My Friend Cousin Emmie Read online

  ‘Me too,’ I said, ‘but what brought him into your head just now?’

  ‘It’s that crack about Cousin Emmie. It is exactly the sort of thing you would say.’

  ‘I?’ I frowned at him. ‘What in the world can you mean?’

  ‘It is,’ he assured me. ‘I can imagine the talk round the table at the club and you suddenly saying it was probably Cousin Emmie who took the badminton cash. It’s not the remark of someone trying to divert suspicion from himself to someone else – it’s the attitude of someone like you who loathes petty pilferage and escapes out of even talk of it into absolute nonsense.’

  ‘I’ve always said the odd few pounds in desk drawers and pockets was too petty for Roddy,’ I told him.

  ‘I know, but there is still something odd about that bloke. Oh, well, we’ll see how things go at the office in the Bay.’

  There was an awkwardness of silence about Roddy’s departure for his new post, an awkwardness which I felt more keenly, perhaps, than I had any justification for feeling it, but, none the less, I was disappointed that, from the time that Twice told me of the projected move until Roddy left Paradise, he did not come to see me. It seemed to me that we had been good enough friends for him to come and tell me personally of his new plans, and, in my foolish way, I was hurt that he avoided the house and then left Paradise without calling to see me.

  It was Rob, Twice told me, who had informed Sir Ian that his son had taken this new post at the Allied Plant office, but between Rob and Twice themselves there was a constraint of silence about the boy. Shortly after Roddy’s departure Twice went on his trip to Trinidad, and when he returned to Paradise Rob behaved as if Roddy had never been in the employ of the Estate and as if he was not now in the service of a firm with which Twice had any connection. It would have been natural, Twice felt, if Rob had enquired how the boy was shaping in his new post, but Rob did not mention the subject, and Twice, consequently, did not mention it either, but he felt a little hurt and mystified, just as I did, when Marion Maclean made no mention of her son to me either, although she knew that I was interested in the boy and he had spent a fair amount of time with me.

  When I was alone in the house I thought a great deal about Roddy; and the more I thought of him, the more uneasy I became. Twice is very fond of saying that I go about with my head in the clouds and my feet never quite on the ground, but I do not think this is true, or maybe it is that, just as everybody is different in every other way, so do all people have different clouds for their heads and different ground for their feet. Be that as it may, it seemed to me that nobody at Paradise other than myself was at all astonished at the fact that Roddy had established himself in a bungalow at the Bay complete with cook and houseboy, or at the fact that from four in the afternoon onwards, after he had left the office, he seemed to spend all his time gambling in Sloppy Dick’s bar or at the expensive Peak Hotel, pursuing a way of life to which his salary from Allied Plant could not possibly aspire.

  Twice was inclined to the view that Roddy was an unusually lucky gambler who might also pilfer a few pounds as and when required, so that after one or two near-quarrels we had ceased to discuss the subject, for I had to concede that when Roddy left Paradise the pilfering at the office stopped immediately and I can never make a concession that I do not like to make without at the same time losing my temper. Dee, although unusually acute about financial matters, was in a country with whose cost-of-living index she was not acquainted, and, of course, she probably thought that Roddy was in receipt of a generous allowance from his parents as she herself had been until she inherited her fortune from her Uncle Archie. But I thought I knew Rob and Marion Maclean well enough to be certain that, now that they had educated their son, he would be expected to stand on his own feet, for Rob and Marion were people of a background similar to my own and it seemed reasonable that they would have the attitudes normal to that background and its tradition.

  In very short time Roddy as a personality retired from the forefront of life at Paradise, partly by his own volition, for he did not come up from town to visit us, and partly because it was more convenient for us all not to mention him. On one occasion, about four weeks after he had left Paradise, there was a minor flare-up between Twice and myself because Twice came home and reported that he had seen Roddy emerge from one of the cafés in Victoria Court, which was the main brothel area of the town, and on another occasion there was some speculation between us when Twice, as if paying duty tribute to the goddess of fair play, told me that Roddy was doing tactful wonders in the organisation of the St Jago Bay office in the teeth of the inefficient yet position-conscious Somerset, but that was all. From every point of view Roddy might never have come to Paradise and might never have left it so suddenly and secretively.

