Billie's Kiss (33 page)

‘Did you see Minnie? Alan?'

‘No. I left Alan some shoes. I lost them for a time, but when I retrieved my horse I found them. They were a present from Billie.'

‘Thoughtful girl.'

‘She is. I'll go with you to see her settled. Like Mr Maslen with his “cottage in Port Clarity”. Settle Billie. Soothe the baby and go back to the book.'

‘What's
your
book, Murdo?'

Murdo opened his eyes and smiled. ‘Job, apparently. “
I
was
not
in
safety,
neither
had
I
rest,
neither
was
I
quiet;
yet
trouble
came.
”'

WHEN THEY got to Andrew Tannoy's Glasgow house, Geordie and Murdo found that Billie wasn't there, and hadn't been heard from.

15

Maintaining a Good Character

B
ILLIE FINALLY fell asleep on the train from Oban to Glasgow. On the water some involuntary fear had kept her aroused and awake. When the pilot's steamer came out of the reef into the tail of the Wash there was a faint shock against the port side. Billie was able to reason that away – it was only an adjustment – but she couldn't sleep. The train carriage didn't roll, it jostled. And she was done in. She woke in the outskirts of the city, looked out on sooty brick and – on a bridge – through the undulations of iron girders. She discovered that she'd lost Edith. Had she left her sister in the sea? Or was it that she was doing something of which her sister would not approve?

Billie began to talk to herself. She talked herself off the train and through into the echoing concourse of the station. ‘Don't sit like that, Billie,' she said first, then, ‘What were you thinking?' And, arguing with her sister, and her sister's ideas: ‘I'll not go where I'm not wanted.' She raised her hot, sticky eyes to the August sun coming through the station's lofty glass ceiling. Pigeons crossed above her, dancing a
quadrille
in the air, some flying from a discharge of steam on a near platform, others from the complicated metal wrenching of carriages coupling.

Billie found a lady with two girls, all in straw hats and white summer gloves. She stopped before them, put down her bag, and dug in her purse for a paper. She asked could madam please read this letter – she'd forgotten its directions.
The timetable too? She would commit it to memory. No, she wasn't able to read – it was a defect, a kind of disease, ‘
congenital
word blindness'. Madam said that, of course, the Express left from Edinburgh, Billie should buy a ticket to Edinburgh. She and her girls were going there, second-class, since it wasn't a long journey. There was the ticket office. Billie had ten minutes.

On the train Madam and the girls shared their sandwiches and, at Edinburgh, Madam stood by Billie as she bought her ticket to London – a space in the sleeper car. Madam took Billie to the tearooms and sat her at a table facing the window, and a clock at the end of the platform with the thickest traffic of porters. Madam said that before Billie left the train at London she must ask a steward for further directions. Madam had, of course, glanced at the paragraphs preceding Reverend Vause's instructions and knew that Billie wasn't running away but taking up an offer of sanctuary. She ordered Billie tea and scones, wished her good luck, and – girls in tow – walked away into the crowd.

The tearooms were noisy, and all the noises were sharp. A boy at a table near Billie kicked the leg of his chair, and someone behind her tapped their spoon on their saucer. Billie drank her tea, but left her scones. Her throat hurt, and it was difficult to swallow. She felt dry, and exposed, like a stretch of sand from which the sea has retreated. After a time she went out into the din and waited under the clock, then, when the flow of people on her platform began to include passengers, she found her coach and her seat.

Inside her a tide was going out. Appetite departed first – before the train – then, as whistles were blown up and down the platform and, ahead, the engine began to twitch the carriages into place, twitch and tighten and apply its different rule of inertia, the tide took Billie's vitality, and her lucidity. She sat with her head nodding and knocking against the window while time tried to untangle itself from her day, gently,
as though not to awaken her, pushing its yarn back through loosened knots, unravelling, following its own thread and rolling her out of its skein as it went.

