Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  Murdo said this, Ian wrote, then saw Ian’s surprise. ‘Don’t mistake me,’ Murdo said, ‘James was always – is still – a good match. A well-bred, honourable, conscientious man. But Clara had many admirers. Male admirers, and female imitators – valiantly loyal friends. Clara was restless and venturesome and changeable. How could James fully appreciate her? A man who minds so much that doors are either firmly shut or fully open! I see now that James couldn’t. That he only differentiates the people around him by ideas he has about people. They’re all beads sorted by size in a tray. Valuable to him in all their types and classes. Clara loved to astonish – and she married someone to whom she couldn’t ever be sure she’d appear as herself, or be heard as herself.’ Murdo said to Ian that he now understood that, when Ingrid was four, and Clara visited her mother, she’d really come to complain about James. ‘My aunt failed to follow Clara’s meaning. James wasn’t hard-hearted, he was only impervious – and it was churlish and girlish of Clara to object to a fault that was certainly also a virtue in a millionaire.’

  Geordie put the letters back in his pockets, pulled up his sock, and went on toward Kiss.

  AT TWO Geordie reported for the fitting of his false beard. The ballroom was partway through its transformation. Its stage, the foot-high orchestra dais, as yet had no curtains. These were being made, and Geordie took his seat beside long swathes of stiff blue cotton bunting, on which Billie knelt plying a paste brush and tinsel stars.

  While the Tegner twins adjusted the gauze and glue and hair on Geordie’s face he read the programme – typed by Minnie on Gutthorm’s machine. Fortune and the Four Winds: A cautionary comedy, by G B Shaw. There was a cast list in which the Patriarch was described as ‘a social experimenter’ and – like a dictionary’s secondary meaning of a word – a ‘serious positive character’.

  The Tegner twins were giggling. Geordie said his beard must not be ridiculous. Anne held a mirror before his face. There he was, an illusion dependent on poor illumination. With a beard he seemed more a gentleman than a gentleman’s gentleman.

  Minnie and Rixon were inspecting an arrangement of black screens at the back of the stage. It was from these the fake walls would fall – lengths of real wallpaper, some with washes of watercolour to form fake shadows and angles. The exits were in the obvious places, two hinged pasteboard doors, but there was also a trick exit. ‘If only we had a trapdoor!’ Minnie lamented.

  Rixon said she was getting above herself. This wasn’t a theatre. ‘And if you hope to suggest the Patriarch has a spooky way of coming and going without being immediately noticed, you can’t do it by the deployment of a device traditionally reserved for devils, ghosts, and witches. Minnie, it’s only the other characters who should fail to notice that he’s appeared and is listening to them. The audience has to see him listening.’

  Geordie remarked that, since he had his cues by heart, he wished they would settle their ideas. Then he saw that everyone had stopped what they were about. Billie got up. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘I lost track of the time.’

  Clara was waiting for her at the ballroom door.

  CLARA TOOK Billie to the cottage Lord Hallowhulme had supplied for his cataloguer and family. Under the circumstances, Clara thought Billie should look over the house and its furnishings before Henry. After all, the house was more Billie’s business. She should examine it, see what alterations were required. They had the rest of the summer to get it up to scratch, Clara said.

  The cottage was whitewashed brick, and stood alone one street up from the harbour. Its front rooms faced south. The parlour was papered in a simple blocked floral pattern. The kitchen had a timber floor and pump indoors over a copper-lined scullery sink. The bedrooms were upstairs, and both had gabled windows that looked out into the trees on the Nose, a belt of green in which an odd whitened snag showed, and then hid.

  Clara reached past Billie to open a window. She did this as she did everything – stately, deliberate. But Billie could scarcely feel the woman behind her. Clara stood close only to manage the window’s catch, but did so without imposition. Her presence lacked palpable intent, or warmth, or impetus, so that Billie felt that Clara was more shade than person, more ghostly than the woman whose house the cottage really was.

