My Friend Cousin Emmie Read online

  I do not think Dee and I talked very much on the way home from the airport, and when we came into the house I went straight up to my bedroom. On my dressing-table a dozen roses stood in a tall vase, and from the stem of one of them hung a card on which was written: ‘Flash – with love – Twice.’ I sat down on my bed and began to cry.

  ‘Miss Jan, I’m going out to—’ said Dee in the doorway and then: ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?’

  I pointed at the roses.

  ‘Don’t you like them? They were terribly expensive. I fetched them last night, so I know. Twice said I wasn’t to tell you and he gave them to Clorinda. They’ve been in the laundry all night. I’ll take them away if—’

  ‘Leave them alone!’ I snapped at her, irritated beyond bearing by this dreadful ineptitude of hers or inability to feel or whatever it was.

  ‘But why are you crying?’

  I drew a deep breath and bit my lower lip. ‘I don’t feel very well. I am going to lie down for a little. I’ll be downstairs by lunch-time.’

  ‘Can I get them to bring you some tea or something?’

  ‘No, thank you, Dee. Are you going out?’

  ‘I was going round to the club.’

  ‘That’s splendid, dear. Off you go.’

  She did not come back until lunch-time and by then I had pulled myself together. Twice was not mentioned between us. For the rest of that day and most of the next Dee was very silent altogether, as if she were mystified and at the same time a little afraid of me, but as the days followed one another she became more normal and very agreeable and companionable. Everything was quietly routine. Cousin Emmie called once or twice; the factory hummed on and the cane fields were turning one by one from emerald green to Cousin Emmie brown as the crop was cut and the chopped-off blades withered to trash in the heat of the sun. On the eleventh day after Twice’s departure, at nine in the morning, there was a cablegram: ‘Please meet me Thursday noon love Twice.’

  I showed it to Dee.

  ‘But that’s tomorrow!’ she said, and it seemed to me that her brow clouded.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘But that’s two days too soon!’

  ‘Too soon for what?’ I asked, puzzled.

  She opened her lips to speak, closed them again and then, after a pause, she said: ‘Not for anything. It’s just that I wasn’t thinking of his coming until Saturday.’

  She left the room without further explanation, and a moment later I saw her car go down the drive. It was only then that it occurred to me that for the last eleven days Guinea Corner and I myself had more or less revolved round Dee. What she had wanted to do had been done. If she wanted me to go to the club with her, I had gone; when she went somewhere and did not invite me to go with her, I had stayed at home. When I thought now of those days, I thought that well might she have been content, and when she returned for lunch I said carefully: ‘Dee, are you free to meet Twice tomorrow at twelve or shall I ask Sir Ian to take me down?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll take you down to meet him,’ she said, but she did not smile and obviously she did not share in my joy at his return.

  The next morning, before we left the house, I said to my cook: ‘No lunch today, Cookie. The plane may be late and we’ll have lunch in the Bay.’

  As Dee drove out of the gates of Guinea corner she said: ‘Are you going to the Peak for lunch?’

  ‘Yes, I thought so.’

  ‘I’m not coming,’ she said. ‘I’ll drop you and Twice and call back for you.’

  ‘Dee, what is all this about the Peak? If you feel like this, I’d much rather have got Sir Ian to come down with me.’

  ‘There isn’t any all this. I’m just not going to the Peak, that’s all. . . . I suppose you would have preferred Sir Ian to drive you, anyway.’

  ‘Dee, please don’t be silly. We’ll all have lunch at the Palace, then.’

  ‘No, we won’t.’ Her mouth tightened into a little button with a vertical line at each side as it used to do when she was a child. ‘I’m not interfering with what you and Twice want to do. We don’t have to have lunch together.’

  In an exasperated way I wanted to tell her that she had already ‘interfered’ by this refusal to go to the Peak, but instead I said: ‘Oh, very well, Dee. Of course, I don’t understand in the least what is going on, but I suppose it is none of my affair, anyway.’

  ‘Don’t be angry with me, Miss Jan!’

  I drew a deep breath, hoping that it would crush my exasperation down, and it did, packing it into a tight knot in the region of my solar plexus.

  ‘It is very difficult for me not to get impatient, Dee. It would be easier if you would explain a bit.’

