Billie's Kiss (21 page)

The track was too steep for the horses, so Hallowhulme and his wife, Minnie, Elov, Billie, Jane Tegner, and her girls all got down from their respective traps, leaving only Henry, cocooned in his travel rug. Most of the young people bounded ahead. Lord Hallowhulme offered his arm to Billie, who said she'd see to Henry, caught up with him, walked by his side, her hand on his wrapped leg. She looked back at
Hallowhulme
, alone, Clara and Jane arm in arm behind him, their heads turned down and faces hidden by their hat brims. Minnie came last of all, weaving up the track in their wake. She had a book before her face, had been stupefied by it throughout the ride, and now, staggering, seemed drunk of it.

Henry was watching Lord Hallowhulme, peering with the same expression – puzzled, patient – he'd worn when he first came to understand that Edith was neither mistaken nor exaggerating when she said that Billie wasn't able to learn to read.

‘What is it?' Billie said.

Henry thought she was asking after his health. He reassured her. The sun was out, and he was enjoying every minute, the views revealed at every bend in the road. He smiled at her, and covered her hand with his own. Billie tried to remember what Henry and Lord Hallowhulme had talked about during the ride. Billie had been relegated to what she found herself thinking of as ‘the elder persons' carriage' with Henry, James,
Clara, and Jane Tegner. She'd spent much of the ride looking back at the others: Rixon bringing his horse at a gambol toward the carriage and trying to snatch the twins' hats, Elov, in the carriage, tussling with Rixon, the Tegners giggling, and Minnie leaning out over the padded sill of the door and turning the pages of her book. Billie listened for a time, with curiosity, to Lord Hallowhulme's analysis of the island's problems and prospects. Hallowhulme thought that crofting was a fine old way of life – but that it would only thrive if supplemented by new industries. It wasn't that he believed in progress
per
se
, but that he thought, since humans were capable of making rational forecasts about the future, they had
choices.
They could retain what worked in tradition but modify their lives by adopting new methods and inventions. He wanted to see stable seasonal employment, better housing, and children under twelve in schools. He talked about how herrings were salted and how alginate was extracted from seaweed. He and Henry discussed a book he'd given Henry to read,
Science
and
Penology
. Hallowhulme was animated; he said, ‘After all, we all agree that you can't breed a gun dog from a shambles cur.' He insisted on ‘proofs beyond cavil' of the power of inheritance. Billie had kept half an ear on their talk,
recognising
Lord Hallowhulme's argument as an opposite to those of Minnie's Mr Goodwin in the play. She finally understood what made Elov Jansen so uneasy in rehearsals. As she listened, Billie watched the island open up around them as they crossed beneath its two-and-a-half-thousand-foot divide. She could hear that Henry and Lord Hallowhulme were talking without rancour, Hallowhulme enthusiastic, Henry fully engaged and in good voice. Billie didn't feel she needed to keep an eye on Henry.

But, on the last slope up to the Broch, having dispelled Billie's fears for his health, Henry finally tried to explain his frown. He said he'd never thought of himself as someone with social graces, who knew what to do and say in most social
situations. ‘I'm shy, and that's a shortcoming. I'm neither wary nor obsequious to my social superiors – and that is possibly a virtue. But, unless I know someone well, I am too serious. Another shortcoming. I'm serious, but not sober – though sobriety is more acceptable than seriousness.' Henry paused, and Billie watched his face, watched him formulate a thought. Henry was cheerful and conscientious – he thought well of the world, he was scarcely ever critical. Time and again Billie had listened as Edith was tart about this or that person they knew, and Henry, offering his opinions, encouraged Edith to be more moderate.

Henry said, ‘Lord Hallowhulme said a number of things that I think he should have thought better of saying. But who am I to criticise?'

‘What did he say?'

‘We were discussing the book I borrowed.' Henry was polite, he had
borrowed
the book, it had not been imposed on him. ‘A book about artificial selection. Eugenics. Lord Hallowhulme was talking about the need for accurate and standard classifications of persons.'

‘I don't understand,' Billie said.

