Billie's Kiss

  ‘I think my wife should not be party to this discussion,’ James said.

  ‘She’s involved, James.’

  ‘But I’d never harm Clara!’ James was aggrieved.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she’s my wife!’ James was amazed.

  ‘Attached to you, so exempt.’

  James looked blank, then he squinted, and his top lip lifted as if he was straining – to hear perhaps, or to follow what was being said, as if Murdo was speaking in a language foreign to him.

  Clara said that they had quite lost her, and Murdo said that this was not a moment for courtesy. Then he told James that he still had no idea how James had done it – it was all too complex and specialised. ‘I’m betting, like a gambler. I’m calling you. I’m paying to see your hand.’

  James remained blank. After a moment he said, ‘Ah – a figure of speech.’ Then he began to explain. He couldn’t resist explaining.

  He said that the device itself was simple but innovative. If he said so himself. The task was always to deliver a flame safely to the priming charge, and degrees of flame to complement different rates of detonation. ‘But there’s no point me explaining the theory of the problem to you. You – who can’t guess how. Who can come up with clever figures of speech, but can’t guess.’ James was boasting. He said that his problem was how to work from a great distance, in space and time, and to act without touching. ‘To light no touch paper,’ James said. ‘To touch off no fuse.’ Then, ‘See, I can do it too – make matter out of words.’ He went on eagerly to say that he’d hit on a notion – a notion so inevitable that he was sure it could stay his secret and still be copied, copied by human ingenuity itself. He called it his ‘timing bomb’. The batteries for the telephone exchange supplied the charge, they were attached by wires to an alarm clock, its hammer and its bell. When the alarm went off and the bell and striker came into contact the charge jumped through another wire, delivering fire – in the form of electricity – into a blasting cartridge. ‘One of Alfred Nobel’s gelignite blasting cartridges. Manufactured in Glasgow.’ This priming charge was, in turn, attached to a bundle of dynamite. ‘The batteries – three feet in height and twenty-five pounds apiece, plus the baled cables and the steel rails, and the seats from my beautiful Panhard et Levassor high-wheeler – all formed a buffer that concentrated the blast against the hull.’

  Clara jumped up with a cry and covered her face. She said, ‘Please, God, no more.’ She said it in Swedish.

  ‘The timing was intricately planned,’ James said. ‘Eleven hours and fifty-nine minutes. Though I was haunted by an odd fear that the clock would go backward – as that case clock of your grandmother’s once chose to, Clara.’ James addressed his wife. ‘Do you recall – we came down to breakfast one morning and found the clock making a senile purr and telling time backward.’ He nodded at Murdo. ‘Prefer to do things for myself. Right about that. Not always easy to find someone to follow the thinking.’ James gave one of the small grimaces that Murdo had long ago realised was his imitation of what he saw – all he could see – when people bared their teeth to smile broadly. James said, ‘There’s plenty of “confession” material here – eh, cousin – regarding aspirations to “testimony” and “truth”.’

  Murdo might normally have said – in as dull and discouraging a way as possible – ‘I can’t follow you.’ But he knew that when James was under pressure his speech became very odd – for instance pronouns began to vanish from his sentences. Murdo had always thought this was James’s way of asserting himself by abdicating into the impersonal – making his views sound universal and inevitable. But it was something else. A quirk. A characteristic. James was full of talk, but not full of himself, so that people who saw him only a little called him ‘good-natured’. For Murdo the ‘natured’ part of the public praise was coming into focus. Was this a product of nature – an accident of birth rather than biography – this heartless, hobbyest attention to detail, this disease of visionary confidence?

  ‘I wrote to Elov Jansen,’ said James. ‘In time, too – but foreign mails are very unreliable. I filled three cabins with men I paid to leave at Luag. At eight bells there was only one stoker on watch below. One attendant at the furnace.’

  ‘That still leaves five dead,’ Murdo said. ‘By your intention.’

  ‘Four, cousin. The fellow pinned by Mr Maslen’s trunk wouldn’t have been moving luggage at eight bells.’ James seemed to get pleasure from correcting Murdo.

  ‘The steward. I believe his name was Alfred,’ said Murdo.

  ‘Please,’ Clara said – in Swedish, perhaps to Murdo, or possibly to the God of her childhood.

  ‘Speak English!’ Her husband shouted. He balled his fists and beat the air. ‘Don’t be secret together.’

  Once he’d raised his voice, James was unable to wind it down. He went on, loud, toneless, declamatory. He explained and expounded. That steward would certainly not have been crushed by Mr Maslen’s trunk, since Mr Maslen had undertaken to ship with the Stolnsay pilot from Dorve the day before.

  ‘Your instructions – as conveyed to him by Gutthorm – were so particular that Mr Maslen took his cue from their tone rather than their substance,’ Murdo said. ‘Maslen decided that you were very particular about punctuality, and that he must, at all costs, arrive on the appointed day. Or as near to it as possible. And, James, what about the child, the three-year-old in the salon? What about her in the cold sea off Alesund Head?’

  James went purple.

  Murdo asked, ‘What was your margin for error?’

  James thrust his own hand into his mouth and bit himself. He bore down, grunting with effort, and blood ran from his broken skin. His wife went to him and pulled the hand down, held it. She said, ‘Don’t do that, James.’ She was so matter-of-fact that Murdo knew she’d seen him do it before.

  ‘Clara,’ James said to Murdo, through lips lacquered with wet blood, ‘was a breath of fresh air. My feelings were always too strong for the other ladies, who seemed to feel nothing for me. Clara was the crown of my life – perfect, picture perfect, until her visit home. You know what visit. I came to fetch her and my’ – his voice strangled – ‘my little Ingrid – and I found the hussar at home and banging about with a cord through his jacket sleeves and jacket slung around his shoulders like a person from Pushkin –’

  Murdo was able to make sense of this only because his own thoughts had often returned to that time – Clara’s first visit to her mother after her marriage. He said, ‘I’d broken my collarbone.’

