My Friend Cousin Emmie Page 11

  On the tenth evening of Crop, I was packing Twice’s suitcases for his trip to the southern islands while he sat on the bed arranging the papers in his brief-case.

  ‘I know I am a big grown-up boy now,’ he said suddenly, ‘but I don’t want to go away from home one bit.’

  ‘Darling, I don’t want it either, but there it is and a fortnight isn’t all that long.’

  ‘It won’t be a fortnight long if I can help it. You are sure you will be all right?’

  ‘Of course!’

  We went on with our separate jobs, both a little ashamed of ourselves and trying to adjust ourselves to this new departure in our lives, for since we had first met in 1945 there had not been a single day that had not largely been spent in the company of one another.

  ‘And you are not to worry about Dee and me while you are away,’ I told him.

  He had finished arranging his papers and had taken one shoe off preparatory to having a bath before dinner. He sat on the edge of the bed with the shoe dangling from his hand by its lace.

  ‘I wish to God we had never brought her out here!’ he said suddenly.

  Since the evening when we quarrelled on board the ship we had tacitly avoided serious discussion of Dee, and had gone on from day to day, coping with her moods as they came, but for the most part avoiding mention of her when we were alone. On my part, the reason for this was that I was afraid that discussion of her might lead to another quarrel between us, for I could now understand Twice’s liking for her even less than I had understood it that first evening at sea. Since the ‘nobody-wants-me’ scene of about a week before, I was less in sympathy with Dee than ever because my attitude was that, if she felt like this, she ought to examine herself and find the reason why ‘nobody wanted her’ instead of blaming people and retiring into sulks and self-pity, but the effect of the scene on Twice seemed to have been the reverse of the effect it had made on me. Through it, she seemed to have made some pathetic appeal to him so that, since it happened, he had given her even more of his time in the evenings, allowing her to sit with him in his study which was mainly a drawing-office and where I myself did not go unless he invited me to look at some piece of work he was doing. I was not jealous of the time Twice gave to her, but I could not understand the appeal she had for him, and her whole personality lay between us like a barren wilderness in the realm of our emotions, a wilderness in which I was afraid to set foot by any talk, other than of the most casual nature, about her.

  ‘But, Twice,’ I said now, ‘why? Since the nobody-wants-me carry-on last week, I thought everything was merry as a marriage bell! There have been no moods or anything and she is going down to the Bay again and—’

  ‘Do you know what she has been doing in the Bay?’ he interrupted, his voice shaking with suppressed rage. ‘Borrowing books about sugar-processing from the Chamber of Commerce library and reading them and spewing their contents over me in the evenings until I think I am going out of my mind! Does she think I want to spend my day in a sugar factory and then have Madden’s theory of crystallisation rammed down my gullet all evening?’

  Sometimes I think there is a chance that I am not the most tactful woman in the world, because at this moment I began to laugh, causing Twice to throw his shoe with a bang on to the floor and glare at me with blazing eyes.

  ‘I am happy that you find this funny!’ he said.

  ‘Darling, don’t be so angry. It’s rather pathetic, really. She needs so desperately to reach common ground with somebody. Don’t you think that’s it?’

  Even as I spoke, it struck me as odd that, little as I liked Dee and little as I could understand her appeal for Twice, there was never a time that he criticised her that I did not feel constrained to take her part. We could never be together about her, it seemed. Twice glared at the shoe he had thrown to the floor and I went on: ‘I agree that it is pretty inept to try to get close to you through a sea of molasses or something but her sheer ineptitude is one of her dominant characteristics.’

  ‘You pointed that out away back on the ship, and you also pointed out that she was destructive and you were right on both counts. Janet, how do you come at these things about people?’

  ‘I don’t know, Twice. I think it is the Reachfar in me. I have an animal instinct for danger to things I value. I don’t come at things, as you call it, with everybody. I am as blind as a bat about most people, as you well know, but I think I have an instinct about anyone who constitutes a threat to you and me and she seemed to do that right from the start.’

  ‘What sort of threat? You can’t mean that you ever thought that I would fall in love with her?’

  ‘No. Not that.’ I sat down and picked up my hair-brush with the dent in its back and held it between my hands. ‘It seemed to me that you regarded her as a potential daughter of ours,’ I said, looking down at the brush, ‘and I didn’t like that. I couldn’t imagine the union between you and me producing a leaden lump of introspective ineptitude like Dee, and if you could see her as a daughter it meant that she was between us like a destructive wedge. I think you did have a bit of a fatherly thing for her, didn’t you?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘Yes, I did, but there was something else in it too. When we met her in London I simply didn’t believe in all this stuff about how difficult she was and how impossible to deal with. I have always found, even with the toughest conscripts in the Army during the war, that anybody can be dealt with if one is prepared to take a little trouble. I simply didn’t believe in the born outsider, if you like.’

  ‘No man is an island,’ I said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘John Donne,’ I explained and quoted: ‘ “No man is an island, entire of himself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main . . .” I can’t remember how it goes on.’

