My Friend Cousin Emmie Read online

  Jane Duncan

  MY FRIEND

  COUSIN EMMIE

  This book is for

  Mrs E. James Rogers

  Contents

  1 A Dent in the Silver

  2 Queer Things Happen at Sea

  3 ‘People are Themselves First

  4 ‘Liking People is Very Difficult’

  5 ‘Nobody Wants Me!’

  6 ‘Love and Obliqueness’

  7 ‘Relationships are Always Complicated’

  8 Ships Passing in the Sunlight

  9 ‘She Knows Nothing About Dee Andrews’

  10 ‘People are Never Settled Until They are in the Grave’

  11 A Blown Ostrich Egg

  12 A Question of Knowing Enough’

  Jane Duncan

  1

  A Dent in the Silver

  IT WAS December of 1951 and a dull, sullen south-west-of-England morning when I stood by the ship’s rail while all the last-minute bustle of sailing went on about me and discovered in my mind the thought – the thought as complete, concrete, clearly delineated and unexpected as a newly minted silver sixpence found lying on the ground at one’s feet – that I was about to sail back to St Jago and that this was something that I did not want to do.

  I do not suppose that there is in anybody’s life the right moment for making the wrong discovery, but it seemed to me singularly contrary, even for my ineptitude at this activity called ‘living’, that my moment for discovering that I did not want to go back to St Jago should have come so inopportunely as to fall within the last half-hour before the ship sailed. But there it was. The moment had come and the discovery had been made.

  I have read of people who, on making a discovery like this, simply get off the ship and rearrange their lives without further ado, but my life was not, it seems, like theirs. My life is not like any life of which I have ever read. Mine seems to contain much more of what the authors of books seem to regard as unimportant trivia, and I seem to be much more at the mercy of such trivia than the people in books. Some of this trivia which now stopped me getting off the ship was that our livelihood depended on my husband’s engineering job which was based on St Jago; in the course of our leave we had sold our house in Scotland, and our china, linen, books and other valued possessions were in the hold of the ship; our mastiff dog, Dram, full of inoculations against canine tropical diseases, was on his leash at my side, and our car had already been shipped west by an earlier boat. And, down below me, watching the final bustle along with my husband, was something that surely even the author of a book could not treat as trivial: a young woman of twenty-four called Delia Andrews, who was coming out to St Jago to spend a holiday with us. The heroine of a novel, no doubt, having made the discovery that I had just made, would leave the ship forthwith and thus avoid all risk of frustration or the repression of her ego, but I, thinking of all the things which I have just noted and many more besides, merely sighed and did nothing. I have not enough character to bend life, the world, people and events to my will Indeed, for most of the time, I think, I have no character at all. I am merely the prey of every influence, pressure and thrust that life has at its command; I am the straw that is the prey of every wind that blows.

  That Delia Andrews was coming to St Jago with us is fully illustrative of me as a straw in the wind. Sixteen years before, when she was only eight, I had become her governess for a year or so, more or less by accident, in the unwitting way that women of straw like me are persuaded to change overnight from being secretary to Delia’s father into being governess to Delia. Then, during this leave, my husband and I had come across her again at a moment when she was at odds with her family and very unhappy, and in a careless moment my husband had suggested that she make this trip with us. That was the moment when I should have made a stand, but the moment happened in the middle of the night, with Delia in floods of tears, so I left the making of my stand until the morning and I can only shrug my shoulders and say that here we were, on board the boat. Delia was aboard the Pandora with us, and her car was even now being lowered in its net through the hatch into the hold. With misgiving I looked down to where she stood on the deck below and wished with all my heart that she were safely back in London in the bosom of her wealthy stuffy family, where she would no longer be my responsibility.

  The longer one lives, the more habitual it becomes to compromise with life. It becomes so habitual that one, for most of the time, makes the compromise unconsciously, and I now began to seek terms of agreement with life as it was as expertly as any team of diplomats drawing up a treaty of non-aggression between any two irreconcilable enemies.

  We could not have had more depressing weather for our departure, I told myself, than this grey drizzly murk which made the little white ship look like some summer-dressed holidaymaker who, through some displacement in time, had arrived on a deserted stormswept promenade in the middle of winter. Once back at Guinea Corner, our house in St Jago, I assured myself, and into the routine of the sugar plantation again, I would feel quite different. And, without any specious self-assurance, I could tell myself with truth that it always depressed me unreasonably to cast off from the shores of Britain, even for a short holiday, and no matter how much I might like the shore of my destination, for I seem to be very deeply rooted in my native soil – or native rock, rather – in the Highlands of Scotland. In a sense, I never really cast off from the shores of Britain at all. The moment of sailing is merely a painful wrenching of the roots that bind me to home, but, after that initial wrench, these roots seem to uncoil and stretch to a limitless length and become a channel of communication from me back to the hilltop in Ross-shire, called Reachfar, where I was born.

