Billie's Kiss (11 page)

‘Miss Paxton,' Lady Hallowhulme began. Then she paused, frowning, as her husband crossed the room and pushed one window wide.

The doctor was with Henry, Henry's wrist limp in his hand, checking Henry's pulse against the circuit of his watch's second hand. Because he was figuring he ignored their entry, their precipitation.

‘Miss Paxton – we have another room ready for you. This really isn't at all satisfactory –' Clara began, and gestured at the mashed cocoon of white silk quilts that was Billie's nest on the daybed. Lord Hallowhulme, by the window, put his hands down into the cushiony billows and stood absorbed.

‘James,' said Clara, sharply.

The doctor replaced Henry's hand under the covers. ‘Miss Paxton,' he said, ‘it's my opinion that you haven't the stamina to be a sick nurse. You've suffered a terrible shock. You're
entitled to care yourself, and to rest.'

‘You must trust us a little more, Wilhelmina,' said Clara.

‘Billie,' Billie corrected her.

James Hallow withdrew his hand from the bedding and looked up at her. ‘Billie,' he said, ‘The doctor and my wife are quite right. Mr Maslen will be better off in the care of a
round-the
-clock, trained nurse. I have acquired that nurse. I propose you come downstairs and meet that nurse. You are
reduced
, dear girl. And you are my guest, not a refugee.'

Minnie Hallow barged, panting, into the sickroom. The door
was
open after all. She skidded to a stop, her heavy black skirts catching up with her and carrying on, swinging forward under their own momentum then settling with a rush that was like her breathing. Minnie glared at her father. She'd been deceived by the open door perhaps and hadn't thought to find him there. ‘I just wanted to say –' she began.

‘Minnie! Moderate your voice!' her mother chided.

‘Minnie, are you aware that it isn't advisable to enter the room of a sick person in a violent perspiration? The moment your body cools it will absorb the sickness.' James Hallow delivered this little rebuke in a mild, toneless voice.

‘Oh, I'm going directly.' Minnie was impatient.

‘What did you come about?' her mother asked.

‘Never mind,' said Minnie. She glanced at her father, then frowned at her mother.

‘Minnie,' said Lord Hallowhulme, ‘could you please show Miss Paxton to her room?'

Clara touched Billie's arm and said she'd send Jenny along to see if there was anything else Billie required.

Billie stooped over the bed and kissed Henry's forehead. She whispered to him that they were taking her away from him. There was sun in the room, and his skin glistened, dewy and yielding.

When she stood back up Billie felt time start. It was as though she jumped from something in motion onto something
firm, from a ship onto the pier. Time was starting again for her – or, at least, a period of time in which certain things would happen, like the twelve days and nights of Christmas, a time
apart
,
but with events in sequence. After the sequestered timelessness of the sickroom, the thought of
events
made Billie dizzy – motion sick.

She heard Minnie say to her parents, ‘I
do
know which room you mean.' Reproachful. The girl came up to Billie and took her arm. ‘Come along, Miss Paxton.'

The passage was intersected by one of those strange short flights of steps, four down then up again, where two passages met and one cut through the other like a dried streambed. They turned a corner, and there was a view of the water from the window at the end of the hall. Minnie walked with her head inclined, so that all Billie could see was the back of her thin neck and the knuckly ridge of her cervical vertebrae. Minnie was slight, slope-shouldered, and had her father's frizzy mid-brown hair – Minnie's was pinned into a beaded snood. Billie heard her say, ‘After all – they already have you in her shoes.'

Billie's new room was redolent with fresh beeswax polish. Stacked coal glowed in the shallow grate. The fireguard wasn't yet replaced, and the water in a glass ewer was still moving, seesawing faintly. Whoever had made the room ready had only just left it. The bed was made, the wardrobe open and empty, the mantelpiece without ornament but dressed in a red velvet drape, with scalloped edges embroidered with swans made of mother-of-pearl, and lilies and bulrushes of silk. Only one thing in the room seemed stale, and that was a shawl, once very fine, now a withered skin of yellow silk draped across the glass of a full-length mirror on the far side of the room.

