My Friend Cousin Emmie Page 13

  However, Twice worked by logic and reason much more than by intuition, and I respected this. His attachment to Dee, even, had been formed on the practical basis that I had known her as a child, that she was unhappy and at odds with her family and that a few months with us in a different milieu might be of help to her. Meeting her in London, he had not looked at her as I would have done were I meeting her for the first time, as Dee Andrews, a fairly dull-looking and unattractive girl of not much interest. On a generous impulse of trying to help, Twice had approached her and had then become attached to her. I respected this logical and reasonable way that Twice had of going about things although I could not approach people in this way myself, so I began to try to think of Roddy in a manner detached from my intuitive liking for him.

  Twice spoke the truth when he said that Roddy was unlike most engineers. This was the first thing I had to admit. Roddy had not about him the air of a scientist of any kind. In an age when people are growing standardised, when it is possible in the London subway, for instance, to look round at the passengers and divide them into ‘banker types’, ‘saloon bar types’ or ‘good husband and father types’, it was difficult to fit Roddy into any category. It was difficult, even, to fit him in as the son of Rob and Marion Maclean, somehow, and difficult, too, to fit him into his own day and age. There was about him something archaic, something of a time when the world was younger and more adventurous, of the days when the Caribbean was richer in pirates than in engineers, and at the same time his air of gay, reckless courage gave him a forward-going feeling as if he would be the one to stride ahead of the rest of us into the future.

  Another thing that I had to admit abut Roddy was that he differed from the other young men who came to the house in that he came only when Twice was out, and very often when Dee was out too. Most of the young men who came to Guinea Corner were young engineers who came to sit at the feet of Twice. Without self-flattery, I had little doubt that Roddy came to talk to me; but, in spite of Twice’s earlier suspicions, I was certain that Roddy had no interest in me of a male-female kind. Also, I now recognised, when he talked to me he differed from most people of his age that I had met in that he did not talk about himself. Indeed, one of the most attractive features I found in him was his genuine and vibrant interest in almost anything, be it the book I was reading, the letter from my father in Scotland, the embroidery I was working on or what Glasgow University had been like when I read English there twenty years ago. Roddy, I discovered now, was a past-master at the art of drawing one out, of making one talk, and this probably explained why Dee felt so comfortable in his company, while I, of course, found him a relief after some time spent in the company of the introspective Dee.

  But in spite of all this calm logical examination of Roddy, I could not see him as a petty thief, creeping into the office washroom and stealing the housekeeping money from Twice’s wallet. I could visualise Roddy as the master-mind and action-leader in an attempt to rob the Bank of England, but I could not visualise him going through the pockets of odd garments left in lavatories.

  When Twice came back with the twenty-five pounds, he handed the notes to me, and there was a tense silence between us for a few moments.

  ‘Where is Dee?’ he asked then.

  ‘She and Roddy went off in her car. I suppose just round to the club.’

  ‘Janet, do you think she is fond of him?’

  ‘I doubt if Dee can be fond of anybody, Twice. She seems to want to rely on people, have them there when she needs them but without her giving anything in return. I think the trouble is that she can’t give anything. She does not seem to feel anything about anybody really – all her feeling is engaged with herself and, like the rest of us, she thinks that everybody is as she is. When you went away she did not seem to miss you and she could not imagine that I was missing you. She was unspeakably – well – inept.’

  ‘It may be a blessing she is like that. I’d hate her to get involved with that bloke.’

  ‘Twice, I simply cannot see that boy as a petty thief.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t explain it. Pilfering is too small for him somehow. If Roddy is going to sin, he’ll do it on a grander scale.’

  Twice narrowed his eyes, frowning, looking into my face. If I respect his rationality and logic, he also respects these intuitions of mine.

  ‘I agree with you,’ I said, ‘that there is something unusual about him. He isn’t run of the mill, but I’d bet my Sunday boots he didn’t steal that money.’