  ‘There’s nothing to explain. They just don’t want me around the Peak and I’m not going there.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ I said wearily. ‘You don’t have to go to the Peak if you don’t want to.’

  We met Twice. Dee dropped him and me at the Peak Hotel and drove away.

  ‘Dee not staying for lunch?’ he asked.

  ‘No. She has something to do in the Bay – I don’t know what and I didn’t ask. She’ll be back for us at two-thirty.’

  ‘What you mean is that she has still got what Sir Ian calls a fit o’ the pique at the Peak?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘What’s she been like these last two weeks?’

  ‘Splendid. Not a pout or a glower,’ I said, but I was not going to spoil his homecoming by telling him what I thought was the reason for the more amenable mood. ‘Not a word until today when I suggested coming here for lunch. Oh, the devil with it! Darling, I am glad you are back!’

  Twice and I had a pleasant two hours, chatting to Isobel, Don and Sashie and other friends until shortly after two, when Lionel Somerset, Twice’s colleague from the office, came in and he and Twice went off into a corner to discuss some matter of business. Isobel, who had been superintending the busy patio bar where I was finishing my coffee, came towards me between the tables in her pale-green shirt and slacks, and I watched with pleasure her free stride, the long legs swinging from the hips, which were so narrow for her height and width of shoulder, and I wished that Dee had some of this forthright air of easy self-confidence.

  ‘How did you come down?’ she asked. ‘Sir Ian or Dee aren’t here?’

  ‘Dee brought me. She is coming back for us. She had things to do in the Bay.’

  ‘It seems like weeks since we’ve seen Dee. I wondered if she was sick, but that Maclean type was in here the other night and he said she was all right.’

  I noticed the phrase ‘that Maclean type’, which had obviously been adopted by Isobel from Don, and in her accent it had a curious ring. ‘Dee has been taking her job of nursemaid to me while Twice was away very seriously, I am afraid,’ I said. I thought of telling Isobel that Dee had the idea that they did not want her at the Peak, but I then thought that it would infuriate Dee if she were to find out that I had been ‘interfering’, as she would call it, so I said instead: ‘What Maclean type did you mean?’

  ‘You know the one I mean, I guess. Roddy they call him.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with him?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing much, I suppose. I just don’t happen to care for him, that’s all.’ One of the waiters appeared beside her. ‘Yes, Peterkin, what’s on your mind? Okay, I’ll come. Excuse me, Janet. Come down again soon, huh? And tell Dee to come and see us, for goodness’ sakes!’

  While I sat in the bright noisy bar, waiting for Twice to be free and for Dee to come with the car, I felt that in a few hours the peace that had prevailed over me and Guinea Corner for twelve days had been torn to shreds. The world would be a splendid place, I thought unreasonably as I had often thought before, if it were not for the people in it, but at the back of my mind I knew that what was nagging at me was the climate of adverse opinion that seemed to be building up round Roddy Maclean. My loyalties to the people I like cause me more trouble than any other one thing.


  We arrived home at Guinea Corner about mid-afternoon and Twice at once changed out of what he referred to as his ‘city slicker suit’ into shorts and a shirt, and intimated that he was ‘just going up to have a look at the factory.’

  ‘That flippin’ factory!’ I said. ‘I don’t believe you came home to me at all. The lure is the heap of junk up there!’

  I said this upstairs in our bedroom where the door stood open, and I did not know that Dee also was upstairs, but after Twice had driven away she told me that she had heard and added: ‘Miss Jan, I don’t think Twice can like it very much when you call the factory a heap of junk.’

  She was painfully solemn and earnest, as if she had screwed her courage to the sticking place in order to give me this gentle advice on how best to handle my husband; and although I wanted to laugh at her, I did not because I knew it would hurt her mortally.

  ‘You think not, Dee?’

  ‘I’m sure he can’t like it. After all, he helped to build it and he is terribly interested in it.’

