My Friend Cousin Emmie Read online

  ‘And what is that – what they wish it were?’

  ‘A feudal plantation, a tropic paradise indeed, where everybody lives in perfect peace and harmony.’

  ‘And isn’t Paradise nearly that?’

  ‘That’s how it seems. But Paradise Estate is part of St Jago. St Jago is a West Indian island, and West Indian islands have colour problems and all sorts of other problems and they wriggle like maggots under the surface of Paradise. Of course, people don’t like looking at maggots.’

  ‘I don’t know that I blame them.’

  His smile broadened to a grin. ‘But maggots are indubitably part of things-as-they-are,’ he said.

  ‘But do we have to examine them?’ I asked. ‘I think I belong to the school that is content to let them wriggle away below the surface as long as I don’t have to see them.’

  ‘It’s all right, I suppose,’ he said, ‘until they actually pop out, but I am afraid that if I spent much time at Paradise I would begin to turn stones over and actively look for them.’ He had been patting Dram’s head, and now the dog raised a large paw to his knee. ‘You handsome large lump,’ he said, scratching the dog’s ears and shaking the big head from side to side while I thought: ‘I haven’t deliberately turned a stone over to see what was underneath since I was a child at Reachfar. You have to be young and full of confidence to turn stones over, just to see what is underneath.’

  In my mind, while the young man played with the dog, a maggot wriggled, the maggot of the knowledge that only a few moments ago I had quarrelled with Twice more grievously than I had ever done in all the time I had known him. We had had many more prolonged, many more violent and noisy quarrels, but never one as grievous as this, never one that arose out of such a depth as this. I sat looking at the young man, admiring him and envying him, envying him his youth that had no responsibilities except to himself, envying him because he could say openly that he disliked St Jago and its maggots, envying him because he had no restraining ties with other people.

  ‘What is his name?’ he asked, still holding the dog by the sides of the head with both hands.

  ‘Dram. It is a short version of his over-fancy kennelname Drambuie of Kilcarron.’

  ‘Dram,’ he said, giving the dog’s head another shake from side to side. ‘Like Roddy being short for Roderick,’ and with an upward glance he invited me to call him by this name.

  ‘And I think we had better go down to the kennel,’ I said. ‘It must be nearly time for lunch.’

  Roddy came down with me to the kennel, which was really Dram’s own basket in a corner of the luggage room where there was a ring in the wall to which his lead could be tied; and after taking a drink from his own water dish, Dram got into the basket and lay down contentedly.

  ‘He is a very reasonable sort of bloke, that dog,’ Roddy said.

  I patted Dram’s head. ‘He is reasonable about everything except C-A-T-S,’ I said; but even although I spelled the word, Dram looked at me suspiciously and gave a small and menacing growl.

  ‘But you spelled it!’ Roddy protested.

  We came out of the room and I shut the door.

  ‘Dram works a great deal by some sort of intuition,’ I said as we came along the passage and up the steps. ‘I suppose that even if I spell the word “cats” I give off some sort of feeling that I am thinking about cats and he picks up the feeling out of the air.’

  ‘I suppose people would be a bit like that too before all this civilisation killed it out of them,’ Roddy surprised me by saying.

  I paused at the top of the companionway at the end of the passage that led to our cabin. ‘It’s not dead in all of us,’ I said. ‘I live a lot by intuition. I get feelings about things and about people. Sometimes I wish I didn’t. It can be depressing. . . . Well, I must go and wash for lunch.’

  The ship was primarily a cargo vessel and had accommodation for only twelve passengers, consisting of eight single cabins and two double ones, but this accommodation was very comfortable and every cabin was equipped with its own bathroom. When Roddy left me, he went across to the starboard side of the ship and I turned into our rooms at the end of the passage on the port side, going through the little sitting room with its two easy chairs and writing-table to the bedroom, off which the bathroom opened. I felt a little uprush of annoyance to find Dee sitting at the dressing-table, combing her hair while she talked to Twice, who was in the bathroom.

  ‘So that means there are only five of us altogether?’ she was saying. ‘That’s marvellous! And that old woman won’t bother anybody much.’

