Billie's Kiss (7 page)

Murdo covered his face with his hands.

4

The Elder Betler

I
T WAS Meela Tannoy, his employer's wife, who stopped Geordie Betler. When he reached for the door handle she leaned forward and placed her hand on his arm. She gently pressed him back beside Tannoy and put up the heavy leather blind that covered the carriage window. It was around ten in the morning, and the sun was out, but mist still pushed against the blind arches of Carrick's Folly and poured over its rim.

Meela Tannoy told the men that she would take the
footman
– to beat off thieves, or curiosity-seekers – and walk up to the high street. Her eyelids were heavy and her look droll. She said that since she was in Oban she might as well take a look at its little shops. She opened the door, and the footman was there, folding down the steps before her stout boots. Quayside idlers stirred and stared. Mrs Tannoy fished two folds of her silk sari out of the collar of her long Paris coat and drew them up over her head. She paused to look back in, not at Geordie, but at her husband – a quick look that carried several clear instructions, and her confidence in him. Then she left, the footman following her figure in its weird mix of nipped-waisted wool and amber gossamer.

Andrew Tannoy raised the other blind and a long halt of sunlight ran through the carriage. The dust looked lively.

Geordie and his employer regarded the ship. It was still taking on cargo and signing new crew, three of whom had paused, canvas sacks on their squared shoulders, facing the cargo that was still waiting its turn, a collection of empty boxes
that had to go on top, couldn't take too much weight, or sit too close to other goods and contaminate them. Contaminate with bad luck, for the cargo the new crew stood and eyed waited stacked in four hearses – coffins for Stolnsay, whose own coffin-maker hadn't enough seasoned timber to house the
Gustav
Edda
's
eighteen dead crewmen and passengers.

‘The wind is sharp,' said Andrew Tannoy. ‘Parky.' He didn't say, ‘
You
need
not
go
yet
,
Geordie
.
We
'
ll
wait
here
till
you
embark
.'

Geordie felt comfortable with this restraint, for Geordie Betler was a butler, and a model of propriety. Well – it was axiomatic, all butlers were proper, but Geordie had been seven years with Tannoy and the rules of Tannoy's house were relaxed and informal. Informal, not unnatural; relaxed, but not lax. Andrew Tannoy put no stock in the niceties that had often worked to exclude him even as he made his fortune. He didn't oppose, but ignored them. Tannoy was an educated man. The son of a poor parish minister, he had starved his way through a degree in mathematics and a pinchpenny post in a Glasgow firm of engineers. Then he went to India and built bridges on a Himalayan railway. Tannoy had retired at thirty-eight, his health imperilled by a fever. He came home to Scotland with a yellow complexion and an Indian wife. ‘I was on the bones of my bottom,' he'd once told Geordie. ‘But we rented rooms, and I used my little bit of money to build my first steam shovel, then I put in for the patent.'

Andrew Tannoy now had a factory in Glasgow, and a big house in Ayrshire, a tender liver, and his white-haired,
soft-spoken
Meela. He had friendly tenants and a few good friends – enough for a busy shooting season. He had a well-paid, comfortably housed butler whom he was loath to lose. And he knew enough to be worried.

Geordie could see that his employer was trying to think how he could coax his butler to talk. Andrew Tannoy was concerned – and in need of reassurance. Geordie was fond of
his employer, but he was also curious about him. Tannoy was an original, and Geordie wanted to see what he'd do, how he'd manage both his anxiety and the impropriety of fussing over a servant.

Andrew Tannoy rubbed his forehead. Then he blurted, ‘He's no idler.'

This was a novel approach. Geordie turned in his seat, and looked attentive.

‘Well, of course, I am. Played out. Or, I play as men do when they've made a fortune and want a quiet life.'

Andrew Tannoy was talking about Lord Hallowhulme. He was making his foray into Geordie's near future – but on
his
side, as a segregated stallion, who must watch his mares and keep pace with them along his side of the fence. Geordie and Andrew Tannoy were servant and master, but for Mr Tannoy the barrier was more of a ha-ha than a fence – a recessed, stone-lined ditch that stops sheep and cattle from wandering into the garden and eating up tulips and grape hyacinths, hellebores and honesty, a barrier invisible from the parlour, a barrier that presents no impediment to the view.