  8

  Ships Passing in the Sunlight

  AT Easter it was traditional to stop work at about midday on Maundy Thursday and not resume until six o’clock the following Tuesday morning. This was the only time during Crop that the factory was deliberately closed down and processing suspended. A ‘shutdown’ for mechanical, weather or other reasons was regarded as a tragedy, but the voluntary ‘shutdown’ for Easter was hailed by everyone as a junketing half-time interval in the hard monotonous work of Crop. And this year it was a particularly joyous pause, for even Rob Maclean and Twice could not think of any part of the equipment that was working badly and would have to be put right during the short holiday period.

  At Easter, in St Jago Bay, the Yacht Club held its annual regatta and every young man and most of the young women had appointments to ‘crew’ in one or another of the yachts, so that Mackie and the other young engineers and chemists all left Paradise on Thursday evening to put in some practice before the regatta on Easter Monday, and the rest of us looked forward to a few days of non-routine, crowned by the regatta as a finale to the holiday. Dee had been invited to sail in the Peak Hotel yacht Amaryllis, which was skippered by Don and had Roddy, Isobel Denholm and young Mackie as her crew, but Dee preferred not to go, and Twice and I did not press her, for she was not a strong swimmer and, in the words of Cousin Emmie, ‘anything might happen’ in a sea where a squall can come up with the sudden viciousness of a tiger’s paw. Nevertheless, in the contrary way of human nature – or human nature as manifested in me, at least – although I was relieved that she was not sailing, I was annoyed at the reason for the non-sailing.

  ‘They don’t really want me,’ she said, her lips tight, at breakfast on the morning of Maundy Thursday. ‘They only asked me to be polite and because of you and Twice and things. I shouldn’t be any use, and four is all they need. Five is too many.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Twice said. ‘There is nothing all that real and earnest about the racing – it’s just a nice day’s sailing, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, anyway, I don’t want to go in Amaryllis.''

  ‘All right, Dee,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. Is Roddy a keen yachtsman? I know that Don and Isobel and Mackie are.’

  ‘Roddy can do a bit at most things,’ she said. ‘He is a very good joiner-in. He wanted me to go. He was very nice about it.’

  Twice and I made no comment, and after a moment she went on: ‘But I said I wouldn’t.’ She looked from one of us to the other. ‘I didn’t make a fuss or tell him and Don and the others that they didn’t really want me or anything. I just said I’d be too nervous to be of any use.’

  She now had an apologetic air, as if she were begging us to understand that although she felt unwanted she was trying, for our sakes, not to make a parade of it in the local community. She was exasperating and, at the same time, pathetic.

  After breakfast Twice went up to the factory office, and Dee went off somewhere with Sandy Maclean, whose Easter vacation from lessons had now begun, and when I came out of the kitchen in the middle of the forenoon Cousin Emmie was depositing her bag and parasol by the chair in the corner of the veranda, and without preamble she said: ‘Are you going to th
is regatta on Monday?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, my voice sounding defiant even to myself, ‘I’m looking forward to it. I missed it last year because there was trouble at the factory and Twice was working over the Easter weekend. Are you going?’

  ‘I don’t want to, but I’ll have to go now if you are going because my cousin is going, and the servants are getting a holiday and there will be no food.’

  ‘I am sure you will enjoy it once you are there. The yachts have coloured sails and it is all very gay and beautiful.’

  ‘I don’t like yachts. Miss Murgatroyd’s cousin was drowned off a yacht at Cowes. I don’t like the Peak Hotel either. I don’t like that man de Marnay.’

  This, of course, raised my hackles, for Sashie is a special friend of mine. Indeed, he has my equivalent of Somerset’s G.F.O.M. and a great deal more. ‘Why don’t you like him?’ I demanded.