  Now this was the year 1952, and since the end of 1948, more or less, I had suffered at close quarters the prolonged birth-pangs of the new Paradise Factory. I had seen the plans drawn, I had heard the oaths when a lay-out would not ‘lie down’, I had seen a T-square go through the study window and accidentally and incidentally clout the yard boy on the skull when it was discovered that the planned sugar-cane elevator would not ‘come in’, and I myself had been hit on the face with a thrown cushion when I said that if the boiling-floor was my kitchen I would have that door there instead of here. Twice will always hit me in the face with a cushion first before admitting that I may be right about an engineering matter, but I do not mind and it does not happen very often.

  I now stared solemnly back at Dee and wondered if she seriously believed that I had lived down the years with Twice and had not yet discovered that he had helped to build the factory and was interested in it. For a moment it seemed to me that my decision made long ago to meet life with a light-hearted smile wherever possible had been almost too much of a success, if this was what made Dee think that I, or any woman indeed, could be as stupid as this, and at first I could not think of anything to say, but after a moment I said: ‘Dee, have you ever thought that it is possible to make love obliquely?’

  She frowned and her face flushed a little. ‘Love? Obliquely?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes. When I call the factory a heap of junk, it is a way of telling Twice that I love him and want him to stay with me instead of going up there.’

  ‘And he understands that?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ I felt embarrassed now. There was something indecent about this ineptitude of hers.

  ‘I don’t know anything about love and obliqueness,’ she said and drifted away from me out into the garden, where I saw her pause by the hibiscus clump and began to pick at the leaves, and, suddenly depressed, I went upstairs to do Twice’s unpacking.

  Just before I finished, I heard Roddy’s voice downstairs and Dee’s car drive out, and as I was silently giving thanks for this in my mind, my maid came into the room and said: ‘Tea in de drawin’-room, Ma’am, an’ Miss Emmie from de Great House in de drawin’-room too,’ and thinking that life never brings a good without an evil, that it always carries a sting in its tail, I went downstairs.

  Cousin Emmie was in her usual chair in a corner of the drawing-room, with the parasol on one side of her and the bag on the other.

  ‘And so your husband came back all right?’ she greeted me.

  I would not have minded so much if she had said ‘get back’, but the use of the active ‘came’ seemed to imply her belief that Twice was only awaiting the right opportunity to run away from me for good.

  ‘Yes. Two days sooner than we expected,’ I said rather pointedly. ‘I see that that little girl is off with that young man Maclean in her car.’ She now contrived to convey that they had eloped, probably taking with them the Paradise pay-roll.

  ‘Only round to the club, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘That young man is no good to that little girl.’

  ‘Nonsense! He is an ideal companion for her.’

  ‘I don’t like him.’

  ‘Dee apparently does and so do I.’

  ‘I don’t trust him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s more in that young man than people think and not what they think either.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Another thing I don’t like,’ she went on, not replying to my question but changing the subject in her exasperating way, ‘is this party they are going to have at the end of Crop round at the club. It is a lot of nonsense. These Negroes don’t want parties. They would rather have the money it costs to buy fancy clothes and cheap jewellery. My cousin doesn’t look facts in the face.’

  This was one of those truths which, at Paradise, we preferred to keep submerged, and this public airing of it did not make me like Cousin Emmie any better.

  ‘Why do you distrust Roddy Maclean?’ I asked as she helped herself to a piece of cake.

  ‘I can’t see to the bottom of him,’ she said in a sinister croak, and I would have pursued this further but that at that moment Sir Ian strode into the room.

  ‘So here you are, Emmie! What the blazes you doin’ round here again? Mother has six women at the house all waitin’ for you so they can play bridge!’

  ‘They can’t play bridge,’ she said in her monotonous, unemphatic way that yet had its own deadly emphasis. She had not even jumped when Sir Ian came shouting in as I had done. ‘None of the people here can play bridge. If they played like that in Kensington I don’t know what would happen.’

  ‘This ain’t Kensington an’ they call it bridge an’ the car’s outside.’ Cousin Emmie got up, took a biscuit and popped it into the bag and took up her parasol. ‘I am ready,’ she announced like a shabby French aristocrat on the way to the tumbril and the guillotine.

  Twice, on his way home, passed the car with Sir Ian and Cousin Emmie on his way across the park and came into the house laughing. ‘Was Sir Ian round here retrieving Cousin Emmie again?’

