Billie's Kiss (15 page)

The Reverend Vause went right by them. Billie said, ‘It's all right,' to Edith. But then the reverend reappeared with a lamp. It was gloomy in the hall. ‘I thought you might like a light,' he said, and put the lamp down on the table beside them. The rose dress came alive. And Edith's hair – before as dark as the old oak of the stairs – gave out its full bloody
lustre. Edith got up to give him her hand, thanked him, introduced herself and asked if her sister might be let off for an hour to walk her back to the church at Hayle, where she would rejoin her employers.

The reverend said yes, certainly.

And Edith, droll: ‘Quickly, dear, run upstairs again and change out of that magnificent dress. And remember to tie your hair.'

When Billie came back down Edith and the reverend were on the front steps. Edith was saying, ‘… he was a very
affectionate
parent, and we were never really unhappy. In hindsight I can't hold him entirely responsible for our difficulties. It's hard to say. You know –
post
hoc
ergo
propter
hoc
.'

‘Do you know Latin, Miss Paxton?'

‘It was my patrimony, Mr Vause, a patchy classical education.'

‘And red hair,' said Billie.

The reverend smiled at her.

From somewhere overhead came the carrying sound of Mrs Wood's tight cough, and several startled sparrows flew from the face of the house.

Edith began to stroll toward the gates, and the reverend followed. She told him that she'd had the opportunity lately of polishing her Latin. Or rather her Latin had been buffed up some in the course of the general polishing going on in the Lees' household, where Mr Maslen was preparing the boys for Eton. And it turned out the Reverend Vause had gone to school with Henry Maslen. ‘And it wasn't Eton,' the reverend said. Edith told the reverend about Henry's cataloguing, his love of systems, and the reverend said he could recall Maslen's enthusiasm for memory palaces – the medieval memory system, where facts are made to live in an imaginary ‘palace' according to their rank.

At the gates they went different ways, and the reverend said that Edith must say hello to Henry from him, then, to be
correct – Billie supposed – to the general ceremony of parting, he shook her hand, looked at her boots, and said that it was good to see her suitably attired for a long walk.

‘Oh – the dress,' said Billie.

‘Billie just sometimes forgets herself,' Edith said – explaining. They walked off their separate ways, Billie already chattering to Edith about the sheet music she'd bought with just a little of this quarter's pay, and how she was being
given
that gorgeous dress.

In Billie's experience all situations improved once Edith had
explained
her. After Edith's visit, Billie relaxed. She was cheerful and forthright at the below-stairs table, and fearless going about the house, about her work. She was trusted, it seemed, and given the better tasks. For instance, she carried a letter to the rectory. She waited while the Reverend Vause wrote his reply, and drifted some as she waited, toward the piano, the piano itself – not the picture in pride of place. The reverend looked around, got up, and came across the room to pick up the photograph of a girl with a thin face in a nimbus of fine blonde hair. They had been engaged, he said, she had tuberculosis of the bone. She'd wanted to break off the engagement, had thought she was being generous, but he thought it was possible to have a too finely developed sense of duty. Billie – who had only intended to stroke the keys – recognised this confidence as complimentary somehow, and confided in her turn. Her father had died of his lungs. The same disease. But his sense of duty was questionable. ‘He usually kept enough back to feed us. He was a gambler. Sometimes he won, then we lived like royalty.' She smiled at her memories, of new clothes, fine meals, fireworks. Then she did stroke the keys, and said she liked his piano. She told him she'd bought some new songs – couldn't wait for her Sunday off, when she'd be able to try them out on her own piano. It took her
such
a long time to puzzle out a tune from a song sheet. She sighed. The reverend wanted to know why,
and Billie told him that she found those sorts of things very difficult. ‘My father used to say I was a stone. Impervious. In every way but one.'

‘What on earth did he mean by that?'

‘No, my mistake. I mean, sir, a
stone
in every way but one. I never sink.'

It was then that the reverend asked if Billie would like to come sometimes and try her songs on his piano.

‘If Mrs Wood can spare me,' she said.

