Billie's Kiss (3 page)

Billie turned back to empty the bucket and, because she wasn't thinking, she threw the pint or so of cloudy bile out into the wind. The wind caught the mess, stopped it in the air then flung it back toward Billie, who ducked. Nothing nasty hit her. She stood straight and cleared the few pinkish tendrils of her hair away from her eyes and found herself looking again at the beautiful sable collar and astrakhan coat
splattered
with ropes of grainy bile.

Billie dropped the pail. It made a clang and rolled away from her feet. She stood with her mouth open, trying to hear. Her ears were ringing.

He had spread his hands, his arms, too disgusted to touch, and was looking down at the front of his coat. Billie watched the wind part his pale hair, like water pouring into water. He looked up at her as she went to him. She lurched against him, unsettled by her numb clumsiness and the motion of the ship. Billie pulled her shawl from her head to mop at his coat. The ends of her hair rushed in front of her and got into the mess but she kept on mopping, folding, finding a clean spot on the shawl to soak up more filth. She could see how the fluid left smears, like the snail trails on the brick steps of the cottage at Crickhowell. She couldn't speak, knew she'd only stammer if she tried.

He stopped her, brought his arms up slowly between them, so that her hands were moved aside. But he wasn't trying to master her hands; he put his own gloved ones together and used his clean sleeves to push her hair up and back, so that his arms were crossed behind her neck, and her hair was out of her face. He moved slowly, apparently concerned not to
frighten or offend her, and with the effect of someone lifting something heavy, or capturing something lively – her hair.

‘I'm so sorry!' Billie said. She was more miserable than embarrassed. She was tired of her own stupidity, tired of being conscious enough to suffer shame for it but unable to correct herself. Then she dropped the shawl and ducked out of his arms. She scrambled away from him, got up, and struck her head on one of the short craning turrets that ventilated the engine room. Her eyes filled, and she glanced back at a blurred block of darkness that was all those coats. Those men. She fled to the far side of the steamer and pressed her back against the wheelhouse wall.

From this retreat, as she collected herself, Billie watched the pilot come alongside, both ships backing their engines. A boat was put down from the pilot's vessel, and a line thrown from the deck of the
Gustav
Edda.
The
Gustav
Edda
's captain waited for the pilot, and another man, to climb the rope and wood ladder that two seamen had rolled over the side. They stood talking at the rail.

Eight bells were sounded.

The fair-haired man in the astrakhan appeared, followed by his servant. Billie flattened herself against a closed door. But he wasn't interested in her. He wanted to know what the problem was. He was, apparently, one of those people who wouldn't acknowledge any problem unforeseen by him as an actuality. ‘What
seems
to be the problem?' he said. It was another expression whose usage Billie had always found intriguing – the possibilities of concession provided by ‘seems to be', as opposed to the inconvenience of ‘is'.

The pilot asked the captain for the cargo manifest. He glanced at the tarpaulin-shrouded shape firmly roped to the stern deck. The captain explained that it was Lord
Hallowhulme's
new automobile. He'd find its seats and doors in the hold – where they had been put in order to preserve their leather from the elements. The pilot said he was more
interested in how the coal was stowed. He told the captain that the Wash was particularly wicked today. The captain said all the cargo was fast, but let the pilot and his man go down to look for themselves.

The person Billie had drenched in Edith's bile lost interest in all this and went back into the sheltered place between the wheelhouse and galley. The pilot eventually reappeared. He was followed by his man, who was, Billie saw, oddly engaged – the man was tucking in the tail of his shirt, as if he'd had some cause to unbutton and unbelt his trousers while below. Billie was intrigued. The pilot seemed satisfied. Then he saw Billie, and she believed he asked the captain who she was.

‘Miss Wilhelmina Paxton,' Billie heard the captain say, ‘who is travelling with her sister and her sister's husband, Mr Henry Maslen.'

The pilot said he had thought that Mr Maslen and his womenfolk would wait another few nights at Dorve. He had been supposed to ferry them over. Their haste was unnecessary. He said it loud enough for Billie to hear, seemed regretful, as if he was acquitting himself of some blame. Perhaps he'd mistaken the pallor of Billie's mortified embarrassment for illness.