  Clara said that, as Lord Hallowhulme hoped, Henry’s first task looked set to last him through the winter. The family always left Kiss in late August – though James was back in October for the shooting, and often came at Christmas, too. Kiss wasn’t closed up, but ran on a reduced staff and, Clara said, she and Lord Hallowhulme were sure Mr Maslen and Miss Paxton would be more comfortable here. The cottage was cosier than the castle, more suitable, and nearer the estimable Mrs Mulberry …

  Winter in Stolnsay. Billie would put seed in the garden beds she’d glimpsed out back and lay straw over the soil, to keep it warm. She’d done it before, in Crickhowell. She’d watched frost scab a seedbed before. But the snow here would fall thicker than she’d ever seen. She imagined it, the white cottage fastened by snow, mortared in its place. For the last few weeks Billie had sat at her piano, watching Minnie’s play, and had felt entitled to play herself. But she wasn’t Minnie, or Ailsa and Anne – she was neither host nor houseguest. And Billie remembered how, that morning, when dressing Alan in his footman’s finery, his stuck-on, tufty muttonchops, Minnie had said, ‘Alan will just have to do.’ Alan would do. Billie would do – and then she’d be done with. Autumn would find her in the cottage, Edith’s sister in Edith’s place.

  She wondered, did Lady Hallowhulme assume that she and Henry would marry? It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption – it happened all the time, that a woman took charge of a sister’s widower, usually ‘for the sake of the children’. But surely, without children, wasn’t it a little improper for Billie to set up house with Henry – Edith’s sister in Edith’s place?

  Billie had never wanted that, and she wasn’t sure now that she had ever really wanted Henry. She wondered: what were her feelings for Henry? She hadn’t loved him like a brother, or like her sister’s husband. She’d loved Henry as Edith had, persuaded by Edith’s love. Billie’s love began in her empathy with Edith, and continued in her envy. These were, after all, the most intimate ways people had of living other lives, of walking in other shoes – empathy and envy.

  Billie brought Henry to mind – Henry on the mend and on the move, active, radiating heat. She had the oddest feeling, as if both she and Edith had Henry before them, he making a reasonable appeal for the affection that was his due, that he’d done nothing to lose. But Billie and her sister were suddenly out of Henry’s scale – Edith was too big, swollen with something, her own death like an undelivered child. And Billie had lost ten years of her own life, she was the Wilhelmina Paxton who’d stood beside her father’s coffin, wiping her nose on her sleeve. This Billie wasn’t a proper companion for Henry. This Billie’s only proper companion, it seemed, was the person she was happiest with, a person her own age, ten-year-old Alan Skilling.

  MINNIE HAD left a handful of programmes on the hall table, and, an hour before dinner, Lord Hallowhulme, his interest piqued, paid a visit to the theatre. As far as he was able to see, the ballroom was empty. Minnie and the twins were out gathering heather with which to make a skirt to hide the base of the stage. The boys were playing cricket. And Alan was foraging at the gatehouse table – if he didn’t coincide with dinner they kept nothing back for him.

  Lord Hallowhulme arrived with Henry, who was looking for Billie. And Billie saw them, through the overlapping walls of black gauze that formed Minnie’s optically elusive exit. Billie had come in to try it out and had, for the umpteenth time, just stepped out of sight of her reflection in a full-length mirror which Minnie and Rixon had carried down from Minnie’s dressing room in order to test their effects. The light was right and Billie was invisible to the men, although she could see them.

  Lord Hallowhulme was reading Minnie’s conniving programme notes. He said he wasn’t usually a man for plays. To h
im a play sometimes seemed just so much polite conversation. ‘A demonstration of what society is prepared to accept in terms of intimacy and interaction. And yet no play I’ve seen has managed to provide a practical blueprint or procedure for that kind of unexceptional talk.’ He mused, then said, ‘I’ve tried to protect my children’s integrity of character, Mr Maslen, by periodically removing them from fashionable society. But my daughter, following instincts that are deeply ingrained in her sex, re-creates fashionable society – or at least its diversions – here, on the island.’