Minnie strode over and pulled the shawl from the glass. A plume of dust hung in the air between fabric and mirror. Minnie went out past Billie, pausing to smile, a knowing,
clever smile. She was fingering the embroidery along the shawl's hem – once red roses in bud, and daisies with yellow hearts, now scabs of faded silk in the shape of flowers. ‘I do hope you'll be comfortable,' Minnie Hallow said.

6

Billie Is Examined Again

B
ILLIE, IN tears, sitting on a chair in the passage outside the sickroom, was only consoled by the familiar sight of the toes of her own boots peeping out from under the hem of her own grey wool dress. The doctor and Lady Hallowhulme had just left her, Lady Hallowhulme to see the doctor out herself, to hand him his hat and have a private word. He'd made a point of reassuring the patient's
sister-in
-law that the patient was making progress. Perhaps Clara meant to ask what Billie hadn't – was Henry making the
expected
progress? He hadn't come back to himself, not far enough fully to understand his loss. The night before, when Billie arrived in his room, she found him awake, his face relaxed under a condensation of sweat. She took his hand, and he asked her, ‘Is Edith dead?' Then, to account for his question, ‘She hasn't been here.' Billie nodded – he echoed her nod and turned his face away, his cheeks drying, tearless. But in the morning the fever was back, and he was asking again for Edith.

How many more times would Billie have to break the bad news?

She dried her eyes. She found she was looking down at someone else's shoes, their toes pointed toward her own. It was Minnie Hallow, standing over her with an expression of pitched determination. ‘I think you need to go out and get some air,' the girl said. ‘You need to avoid all those endless directions about where to stand – between the invalid and
window, or window and fire, or the invalid and the fire – you must be worn-out.'

Finding herself with a representative of the family, Billie said what she had forgotten to say to Lady Hallowhulme. ‘My room is very comfortable, thank you.'

‘Oh, hell!' said Minnie, then, coaxing, ‘Anne Tegner and I are going out. My boy will drive. I suppose I should call him “my odd man” – Alan Skilling. Anyway – you should come with us. You can simply sit on a hillside for an hour or two and think of nothing.'

Billie got up.

‘You'll need a wrap,' said Minnie, trailing after Billie, who was going to her room to shut herself in, away from invitations and kindness and this girl's clear, well-bred voice. But they reached the room together, and Billie couldn't bring herself to close the door in Minnie's face. She collected a shawl – one of her own, washed and dried but faded a little where salt water had collected in its folds.

In the driveway a low trap was harnessed to a short-legged, broad-backed, hairy pony. The driver was a spindly boy whose skin, hair, and eyes were all the shade of brown sugar, and whose nose was like a round bead sewn in under his skin. His shirt was too big and frayed at collar and cuffs; both shirt and skinny torso were forced together into a jacket made for a child several sizes smaller. He had the reins wrapped around his fist and raised tight, as if he thought his little horse was skittish. But the pony and cart remained motionless, even when the boy wriggled around to appraise Billie.

Anne Tegner – one of the twins Billie had observed earlier – was already seated. She wore a handsome fur hat and jacket and carried a large jar on her lap. Minnie rearranged her easel, sketchpad, a different paint box – this one pristine – and made room for Billie. ‘Room for one more,' she said, in a managing tone, and to no one in particular.

‘It'll be you tumbling off the back if your
one
more
has
Kirsty overbalanced and dangling between the shafts with her feet off the road,' the boy warned, darkly.

‘Nonsense, Alan,' said Minnie. ‘I'll set my back against yours, and you and I will be the centre of gravity, the pivot point, if you follow me.'

‘You pay me, Miss Minnie, so I follow you.'

The boy tapped the pony with the tip of his long whip. The pony's skin twitched, but it didn't stir. ‘Get on, would you,' he said. Kirsty set off at an ambling walk. Minnie made introductions. ‘Miss Paxton, Miss Tegner.' Minnie had perched herself above them on the buckboard, her back against the boy's. She was in some danger of displacing him with her weight and height.