  ‘Showing off,’ said Clara. Then, very low and tentative, ‘James – Murdo and I were never alone.’

  ‘Yes! I prefer to do things for myself!’ James shouted. ‘Including fathering my own children!’

  Murdo thought about the theatre, men wearing dummy horses they seemed to sit astride, a puppet cavalry wheeling onstage to the crash of tin cymbals. He thought of ice cream and ice-skating; of his eleven-year-old sister Ingrid carrying little Ingrid across the hall, little Ingrid’s red boots banging against big Ingrid’s shins.

  ‘The hussar put me in a difficult position,’ James said. ‘Required me to exercise aggression. Masculine competition. Difficult for me.’

  Clara said to her husband, ‘You’ve made a terrible mistake.’

  ‘In your terrible certainty,’ said Murdo.

  But James wasn’t attending at all. He was talking. About the cuckoo in his nest. And about character. No matter what he was given, Rixon remained Rixon. There was nothing at which Rixon excelled. The only education that stuck was a conventional mimicry of conventional male behaviour. ‘Always catching him practising gestures with a cigar. A dandy, like his father,’ James said. He asked when the world would understand that everything, that character, in the modern and the old-fashioned senses – personality and force of will – were formed from one cell, one germplasm, at the moment of conception. It was a miracle. Too much of a miracle to go unmonitored, or unchecked.

 
Clara groped about for something with which to wipe her face. She fumbled with the scarf knotted at her waist. Murdo passed her his handkerchief. ‘You’ve made a terrible mistake,’ she sobbed at her husband.

  ‘And – where was your margin for error?’ Murdo asked again, cold.

  James peered at him, cockeyed. It was that odd look he had, his eyes wide only because his brows were hitched high. It was as if his eyelids couldn’t open fully of their own accord, but required his whole upper face to move, too.

  ‘Rixon is yours,’ Clara told her husband. ‘I’ve been true to the vows I made when I married you.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Don’t hurt our son,’ Clara begged.

  James peered at her, mouth open, breathing noisily. Then his mouth snapped shut and he said, ‘These are reasons I’m giving. You wanted me to be magnanimous to Murdo. Our cousin, you reminded me. I was magnanimous. Never suspected. But you bloomed and blushed and flourished. And he debauched our daughter. Tried to, or wanted to. I sent for the coroner from Edinburgh not to see whether Ingrid had taken her own life – I knew she had – but to see whether she was still intact.’

  Clara made a low, pained sound. She began to walk – tottered slowly to the door. Murdo intercepted her. He held her. He watched her hands, picking and picking at his jacket as his mother’s had plucked repeatedly at the coverlet of her deathbed.

  ‘As it turned out she was,’ James said. ‘It wasn’t that then. Of course, that would have been a far simpler matter. I racked my brains. I realised that, on Ingrid’s part, it was a chaste affection. A noble affection. But while he dallied with her, she guessed, you see. She watched you together. You. You, Clara. Always asking him, “Will you take Rixon?” She was a loyal daughter, and ashamed of her mother.’

  ‘No,’ said Clara.

  And Murdo, ‘Ingrid told me she loved me, and I said, “Don’t love me.” I said I was fond of her, glad of her company, counted her as a friend. And she gave me a big shove, and ran away weeping. I thought she’d be all right. That we’d be awkward. She’d treat me coldly, perhaps, and everyone would wonder what had happened. I anticipated embarrassment. And I thought perhaps she’d renew her attack. Something, anyway, just something more.’ Then, in despair, ‘Not more nothing!’

  Clara touched his back.

  ‘Look at you!’ James yelled at them.

  Clara drew herself up; she seemed to collect herself. ‘Well, James, you’re not a man who made much of’ – she sighed, as if the air were thin and insufficient nourishment – ‘of my hand on your shoulder. Sometimes you would flinch. Even at first. Affection must have its rewards.’ She said, ‘I’ve been a good wife to you. In fact, I’ve followed my principles. But I must tell you that I now think my principles are only prison bars. I’ve incarcerated myself and excluded others.’

  Murdo tried to take Clara’s hand, but she shook it free.

  ‘However,’ Clara said to James, ‘I will continue to follow my principles. I’ll provide an example for you. You won’t harm Murdo. He’ll go away, and you can stop thinking about him. You won’t hurt Rixon – your son, however unsatisfactory you find him. There will be no divorce, no court case, no untoward exclusions from any will you make. You will make no more murderous budgets where a manservant and a stoker are merely “necessary expenditure”. You will obey me in all this, and I will save you – your life, fortune, and reputation.’

  James grunted.

  ‘Let yourself be guided,’ Clara said, measured and firm. ‘You don’t know, James. You were wrong about Rixon. And Murdo didn’t touch Ingrid. You don’t know.’

  ‘You had no margin for error. And Johan Gutthorm didn’t have the correct time,’ Murdo said.

  Clara was looking at her husband with an expression of compassion. ‘James. The death of a child is terrible. All of life is its anniversary. Each week I say, “At this time last week, month, year, I was potting parsley, and Ingrid was walking back to Scouse Beach.” I say, “A week ago, a month, a year, two years ago at this time my daughter stopped breathing.” I’m living in her time, not my own. At intervals I’m living in her last day, as if that’s the only thing left for me to do. James, I know you’ve felt it, too – felt your life taken. It’s what we must feel. It doesn’t mean that someone – anyone – has stolen from you, or behaved treacherously. You imagine someone must have meant to hurt you – hurt only you, since you feel only your injuries – but death is terrible.’

  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 s
trength 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!’