Billie's Kiss (32 page)

She turned to Murdo, looked up into his face, tearful, appealing. ‘Please,' she said. ‘You're safe. He's safe. I can persuade you both.'

James was pale, perspiring, his eyes darted about.

‘Your reckoning was right out,' Murdo said to him. ‘Here I am, alive. Rixon is at your table eating his lunch. Fifteen people are in their graves – by your murderous incompetence.'

James exploded. He picked up a pile of books and papers and threw them on the floor; he overturned his easel and its dust-furred oil painting; he blundered about the room breaking inkwells, vases, instruments of measurement. He flung his leaf press at the wall and showered the study with sere green flakes.

Murdo pulled Clara out of the room and closed the door on the din, the grunts of effort, the aggrieved whining.

‘If he had made less money, and merited less indulgence, he might have learned to think twice instead of building and building on his first thought,' Murdo said. ‘God save us from his kind.'

‘I've made mistakes,' Clara said. She had his hand now, was holding it hard in both of hers.

‘You chose James.'

‘I can't take that as a mistake, Murdo, and wish away Rix and Minnie, whom I love.'

Murdo looked down at her, the pink scalp showing through the thin hair on her crown, the shadows dappling her skin, as if she were spoiling in pieces. He looked at the skin on the back of the hands that held him, foxed, like an old map. He looked without compassion because he knew she was about to ask him to spare James. To think of her, of Rixon, of Minnie.

‘Don't start,' he said. ‘I can't keep what I know from Geordie. I owe Ian that.'

Clara shook her head. She said her mistake was her silence. She'd lived so long with James she'd become accustomed to going unheard. First it was a deprivation. Then a form of immunity. Nothing she said made any difference. ‘I forgot entirely the real effect of speech.' She crushed Murdo's hands between her own. ‘Listen,' she said, urgent. ‘You told me how you felt when you visited Karl Borg. Locked into his cell, you said, and the course of his execution. Monstrous and
cold-blooded
, you called it. You said that Karl's condemnation saved no lives.'

‘Karl was hapless. He hadn't handled a pistol. He didn't hunt. He had no former experience of the effect of a
well-placed
shot. He had a fatal failure of imagination.'

‘So did James,' Clara said.

‘James thought it through. He planned minutely. But he didn't distinguish the
people
from his automobile or the phone cables. He made sacrifices, he set himself back months – his alginate factory and the telephone exchange. And, he said, about the stoker, the man left on watch, “The devil take him.”'

‘Have you nothing on your conscience?' Clara said.

Murdo said nothing.

Clara placed her hand, palm flat, against his shoulder. Its warmth, if it had any, couldn't make its way through the fabric of jacket, shirt, bandages. She began to talk, to tell him something. ‘I had thought I'd spare you this, Murdo. But you persist in making up your accounts, like James. Blame
me
. I told my secret. I went up after lunch to see how Ingrid was – she'd come in out of sorts and complained of a headache. She was upset – so I went to talk to her. They were never easy to show love to, my children. Rixon was – is still – inclined to say: “Oh,
Mater
!”
He's very English. Minnie reads me lectures on “the feminine education in self-sacrifice” or “Science and Sentiment”. Ingrid didn't say anything – she simply shook my love off. She had grown into her strength and out of being mothered. She was very unhappy – but very dignified. When
she told me how she felt about you, and what you had answered to her honest approach, I could see she was serious, and that it wasn't something she'd get over easily. I wanted to – nip it in the bud.' Clara paused, then said, in quite another tone, sly, insinuating, ‘By the way – do you remember the rosebuds I was to wear at my wedding?'

Murdo started, then dipped his head to regard her full in the face. ‘What?' he said. It was all he could manage.

‘I told Ingrid my secret. I told her that she was your daughter.'

Murdo frowned at her; he tried to think.

‘You were –
great
trouble
. You were out of your mind with drink. You threw my rosebuds – my “girlhood” in the language of flowers – into the kitchen fire. You wept. My dear. The very next morning – my wedding day – I looked into your face and realised you had no memory of what had happened. And I felt as light as air.' Clara actually smiled, remembering. ‘You didn't like James any more than I did. I liked his money. I was a greedy, indolent girl. You wanted me to be some kind of free, fine, noble creature – but
I
wasn't
like
that.
I loved you so much – my miserable, enraged, bawling bobby calf. And when Ingrid was born, with her feathers for hair, I knew she was yours.'