He finished his letter, she ran back to the house with it, and, that evening, she asked the housekeeper how she might best approach Mrs Wood about the Reverend Vause's kind offer.

Billie said later to Edith that she thought the important thing was to remember to use the word ‘kind' of the reverend's offer – to show gratitude.

The following day Billie accidentally knocked a box of loose face powder off Miss Olive's dressing table and onto the floor. Miss Olive was angry at first, then she laughed, because her terrier, who had been lying on a dark blue rug by the dressing table, and who had leapt up and run, emitting pinkish clouds at each leap, had left a dog-shaped silhouette on the rug. Billie cleaned up. But that afternoon she was called to the housekeeper's room and informed that Mrs Wood was ‘letting her go' – would pay the balance of her wages, but was letting her go. Billie asked why. Because, the housekeeper said, her work wasn't satisfactory. The woman counted out coins and made Billie sign the ledger. Baffled, shamed, and angry, Billie picked up the cash and went upstairs to the attic room she shared with another girl. The rose dress was hanging from a hook on the rafters. Billie had been finishing its hem, to her height. Billie hauled her bag out from under her zinc bedstead and hurriedly packed her possessions. Then she bundled the dress and pushed it in on top.

She carried her bag downstairs and had to find the
housekeeper again – in the kitchen – to ask her for information about the trains. She listened, committed times to memory, then stared for a long moment, her eyes peering, at the blank, seamed face of the clock. ‘Is that the right time?' Billie asked, and the butler pulled out his watch, and said, ‘I have a minute more. It's a quarter after two.'

Billie left the house. She was at the gateway when the butler and a footman came up the gravelled drive at a rasping run and stopped her. The butler wrenched her bag out of her hand, and both men turned her and marched her back to the house. She was taken to a drawing room and asked to wait. The footman, Owen, waited with her. ‘I'll miss my train,' she said to him.

‘That's nothing to do with me,' he replied.

Mrs Wood arrived, with Miss Vause and the housekeeper. The ladies seated themselves, Mrs Wood on the sofa, and Miss Olive erect in a small Queen Anne chair. They talked about time. It would take ten minutes for the message to reach him. He'd drive over. He'd be here any moment.

Mrs Wood produced her handkerchief and wiped her eyes and nose. She said that times like these brought her loss sharply back to her.

The Reverend Vause arrived, pale and winded, and the court was in session.

Billie's bag was opened and the rose dress burst out, in a gleaming foam, like a silk scarf from a magician's top hat, striking, especially when one has expected three broken eggs and a mess of shells and slime.

Olive Vause stood up on a slow intake of breath.

‘You said I could have it,' Billie told her. Then she looked at Mrs Wood, and said, ‘Miss Vause gave me the dress.' Yet her first thought wasn't to defend herself. She wanted to say, to Olive Vause, ‘You went up to the attic the moment I was gone.' How else had Olive known the dress wasn't still hanging from the rafters?

‘Olive?' said the reverend.

‘It
is
true that I said to Wilhelmina, sometime in May, that if she were good, the dress might be altered for her. I should, of course, suppress these whims of mine, but – Wilhelmina – you have known since Friday that you were making the alterations for Miss Deborah.'

Billie shook her head. She told the Reverend Vause that Miss Olive told her that she must make the alterations
in
her
own
time.
‘Why would she ask me to do it in my own time if she didn't mean it to be mine?'

‘I said it was worth the reward. You knew I meant to put a little extra in your pay.'

The Reverend Vause asked his sister Olive whether it was possible there was a misunderstanding?

‘Oh – I suppose it's possible,' Olive said. ‘It's so hard to know, William. With good diction one expects acuity, but –'

‘And why on earth was Wilhelmina dismissed without –' the reverend began.

‘Without asking
you
, William?' Mrs Wood said. ‘Dear – while I value your advice, particularly in an awkward situation of this sort, I'm quite capable of seeing to the day-to-day management of my own house. Including letting go a servant who – after all – was only in her trial period.'

‘This “awkward situation” might have been avoided if you'd come to me with your complaints about Wilhelmina
before
dismissing her.'