Tannoy went on. ‘Of course, some of what Hallowhulme does
is
a kind of play. But it takes a great deal of wealth. He's no Mellon or Carnegie, but –' Andrew Tannoy blushed. He fiddled with the fringed pull on the leather blind. It swung back and forth before the view, a hypnotist's fob watch. Geordie focused on it and was again able to lose sight of the stacked coffins.

‘Meela and I were invited to Port Clarity once,' Andrew Tannoy volunteered. ‘You know, Port Clarity, Lord
Hallowhulme's
model town? The town he built near his soap factory in Hull. It has workers' cottages, all plumbed, two up, two down; it has a library, museum, observatory, swimming baths; it has parks, schools; a hospital, and an employees' health plan. A marvellously progressive project.' Mr Tannoy mused. ‘He's an enlightened man.'

‘So you've met him?' Geordie said.

‘Yes.'

The undertakers were waggling the end of the first coffin to ease it out of the hearse. Andrew Tannoy watched them, then said that they could do with some recessed rollers along the bottom of that vehicle. ‘But they'll think of it themselves,' he added in a strange, cold voice. Then he said, ‘Forgive me. I've wandered rather from the point. Betler, I am sorry that I never met your brother. You kept up a regular correspondence, I believe?'

‘Yes, weekly. Ian liked to get letters. Liked to write them, too. I've been hard put to it sometimes to keep him entertained. I have enough to do, but my life is quiet. Ian had rather more colour and incident in his. But he never forgot me, he always reported to me. When he was a boy and I was a big lad he'd come out to meet me when I was on my way home from school. Sometimes I'd find him three or four miles from home. This was when he was only seven. I learned not to dawdle. I'd go on as fast as I could so that he wouldn't come too far.'

They were silent a while. The mist was turning dilute in the blue sky, only a smear against higher, sunlit clouds, clouds with some architecture, as imposing as the public buildings of Empire. ‘He got a peerage on top of his knighthood,' said Tannoy. ‘Four years ago. And he added the “Hulme” to his name. He was a grocer, then an inventor, now he's a
philanthropist
– a great man, really.' Mr Tannoy glanced at Geordie. ‘I do admire him. And he's bought that island in order to give it back to the crofters. And to start a few industries, to make work for all.'

‘But?' said Geordie, amused, despite his trembling hands, heavy eyes, sour stomach. Despite the view he had.

‘But nothing, Betler.' Tannoy blushed again – that is, his complexion went an orange shade. ‘I
approve
.'

‘My brother disliked him,' said Geordie. ‘Ian was very attached to Mr Hesketh.'

They watched a procession of three empty coffins carried, lightly, up the angled gangplank to the steamer's deck. ‘Will they stow them there in the weather and in plain sight?' Geordie said, exasperated.

In the breeze the blind's tassel tapped and tapped on the sill of the carriage window.

‘So – did your brother feel he had to choose between them?' Andrew Tannoy asked.

‘Hallowhulme and Hesketh? No. Lord Hallowhulme paid Mr Hesketh's debts. Or
bought
them. They're cousins. So is Lady Hallowhulme a cousin. All cousins. Clara and Murdo Hesketh twice over, since both their fathers and their mothers were siblings. The two Hesketh brothers, Lars and Duncan, married two Vega sisters – white-haired Swedish lasses, the daughters of a baron. Lars and Duncan's sister Mary, the eldest Hesketh, married a grocer from Durham, Edward Hallow. They are all very near kin. But – you see – Mr Hesketh liked his independence.'

‘Fellows who value their independence are usually more careful with money,' said Andrew Tannoy. ‘They don't gamble and think God will make an exception of them.'

Geordie looked hard at his employer. Why, he asked, did Mr Tannoy think it was gambling?

‘I'm fishing, Betler. Angling. I had heard Murdo Hesketh was ruined.'

The coffins had gone below, after all. The undertakers came back down the gangplank, showed for a minute like black cormorants against the sparkling water.