Again Clara freed her hand, this time to use her sharp fist to beat herself on the breastbone. ‘I should have told
you
, not her!' she cried. ‘I should have made it
your
task to keep her at arm's length till she fell into some other arms. I loved you, and gave you up – it was easy when you were fifteen. Ingrid saw what I had only seen after my marriage – the man you became. I gave you up – but she couldn't.' Clara threw back her head, and sobbed. ‘
She
left
me.
My daughter!'

At that moment, hearing herself called, Clara's daughter appeared – she'd been in the upper hall on her way to her room and Conan Doyle's
Final
Problem.
Minnie pounded down the lower flight, sailed like a swinging boom around
the newel post, and landed near Murdo and her mother. ‘Mama!' Minnie was horrified. She hugged Clara, held her as Clara's hair collapsed and oozed out of its pins and over her face. Then, with canine alertness, Jenny appeared too – and between them the younger women began to lead Clara away.

‘Come upstairs, Lady Hallowhulme,' said Jenny.

‘Shall we lie down, Mother?'

Clara turned her ruined face to Murdo and whispered something, something insane, nonsensical: ‘For thousands of years, man has made a god of Chance –'

Murdo's hair prickled.

‘Mother!' said Minnie, moved and flattered.

Her mother patted her shoulder. ‘Then what does he go on to say – the silly man?'

Minnie quoted: ‘It's time man made a god of Will.'

‘Yes. Dreadful,' said Clara. Again she looked at Murdo, her eyes so suffused they seemed blind. ‘Then the clever young man says: “But sometimes chance will make a god of a person – or an instrument of God.”'

‘That's right,' said Minnie.

‘That clever Mr Shaw,' said her mother, with a smile at Minnie. Then, to Murdo. ‘You don't owe me anything. But I am owed – I'm owed a life. One life. And Chance has made a god of you.'

GEORDIE HAD an unsatisfactory leave-taking. After lunch he went to the kitchen to give away those things of Ian's he'd decided not to keep. He sat with Mrs Deet, Cook, Ward the butler, and Robert, the footman with whom he was friendly, and talked. Jenny was with Lady Hallowhulme, Mrs Deet explained. Lady Hallowhulme was in ‘a taking'. ‘Very unlike her,' Deet added. ‘But I expect you know all about it. Since Agnes tells us Mr Hesketh's back – Agnes has his muddy clothes to clean – and he had some news of that strange girl, Miss Paxton, and why she ran away.'

‘It'll all blow over,' Geordie told them.

And Robert said, admiring, that the master was human after all.

Geordie could see they were pleased by the thought – that they warmed to the idea of Lord Hallowhulme's human failings.

‘What will Mr Maslen do?' Cook wondered. ‘Poor man. He needs to stop somewhere. And we'd all rather have him than Johan Gutthorm.' This remark set up a quiver of
consensual
nodding. Then the butler said there wasn't any point in further speculation. Mrs Deet, for one, would only be able to follow the story like a book with its middle torn out. The rest of them would be back in Edinburgh in three weeks. And London shortly after, since the Lords would be sitting soon.

They all told Geordie he must write, visit – and he took his leave.

He found the Tegners, mother and daughters, and they told him the same –
if
he
was
ever
in
Malmo.
Jane thanked him for his kindness to her girls and teased him about his alternative career on the stage.