  And so, compromising, making the best of things, as it is called, I turned away from the rail above the foredeck and began to walk towards the little smokeroom that looked out over the stern of the ship, Dram walking beside me, very stiff-legged, his tail making a round ‘O’ over the end of his broad back, his eyes and ears very alert as he looked with suspicion around this steel and wooden contraption of a vessel that was full of strange noises and smells. When I sat down in the smokeroom, he sat down beside me, raised a large paw on to my knee and looked at me in a questioning way.It often seemed to me that Dram could catch my own mood, and I argued with him much as I had been arguing with myself.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘You’ll come to like it. Ships are great fun, and you’ll love Guinea Corner.’

  He sighed, wrinkled his brows and then turned his large head as the door slid open.

  An elderly woman came in from the deck, made her way to one of the little tables on the far side of the room and sat down in a green leather arm-chair. She was small, thin, dressed from head to foot in an indeterminate drab brown colour, and in this breezy sea-going atmosphere she had, somehow, the effect of a withered autumn leaf that had been picked up in a careless frolic mood by the wind and blown here to be trapped in the crevice that was the green leather arm-chair. Having settled herself in one corner of the chair which could have held three people of her bulk, and having deposited on the floor at her feet a large, brownish canvas bag and a brown cotton umbrella, she stared across at Dram and me.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said.

  Her face, which was curiously expressionless, did not indicate that she had heard me, and there was a short interval of silence before her eyes moved from me to the dog who sat beside me.

  ‘It is a very nasty morning indeed,’ she said then.

  Her voice was as expressionless as her face and I had a moment of feeling utterly disconcerted. During this moment she was sitting there looking at me out of her queer, flat, light-brown eyes, and I felt resentfully that she was studying me, considering m
e, but her face expressed nothing of what she was thinking, neither interest nor lack of interest, approval nor disapproval. Suddenly, after perhaps two minutes of silent staring, she bent from the chair, picked up the canvas bag in one hand, the cotton umbrella in the other, and drifted out on to the deck and, turning a corner, disappeared from sight.

  I stared at the sliding door through which she had gone, finding difficulty in believing, now, that she had ever come in, spoken or gone out at all. Looking across at the chair she had occupied, it was difficult to believe that she had ever sat there. The chair looked back at me, more anonymous and more empty than any chair I had ever seen in any public room, I thought, and in the air there remained no faintest vibration, even, of that drab brown visitant. I began to feel more depressed than ever.

  I was just about to return to the deck, for that urgency of near-sailing had begun to pervade the air round the ship, when my husband came into the smokeroom.

  ‘Are we off?’ I asked.

  ‘Where is Dee?’ he asked in the same instant and then repeated:

  ‘Where’s Dee? I thought she was with you.’

  As we stood looking at one another, the ship’s siren blew and there was no doubt now that we were in motion. The warehouses beyond the windows began to slide past.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose she has jumped overboard.’

  He drew a sharp breath, about to make some angry retort, but at that moment a rolling screen rose, disclosing a bar in the corner of the room, and a very freshly scrubbed young steward said: ‘Good morning. Mr and Mrs Alexander, isn’t it? Would you care for a drink before lunch?’

  ‘I’d like a glass of medium sherry, please,’ I said and went to sit down in a corner of the room.

  My husband brought the sherry and a glass of beer for himself and put them on the table, but he did not sit down. ‘I’ll just go and see where Dee is,’ he said.

  ‘Is that really necessary?’ I asked.

  He stood looking down at me, frowning. ‘Janet, what is the matter?’

  ‘I think it is time you stopped behaving like a hen with one chicken. Dee is twenty-four and in no sense a chicken, anyway. Do you realise that for the last week our life has been completely dominated by her?’

  ‘You are talking absolute rubbish.’ I stared at the wall ahead of me without speaking, and he now sat down across the table from me and went on: ‘This is a pretty time to indicate that Dee is not very welcome. I take it that that is what you are indicating?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ I could feel distance growing between us as rapidly as distance was growing between the ship and the shore of the estuary. ‘What I am indicating is that she has come on this trip with us ostensibly because her family in London interfered in her life too much – clucked round her every minute, as she puts it – and it seems to me that your behaviour makes her coming to us a jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire.’

  ‘I’m not clucking round her! I just want to be sure that she is all right and not homesick or anything. A lot of people feel depressed at the start of a journey and—’

  ‘You are telling me?’ I said and my voice shook. ‘Look, you had better get out of here before I throw this glass of sherry! Go on! I mean it. Go away, for God’s sake, and leave me to pull myself together before anybody comes in here!’

  ‘Janet—’

  ‘Go and find Dee!’ I said, aware that my voice was rising, and he left me and went out on to the deck.

  I was sitting with my back to the bar so that the steward could not see my face, and I stared hard at the panelled wall as the tears of mingled confusion and shame began to rise in my eyes. Dram put a paw on my knee and I put my hand on his head.