  ‘For Rob’s sake, I hope he didn’t, but I wish I felt as sure as you seem to do,’ Twice said.

  7

  ‘Relationships are Always Complicated’

  IN CROP or out, Twice and I always got up with the sun, which was about six o’clock in these early months of the year, and this was the best part of the day. Paradise, like all the upland valleys of the island, was subject to a heavy night dew which made the early mornings cool and also gave them an almost sophisticated beauty as if, during the night hours, Nature had become discontented with her appearance and, rising in the morning, had put on every decoration of lace, coloured ribbon and jewel that she possessed. The red, pink and yellow rosettes of the hibiscus, with their long golden tassel of stamens, blazed between the dark-green velvet of their leaves; the pinky-mauve clusters on the Pandora vines swayed among their feathery leaves like ostrich plumes, and the orange and purple papery-textured flowers of the bougainvillaea rustled in the dawn breeze with the dry whisper of stiff silk. And all the spiders had left the results of their night’s labours in great webs, some of them two feet in diameter, between the branches of the trees, some of them great looping festoons of fine thread that went from leaf to leaf and shrub to shrub. And, on top of all this, the dew had left a shower of jewels. The drops hung from every web and festoon, some like pearls, some catching the sunlight to become diamonds, and others taking on, too, the red and blue of the flowers to become rubies and sapphires among the millions of emeralds that were drops that had borrowed their colour from the leaves and the grass.

  A little after six we had breakfast on the veranda, and on what I thought of as her ‘good’ days Dee would join us, while on what I thought of as her ‘bad’ days she would decide she was a nuisance, in the way, and that we did not want her, and would not appear downstairs until after Twice had gone out.

  By the beginning of March, when she had been with us for well over two months, we had given up all attempts to argue her out of these attitudes of hers and had begun to take the days as they came, although, to be honest, I have to record that the ‘bad’ ones, when she came down late and drooped about the house and garden picking at things, rendered it difficult for me to keep my temper below what, in engineering parlance, Twice called its flashpoint.

  On this morning in early March, however, it seemed that we had a good day before us, for she appeared at the breakfast-table bright and pretty shortly after six and ate the meal with us, chatting of the goings-on at the club the night before, where Cousin Emmie, less than an hour after the lavish dinner at the Great House, had eaten four ham sandwiches and drunk a bottle of stout.

  ‘She says you have to keep your strength up in these hot climates,’ Dee explained.

  ‘Awful old woman,’ I said. ‘Dram, bring Charlie for his milk.’

  The dog and cat had just come back from their morning mongoose steeplechase through the sugar cane and Dram picked Charlie up from the lawn by the scruff of the neck, bore him to the veranda to the saucer, sat down and watched him lap with besotted pride as if Charlie were the only cat in the world endowed with this astounding ability to lap milk from a saucer.

  ‘Cats!’ said Twice sharply.

  ‘Gr-r-r!’ said Dram, springing up to stand guard over Charlie, every hair brisding while he looked about him for the hated enemy.

  ‘None!’ Twice said. ‘All gone! Sit down, you fool.’ Dram sat down and put on his besotted look again, ‘I wonder what, in the name of goodness,
he thinks Charlie is?’ Twice asked.

  ‘Charlie is his well-beloved with whom he is well pleased, isn’t he, Dram?’ I said, and Dram wagged his tail.

  ‘Twice,’ Dee said, ‘may I come up to the factory this afternoon? I want to watch the crystallisers.’

  ‘Not today, Dee. I’ll be at the Bay office all the afternoon,’ said Twice, and, as if he were behaving in the most reasonable way in the world, he planted a kiss on my cheek, went down the steps into his car and drove away.