  Twice came out of the bathroom, drying his hands, saw me and said: ‘Oh, there you are! Where have you been? We looked for you in the smokeroom,’

  ‘I was putting Dram in his kennel,’ I said, and looked at Dee, who had turned round on the dressing-table stool.

  ‘There are only five passengers altogether, Twice says,’ she told me. ‘There was to be a family of six, but they had to cancel at the last moment. Isn’t it marvellous!’

  ‘I don’t know if it is,’ I said. ‘Five of us may get fairly sick of one another at the end of twelve days.’

  ‘We’ll wait for you in the little place outside the dining-saloon, Janet,’ Twice said. ‘Coming, Dee?’

  They went away and I washed and tidied my hair, fighting all the time against a childish desire to cry.

  Only four of the five passengers appeared for lunch at the big table in the middle of the dining-saloon. The old lady I had seen in the smokeroom was not there, and Dee and Twice sat on one side of the first officer, and Roddy and I sat on the other at his end of the table, while the captain’s chair at the other end stood empty. Captain Davey was still on the bridge with the pilot. ‘I hope the other passenger is not feeling ill,’ I said to Mr Radzow towards the end of the meal. This was no empty conventional remark, for this little ship did not carry a stewardess and it was understood that the sick woman passengers would be tended by the unsick ones and I had no wish to spend twelve days below decks with a seasick old woman.

  ‘I think not,’ the first officer said. He was Polish by birth and he spoke a slightly accented, almost too-perfect English. ‘She requested that lunch be sent to her cabin.’

  I had, of course, introduced Roddy to Dee and Twice, and Twice, naturally enough, was interested in this son of his colleague at Paradise and talked to him most of the way through lunch about his engineering studies at Glasgow and his future plans. I was pleased to see a mulish look possess Dee’s face at this interference of another personality between Twice and herself. She was quite excessively plain in appearance, with a mere plainness, as opposed to any suggestion of the jolie laide, so assertive that it was almost aggressive. Her hair was mousy and badly tended; her eyes were small, round and light hazel; her skin slightly sallow. Her height was less than medium, and her figure unremarkable, but slight rather than full. Physically, her only feature of any appeal for me was what I can only describe as a neatness – neat hands, neat feet and a general neatness of movement, a neatness that, in the way even that her lips moved when she spoke, came near to primness. She was widely travelled for her age and highly intelligent in many ways, but this, along with everything else about her, was, in my eyes, overlaid and dominated by her terrible, edgy self-consciousness, so that, by her very shrinking away from people, she contrived to thrust herself and her self-consciousness on the notice of everyone, just as now I felt that Mr Radzow and all the junior officers who were lunching at little tables round the wall must be aware that Dee was sulking because Twice was giving some of his attention to Roddy.

  When lunch was over, Mr Radzow asked in a general way if we would like to go round the ship with him on his afternoon inspection, but I said that I would prefer to retire to my cabin with a book, which I did. I hoped that Twice would soon join me in the cabin so that we might talk and close this rift which had opened so suddenly and ominously between us; and although I took from the box of new books which had been delivered from London
to the ship for us a novel called But not for Love which had been very well reviewed and which I had been longing to read, I did not read it but sat against the pillows of my bed, the book lying unopened on the eider-down, hoping that Twice would come, and listening for the click of the door that led into the little sitting-room. At last it came, and I sat up straight in the bed, tears in my eyes, my apology for my anger of the forenoon already on my lips.

  ‘Miss Jan, may I come in? It’s Dee,’ the voice said, and: ‘As if I didn’t know it was you!’ I thought as I lay back and thrust my hands, that were shaking with disappointment and anger, under the eiderdown.

  ‘Yes, come in, Dee,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘But I thought you had gone round the ship with the others?’

  ‘I was with them, but they don’t really want me.’

  She stood at the end of my bed and began to pick with her neat little fingers at a thread on the corner of the eiderdown. ‘They are down in the engine-room talking about nothing but engines.’

  I wanted to laugh, and I think I was smiling when I said: ‘But, Dee, Twice and Roddy are both engineers, and engineers always prefer talking about engines to talking about anything else.’