Billie was hot. Sweltering in the trap on the final slope to the Broch. Henry was telling her about Lord Hallowhulme's stepladder. Then she was on the ladder, and opposite Lord Hallowhulme. He was asking her about herself, in search of a common ground for conversation. But his kindness was lost on her, because her side of the ladder was in the green water under Stolnsay wharf, and she was Edith, hair trailing upward and her fingernails drifting above her like fallen plum blossom suspended on the surface of a pond. She was cold, not drowned, but draining water on a stone tower top in the rain, with Rory Skilling lying on her, heavy and stifling.

Billie woke up when the illumination increased. The scenery was shining in her face – a river mouth under a white sky. She went out into the corridor where a man noticed her confusion and said, informative, ‘Berwick upon Tweed,' and ‘The dining car is open.' Then, to show he meant nothing by it, he shook out his paper and hid his face. Billie watched the attendant make her bed, then lay, aching in every joint and gently jerked about all night.

At London the train she wanted left from another station. A porter put her in a cab. Another – she paid them well – set her on a seat on the right platform with only an hour to wait. She jumped up once when she saw her father, Edith, herself, hurrying back into the clamour of the main concourse. They'd got off at the wrong stop. Beyond those doors was not the port, but Genoa's old town, where the buildings leaned together so that their shadows could climb them, and flower, and bear fruit. Billie heard her father promising his girls that it wasn't far to walk. The doors flashed, and they were gone.

Someone asked, ‘Is this your train?' Billie peered about. It was her train. A train from which she saw the sea several times, and on which she was asked
was
she
unwell
?
Yes. But
she was nearly there – in her zinc bedstead under the slope of the roof.

‘Miss? Miss?' She had to change trains. She splashed her face in the washroom and combed her hair, twisted it into a thick knot at her nape. Four hours, the stationmaster said, and that there was a quiet parlour in the pub on the high street. But Billie took a seat in the station and watched the line back the way her train had come, a canted curve. The oak trees were dark now, in August, but lightening, leaves brown at their limbs' ends. Billie had missed the trees, their temperate confidences, volume, their stayed stirring.

A slow train on a branch line. Billie lay down on the timber slat seat. Then, at her journey's end, she had a little bit of luck. She heard herself saying it – ‘A little bit of luck' – just as her father had used to, making excuses for the heartless chance to which he was devoted, his luck, every time it turned back for a moment to trifle with him again. Billie even coughed like her father, her voice caught on something as she tried to get it out quickly, when she saw that, at the same time that she had alighted, so had the Reverend Vause. Billie croaked his name, and began to cough. He dropped his bag and started toward her. He caught her. She drooped in his arms, coughing. He called for water, and the train was delayed while its
tufty-eared
ticket-taker talked to the stationmaster and the Reverend Vause. Indeed, he'd noticed her, but not that she was sick. The Reverend Vause held a glass to Billie's lips. ‘Why didn't you stop somewhere? Were you short of funds?'

‘I still have my forty pounds from Aunt Blazey. Henry kept Edith's. Henry's alive – but you know that.'

‘Mr Maslen survived?'

Billie remembered that Lord Hallowhulme had looked over the letter – dictated to Clara – before posting it. She said to the reverend that maybe she was meant to disappear into Lord Hallowhulme's deep pockets.

The Reverend Vause said – very worried, and falsely bright
– that
here
was
Owen
,
sent to meet him with Mrs Wood's trap. ‘You remember Owen.'

Owen: ‘Wilhelmina.'

Reverend Vause: ‘I'll carry Miss Paxton, Owen.'

A LITTLE over a week later Billie was allowed out, on a wicker lounger placed in a sheltered corner of the garden. Olive Vause arranged a rug on Billie's legs, then put on an apron and gardening gloves, took secateurs in hand, and walked into a frozen fireworks of summer greenery. She began dead-heading. The foxgloves were only standing still for their seed, she explained, tapping it out of the rigid brown rods.

Billie watched. The coneflowers were wilted, their ears laid back. The nearest unfinished thing was the mallow, a pink almost white, a plant that had grown well in the walled garden at Kiss. Bumblebees and cabbage whites worked what was left of the garden.

It was Olive who had cared for Billie. Or rather, it was Olive who supervised the doctor's and servants' care. Nothing had been said about the past. Olive and Billie were engaged in a silent tussle where each meant to make it evident to the other that they were forgiven. Billie was too tired to feel offended.