  I am not, I think, a very nervous or timid woman, for, after all, I was in the Women’s Air Force during the 1939–45 war and did not have my buttons torn off for cowardice or anything, but I sat looking down at Dram and Charlie and felt Dee growing bigger and bigger and blacker and blacker and more and more frightening round the corner of the table to my left. Without words, after what seemed like the year between when you first hear the whistle of a bomb and hear the ‘kerlump’ as it hits the earth, she rose from the table and went away upstairs, but so slowly that I felt she had time to pick at the carpet on every tread with her toe-nails.

  All morning, as I went to and fro about my household jobs, I felt that a black cloud was hovering at the top of the stairs and might come rolling down upon me at any moment, but no sound was heard, and at about eleven o’clock I came through from the kitchen and stood guiltily in the hall, feeling that I ought to go up to see Dee, but at the same time afraid that, if I did, I might lose my patience and make the situation worse than ever. Still feeling guilty, I turned towards the drawing-room, deciding to write a few letters instead, and as I went in the voice said:

  ‘That Nurse Porter is round to have coffee with my cousin this morning,’ and there was Cousin Emmie, ensconced in her corner, with the bag and the parasol in position about her chair.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Morrison,’ I said and went back to the kitchen to ask for coffee to be brought in.

  ‘I don’t like to listen to my cousin and that nurse going on about illegitimate babies and syphilis,’ Cousin Emmie said, dipping a piece of shortbread into her coffee and sucking it with a sloshy noise.

  It may be remembered that I indicated earlier, when telling of our shipboard days, that Cousin Emmie had something of a gift for silence, so that she could pay a visit lasting for about an hour in the course of which she could eat and drink a prodigious amount while making no more than three of her raven’s croaks. On this morning, however, unlike Dee and as if to impress on me that life is full of variety, she seemed to be in an unusually chatty mood.

  ‘My cousin is a fool,’ she told me, and then, after a conversational lull during which she ate half of a biscuit and put the other half in the bag, she continued: ‘My cousin thinks you can stop people having illegitimate babies and getting syphilis, but you can’t.’

  There was another lull while I refilled her cup. ‘As long as there are men and women there will be illegitimate babies and syphilis,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you believe in social advancement or the progress of medicine at all, then, Miss Morrison?’

  ‘Oh, they’ll advance as they call it,’ she said, answering a question for once. ‘There aren’t so many people like the Borgias now and we don’t have the Black Death, but there are people like my cousin and we have the atomic bomb and that’s just as bad.’

  ‘Madame Dulac does a great deal of good among the people in the island and especially on the estate here, with doctor and nurse and everything.’

  ‘No she doesn’t,’ Cousin Emmie said flatly. ‘Not good. She calls it doing good, but she is only trying to get her own way. And she won’t change anybody. People are as they are. I know them.’

  With this last sinister croak, she withdrew under the carapace of the felt hat by bending down her head and concentrating on a piece of cake, which she dismembered and ate raisin by raisin with a clicking of false teeth, and I sat on, fascinated, as if I were a rabbit in the presence of a weasel, until I nearly jumped out of my skin when Isobel Denholm walked into the room. I had not even heard her car come up the drive.

  ‘Hi, Missis Janet,’ she said. ‘Morning, Miss Morrison. Is Dee around?’

  ‘I think she is upstairs, Isobel.’

  ‘Work has started on the house up at Mount Melody. I thought maybe Dee would like to come up there with me.’

  ‘Perhaps she would. She must be writing letters or something. I’ll call her.’

  ‘Don’t you bother, Janet. I’ll go up if that’s okay. Which room?’

  ‘First on the left at the top of the stairs,’ I said, gratitude welling in me like a mountain spring but tainted with some nervousness about Isobel’s reception. However, after a few seconds I could sigh with relief, for I could hear Dee’s voice, light and seemingly carefree, floating down the stairs, and soon they arrived in the room together.

  ‘We’re going up to Mount Melody, Miss Jan. Is that all right?’

  ‘Of course, Dee, but it is nearly twelve. What about lunch?’

  ‘I’ve got it in the car,’ Isobel said.