  ‘Yes. Madame has a bridge party and she ran away round here. She is as much of an anxiety to the Dulacs as Dee is to us. . . . Did you remember to cash the housekeeping cheque?’

  Twice nodded, opening the flapped breast-pocket of his shirt and taking out his wallet. ‘Except for going round to play chess with Cranston now and again, she doesn’t go to any other house on the estate. I think that old dame must like you, Janet.’

  ‘I don’t think she likes anybody much. I think it’s because we were on the ship together. She would say that that makes a difference – she always sees differences where other people don’t see them and not where they do if that is what I mean.’

  Twice, smiling, opened his wallet, but suddenly became rigid and frowned sharply. ‘Good God!’ he said.

  ‘What’s wrong? Oh, Twice, you didn’t forget about the cheque?’

  I have always been the family banker because Twice has an active dislike of money, a dislike so strong that, in spite of his very good memory, it creates some kind of psychological action that makes him do what my father calls a ‘willing forget’ about anything connected with it. ‘This is the vegetable woman’s night and—’

  ‘I didn’t forget, darling, honestly! But the money’s gone!’

  ‘Twice, it couldn’t get out of that buttoned pocket even if you were hanging upside-down!’

  He dropped his eyelids and looked guilty.

  ‘You’ve had your shirt off!’ I said.

  He looked more guilty still. Since his attacks of bronchitis, one in Scotland and one on board ship, I had been laying down the law about his habit of discarding his shirt at odd moments when he went into one of the hotter or messier parts of the factory, for he had a trick of forgetting to put it on again.

  ‘Only for ten minutes when I went down under the boilers.’

  ‘Twice, I’ve told you till I
’m sick that we have a laundress and it doesn’t matter if your shirt—’

  ‘Twenty-five pounds, wasn’t it?’ he interrupted me. ‘Well, we’ve had it, chum. I’d heard there was pilfering going on in the office, but twenty-five quid is quite a bit.’

  ‘In the office? You left the shirt in the office?’

  ‘Yes. On the hook behind the wash-room door.’ He suddenly stood up, turned his back to me and stared across the valley at the factory.

  ‘Twice, what is it?’

  ‘When I came out of there to go to the boilers,’ he said, ‘Roddy Maclean was coming in, on his way to the typists’ tea session.’ He turned round. ‘He was good enough to stop me, ask me if I had had a good trip and assure me that Mackie was on duty in the power-house.’

  ‘But, Twice, do you realise how monstrous this is – this thing that you are implying?’

  He turned away, ‘I don’t trust that youth. I never have. There was never anything like this in that office until he joined the staff. Write another cheque and I’ll go up and cash it. The office will still be open.’

  When he had driven away I sat thinking about Roddy. It was rare for Twice to form a strong dislike for anyone or, indeed, for him to form a strong liking. This was partly why his attachment to Dee had been important to me because it had been an unusual thing, for as a rule Twice was one of those equable people with an ability to ‘get along’ with nearly everybody without becoming deeply involved with anybody, quite unlike myself, who am always in a frenzy of enthusiasm for somebody or in an uneasy state of irritation with somebody as I was now with Cousin Emmie. Now, Cousin Emmie affected Twice not at all. He disliked her less than he had done on the ship, and now regarded her as more of an eccentric figure of comedy than anything. Nor was he affected by Dee, even, to the extent or in the same way that I was. When Dee was gloomy and miserable, I tended to become gloomy and miserable too, whereas Twice would do what he could to help her, and if he failed would become impatient and irritated, but she could not inoculate him with her gloom and misery as she could me.

  Only once before had I known Twice to take the kind of dislike he had for Roddy to anyone, and in the former case the dislike had been for a colleague called Pierre Robertson, who, in the end, turned out to be a petty criminal, and it was distressing that a similar pattern seemed to be taking shape in the case of Roddy Maclean, worse than distressing because Roddy was the son of a man well-known and much respected throughout the Caribbean, and, that apart, Roddy was much involved with Twice and myself through Dee. But between the case of Roddy and that of Pierre Robertson, however, there was a major difference, major in my eyes at least. In my relations with people I work largely by what I can only call intuition, and I had disliked Pierre Robertson in the first moment that I met him, whereas my first reaction to Roddy Maclean had been the very opposite of dislike.