Rixon and Elov had gone riding. Minnie – whom Geordie most wanted to see – was with her mother. He stood at the door with his bags and his coat over his arm, looking back at the empty hall, the fresh flowers doubled, a splash of colour on the silver of the hall mirror; the dark-panelled walls. Sunlight angled in the big landing window and raised more colour on the dim, carpeted stairs where dust hovered like watery midges.
Yet
, he thought,
I
'
ve
been
happy
here.
What right had he to be happy where he'd come to bury his brother? But Geordie's shame seemed rebellious, while happiness was the authority against which it rebelled. No one should ever quarrel with happiness. Geordie thought of Billie Paxton, how she'd done something quite different with her grief. He had kept up his conversation with Ian, wrote to him still, because, without Ian, Geordie wasn't wholly himself. Over the years
Ian had become not just the repository of Geordie's private self, but the
occasion
of that private self. Geordie wrote to Ian to
be
Geordie – not Mr Betler the butler. But Billie Paxton had lost the person nearest to her. She'd been so close to Edith, and so dependent, that she'd let her sister carry her soul – or they had lived and breathed in a cloud of each other's souls. It was as if these sisters, not existing wholly and exclusively in themselves, couldn't be separated, or separately
extinguished
. Now Billie didn't only check herself with thoughts about what her sister would do and say, she simply did as Edith would, because Edith was present to her, as a stain, a preserving medium, a benign contamination.

Geordie would see Billie soon. He and the Tannoys would help her. The thought kept him buoyant. He was carrying something away with him – the intimacy of Kiss – which was a kind of intimacy he'd never known before. Geordie had confidence that, in the course of his life, he'd have further civil conversation with Lady Hallowhulme, and young Rixon, and friendly conversation with Minnie, but he had Billie to care for, to set on her feet, to pass over to the kind patronage of the Tannoys. Ian was gone – but he'd still be Geordie. He'd be Billie Paxton's Geordie.

Alan Skilling was sitting on the gatehouse doorstep. He got up and wrestled one of Geordie's bags out of his grip. ‘I've got nothing to do today. It's the Sabbath. I'm just waiting,' he said.

‘Waiting to do something?'

‘To be asked to do something. And for my father.'

‘Where is he?'

‘At Southport, I expect, looking over the cannery.' Alan went with Geordie around the harbour, both hands on the bag's handle, while it banged on his legs. Once Geordie tried to retrieve it, and Alan growled, ‘I can manage.'

When they got to the ship, Geordie put his bags down at the foot of the gangplank and searched his pockets for a
shilling, and for paper and pen. He wrote out the Tannoys' Glasgow address and told Alan that, when he was a little older, and if he had his father's permission, he could come and ask for a job. ‘If I'm not there, tell the people Mr Betler wants you.'

‘Thank you, I might, too,' Alan said. ‘But I don't like to leave the island.'

Geordie raised his eyebrows at the boy.

‘Father let our croft go – it's all over bracken now. But when I'm old enough to recover it, I'll ask Lord Hallowhulme for it back. I remember that I liked it – though I was too little to be much use. When my mother was alive, we'd put in the barley, then take our cow up to the sheiling to cut peats, then father was on his cousin's boat, after herring, then we'd harvest, and put by everything we'd need.'

Geordie looked down at Alan's thin, tense, sober face, and said that whatever Alan chose, he was sure he'd do well.

‘Before you go, Sir, was there any news of Billie?'

‘Billie,' said Geordie, smiling, ‘is in Glasgow with my employers.'

‘Oh – that villain,' said Alan, darkly.

‘Lord Hallowhulme?'

‘No. Not him,' Alan said. Then, ‘Well, Mr Betler, give her my love. And my thanks. And tell her that she shouldn't fret – no one has to remember to feed Alan Skilling.'

Geordie reached in his pocket and gave the boy another coin. Then he went on board.

At dusk, when the ferry sailed, and Geordie had already installed himself on a padded bench in its small salon, Murdo Hesketh appeared. Murdo threw his one bag into the netted rack in the corner farthest from the stove, his astrakhan on top of it, and sat down well away from Geordie. Geordie kept his eyes turned toward the man, waiting, and eventually Hesketh turned and gave Geordie a look shockingly like the look Geordie had been given by a mangy lion in a damp brick
cell in Glasgow Zoo, a look of impotent, weary hatred. Geordie looked away.

At midnight, when Alesund Head was well astern, shrinking, losing all its naked distinction, and the two women nearest Murdo got up to take a turn around the deck, Geordie took their place.

Murdo didn't open his eyes. Geordie could see that the bruise on Murdo's forehead had spilled its yellow into the nearest eye socket. But Murdo knew Geordie was there. He said, ‘I am going with you.'