‘And have you try to talk me out of it? I have no intention of changing my mind, or my course of action. Why should I let you make me uncomfortable for it? Really, William, you force me to remind you that you aren't on your own ground.'

‘At least let her work out her pay period. She's due home for a holiday in two weeks. If you send her back when she is not expected, she'll be humiliated.'

‘She
was
paid till Saturday,' the housekeeper put in. ‘I told her I expected her to work till Saturday. And she went straight
upstairs, hid Miss Olive's Paris dress in her bag, and walked out of the house.'

‘You told me to go. I asked you about the trains.' Billie interrupted at last.

‘Where on earth did you hope to
wear
the dress, Wilhelmina?' Miss Olive asked, almost compassionate.

And Billie went wild. She grabbed the bag, turned it upside down and shook it so that the rose dress spilled, with an explosive rush, onto the carpet. Of course everything else came out too, her good shoes, her hairbrush, socks, drawers, camisoles, the stays she left off whenever she could – they unrolled with a flap and whipped at Miss Olive's feet with the ends of their laces. Everyone but Olive drew back. Olive Vause leaned forward a little, anticipatory as, after a pile of unironed handkerchiefs, the little illuminated Scripture book, and the bag's own felted lining, Olive's silver-backed brush and mirror fell on top of the pile, the mirror landing faceup and angled so that Billie could see the Reverend Vause in its glass. She thought she saw a smile – but his face was inverted, and after a moment she read his expression correctly, as distress.

Mrs Wood was aggrieved. She was reproachful. This was far worse. This was theft, outright. Was it, she mused, a matter for the police?

‘Just let me go!' Billie yelled. Billie wanted to be where she'd be believed. Edith would believe her. Billie saw she'd been outmanoeuvred, she saw a confidence trick, the words with double meanings, statements that seemed candid
one-to
-one, but ambiguous when there were witnesses. She saw she'd been practised upon, taken in. She had helped her father do these things to other people – but her father's ‘marks' were usually gulled into their own good nature, their better nature, and his game was always for material profit. Billie understood that she'd been fooled – but not
why.

‘A matter for the police?' Olive took up Mrs Wood's remark, turned to her brother.

‘I'm going!' Billie threw herself at her belongings and began piling them together and shovelling them back into the bag. She pushed the dress aside and it unrolled with a lazy, conclusive hiss like the only big wave on calm day. The mirror spun on its back across the rug, the hairbrushes, Olive's and Billie's own, made off in the opposite direction, skittering on their bristles across the parquet. Billie got up, but stepped on the hem of her own dress and pitched down facefirst – as she'd done countless times.

Mrs Wood then, disgusted and peremptory: ‘Please pick her up, Owen.'

The footman helped Billie to her feet. She was crying.

‘Waterworks,' said Olive Vause.

Billie didn't often cry, but when she did her tears were copious, also copious was the thin salt water her nose made. Tears stung the carpet burn on her chin. Owen steadied her.

‘Give her the bag,' said Mrs Wood. ‘I'm afraid, Wilhelmina, that in my letter to your aunt I really am obliged to mention the theft.'

‘Let me speak to her.' The Reverend Vause didn't mean Billie's aunt. ‘In order to learn to – to resist cupidity, she has to repent her – her defiance.'

‘I'm sure,' Olive said. ‘Well, of course, it's your duty to set her on the right path.'

‘You could accompany her to the station, William.' Without waiting for her brother's answer Mrs Wood gave some instructions to the footman for the groom – the Reverend Vause had ridden over, but would like to see Wilhelmina to the station. He'd take the trap.

‘No,' said Billie. Bag in hand, she walked out of the room.

THE REVEREND Vause caught up with her a quarter of a mile from his sister's gate. He was alone in the trap. Billie kept on along the road, her bag banging on her shins. He turned the horse to bar her way. Billie stood still, and stared
through the horse at the road ahead. She waited for him to get down and relieve her of her luggage. He put his hand under her elbow and asked her to climb up. She obeyed him.

As they went, the Reverend Vause said she must see how important it was for her to maintain a good character. He saw her difficulty. How hard it was not to covet what she couldn't have – to be surrounded by beauty and expected only to keep it in trim.