  ‘Well, Donne could never have met anybody like Dee,’ Twice said. ‘With that nature of hers, she will never be a piece of the continent or a part of the main.’

  ‘But it seems to me that that is what she is trying so hard to become, Twice, with her study of the sugar industry and all that. I agree that it is pretty inept to try to approach you through a sea of molasses, as I said, but surely that is what she is trying to do – to approach you?’

  Twice has an unremarkable face except for his strikingly blue eyes, but it is a firm face and I always find it somehow incongruous that, when he is very much moved, his lower lip slackens and begins to tremble like the lip of a child who is about to cry. This happened now, and I sat waiting for what he would say, and I saw his teeth bite at the lip as if to steady it before he said:

  ‘I feel as if somebody had died, as if a child of ours had died. Oh, I know it isn’t true – I know the child did not exist, that I moulded Dee in my mind after my heart’s desire, I suppose.’ His speech gathered speed now that he had begun to say the thing that was so difficult to express. ‘When we met her in London, I saw her as part of you, as someone who had known you in the long time before I met you and as someone who had sought you out and needed you – needed us. I thought she knew about us,’ he said on a note of protest, slamming his hand down on his knee, trying to say the unsayable, ‘that when I took her round the factory it was really you and I who were doing it – that in everything I do or you do, the other is implicit in it.’ He paused before he added in a low voice: ‘But it isn’t like that She doesn’t know about us.’ He then looked up at me. ‘Do you know what she said last night in the study? That she didn’t know how I had ever come to marry anyone as light-minded and silly as you and that she didn’t think you had much moral sense, really.’

  Quite unconsciously his voice had adopted something of Dee’s prim censorious manner, and this time I began to laugh and could not stop until I saw Twice glaring at me angrily and realised that if I did not pull myself together I would lose this opportunity of bridging the gulf that had lain between us since we left London. ‘I’m sorry,’ I panted, ‘but I can’t help it. It is funny, Twice. I know that she has hurt you and d
isappointed you terribly, but seen from where I stand, this thing that she said is funny.’

  I knew as I spoke that Dee had hurt Twice so much with her silly remark because his affection for her had made him vulnerable and that I, who felt no affection for her, was invulnerable and quite impervious to her opinions.

  ‘I can’t see it funny from any standpoint,’ he said, ‘that she should criticise you to me of all people. Don’t you see what it implies? It means that she simply doesn’t know me!’

  ‘That’s true, but then she probably formed her own vision of you just as you did of her.’

  ‘But she has been with us for weeks now! She has seen us together!’

  I suppressed my desire to start laughing again, a desire which came from a deeper source than Dee or anything she had said. The laughter was coming as much from relief and gratitude that the wilderness of Dee between Twice and myself had disappeared as if it had been swallowed by an earthquake.

  ‘Twice, don’t you see that this is some more of this cursed ineptitude of hers? I am sure most of the people we know regard me as light-headed and silly and probably amoral too – I’ll be annoyed and disappointed if they don’t because this is how I would like to be regarded. One has to have some privacy, after all, and what I really am is nobody’s business except yours and mine. But only Dee is inept enough to say that she thinks this about me, especially to you.’

  ‘Inept or not, why did she say it?’

  ‘That I don’t know. Maybe she meant it as an oblique compliment to yourself – that someone as serious-minded and intelligent as you should be so patient with someone as light-minded and silly as me.’

  ‘It struck me as merely disloyal, destructive and bitchy,’ he said, ‘and, in Sashie’s phrase, it has made me utterly disenchanted with our Dee. Even if it was intended as a compliment to me, it augurs either a malice or a stupidity that is almost past belief.’

  ‘No. I don’t see it as either malice or stupidity. It is simply that she has no idea of the relationship between you and me or any idea of relationships at all. She cannot see that a remark by her to you about me can affect the relationship between you and her. It’s from this that her ineptitude springs. It’s odd that away back aboard the ship Roddy Maclean said she hadn’t a clue about relationships. He was right.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Twice said next, ‘if Dee has gone off back to England in a huff by the time I get back, I won’t be sorry.’ He looked at me angrily. ‘I feel I have made a middle-aged fool of myself over her and I dislike her all the more for that.’

  ‘I think you are taking the whole thing far too seriously,’ I told him, but I knew that he had been more deeply involved emotionally than I had been aware and that his hurt and disappointment were deep.

  ‘Maybe I am. Anyhow, don’t have any nonsense while I am away. She has done enough harm. She is a destructive little brat, as you said long ago and you were quite right.’

  ‘No. That isn’t true. Roddy is nearer the mark. It is this cluelessness about people and their feelings that is at the bottom of it.’

  Twice went to the window and looked away across the dark valley to where the chains of lights about the factory resembled the lights of a ship on a night sea.

  ‘Whether he was right about that or not, I don’t like that youth. I don’t trust him.’

  I recognised that by thus dismissing the subject of Dee, Twice was putting his hurt disappointment and his embarrassment at feeling a ‘middle-aged fool’ behind him, but that he should make a new departure by beginning to carp about Roddy again annoyed and irritated me.