  ‘He is a foreigner and he looks as if his legs were one person and he were another,’ said Cousin Emmie and took a large bite of scone.

  I was flabbergasted and also infuriated that this silly-looking old woman should have come so close to – should have arrived at the very essence, indeed – of Sashie’s complexly guarded secret.

  ‘He and his legs are all one person!’ I snapped.

  ‘They don’t look it,’ she said and took another bite of scone.

  We were sitting in a hostile silence when Dee came back with Sandy, stopped her car at the bottom of the steps, and, with a look at me that almost spoke aloud the words: ‘I am trying to be a good girl and a great help to you,’ invited Cousin Emmie to go for a drive.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I am all right where I am.’

  In Dee’s suddenly sulky little face I thought I could read a world of meaning – the feeling that she liked Cousin Emmie and I did not, and yet in an unjust way Cousin Emmie preferred to stay with me instead of going with her for a drive and a hundred other things – and for the millionth time I wondered with exasperation why human nature has to be so complex.

  ‘Are you going down to the Peak to swim?’ I asked Dee, but it was Sandy who answered: ‘No, Missis Janet. We’re goin’ up to Mount Melody to see Miss Isobel.’

  I turned to Cousin Emmie: ‘Have you ever been to Mount Melody? It is a most interesting old house.’

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ she said. ‘That Denholm girl has sense turning it into a hotel. It’s not fit for anything else except perhaps a lunatic asylum.’

  Mentally I shrugged my shoulders and watched Dee and Sandy drive away.

  There was a silence until the car was out of sight, and then: ‘That girl made a great mistake bringing that car out here – a great mistake,’ said Cousin Emmie.

  ‘In what way? She is a first-class driver – even Twice can sit beside her without squirming. Young people here wouldn’t have much fun without some form of transport.’

  ‘It gives things away,’ she said, pursuing her own train of thought as she always did.’

  ‘Gives what away?’

  ‘It lets them know she is wealthy – a car like that.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The men,’ said Cousin Emmie, her voice low and sinister. ‘I don’t approve of young women being wealthy. It puts them in a difficult position. You never know what might happen.’

  ‘Then I don’t agree with you,’ I said. ‘When I was young I had nothing but the small salary I earned and that wasn’t much fun. I like to see young people having a good—’

  ‘Aha,’ she interrupted me on a particularly raven-like note, ‘but you got married to a fine hard-working man. If you’d had a fortune, some adventurer would have got hold of you. I know them.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense! Any intelligent young woman would—’

  Staring past me at nothing at all, she interrupted me again: ‘Intelligence doesn’t come into it. Young girls get led away into ways they don’t want to go. I know them.’

  I could think of nothing to say so we sat more or less in silence until Twice came home for lunch, fortunately very early, and drove Cousin Emmie back to the Great House.

  ‘Darling, she is just about the end!’ he said when he came back.

  ‘What did she say to you?’

  ‘She said she was very disappointed to learn that you were going to this regatta, that she thought you had more sense. Janet, I think in her grudging way that old woman must be fond of you.’

  ‘Well, I am not fond of her! Besides, she isn’t fond of me or of anybody else. She is just annoyed she can’t come here for lunch on Monday, that’s all. I think myself it’s you she likes – she said you were a fine hard-working man.’

  ‘Cheeky old cow,’ said Twice.

  About ten o’clock on Monday morning every car on Paradise except that of the Yates streamed out of the south gates on the way to the regatta, with Cousin Emmie sitting beside Madame in the Rolls, her face wooden both in colour and expression. The pregnant Dorothy Yates did not feel like the long day in the Bay and she and her husband had volunteered to look after the younger Compound children who were being left behind in the charge of their nurses, but Sandy Maclean was in the Bay party, regarding this regatta day as an opportunity for a longer swim than usual from the Peak beach.