  ‘Who is this Roddy Maclean, anyway?’ she asked next, her face sullen.

  ‘His father, Rob Maclean, is the manager of Paradise, where we are going, and his mother, Marion Maclean, is my best friend in St Jago.’

  ‘Did you know he was to be on this boat?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘It seems funny to me that out of all the boats going to St Jago we should be travelling on one that has a friend of yours in it.’

  Her voice was suspicious, as if I had made an assignation with Roddy to travel on this boat; but even although I knew with certainty that she did not mean to imply this, I felt myself growing angry, and I tried to conceal the anger as I said: ‘I think you have got the wrong end of the stick, Dee. What would be funny is if any white person whose home was in St Jago was travelling on this or any other boat to the island and I didn’t know him. The St Jagoan white community is very small, you know.’ She stared at me sullenly. ‘What have you against Roddy Maclean?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing, I suppose’ – she picked at the eiderdown – ‘except that he is just in the way. I wanted it to be just Twice and me – and you, of course.’

  I felt that I had been added to her chosen group rather ineptly as an afterthought, for the sweet sake of politeness, and longed to slap her sullen little face.

  ‘Pity,’ I said. ‘We should have chartered the ship instead of merely buying passages.’

  ‘You are not being very nice,’ she told me.

  ‘Perhaps not. Perhaps it is because I think you are being extremely silly, Dee. You can’t expect to have the whole ship to yourself and generally have everything just as you want it.’

  ‘You are angry with me!’

  ‘No, I am not angry with you, Dee,’ I said, and it was true to the degree that I was more irritated than angry. ‘I simply think you are being silly, as I said. Now—’

  ‘I don’t want the whole ship to myself!’ she said sullenly.

  ‘What do you want then?’

  ‘It’s – oh, I can’t explain.’

  ‘Look, there is a box of books over there. Have a look through it and find something to read, Dee.’

  ‘I don’t want to read.’

  ‘Well, I do!’

  She dropped the corner of the eiderdown and stared at me. ‘You don’t want me in here?’

  ‘Frankly, no.’

  ‘Oh, I wish I’d never come on this ship! You’re horrid! You’re all horrid!’ she said and fled out and along the passage, leaving the outer door swinging open behind her. I got out of bed, banged the door shut and threw myself back into the bed in such a fit of rage and shame that I was trembling all over.

  I did not see Twice again until dinner-time, for he and Roddy had, in the end, spent the whole afternoon below with the chief engineer and had then gone to have a drink with the first officer in his cabin, so that Captain Davey and I were already at table when Twice, Roddy and the two officers came into the saloon. The chair opposite to me, on the captain’s left, was empty, for the old lady had again elected to dine in her cabin, but I was more aware of another empty chair, which was Dee‘s, and sat waiting with foreboding until, about halfway through dinner, Twice said : ‘Where is Dee?’

  I finished the remark I was making to Roddy beside me before I looked across at him and said: ‘Down below, I suppose.’

  His blue eyes looked hardly back at me. ‘Is she feeling ill?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so, but I haven’t seen her since just after lunch,’ and I turned back to Roddy.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ Twice said, getting up, ‘I’ll go down below for a moment.’

  As he went out, I was as fully aware as if he had spoken it to me in words that Roddy Maclean knew that Dee and I had been quarrelling that afternoon and that Twice and I were quarrelling now. I could feel the knowledge emanating from him just as enmity had emanated from Dram when I had spelled the word ‘cats’ that forenoon; and even as this analogy came into my mind, he said: ‘There is something going on down below that will surprise you, I think.’

  For a horrid moment I thought that by ‘down below’ he meant Dee’s cabin where Twice now was, and I repeated: ‘Down below?’

  ‘In Dram’s kennel. He has had the ship’s kittens in there all the afternoon, playing with them.’

  ‘Kittens? Playing with them?’ For a moment I forgot about Twice, Dee and everything. ‘Oh, Mr Radzow, he’ll kill them! He is terrible about cats!’

  ‘No. They have been with him since lunch,’ Mr Radzow assured me. ‘He seems to like them very much.’