‘It was more misfortune than mismanagement.' Geordie confided that much. He said, ‘I must be off, Mr Tannoy.'

Andrew Tannoy nodded. They both got out, and Mr Tannoy put up his arms to take Geordie's bag from the coachman. ‘If we can be of any help at all,' he said, speaking for his wife, as well as himself. He handed Geordie his bag.

The ship's whistle sounded. Two boys running past stopped
dead, covered their ears, and joined the whistle, screamed along with it.

‘That's enough now!' roared Tannoy. The boys looked at his frown, startled, speculative, then went on running. Tannoy's scowl deepened. He looked at his butler, and said, ‘You mustn't be offended if I attempt to press a few pounds on you, a little extra for the unexpected. You don't want to put a hole in your savings.'

Ian's grave. A hole in his savings.

Geordie took the purse; he took it to be kind. Both men shuffled, looked awkward. And then Meela Tannoy appeared, breathless from running, the two layers of amber silk blown back from her white hair. The footman was puffing and blowing in her wake. She took Geordie's hands and said, ‘Please take care. Be as long as you need, but please let us know how you are.' She squeezed his hands.

Geordie boarded the ship for the fifteen-hour trip from Oban to Stolnsay.

MISFORTUNE, NOT mismanagement. A bad investment, a court case, an illness, two funerals. One thing on top of another. A big rock balanced on a cliff top.

The ship was in the Minch, its open water, the voyage half-gone, the sun going. It was a white evening, white and gold, white and rose, the sky an expanse of godly flesh, its white solid and warm. Geordie hooked his arm over the rail and looked down into the water in time to see a seal surface, its sleek head turned to look at the looming side of the ship whose engines were a discomfort that flushed it out from the waves and its pursuit of fish. It was a fur seal, not a sea lion, small, and soon lost again to Geordie's eyes. How delightful it was, Geordie thought, just to look down and chance to see something alive in the water.

Ian had been, by profession, an officer's orderly. The first man he worked for, a major in the Black Watch, had, on his
retirement, recommended Ian to a friend of the family. Ian had wanted to travel. Murdo Hesketh, whose mother was Swedish, was a captain in the household cavalry of King Oskar. Ian did have some trouble learning a new language, but there was quite a group of ‘Scottish Norsemen' in the household, and he took an instant liking to Captain Hesketh, a charming, clever but reckless young man. They had their adventures – the excesses and hard play of bored men in barracks, the fierce games, the pranks, intrigues, romantic diversions. They went about the countryside on royal warrants and travelled with the young princes to Russia and Denmark, Holland and Norway.

Ian was, with people, as a keen reader is with books – he lived on his observations, he took everything in, he enjoyed the life around him as the audience of fiction will the play of character. Gossip wasn't quite the right word for what Ian did, because he seemed to need to share his observations only with his elder brother.

Ian and his employer had five good years, then Murdo Hesketh gave up the army and began to look around for some unstrenuous and gentlemanly occupation. He had money, a modest inheritance, and the pay he'd saved. He stayed in Stockholm – where he had some hopes of a young lady. Besides, his sister was there, his younger sister, Ingrid, and her husband, Karl, who was a friend of his.

This is what Geordie knew. What Ian had told.

It was this Karl Borg who persuaded Murdo to invest money. It wasn't Borg's own financial venture, but that of a friend, a man in whom Karl had complete confidence. The business had, Ian said to Geordie, looked sound on paper. He had even thought to put a little capital in for himself, but he had so little, and looking at the figures – no huge profits were promised – it didn't seem worth the paperwork, or the worry. Ian
did
worry, he didn't quite know why, but wrote later to his brother that, on meeting ‘the man', he had found himself
unable to
read
him. ‘He was like a certain kind of clergyman. A man with a very clear conscience. His brow was utterly unmarked by lines – odd in a man of forty. It was as if he had never bunched his brow muscles, had never been moved to frown, had never lifted his eyebrows in surprise at the world. When I say I couldn't read him, Geordie, I was looking for
lines
,
as one looks for the story under the headlines in a newspaper.'