Billie's Kiss Read Online Free Page B

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 distinguishedfrom 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 zincchild’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