  The Peak Hotel had formerly been the Great House of an estate that specialised in the raising of cattle and polo ponies and whose lands had covered much of what was now the fashionable new hotel district of the Bay as well as the flat coastal plain which was now the airport. The Peak House, now the main building of the hotel, stood on the summit of a cliff promontory, on the west of which lay a wide bay with the commercial port and the old town, and to the east of the promontory was a smaller bay which was the yacht harbour. The Yacht Club buildings were tucked into the bottom of the cliff below the hotel, and it was possible to descend, by winding paths through the hotel garden, to the gate in the high fence that led into the back yard of the Yacht Club.

  Sir Ian was a senior member of the Yacht Club in much the same way that he was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, a Justice of the Peace, an important voice in the Jockey Club and Custos Rotolorum of our parish, and today he was wearing what he called his ‘sea-goin’ ’ hat, and in a very genial frame of mind as he inspected Sashie’s and Don’s arrangements for the Paradise party which consisted of a long table under a row of sun umbrellas and a row of chairs as close to the railed seaward edge of the cliff as was safe. The position on the northward curve of the cliff was a little like the prow of a ship and became very much more so when Madame selected the centre chair, a straight-backed one provided by the thoughtful Sashie, for Madame never lounged, arranged herself quite upright and looked out to the far horizon where the blue sky met the bluer Caribbean.

  ‘Figurehead!’ Twice whispered to me.

  ‘Very nice indeed, Mr Sashie, thank you,’ Madame now announced. ‘And a splendid day for the regatta, not too hot and the breeze not too strong.’

  ‘We did our best, Madame, my sweet,’ said Sashie.

  She looked him firmly in the eye and he looked as firmly back at her, his expression a mixture of mischief and deference.

  ‘Marion,’ she said next, ‘come and sit by me, please. Janet, you on this side and keep in the shade. I suppose you young people are going down to the beach? That’s right. And when you are called to lunch, come at once. Mr Sashie and Mr Don have a great deal on their hands today and have no time for dawdlers. Emmie, sit down and don’t stand there like a wooden image!’

  Madame now looked about her, appeared satisfied with her dispositions and turned to her son. ‘Very well, Ian, when are you going to begin?’

  ‘Regatta began ten hours ago, Mother, when the big boats went off on the Round-the-Island race.’

  ‘I know that perfectly well, Ian. I have been to regattas here before you were born. As you know perfectly well, what I wish to know is when is the race that our Mr Mackie and Roddy and the others are sailing in?’

  ‘Our class isn’t until after lunch, Madame,’ Don said.


  ‘Oh. In that case, we shall all have a cool drink,’ said Madame, and, standing up, she began to turn her chair round to face the table instead of the sea. Rob Maclean arranged it to her liking and she sat down again. ‘Ian, attend to the drinks, please.’ As far as Madame was concerned the regatta did not begin until after lunch, and very soon, having called to the table every acquaintance that passed – and she knew all the Europeans in the island – she was presiding at a morning drinks party that might as well be taking place at Paradise.

  Dee stayed beside me, by years the youngest person at the table, for all the others of her age were involved in some way in the sailing. I was conscious of her there, in the party but not of it, but I had no time to devote to her, for on a day like this Marion Maclean and I were more or less in the capacity of ladies-in-waiting to Madame. Madame invited everybody who passed to sit down and have a drink, but beyond that she did not lift a finger. Sir Ian had his duties as a member of the Yacht Club Committee; Twice and Rob had disappeared with a group of acquaintances, and Marion and I were kept busy. As I dispensed drinks and chatted to plantation wives, business men’s wives and the wives of government officials, I was conscious all the time of Dee, a silent withdrawn presence, and although I introduced her here and there and did my best to include her, her conversation did not pass the initial ‘How d’ye do’ with anyone.

  After about an hour, when there seemed to be a lull in Madame’s informal party, I withdrew from the table and made for Sashie’s bedroom to wash my hands and have a quiet cigarette in peace, and I did not invite Dee to come with me. I was just coming out of Sashie’s bathroom when he himself arrived, followed by a waiter with a tray on which stood a brown teapot and two cups.

  ‘Tea!’ I said. ‘Sashie, you are a pet! I just came in here to get away from the tomato juice and orange juice and all the sticky mess.’