  ‘He loves them,’ Roddy assured me. ‘Probably it is because they are so young. They are only six weeks old.’

  ‘We had to have the mother cat put down at Bristol,’ the chief engineer told us. ‘She had a tumour, the vet said, but two of the hands wanted to keep the kittens, so we have three of them on board.’

  ‘As long as Dram doesn’t harm them,’ I said as Twice returned to the table. I looked across at him. ‘What is this I hear about Dram playing in a kindly way with cats?’ I asked.

  ‘True enough,’ he said shortly.

  ‘Is Dee not coming to dinner?’

  ‘No. She is feeling a bit off,’ he said to the table at large.

  ‘She’ll probably be all right by tomorrow,’ Captain Davey said.

  ‘Probably,’ said Twice, looking sternly across at me, and I felt the word to constitute a threat.

  ‘Would anyone like to play Scrabble after dinner?’ Mr Radzow asked.

  ‘You and your Scrabble!’ the chief told him. ‘It’s sheer victimisation of the passengers, that’s all it is!’

  ‘What is Scrabble?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a sort of spelling game,’ Roddy told me. ‘Quite good fun.’

  ‘I’m not a games player, but I can spell an odd word here and there. I’ll play, Mr Radzow, if a beginner won’t be a bore.’

  ‘Me too,’ Roddy said.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to,’ the chief said, and Mr Radzow smiled. ‘Splendid!’ he said. ‘Let us go up.’

  I played Scrabble in the smokeroom until nearly midnight, while Twice, at another table, played cards with some of the junior officers and glanced at me now and again in an angry way, but at long last even Mr Radzow tired of this means of extending his English vocabulary and there was nothing for it but to go below to our cabin.

  ‘What the hell did you do to Dee this afternoon?’ Twice blazed at me the moment we were inside.

  ‘Me? I didn’t do anything!’

  People who love one another know in an instinctive way a great deal about one another, but this does not mean that they always use that knowledge in a beneficent way. I loved Twice very much; I knew a great deal about him, and one of the things I knew best was how to make him even angrier with m
e than he was already.

  ‘Stop clowning!’ he said, coming towards me in a menacing way. ‘What did you do to her?’

  ‘Nothing, I tell you! It was you who did it’ – I began to whine lugubriously in imitation of Dee – ‘going away looking at those horrid nasty engines and paying no attention to poor little Dee. And talking to that horrid Roddy Maclean and those nasty engineering officers and leaving little Dee all lonely and droopy and miserable!’

  ‘Stop that! Stop it at once!’

  But I did not stop. My face as sullen as I could make it, I picked at a corner of the window curtain with my fingers and whined on: ‘I wanted it to be just Twice and me on this boat – and you, of course. I wanted it to be just ourselves—’

  I raised my eyelids to observe the effect of my performance, to find Twice coming slowly across the small floor towards me, moving like one of the larger members of the cat tribe, his fingers already curved to take a grip of me and shake me. Twice and I have got the better of many a crisis by physical violence for the reason, I think, that we can never find the words, especially when we are angry, for the feelings that lie between us, and now, as I saw the menace in his approach, I snatched my hair-brush from the dressing-table and threw it at him with all my force. Even at my calmest, I have no aim, and, angry as I was now, the brush went wide by a good yard; but Twice, unlike me, is quick of eye and hand, so he caught the brush in full flight, hurled it back, aimed in such a way that it whistled past my ear, making me shut my eyes and duck so that I lost my balance while the brush flew on through the open doorway to the bathroom, bounced off the far wall and clattered with a splash into the lavatory pan. I had fallen on to one of the beds, and Twice seized me by the shoulders and shook me till my teeth rattled.

  It was at this stage, as a rule, that I began to cry with shame at behaving so badly, with sorrow at quarrelling with Twice, and for a complex of other reasons, so that, suddenly, we were no longer angry but ready to dissolve into love-making or laughter, but on this night I was neither ashamed nor sorry and I did not begin to cry. Instead, as soon as he released his grip on me, I sat up and panted venomously: ‘How that destructive little brat would love to see this! You’d better go and fetch her!’