was purely circumstantial.

  Murdo couldn’t move his jaw or hold the cup they offered him. Young Rixon Hallow was better off, shivering hugely, slopping his tea, but able to speak. He said that his friend Elov had come ashore in the herring boat with him and was alive. He said it several times, but, ‘Where is he?’

  A woman with bare forearms glistening with fish scales was trying to get tea into Murdo’s mouth. Murdo realised that he was reading Rixon’s lips and that the rattling of pattens on c
obbles had blended into a high-pitched squeal in his one good ear. He pushed the mug aside and demanded that the woman help him up. She and Rixon reared back. Murdo was shouting. The woman compressed her lips, but did as he asked. Rixon, mistaking Murdo’s intentions, stood too. The boy probably imagined Murdo meant to find Elov Jansen.

  The girl with the beautiful hair had leapt from ship to shore only a second before the explosion. She’d blundered past them, white with fear, picked up her skirts, and jumped. Murdo tried to catch her – because, in careering past, she’d winded him, shoved her sharp, insolent elbow into his ribs. He had staggered, snatched at her, then watched her do something wild as if desperate to escape great danger. Then there was a thud, and the deck twitched and rose. It was an explosion in the hold of the ship, on the side against the pier. Murdo had felt hot air push his face and saw it lift the sailors who had been fumbling after the unhinged, overburdened gangplank. It blew them over backward with bloodied faces. Rixon’s cap flew off, then the deck began to tilt down toward the large hewn stones of the pier.

  Murdo, half-deaf, his strength broken by shuddering, grabbed the arm of a passing man. He asked – shouted – ‘Where is the girl? The one who jumped?’

  The man shook his head.

  Rixon peeled off – he’d seen Elov. His young face quivered, smiled, then collapsed. Still susceptible to reprieve, the boy burst into tears and cast himself at his friend. The bloody-nosed cadets squeezed each other till water started out of the thick cloth of their uniforms. Murdo trudged on. He yelled his question, till finally, to his great relief, he came on Rory Skilling, who was on his knees by a half-drowned sailor. Rory Skilling worked for Lord Hallowhulme but was under Murdo’s management. Rory sprang up smartly to hear what his manager wanted. He listened, his neck braced with his hand, and made a few timid dampening signs until Murdo dropped his voice. ‘I can’t hear myself,’ Murdo said, deafly. His ears popped and whistled.