The pilot and his man went back down the ladder to their boat, and rowed back to the small steamer which, after a minute, was under way again, on a shallow curving course, to the headland and the Wash. The
Gustav
Edda
followed.

Billie remained on deck, on the windward side, away from the other passengers. Without her shawl she was very cold. As the
Gustav
Edda
came into the Wash and began to toss in a strange watch-winding motion, Billie gripped the thick guide ropes against the wall behind her. The steamer came around as if kicked into place by the current, then made its laborious way around the headland. The sea gradually became calmer.

Fifteen minutes later Billie had her first sight of Stolnsay.

The land around the town wasn't in any way distinguished
from the rest of the ‘countryside' – if you could even use that word. It was virtually treeless, except for a quarter mile stretch along one arm of the harbour. Those trees were a witchy wood of lichen-blanched beech, birch, and hazel, framing a grey limestone castle. The castle was newish, a folly of ornamental battlements and towers, inlaid stonework shields, sphinxes, dragons, griffins, and lions. The castle had two wings, which lay somehow awkwardly, like a taxidermist's guess at the anatomy and posture of a creature he'd never seen living. Except for the wooded point there were only a few trees by the town's three visible churches. The remainder of the
landscape
was stone, shaped stone, houses organised out of hills where the green-and-bronze turf looked rubbed away from rock, as if each hill was solid, solid stone under a meatless, fatless pelt of turf.

It wasn't an ugly town, but it looked dour and unfriendly, grown up around the long notch of a fishing port. The tide was right in and the fishing vessels moored along the wall of the inner harbour had their decks less than ten feet from the quayside. Beyond the quay there were several streets of
two-storey
houses. On the slope above these were whitewashed cottages, all separate, with nothing between them, not even fences of stone. Stolnsay was the biggest town on the island, but looking at it Billie could see no public buildings other than churches and a post office. She knew at once what this would mean – that there would be no retreat from indoors outdoors, no gardens, shaped trees, hedgerows, garden seats, no porches even, nor enclosed lanes. No retreat outdoors from in – and indoors there'd be Edith and Henry.

Billie had, in the two years of her sister's marriage, so far been able to take a hat and shawl and walk away from their private moments, their private happiness. Or there were indoor retreats, the kitchen clock's bold, definite tick, a kettle talking on the coal range, or her songbird piping away in the tiny bedroom off the kitchen, whose walls, around her zinc
child's bedstead, were papered for extra insulation with the varnished pages of the mercantile gazette. Billie thought of her retreats, and what she was in retreat from. Edith, on the settee, turning up her petticoats to pick at loose threads, a new run in the soft cotton. Edith's expression: smug, tolerant, exclusive. And there was the soft, luxurious look Edith wore sometimes when Billie brought her up a cup of tea in the morning. Billie had often wondered whether it was
embarrassment
she felt, or envy. She
wasn
'
t
excluded. Henry and Edith would each take one of her arms when they went out walking together. She sat between them in church; and Henry would always make sure to set their one good lamp so its light fell, divided but equal, on Edith's mending or Billie's music – while he'd lounge on the floor himself reading, his back against Edith's chair and a foot braced on the square pilaster leg of Billie's upright piano. When Billie would pass Henry on the stairs, on her way up with tea for Edith – who was of late sick to her stomach, or sleepy and waxing full – Henry would stoop quickly, his eyes warm, to kiss Billie's cheek, or once, her ear, his lips catching a few wispy hairs at her temple and setting her whole scalp aprickle.

