Billie's Kiss (25 page)

Geordie came in behind Billie, said, ‘Oh dear,' and sent her out for some bread and milk from the kitchen. Something to soak up the brandy. As Billie went she saw that, despite his age and slightness, Geordie was stronger than the young people. He got Elov up and led him out into the garden.

WHEN NOT onstage Geordie had waited behind the black gauze of Minnie's secret entrance. He'd been able to watch the audience.

Lord Hallowhulme began the evening with an intrusive appearance of attention. He didn't like to sit still and listen. He liked to make himself felt. His attention was so positive it was almost participation. ‘Hear! Hear!' he cried once, at a speech about the need for a society led by energetic enthusiasts. He chortled and squirmed. He suppressed his urge to interrupt insofar as he remained in the auditorium and in his seat. But in several of the play's quieter moments Geordie could clearly hear James Hallow's loud, dry sniffing.

It was a mannerism Geordie had noticed on a number of earlier occasions. Compelled to listen, Lord Hallowhulme would sit and sniff. At first Geordie had supposed that his nose was bothering him and he'd forgotten he was in company. Finally, he realised it was only Lord Hallowhulme's way of saying, ‘I could add something here' – ‘I know more than you do.'

Hallowhulme squirmed and sniffed and laughed as if meaning to
lead
the laughter. He never did – he was always a beat behind the more moderate amusement of others – but laughed louder, and longer.

Two-thirds of the way through the play, after a sad passage of Billie's music, Hallowhulme fell quiet. He stopped attending
to the play and watched only Billie, who sat with her hands folded and head raised to follow the action onstage, ready for her next cue. Billie's face and hair were lit by the branch of candles that stood behind her, low enough for their flames to cast a clear light on her music, but make no shining haze in the air through which she might have trouble seeing the stage. In the candlelight Billie wasn't a Rossetti or a Burne-Jones – specific, ornate, wholly apparent, features and costume and background all equal in weight – she was an old devotional painting, softly luminescent,

After the applause Hallowhulme set up his camera and photographed the cast, onstage, Billie sitting on the edge of the stage between footlights and the skirts of ferns and heather. Then the actors posed in
tableaux
vivants
of several key scenes, and the second-class rail coach was reassembled from
cardboard
walls and curtained windows, its leather seats salvaged from Hallowhulme's automobile. Hallowhulme emerged from the black skirts of his camera in time to see Billie led out of the room by Henry. He called after them, ‘Remember that there's a supper, Mr Maslen.'

The Mulberrys were making their excuses to Clara – they couldn't stay. They thanked the players and, as they left, they remarked to Hallowhulme how
proud
a parent he must be – such a good performance of such a
creditable
play. The Mulberrys left, and Hallowhulme said to Geordie, who was nearby, ‘One would imagine a minister more sensitive to the social uses of the word “good”.' The remark was
self-confidently
dismissive, but Hallowhulme had that look he often wore, the strained expression of someone hard of hearing, or poor in understanding.

Minnie appeared and took Geordie's arm. ‘Come in to supper, Mr Betler,' she said, a brisk hostess for the benefit of her mother. Then, quieter, ‘I know what the caption will be for the group photograph: “
Fortune
and
the
Four
Winds
,
by
George
Bernard
Shaw.
Kiss
Castle
,
summer
,
1903.
My
house
party
,
who
number
twelve
individuals.”'
She said, ‘Did he listen, do you think? I don't think he did. When he listens he always shows his top teeth. Look' – pointing at her father's strained expression – ‘he's listening now.'

THE SHEET of newspaper from which Billie had cut the outline of Alan's feet was from an Edinburgh paper, dated 4 June. It was part of an article about the sinking of the
Gustav
Edda
. In it Henry had read – around the holes – that a passenger who had embarked at Luag in the company of her sister and her sister's husband had been seen to jump from ship to shore only moments before the explosion that sank the vessel at its moorings. Henry read that this person had declined to speak to journalists.

‘Lord Hallowhulme declined on my behalf,' Billie told Henry. ‘I wasn't aware that a newspaper wanted to speak to me.'