‘I'm sorry, dear. But you don't need to, I'm just giving a context for his remarks. I mean that his remarks followed on from hypothetical talk, they were in no way heated or personal. But he went on to say, “Man is no more capable of selecting a mate fit to be the mother of his children than are the beasts of the field.” His words. Now – his remark wasn't directed at anyone, he was only explaining the reasoning of the theory of artificial selection. But he was speaking to a man who had just lost his chosen mate. And – worse – he went on to talk about extreme youth and unfitness, imbecility and unfitness, criminality and unfitness – then
inbreeding
, making a remark about the frequent unfortunate marriages between first cousins. Of course I glanced at Lady
Hallowhulme
. I couldn't help myself. But she didn't even blink.'

Billie was laughing. ‘Oh, the poor man!' she said. ‘His foot in his mouth.' She squeezed Henry's hand, told him he mustn't mind that his employer was imperfect. ‘Who has all the virtues?'

Both then thought of Edith, and went along in a stunned silence thinking on an angelic flawless Edith who suddenly seemed to have hidden her true human self behind their grief and need. Grief and need were transparent – and Edith had become a dazzling and magnified woman, close only by some optical trick, in fact distant, with lenses, lying lenses, glass between her and those who loved her.

The balance of the picnic party had reached the Broch, where the servants, who'd set out earlier in the day, had laid rugs, and a substantial luncheon, on a patch of springy grass at the base of the tower.

But Henry had one more thing to say before they joined the others. ‘Since you laugh, Billie – listen to this. This is odd. Odder than your explanations of what you see on a printed page, or fail to see. Lord Hallowhulme and I were talking about meeting people and finding things in common. And he said this: that when he meets a new person, in business or even in a social situation, someone with whom he might expect to have a conversation, he draws a sort of diagram in his head, mapping who
they
are, where they come from, what they know, and what they might be interested in; and what
he
knows, and what interests him; and then he tries to find a place where they can meet. His diagram is like a stepladder. A stepladder with steps on either side. As he climbs his side, the new acquaintance climbs theirs, till they are revealed, standing eye to eye, and can begin to have a proper
conversation
– one less “illogical and superficial” than most social conversation. Don't you think that peculiar?'

The driver applied the brake and got down to hand Henry out of the carriage. Billie and he joined the party, who were taking a turn around the Broch before eating. As they came
around its great cylinder they startled some black-faced sheep, who jumped and scrabbled out over the lowest point of the broken wall and bounded down the far slope kicking up turf. A few hundred feet below the Broch was a loch, under the white half of a blue-and-white sky, and nacreous gray. ‘Ah!' said Henry, moved, and Billie leaned into him. Then he said, ‘You didn't laugh.'

Billie said she had so many tricks for managing her own weaknesses that Lord Hallowhulme's didn't seem so funny. She was wondering whether
she
made diagrams. Ever. She said, ‘I only recently met these people – and I've never had to think how to speak to them.'

‘Nothing was expected of us when we met them,' Henry said. ‘Except tears.'

‘Now it's expected that you will get on with your
cataloguing
for
your
own
good.
And all I have to do is remember the music for Minnie's play.' Billie laughed – because it seemed so easy, and she felt as if, for the first time in years, she'd been left in peace to wander in a big open space. ‘And that's all!' she said, sharing her delight.

‘Yet here's someone who loves you,' Henry said, and Billie was startled, because her brother-in-law was pointing at the two horsemen turning off the main road and starting up the slope. She saw the hair, like a thick concentration of the silvery northstars. Then she saw whom Henry meant, for Alan slid down from behind Murdo Hesketh and ran, his big shoes like clubs on the ends of his thin ankles. Alan ran up the road, and straight to her.

AFTER LUNCH Lord Hallowhulme took some of his party down the hill's far side to look at his salmon hatcheries. They walked around the edge of the loch, where there were patches of still water, water standing where bog blended with loch, like a dirty lace trim, mud-pocked by the sharp hooves of sheep. Here water lilies were growing, flowers of a modest
size, but whose petals were robust, unmoved though the water beneath them shivered. The lilies were white, with yellow centres. Billie looked at them and imagined heat; she recalled the garden at Mulrush, a proper July heat, green water, sulky carp.

Lord Hallowhulme's hatcheries were built at the end of a steep valley, where the stream had been piped so that it ran in several strands, gently, through an underwater garden.

The party came first upon a long waist-high tank. They stood and watched young fish appear, in motion, against its gravelled bottom, then slow and disappear into shadow and stillness, tail fins synchronised with the movement of weeds in the current.