  ‘Splendid. Off you go.’

  They went out, and Cousin Emmie, chewing her last raisin, reached for the bag and the parasol and rose to her feet.

  ‘She is sensible, that big red-haired girl,’ she said. ‘She is better company for that silly little thing of yours than that man Maclean,’ and without further words she drifted out through the hall, across the veranda and down the steps, the draperies of her beige foulard hanging about her like bedraggled plumes.

  During the afternoon I sang around the house and garden, so carefree was I now that Dee was employed and off my hands, and in the belief that Cousin Emmie, in the way that lightning never strikes in the same spot twice, would not call again that day, except that lightning is not at all an apt analogy for Cousin Emmie. There was in her something elemental, it is true, but nothing of the nature of lightning. She made me think more of some static yet mysteriously powerful force like the law of gravity which holds people to the earth even in the Antipodes, where they are hanging upside-down, for I have never been out of the northern hemisphere and this is the view I have of people in Australia.

  Twice arrived home from St Jago Bay about six o’clock and said: ‘Is Dee in?’

  ‘As I indicated at lunch,’ I said, ‘you have a damned cheek to ask, after putting her into that Ishmael of a mood this morning. No. They are not back yet, or maybe she had gone down to the Peak with Isobel. Do you realise that this could be a break-through to peace between her and the Peak?’

  ‘Never mind that now. Janet, a queer thing has happened.’ I looked hard at him. ‘Somerset has hired Roddy Maclean as his assistant. He starts in the office on Monday.’

  I sat down with a bump. ‘Mr Alexander, this is so sudden!’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it? That’s just what I thought.’

  ‘You hadn’t an inkling of this before today?’

  ‘Not the smell of an inkling. Of course, Rob’s been away in Jamaica this last week, but it seems to me that nobody here on Paradise had much inkling either. If they had, it would have been mentioned, don’t you think?’

  ‘One would think so. Twice, I don’t suppose you like this very much, do you?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t have walked down the street and have picked Roddy Maclean to work in our office, but I would rather have him down there messing about with a few papers than up here messing about with those turbines, and I suppose the poor blighter has got to be somewhere. In Sir Ian’s words, let’s have a tot. I’ll get them.’

  We sat on the veranda and stared out through the mesh screens at the rapidly falling darkness.

  ‘Although I still think that some of your suspicions are quite unfounded,’ I said, ‘Roddy’s way of going about this seems to me to be unnecessarily devious. I mean, why the secrecy?’

  ‘Exactly. Somerset wasn’t cagey at all, you know. He just said: “By the way, you’ll have heard—” quite airily and told me he had engaged him on six months’ probation. I knew he was lookin
g for somebody who knew the basic difference between a wheel and a lever for the office, and he just came out with it in the natural course.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him I hadn’t heard, actually, but that I’d been crawling round the underworks of the factory here and hadn’t been talking much to anybody. I don’t think he realised I had been hit amidships. Somerset is pretty dumb that way.’

  ‘Well, I hope everything will be all right.’

  ‘There’s one good thing. There is no currency lying about down there – everything is by cheque, even typists’ screws. You know, when you think of it, it may be just the place for that youth. He is much more a collar-and-tie type than a greasy engineer, and Somerset obviously likes him.’

  ‘And what of you?’

  ‘You know how seldom I am in that office. He is nothing to do with me. He is Somerset’s pigeon, and as long as they keep some control between them on the tide of bumph that’s rising round our ears down there I’ll be quite happy. By the way, I’ll have to go to Trinidad about the end of this month. There’s a good few hundred thousand about to be spent down there on some bulk-loading plant and we have been asked to quote. It’s a nuisance, but there it is.’

  ‘The first time is always the worst,’ I said. ‘We’ll get by.’ But as I did not wish to think about the trip to Trinidad, I continued: ‘Have you contrived to inoculate Somerset with that cross-index filing system yet?’