Billie was tired – but the garden wasn't.

‘I wasn't much use to Miss Minnie,' Billie explained to Olive. ‘But I suppose that, if I'd offered myself as a lady's companion, she'd have taken me on.'

‘Well,' said Olive, ‘that would be a step up in the world.'

Billie laughed because, when the heroine of Minnie's play talked about ‘steps up in the world', the hero said he had stature himself, of himself, and didn't need a box to stand on.

The Reverend Vause appeared. He came across the lawn, removed his hat, said good morning to Billie, and waited for his sister to leave. He eyed Olive, turning his hat by the brim. Billie hadn't seen him since her arrival. She had been too sick.

She still felt queasy and colourless.

‘Olive, I'd like to speak to Wilhelmina.'

‘Indeed,' said Olive.

‘Please,' he said, ‘remove yourself by a bed or two. Go and discipline your loosestrife or coddle your artemesia.'

Olive put her secateurs in her apron pocket. ‘I'll make up an arrangement for your room,' she told Billie, and left.

The Reverend Vause sat on the lawn by Billie's chair, one leg cocked, his wrist propped on his knee. ‘We're pleased you came, Wilhelmina, and happy you're with us. But, I must admit, we're puzzled by the precipitous haste of your journey – and the state you were in when you arrived. Not just your health, mind, but your attire – torn petticoats, a skirt worn over a dress, the bodice of which was – well – filthy, its stitching popped as though you'd been
swimming
in it. And, though your nails are now trim, they were terribly torn – as if you'd been digging with your bare hands. You must realise that all this requires some explanation. We have to know what happened to you in order to decide how best to help you.'

Billie looked at her hands, the nails she'd torn prising a stone from the top of the tower at Ormabeg, and the
still-spreading
bruise around the thumb dislocated by the revolver's recoil. She didn't make any answer.

‘Furthermore, Mrs Wood is concerned that you've become accustomed to luxury,' he said, and, surprised by the tension in his voice she met his eyes. She told him that Kiss wasn't particularly luxurious. It was rather horrible. Grim and
over-ornamented
. She was quoting Minnie. ‘The last laird had terrible taste. Lord Hallowhulme has some beautiful things, though. Lovely vases,
favrile
lustering
,
and one which sat by the ballroom door, that glowed in the dark as though it held a smoky green genie. I only noticed it the night I went in and found only one branch of candles lit.' Billie remembered then the song she'd begun, its opening passage. She heard it, saw what it expressed, the moon breaking free of a cloud and a
road suddenly coming clear, the road that was
always
there
, the earthly whiteness of a well-worn pilgrims' path.

Billie wriggled out from under the rug, ‘Come with me,' she told the Reverend Vause.

He followed her into his sister's music room. Billie sat at the piano – a grand, like Kiss Castle's. She had played this one once, but like a nervous scullery maid set to dry the best glassware – too tentative. Billie lifted the lid, said, ‘Listen,' and set her damaged fingertips on the cool keys and played her tune.

‘It's lovely,' said the Reverend Vause. ‘Is that all you know?'

‘It's unfinished,' said Billie. She sat, throbbing with breath and smiles, tears in her eyes, because Edith had come back, rekindled, as steady as a flame in quiet air.

The Reverend Vause sat beside her on the piano stool. He put his hand on her shawled shoulder. He said that his sister Olive had told him how she had hidden her own silver-backed brush and mirror beneath the lining in Billie's bag. ‘When Olive read about the accident she was distraught – quite ill, and she had to tell me.'

‘Oh,' said Billie.

‘She's had her troubles,' he said. Then he went on to say that his living was modest, his house dowdy – he wasn't rich like the widow Wood – and the country hereabouts was very quiet –

Billie put a hand on his head, pushed her fingers into his hair. His scalp was humid and the smell rising from it recalled other intimacies. He stopped speaking, and began to tremble. He took her other hand and kissed her palm. After a moment he said, ‘I must know what happened to you.' Then, at her silence, and as a kind of guess, he quoted Scripture: ‘
Put
not
your
trust
in
Princes
.'