Hallowhulme let one of the men who ran the hatcheries answer any questions the visitors had, while he took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and set to work pounding cooked beef in water to make a paste of it.

Billie leaned over the side of the tank. She was enchanted by the light on the gravel, and the blue-green-pink tessellated shapes of fish. They glowed with life, but played dead – it seemed to her – going nowhere, only hanging in the current like buoyant stones. She wanted to climb in and drift down the tank with them, but only slid along its edge, the smooth lip wetting the fabric under her arms and across her chest, her face so close to the water that her view was intermittently obscured by the ripples her breath made on its surface. She came to the end of the tank, where the water was deeper and there was a stretch of pale sand where the current feinted and made a fist against a weir. The bigger fish were here, more than she'd ever seen, so that her mind began to make strange comparisons – a flight of ducks against a white evening sky. But the salmon had no voyaging formation; they reached the end of the tank, pushed sidelong in the current, then came to life, accelerated, and shot back up the pool.

Billie put her hand in the water, at the invisible line where
the salmon chose to turn. James Hallow appeared beside her with a bowl of mashed meat. The twins were feeding cooked meat to the smelt, he said. What he had here was a meal made of raw beef and other, cheaper, fish. This they fed the adult salmon.

Billie put her wet hand into the bowl, scooped out some warm, mealy matter, felt bristles of fine bones scratch her fingers and lodge in her nails. She put her hand back in the water and shook it. She watched fibrous gobs of mince drop away from her, to be snatched out of space by a shadow, a flash, a thick, moving curve.

Lord Hallowhulme stood quietly beside her as she took more, repeating the process till the bowl was empty. He dipped and rinsed it, and she, cooperative, wiped its sides till all the meal was gone. He set it on its edge against the tank and escorted her upstream to show her where the spring came up through the gravelled floor of a pool perhaps eight feet deep. The spring was invisible, pure water in purity, but the stones at that place flew up and fluttered down like moths disturbed by someone crossing a meadow.

James Hallow took Billie back downstream to the smaller tanks to watch Geordie – less fastidious than the twins, who only looked on – pinch little portions of boiled beef and drop them through a timber grille, which pressed a grid of glass rods down in water only a little dimpled by a gentle current. Among the glass rods, and batches of eggs still opaque, or spotted with life starting, were tiny translucent fish, salmon smelt, some still attached by umbilical cords to their egg remnants, their transparent bags of provisions. Billie could see the food in their digestive tracts, their spines, their brains behind their eyes – the only wholly solid features emerging out of glassiness, a whole glassy world where everything seemed liquid, water in more forms than she'd ever imagined water could take.

Billie's sleeves were soaked, so she unbuttoned them. They
dangled, and dripped as she followed the others along the path to the smallest tanks, and a table on which the man who'd hitherto been their guide was setting a flat vessel, a low zinc pan, half-full of water.

Geordie said, ‘What's this?' sounding, for some reason, uneasy.

Billie was nearly asleep in the heat and the silence. She wasn't in need of any kind of information. What this was, for instance. She got it though.

‘The primal moment of pisciculture,' Hallowhulme said, tense and husky. He made a joke as he plied the net over the tank. He was the spirit moving on the face of the water. But he didn't have any luck, though the fish were confined, so he passed the net to his assistant and called Billie to him. This was something he could teach her, James Hallow said,
something
she could be taught. Besides, it needed hands, and hers were wet already. He had her lift her arms and rolled her sleeves for her. His assistant had netted a fish. James extracted it from the net, very delicate, and held it carefully, head up and tail down over the pan. He gripped the fish with his left hand and began to pass his right down its length. It was
important
to apply an even pressure, he said. A grainy transparency appeared under his hand and dribbled into the pan where it gelled and slopped, tiny beads of water in water. James cleaned the salmon's belly of the strings of eggs and put the fish back in its tank. His assistant had another fish ready. James took this one, too, by its head, and held it over the blistered water. He called Billie to his side and set her hand on the creature. She felt its scales, silkiness one way and rough opposition the other. She felt James Hallow's warm, cushiony palms pressing the back of her hands. James said she mustn't be afraid of hurting it. She should be firm, her pressure consistent. His hand guided hers, down the fish's belly, squeezing. This was a male fish. Billie saw the milt, white and creamy, pour from the pouting slit near its tail.