‘Could you shift your arse a little?' the boy said, amicably.

Minnie made an adjustment, and the pony plunged forward a jump to keep her feet.

‘I can't answer for us on the hill,' said Alan.

Billie offered to get off and walk behind, and earned a look from the boy which told her that, if she did, she would be robbing him of a pious cause.

Kirsty picked up her pace. The morning was fresh. In the seven days Billie had been on Kissack this was only the second of sun. Everything glistened, the stones on the roadside, the trunks of the trees furred with refreshed moss. The trees were in late spring leaf and, with the moss, were fully green in foliage, branch, bole, as though some painter had been at work with a sadly limited palette. The harbour was nearly empty, all the fishermen still out, and from the road along the point the long stone pier seemed crowned with frozen grey smoke – the skeins of drying nets. These seemed to have a catch of shadows – old men standing behind and plying awls to mend them.

The cart passed through the open arch of the gatehouse, which dripped on them.

‘Is your father at the Scouse Beach site today?' Minnie asked her driver.

‘I think so.'

‘Are you sleeping here now?'

‘The gatehouse, Miss Minnie?'

‘Yes.'

‘I am.'

Minnie was impatient. ‘Is it
comfortable
,
Alan? Are you glad to be able to keep your father company?'

‘Glad, Miss Minnie. And grateful.' His tone was teasing.

‘I didn't ask you to be grateful,' Minnie Hallow said.

‘Aren't I allowed to do something without you asking?'

‘You know that isn't what I mean. You're impugning my motives, Alan. I mean to help, not to inspire gratitude.' She was affronted.

‘Don't go on, Miss Minnie. Kirsty has enough trouble with the noise of the town.' The boy was very reasonable.

‘This,' said Minnie Hallow, rigid with scorn, ‘is
not
a town.'

The boy glanced back at them, dropped his jaw, and said that those
big
towns must be a staggering spectacle indeed.

‘Be quiet, Alan Skilling,' said Anne Tegner.

Alan was quiet.

Not far beyond Stolnsay, where the few pastures came to an end, there was a final stone wall along the brow of the hill, a new one, not yet settled, and as they came up the road beneath it Billie could see the sky shining through its piled stones as if they were only knotted lace. She looked back at the town and saw, in the still air, exhalations of hearth smoke going up like slack strings, which seemed to anchor the few motionless clouds. She could discern the wreck, under green water, a salvage derrick on the wharf above it. The
Gustav
Edda
didn't look like a ship. It looked like its own shadow, the shadow Billie had seen on the sandy seafloor as the ship had manoeuvred slowly into its berth, shortly before she went below and met Henry at the ladder, and Henry had pressed her back against the wall.

The dogcart passed over the rise and pulled in where the
road branched, turned one way into the hills and out across a vast stretch of rolling bronze bogland, and the other way down a narrow valley, crossing and recrossing a wayward
watercourse
that had scattered stones around itself like a trail of crumbs. This road was eventually smudged out in
bracken-covered
sand hills. Through these Billie saw a beach with golden sand.

Minnie climbed down from the cart. She removed her easel, canvas, paint box, and set them on the roadside. She said to Anne Tegner that by the time they got down to the beach the tide would be well in, and they should be able to find some pipefish in the shallows along the shore. Alan would help.

Billie got down, too, and without a word walked away onto the heath. Around her feet was thyme, and budding heather – in bloom only by stones whose radiating heat had brought some flowers on early. Billie saw thrift and clover and mountain speedwell and tough tawny grasses. The heath was a springy patchwork dotted with smooth stones, none the same composition or colour. It was all so pleasing and varied, it was as if it had been planted, planned. It was lovely, so lovely that Billie wasn't watching her step and stumbled again and again. She waded and staggered, and then dropped down among it, and the heath buoyed up her body, and hissed in the breeze, a hiss made of the ringing of dry bells.