Beside the wheelhouse, on the deck of the
Gustav
Edda
, Billie Paxton scraped her loose hair back to look at her new hometown. Her hair pushed heavily against her cocked arms and flickered around them. She caught the two uniformed youths staring at her. They appeared to consult, to egg each other on, then they came over. The boys removed their caps, but the strong wind was only able to set up a telegraphic quiver in their cropped hair. One spoke, the other merely gazed. The one who spoke had slightly protuberant pale blue eyes, but was otherwise good-looking. He was perhaps fifteen years of age. He introduced himself – Rixon Hallow, and this was his friend Elov Jansen. He said he hoped Mrs Maslen was comfortable in her cabin. Billie nodded, speechless. She felt the wind poke a cold finger through a split seam under
her arm. The boy blushed. He was waiting for something. Billie realised that, as it was this party who'd given up their cabin to the Maslens when they arrived unexpected at Luag, they might expect her to acknowledge it. These boys had been obliged to walk the deck for the ten hours of the voyage. Surprised into it – and despite herself – Billie dropped into a jerky, curtailed curtsey; she bobbed, as she'd used to do to her employers when she was briefly in service. She resented this, that she'd been reminded to show gratitude, found ungrateful, or hesitant – again.

‘Mr Hesketh says he'll send your shawl on to you once it has been laundered,' said Rixon Hallow. He was still blushing.

‘Thank you.' Billie excused herself, said she must go help her sister get dressed.

The engines had slowed. The ship was making not for the deep, sheltered water within the harbour proper, but for a berth at the sea side of the longest pier. Billie saw that the pier had been constructed as a causeway to a much older castle, a small fortress really, on what must once have been an island of rock. Nearer to, the fortress showed dilapidated, its lower walls thick with salt scum, its unglazed windows protected by bars in the form of rusty iron arrowheads.

Billie walked between the boys before they had replaced their caps. She ducked her head and darted around the
wheelhouse
, watched only her step, her hand on the rope rail along the wheelhouse wall. The sea was quiet enough now for her to hear the ash smuts from the ship's smokestack drop hissing into the waves. She glanced toward the sound and saw the water, clear and almost grass green over stretches of sand between rocks maybe thirty feet down. The sea turned grey again over the rocks, but green was the true colour of its dense transparency. The ship was backing its propellers and Billie saw wind-pushed wavelets crisscrossed by smaller wrinkles, water disturbed by the engine, the cross-hatching a border between natural wind-driven, and unnatural,
submarine turbulence. Perhaps because of its colour, or its texture – this novel sign of engine's muscle moving water's weight – the sea suddenly seemed strange to Billie, as it hadn't since she was a small child.

Henry met her at the hatch. He said he'd been sent to fetch her. Edith had told him Billie had the buttonhook. Then he said, ‘Look at our new home.'

‘I looked.'

He touched her cheek. ‘You must be tired, dear. And cold. Have you been up here without your shawl?' His hand was warm. Billie tilted her face momentarily into his cupped palm. Then she went by him and let herself down the ladder into the gloomy passage.

Edith was upright on her bunk, with her face clean, and an unpinned hat perched on her damp hair. Her feet were in her shoes but unfastened. The cabin stank of vomit, sweat, and distress. Billie crouched at her sister's feet and got the buttonhook from the bag at her belt and began to prise the kid-covered buttons through their stretched holes. Edith's feet were swollen, were fat and tender to the touch. ‘Please God don't let me have to spend the rest of my time lying down,' Edith said. ‘I'm afraid they'll have to carry me off the ship. What an embarrassment.'

‘It's Lord Hallowhulme's cousin whose cabin we've taken,' Billie said. ‘There will a carriage for them, surely.'

‘But
we
were expected at Southport, Billie,' Edith said. ‘On Thursday.'

‘I mean, we can take their carriage as well as their cabin.'

Edith smiled. She drew her foot away from her sister's hands. ‘Leave it a little undone at the ankle, or I'll be crippled. My feet are all pins and needles.' Edith showed no sign of moving. She said she'd wait till the ship was at a complete stop.

Billie went to find Henry. She was concerned that they would have to carry Edith between them. Henry met her under
the hatchway, and they paused in the now-motionless square of light by the foot of the ladder. Henry said that the sailors who had carried his writing case, microscope, and leaf press onto the ship could be trusted to carry his burdened wife. He took Billie's hands and told her to stop fretting. ‘It's unlike you.'

The
Gustav
Edda
quivered as its anchor chain played out.

‘You must compose yourself a little,' Henry said. ‘I think I saw Hallowhulme himself on the pier. Waiting for us. Wearing a frown.'