They stood at the seawall below the long lawn. The evening was overcast. It was after nine, but the sky was the even white it had been since morning. From this angle the town appeared compact, low, no land visible behind it. Built on a spit, spiked with gabled roofs, chimneys, and steeples, Stolnsay looked like a ‘mariner's elevation', a drawing on white parchment, flat and diagrammatic, and all exaggerated horizontals. Billie stared at this belt of buildings and streets. She didn't want to look at Henry. Her hand stole into her pocket and closed around the plaited pigskin button she carried –
always
carried, transferring it from garment to garment when she changed her clothes. She said, ‘Do you remember now, Henry?'

‘I guessed, dear. I don't remember.' He touched her sleeve. He said, ‘We were always together, Billie. All of us.' Henry said that for weeks he'd hoped to remember. He felt that, if he didn't, he wouldn't be much help to her. ‘It's been more your burden than mine, Billie. What actually
happened
,
as well as its aftermath. And, because you remember, you must
feel that we are at fault. But, Billie, please listen –'

She shied away from him. He touched one finger to the raised mound of bone on her wrist, and she stopped still.

‘It was a
mistake.
A mistake easy to make. It seemed only natural. We were always together. We were together, and we kept to ourselves too much – you, me, and Edith.
Your
remedy was company.'

‘Yours was Edith,' Billie said. Henry was being kind, and his kindness was inadequate.

‘Please tell me if I'm mistaken!' Henry begged. ‘What did I do? I need to know. I think I know myself, and what I
would
do. Is it something worse?'

‘Worse than a kiss?' Billie said. Edith, drowning, had clung to her husband, and he'd torn himself out of her grasp. Billie had kept the button in order to share it with him. Day after day she'd touched it with her hand and told herself she was sparing him. But she had only been waiting to spare him no more.

Billie took her hand out of her pocket, the button closed in her fingers. She stepped up to the seawall and threw it. It was light even in its flight, more like an acorn than a pebble. It made a splash, then bobbed up in the centre of its ring of ripples and floated. Billie told Henry that it was a hazelnut she'd had in her pocket. ‘Too stale to eat,' she said.

The evening was beginning to seem very strange to Billie. It seemed that only what was harmful had any weight, that truth was money, kindness only a token in money's shape – like the tokens Billie's father had bought her and Edith to spend on the rides at a carnival in Marseilles. The tokens were only for the rides. Edith would rather have had a fringed silk scarf, but couldn't buy back her money.

The button was harmless now – impossible to exchange. Billie watched it bob in the slight current of retreating tide. She remembered how Mr Betler hadn't let her unwrap the bundle in the coffin with Edith. Without looking himself he'd
known what it was. He'd put his arms around her to hold her back, because truth was knowing, but kindness was knowing better than to tell.

Billie gave Henry her hand – he'd asked for it. As they walked slowly back up the lawn Henry told her that, although they'd spend the coming winter in Stolnsay, Lord
Hallowhulme
had asked him if he'd like to replace Johan Gutthorm. Mr Gutthorm had given his notice. ‘Family responsibilities, apparently,' Henry said. Then, ‘I'm assured it's all on friendly terms.' It was a great opportunity, Henry said. All his life he had schooled himself to accept work of little – or incalculable – influence. He was a teacher or a cataloguer. But, as Lord Hallowhulme's secretary, he'd have work that was varied and challenging, and a more
worldly
life than he had ever dreamed he'd have. ‘I'll live in London and Edinburgh. I can see you settled somewhere comfortable, like Port Clarity. And, Billie, you can meet people, make a broader acquaintance. You can choose who to befriend.'

‘Choose whom to kiss,' Billie said.

There was a hitch in Henry's stride. He squeezed her hand. ‘You should have a choice.' Then he went on to say something Billie couldn't quite follow. He said that Edith chose him, but he was her only choice. He knew that Billie could never get far enough away from Edith to sense Edith's
size.
But he had come to understand that Edith was immense – very strong, and beautiful in a way that made her out of place everywhere she was
able
to be.