Nearby, but invisible, Minnie Hallow said, ‘It's beautiful, but none of it is tender. I like tender plants.'

Billie stroked a stiff sprig of some herb, resinous and aromatic. Then she sat up. The cart was some way away down the road to the beach, Anne Tegner holding her hat and hunched around her jar. Minnie said, ‘I have to get my fill of tender flowers before we come.'

She had set up her easel and was at work already, testing the tip of her brush on the sleeve of her white smock. ‘We follow the spring north,' she explained. ‘We see it first in London, then Port Clarity, then Edinburgh, then here.' Minnie
said that Billie would have liked Scouse Beach. It was warmer than the hill. And none of the bays nearer the castle was any good. They were all stony and cold and coated with sulphurous weed.

Billie lay down again, sank into the low room of heath.

Further silence. The angle of the light was such that the sky wasn't the deep drawing blue it would be on a cold day. There seemed to be a fine and flawed white screen between Billie and the blue. She pretended she was alone. She listened to the sifted air. She nearly slept, but her body jerked, as if the ground had given way and dropped her – twice – and at each fall she snatched something, first a plaited pigskin-covered button, then the untucked tail of the shirt of the man who came onto the
Gustav
Edda
with the Stolnsay pilot. Billie heard her sister's voice, right at her ear, hoarse with cold and calling. ‘Billie!' said Edith.

‘Miss Paxton,' said Minnie, scarcely distinct, as though she'd waited for some sign Billie was asleep and only then addressed her. ‘Miss Paxton, we have something in common.'

Billie sat up again and had to tear her hair out of the heath – her head was taking root.

The dogcart had gone out of sight. She had no notion how long she'd slept. Minnie was seated on the ground now, her paint box shut and propped on her knees, in use as a desk. It was covered in paper, a thick sheaf of pages, the breeze thumbing their top corners.

Billie said that maybe she would follow the others. Minnie stopped writing and chewed her pencil. When Billie got up and moved a little her way, unintentionally, for she was groggy and unsteady on her feet, Minnie hunched over the papers. Billie saw this and looked sharp.
A
love
letter
,
she thought.

Seeing Billie looking at her pages, Minnie told her that she was making several fair copies of a play by the well-known playwright George Bernard Shaw, for her theatricals at the castle. But even the illiterate Billie, who had never heard of
George Bernard Shaw, could see no printed text from which Minnie might be
copying.
The excuse seemed curious, too hasty to be true.

‘Miss Paxton,' Minnie said, frowning at her, ‘perhaps you should go and see how they are.'

The road was uneven, the burn that it repeatedly looped to avoid still crossed it a number of times, dropping its crumbs of stone. Billie went easy but was pleased when the road petered out into several sandy tracks through the bracken. She took the broadest of these, where the wheels of vehicles heavier than the dogcart had ploughed a way through between two dunes. But its churned sand was heavy going, and Billie left it for a narrower one, sprinkled with dry sheep droppings. This track came out on the crest of the dune, where bracken gave way to cropped grass, above the long gentle curve of Scouse Beach. Far out, the sea's dimpled blue passed
imperceptibly
into the cobalt blue of the mountains of one of the Inner Isles. Closer to shore the water was placid, and completely clear.

Directly below Billie stood the dogcart, the small pony drowsing in harness. Kirsty was snoring into her feed bag, and had blown chaff up into her eyelashes.

At the near end of the beach Anne Tegner was up to her ankles in the water, her thick flounced skirts bunched around her thighs. She was attempting to direct Alan Skilling, who was in over his knees and treading the sand as though stamping out a vintage.

Billie scrambled down the dune with more impetus and less stealth than she'd planned, so was obliged to go join them.

Alan had discovered that a certain kind of sand, collected below miniature headlands of rock, had somehow, when submerged, remained infused with air. If he stamped, he sent up a fizz of bubbles. When Billie arrived he was busy speculating to Anne about how the sand had trapped the air. The water was very cold and his knees were bright red, the rolled ends of his trousers wet through.