  Henry said that although the starry theatre curtains certainly looked the part of parlour theatricals, the play itself sounded rather less conventional. He paused to examine the angled lid of the piano. He touched its highly polished surface, frowned, tapped his fingertips together, testing tackiness, not dust. Billie had forgotten to wipe her hands when she went from paste pot to keyboard. She had rested her hand, hot, insulated by spilled glue, on the piano’s black ice. In her hiding place, Billie put her hand back to touch the taut edge of the gauze behind her and her fingertips, feathered with flaking glue, caught on the cloth. She wondered would she be seen if she moved, if she wove her way into a thicker weight of fake shadow.

  ‘Yes. Unconventional,’ Lord Hallowhulme said. ‘I’ve already recognised Mr Shaw as a dramatist with a coordinated philosophy and some constructive ideas.’

  Henry read out the scenes, in order. ‘A train, second-class coach. A drawing room. A heath. A hearth,’ then, quietly, ‘Heaven.’

  Billie, who had the play by heart, all its cues, all its lines, knew there was no scene in Heaven. She wanted to step out and take Henry’s hand. She saw herself do it, and what she would see if she did, Henry’s warm brown eyes across a short space of quiet air. Instead she made herself less visible by slowly raising a hand to gather her hair at her nape and draw the mass of it behind her body. There was a perceptible dimming in the reflected light about her face and she could see more clearly.

  Lord Hallowhulme, inspecting Minnie’s footlights, candles in halved tin cans, came closer to the stage. He glanced up and saw Billie. She didn’t move, but kept her hand behind her head, elbow cocked, like a marble caryatid. He, too, was still, staring at her. Then he put his hand up to his mouth – and for a moment Billie thought he’d do something gallant, perhaps kiss his hand at her, but instead she saw him biting a knuckle, his nose wrinkled, his eyes squeezed into slits.

  On the far side of the room Henry chuckled. He held up a sheet of newspaper and peered through foot-shaped stencil holes. Then his attention was caught by a headline, or the caption of an illustration. He picked up the remainder of the sheets – just scrap paper to the illiterate Billie – folded them and tucked them under his arm. He said they’d know soon enough what kind of play it was. He only hoped the vapour in the glue would be gone from the room by tomorrow night.

  IN A warehouse in Oban, Murdo found James’s automobile, or rather its replacement. A two-cylinder, chain-driven Panhard et Levassor. It had high wheels for the island’s poor roads, spoked yellow wheels, a single Ducellier headlamp, and cream leather-buttoned upholstery with removable flat leather seat cushions sans buttons.

  The man who let Murdo into the warehouse was an agent of the shipping company that had transported the first vehicle, James’s factory fittings, and telephone equipment.

  The man opened an office and showed Murdo his manifest book. The relevant page – Lord Hallowhulme’s component of the Gustav Edda’s cargo – gave Murdo no new information. He left it open on the desk, and he and the agent gravitated back to the car. It was a wonderful object, with its multijointed radiator and green-painted steel – a glistening insectile thing.

  ‘Have you ever taken one out?’ the agent asked.

  Murdo shook his head.

  The agent had, and offered pointers. He’d sprained his wrist on a crank handle. You had to be very careful about that. Murdo had seen a car cranked, but hadn’t been at leisure to ask about it. The agent was happy to tell him. The crank turned the engine over. ‘Then it sparks. The fuel and air ignite in the cylinders, and the pistons jump.’ The man thrust his hands into his pants pockets, rose on his toes. ‘When I first saw an automobile I thought, erroneously, that it was like cranking a phone. But when you crank a phone you send a small electrical charge down the wire.’

  The agent jiggled his hands and jingled his coins. Light shivered on his silver watch chain, a visual equivalent of a thin, tittering laugh. Murdo felt encircled, softly touched and coaxed by all the instruments and artefacts in the warehouse. He focused on the crank, an object named for its shape, its angle – crank, crooked, a crevice, a caprice.

  Might not a small electrical charge have the same effect upon explosives as fire delivered by a fuse?