  ‘I wish you would stop croaking that out without any explanation of what you mean,’ I said. ‘It’s just like Cousin Emmie, as I told you before. And I simply don’t understand you. If Roddy isn’t a fanatical engineer as yet, he is young and has time enough to grow into it, and in the meantime he is a charming boy.’

  ‘He has far too much bloody charm,’ Twice said, staring away at the factory lights. ‘I hate the thought of him in that power-house up there. He is shifty, shiftless and bone lazy, and he’d try to lie his way out of the back kitchen of hell,’ he ended viciously.

  ‘Twice, is this a straightforward opinion you have formed of the boy as himself or is there any jealous rubbish about his liking for me and mine for him mixed up in it?’

  He turned to face me. ‘Honestly, Janet, you don’t come into this at all. I admit that in the first days at sea there was a bit of suspicion about you in what I felt about him, but it isn’t like that now. I am talking of him as a young man like Mackie or Christie or any of the other youngsters up there.’

  ‘Then how did you come to think like this about him?’

  ‘In the ordinary course at the factory. You simply can’t rely on him to do what he is told or take the trouble to do it properly. Dammit, you can’t rely on him to stay in the powerhouse – he’s as likely to be in the office drinking tea with the typists. And there are a couple of hundred thousand pounds’ worth of new turbines in that power-house and the whole plant depending on them, but he is just as likely to forget to open or shut a valve as the sun is to rise in the morning. And then he gives one a charming smile, as if one was a woman he’d bumped into accidentally and says: ‘I’m awfully sorry. I am entirely to blame.’ Charm, you know. The attempt to oil his way out when he’s been too lazy to check the oil in his lubricators!’

  ‘Twice, does Rob know any of this?’

  ‘I haven’t told him, if that’s what you mean. I’m too big a coward to look old Rob in the eye and say: “Look here, that son of yours is a stinker!” But I pitched a tale to Sir Ian. Young Mackie is mad about those turbines, so I asked Sir Ian to let him stand watch in the power-house four hours on four off round the clock while I’m away. Mackie has been doing nights up till now. And Mackie jumped at it because the distillery is more active on the day-shift and it’s all more exciting. Mackie would eat and sleep in the power-house if he got a chance, so I know things can only go to hell for four hours at a stretch.’

  ‘This is all terribly worrying, Twice. The factory staff has always been so trouble-free except for the odd professional breeze between you oily engineers and Cranston and his white coats in the lab.’

  ‘Well, that young slob is trouble in my book, but maybe it won’t be for long. He’s not really on the contract staff, you know. There’s a queerness about the whole thing, to tell the truth. Rob is very cagey about him, somehow.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry about it all, Twice. He has been so very good about Dee, too.’

  ‘That’s another thing. I wouldn’t trust him not to marry Dee – not because he is fond of her but because of her money.’

  ‘Aren’t you being a little far-fetched there?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe I am but I am not as starry-eyed and trustful as you are. Heaven knows, I don’t like Dee very much today, but as long as she is here we are in some degree responsible for her. I’ve seen Maclean in the office with the typists – there’s a little new girl up there called Lucy Freeman, coffee-coloured and very pretty – and he gets the old come-hither look very, very easily, but I’ve never seen him get it over Dee. You are not going to tell me that a hot-arsed bloke like that runs about with our Dee out of the goodness of his heart. I just don’t believe it. But he hasn’t many scruples. He might try to marry Uncle Archie’s money.’

  ‘Well, you and I agreed at one time to differ about Dee. We have come together on that, but we’ll still have to differ about Roddy,’ I said. ‘I just don’t see him as you do, Twice.’

  ‘I think he gambles too,’ Twice said, frowning. ‘I’ve seen him coming out of Sloppy Dick’s bar in the Bay. I don’t feel that the Maclean sons are given allowances big enough to stand up to the stakes at Sloppy Dick’s.’

  ‘No. That I don’t like the sound of,’ I admitted.

  The next morning at eleven o’clock Dee and I watched Twice’s plane soar away to the north, turn in a wide circle and climb away out of sight, southwards, over
the mountainous backbone of the island, and then we came back to the waiting car. I had an unreal feeling, as if my feet were not quite on the ground, as if I were being pulled upwards in the slipstream of the aircraft by an invisible, intangible cord that was attached to me somewhere in the region of my heart. Groping for reality, I tried to think myself back to the time before I knew Twice, to the time when an attachment like this did not exist so that I might be again as I was then, but one cannot go back through time. One can make an evocation of the past, but inevitably that evocation has something of the colour and texture and feeling of all the time that has been experienced since. My relationship with Twice was the most important experience of my life, the experience that coloured and altered the texture of everything so that, in the moment when the aircraft disappeared, I knew that I could never be as I was before I met him. I was a different person now, the person who loved Twice and I must live with this tugging sense of loneliness until he came back. To part is to die a little. . . .