But Billie
could
see it now, could see Edith stalking over the sliding litter of broken floor tiles that made the beach at Garavan, her shawl shading her head. Billie's beach friends – some Edith's age – falling silent and, if they were tussling, apparently fainting out of their tangles, and lying still,
speckled
with grit, staring at Edith. It was her sister's scowl, Billie had always thought. But really it was Edith's beauty – scowl, shawl, flapping shade – Edith's density and size, what Billie
sensed now when she was puzzled by how to
be
Edith.

‘Edith loved me,' Henry said. ‘But she was poor in choices.'

Henry meant that Edith was better than they were. And he was saying
be
patient.
Wait
–
but not for him.

They were below the west face of the castle. Above them the glass in its leaded windows shone like a cliff of white scales. In the sky there were two visible streams of cloud, many thousands of feet apart and moving in different
directions
. One rind of sky wound against the other and reflected in the west windows in sections, in separate panes, a movement of mismatched instants, as if some bits of the whole real world were destined to catch, or falter, or wind down before the rest.

‘We should go in,' Henry said.

Billie thought: ‘
I
should
kiss
you
.'
She put her palm against his face, her fingertips forming a grille over his ear, the heel of her hand on his jaw, his springy side whiskers. His skin was soft, and a little tacky to the touch. Its exact temperature reminded Billie of another warmth, and for a minute Billie was adrift, she was in a room that plunged and kicked, her hand on Edith's forehead, wiping Edith's mouth; she was by the ladder with Henry; she was cold and wet, struggling free of a clammy grip not because it was clammy, but because through his wet clothes a specific warmth had surfaced and her own had jumped out to meet it.

Henry put his hand over her own, pressed it briefly, then pulled it down, cheerful, like someone detaching an
overexcited
kitten from a curtain. He said he'd stay out here for a time.

‘I'll stay with you,' she said. But it was like trying to pull herself out of water on the air. She couldn't get any purchase. Henry said she should go in.

Billie went in, and upstairs. Three steps below the landing she raised her head and saw a massive shadow, a silhouette, a head with a squared beard, like a trenching tool on a thick
haft. Lord Hallowhulme said to her that he thought she was very good.

‘Thank you, Sir,' she said.

He put a hand on her arm. Heavy but unstable, it twitched rather than trembled. He drew her toward him, so that she could smell sherry, cigar, the orange flower water in his hair or beard. He meant to show her something. Below them, on the terrace, Henry still stood where she had left him. James Hallow took Billie's hand and lifted it to his own cheek. He put her hand on his face in a position that corresponded to where she had touched Henry's a moment before. Billie felt a smaller ear, sleeker beard, the bone in James Hallow's blunt jaw.

Billie removed her hand, but he kept her fingertips trapped between his own. No more proper, but less alarming, he kissed her hand. It was ordinary gallantry and had as predictable a trajectory as investigations by the San Remo ragazzi of her nine-year-old knees. There was no boat to overturn, though, and it seemed to Billie that her only available defensive gesture was to return the kiss. Because Henry hadn't wanted to be kissed.

Billie jumped up against her host like a steep wave against stonework. He was tall, so she set her foot on the toe of his blocky boot, got enough elevation, and rose in and up to his face.

He gasped and jerked back as if expecting her to bite him. They both overbalanced and his elbow knocked a pane of glass and shoved it, whole, out of its lead. It fell onto the terrace beside Henry. Billie put both her hands against James Hallow's chest and, launching herself off him, found her feet and clambered away upstairs.

MINNIE OBSERVED to Geordie that Billie hadn't come back for her slice of cake. ‘I saved one for her.'

Minnie had taken down her playbill. The servants were
clearing the tables and carrying away the screens. Alan had finished everything around Billie's saved slice, even clearing the crumbs from plates, pressing them flat and licking them off his fingers.

Minnie asked Alan if he would go and see what had become of Billie.

It was a long while before Alan came back. The servants had gone to their beds. Geordie and Minnie were alone, in an island of candlelight by the ballroom door. Minnie had been talking to Geordie about Ingrid. Or about
after
Ingrid. After Ingrid, Minnie had found it almost impossible to let her brother out of her sight. She was a sore trial to him. But their father insisted that Rixon go away to school.
This
summer was the longest she and her brother had been together for two years.