  GEORDIE, IN bed and propped up by pillows, surrounded by the crackling mass of Ian’s letters, had discovered why he’d not remembered what Ian had first said about Ingrid Hallow – Ian scarcely ever mentioned her. Ingrid was merely ‘well-bred’ and ‘something of a beauty’. She was tall but had a way of ducking her head and looking up under her brows calculated to make everyone feel they towered over her. In Minnie’s Twelfth Night Ingrid played a passable Olivia. (Minnie, on the other hand, was a spirited Viola – ‘But,’ Ian wrote, ‘from the start she tended to render Viola’s speeches in a way that emphasised their full philosophical reverberations. She asked, “What country, friend, is this?” and I found myself looking at Lord Hallowhulme.’)

  It wasn’t until Geordie reached the letter written the day after the drowning that he felt – regarding Ingrid Hallow – he was back in the company of the brother he knew, the sympathetic, fully alert Ian. He read, he followed his brother’s painstaking reasoning, as Ian tried to work out what had happened. Why was Ingrid at Scouse Beach alone? How did she get into the water?

  There was scarcely a mark on her body. She was found only a few hours after she drowned, rolled up onto the smooth beach and left by a retreating tide. The people who found her saw no bruises or abrasions. She hadn’t slipped from a rock and knocked herself silly. She hadn’t struggled; all her buttons were still fastened. They found her shoes above the high-tide mark. She’d been paddling, perhaps.

  Lord Hallowhulme called in a coroner from Edinburgh. Clara’s maid, Jenny, said to Ian, ‘He wants to know whether Miss Ingrid suffered.’ But other servants were already talking about suicide. Ingrid had been on the beach earlier in the day – had accompanied her brother and her father, his cousin, and an engineer, to the spit at the end of Scouse Beach. She’d asked to come for the exercise. They let her help hammer in some boundary pegs – Lord Hallowhulme planned to build a factory at Scouse. He had some scheme, some process to extract a perfect food from seaweed. The men were there about men’s business, and Rixon had taken to following Mr Hesketh. Ingrid’s presence was odd, unlikely. The party returned to the castle for lunch. For some reason Ingrid went back. The cook told Ian that Miss Ingrid hadn’t dined with the family – she’d not felt well, and Lady Hallow had a syllabub sent up to her. ‘My syllabub,’ the cook said. ‘Lemon, cream, sugar, and Madeira whipped to a froth.’

  ‘The recipe is now enshrined in the cook’s mind,’ Ian wrote, ‘and is what she always tenders in talk about poor Miss Ingrid, like a newspaper account of a condemned man’s last meal.’ The syllabub was returned uneaten – the cook’s previously infallible temptation to invalids. Ian wrote, ‘The cook implies that, after rejecting her syllabub, Ingrid’s obvious next step was to renounce living.’ Lady Hallowhulme was concerned about her daughter – Ian wrote – and had looked in on Ingrid after lunch. Nothing further was known, not when Ingrid left the castle, nor how she reached the beach. ‘Mr Hesketh says she walked,’ Ian wrote. ‘But I will not ask him what he and his cousin James and the boy Rixon have probably all been asked: “Did anything occur that morning to upset her?” We all assume someone hurt her, and Lord Hallowhulme then compounded the gossip by sending to Edinburgh for a coroner.’
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br />   The more audible talk was all of the perils of bathing on a full belly, or fatigue and an empty one. ‘Mr Hesketh doesn’t say anything. I wasn’t with him that day. I was plying my iron over his shirts, about which he’s so particular, and for the sake of which I’ve incurred the hostility of the laundress.

  ‘Mr Hesketh doesn’t say a thing,’ Ian wrote. ‘He doesn’t speculate. Everyone else does. I went into town the other day and talked to a man I know – Duncan Macleod – he told me that Ingrid Hallow’s shoes were found just above the heap of charcoal where Mr Hesketh had made a fire for tea that morning. When I asked Mr Hesketh if this was true – that she’d left her shoes right where she’d had tea that same morning – he told me that Ingrid fetched driftwood for him when he built the fire.

  ‘I can almost see them, Geordie, Mr Hesketh putting up a fine fretwork of dried black seaweed over balled newspaper, taking wax matches out of the flat silver box in which he carries them. Ingrid is busy, her hands are full. Is she unhappy? If she’s so very unhappy, why is she helping Mr Hesketh build a fire, why isn’t she at home with her head rested on her mother’s knee?’