  I was both miserable and ashamed, miserable with a misery that had been growing during this past week, a misery that had reached its culmination this very morning in the discovery that I did not want to go back to St Jago, and I was ashamed of this outburst of feeling about Dee, but that too was something that had been growing during this past week and had now come to a culmination. I supposed that I was jealous of the girl, and this made me very ashamed, for I have always regarded jealousy as a mean, unworthy emotion which should not be harboured, and it was an emotion which I had never before, even when, a few years before, I had thought that my husband was in love with my friend Monica. At that time I had felt that if he wanted to leave me and go to Monica, that was what he must do; he must have what he wanted. That he seemed to want to go to Monica made me sad, but I did not feel jealous of her as I was now feeling of Dee because of his interest in her. Maybe, I thought as I struggled against the tears, it is because I myself love and admire Monica while I neither love nor admire Dee – while I do not really even like Dee? My train of thought stopped as if in front of a blank wall, for this was another new discovery. I had not, until this very moment, been aware that I did not like Dee Andrews. When she was a child I had been fond of her, and until now I had thought that I was fond of her still, but I now knew that if, as my husband had done, I had met her for the first time as a young woman of twenty-four, she would have had no appeal for me. She was too restless, too discontented, too sullen, too old for her years and at the same time too young; she had none of the attributes that draw me to people and none of the attributes that I hope to find in youth. That my husband had been drawn to her seemed to argue some deep basic difference between him and me, a difference of which, until now, I had been utterly unsuspecting.

  Behind me, I heard the voice of the steward: ‘Mrs Alexander—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If anyone comes in wanting a drink, will you ask them to push this button here?’ He indicated a bell-push in the panelling beside the bar. ‘We are always in a bit of a muddle after sailing and I have to go down and give them a hand in the dining-saloon.’

  I said that I would do what he asked, and he dropped the screen over the bar and went away.

  I was still staring at the wall, but the urge to cry had abated now, when the door from the deck slid open to admit a young man who went towards the bar, then turned away from the closed screen and stood looking at me. He was not less than twenty, I thought, and no more than thirty, but it was impossible to estimate his age more closely than that. He had very strong-growing, slightly curly dark hair, dark eyes and a ruddy skin, and he seemed to exude health and vitality. He moved well, with a control that seemed to be overlaid on a swashbuckling sort of recklessness, and there was a similar air of insouciance in his smile.

  ‘If you want a drink,’ I said, ‘the steward said that if you pushed that button there he would come a-runnin’ from the dining-saloon.’

  ‘I don’t want a drink all that much,’ he said, came over and sat down opposite me. ‘Mrs Alexander, I owe you an apology, if I had obeyed my mother I’d have got in touch with you about three weeks ago.’

  I looked into the gay reckless face. ‘Oh? And who is your mother?’

  ‘Marion Maclean.’

  ‘Marion!’

  Marion Maclean was the wife of Rob Maclean, the manager of the Paradise plantation where my husband and I lived in St Jago. The Macleans had seven sons, but so far I had met only the youngest one, Sandy, who had not as yet gone home to school in Scotland like his brothers.

  ‘Now which one of the seven are you?’ I asked the young man across the table.

  ‘I’m Number Three – Roderick. Mother wrote to me about three weeks ago and said that you and your husband were sailing on the Pandora too, and that I was to get in touch with you; but I am dilatory about letters and things and – well, there it is. I didn’t write to you, and I’m sorry.’

  He smiled contritely, and I said: ‘I don’t see that it matters. Here you are now. Are you coming out on holiday?’

  ‘Sort of. I just got through my finals at the university last month and we’re now going to hold a family parliament about my future.’

  He assumed a parody of a heavy pontifical air for a second, and then the youthful gaiety, which
betokened all the confidence in the world as to the joyousness of his future, broke through again, and it struck me that he was the very opposite of Dee Andrews. Roddy Maclean was youth incarnate.

  ‘Are you another Maclean engineeer?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, lord, yes! There seems to be some natural law that most Macleans are engineers. . . . Listen, would you tell me something? Why is your husband called Twice?’

  The sudden change of subject took me by surprise and then I smiled. ‘I am afraid that I’m responsible for that. His parents christened him Alexander Alexander and I shortened it to Twice. Why?’

  ‘Mother is a very diligent but rather irritating letter-writer. She has kept mentioning Janet and Twice in her letters for the last two years, and if I have asked her once to tell me the origin of the Twice I have asked her a dozen times. She always forgets to answer. It’s been haunting me. Do you ever get haunted by things like that?’

  ‘Often. In fact, names and words in general can haunt me more than anything. I still haven’t got used to the place-names in St Jago, for instance – New Hope, Canaan, Content, Paradise – they turn St Jago into a fantasy world for me.’

  ‘St Jago is a fantasy world,’ he said. ‘At least Paradise is. It isn’t part of things as they are at all,’ he said with a gravity that sat strangely upon his handsome young face.

  He kept on taking me by surprise, this young man. ‘Things as they are?’ I repeated his words.

  ‘That is a bit of private idiom like your Twice,’ he told me, smiling again. ‘I divide things into things-as-they-are, things-as-they-seem and things-as-you-wish-they-were.’

  Looking at him, I repeated his three categories to myself silently and then I asked: ‘If Paradise isn’t things-as-they-are, which is it?’

  ‘A mixture of the other two. It is things as Madame and Sir Ian and my father wish they were, and they do everything in their power to make it seem what they wish it were.’