My Friend Cousin Emmie Page 3

  Sitting on the other bed now, panting with rage as I was, Twice said: ‘What the hell’s got into you?’

  ‘It seems to me that whatever it is is in you!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I rose, went to the dressing-table and sat down with my back to him while, my hands shaking, I began to take the pins out of my hair.

  ‘I suppose it flatters your forty-one-year-old vanity to be gazed at starry-eyed!’ I said viciously.

  ‘Great God Almighty—’

  ‘Stop shouting! You might have picked something with eyes that could look starry and a bit less like the eyes of a dead cod!’

  ‘Look here—’

  ‘No, I won’t. I’ve looked at the two of you enough today, not to mention this last week, and it gives me what my old Air Force chums called The Sick!’

  ‘Now, Janet, listen—’

  ‘I will not listen! If you need an audience it’s two doors down on your left,’ I said, went into the bathroom and banged and bolted the door.

  I had rescued my hair-brush from the lavatory pan and had begun to wash it, when I heard the door of the bedroom slam shut; and as I wrenched open the door of the bathroom the outer door of the sitting-room slammed and I heard Twice’s angry steps die away along the passage until there was no sound but the wash of the water against the hull of the ship. For a second I had a panic-stricken urge to run after him, but then I saw the dent in the silver back of the brush between my hands, and, my anger rising again, I went back to the bathroom and rubbed more soap into the bristles before scrubbing them furiously with the nail-brash.

  It was a long time before Twice came back. I do not know by the clock how long it was, for I turned the lights out when I got into bed by way of showing, when he chose to return, that I had gone uncaring to sleep, but between the time when the doors slammed shut and then softly opened again, it seemed to me that I had lived through at least a century of even grimmer historic weather than that which prevails on this twentieth century of ours. During that century I had promised myself that if ever Twice came back to me I would apologise to him kneeling, offer to find a second Dee for him and never quarrel with him again, but as soon as the door opened and he was moving quietly about the room, all my promises to myself shattered to fragments and it was as much as I could do not to sit up in bed and scream at him like a virago accusations of his having spent this last century in Dee’s cabin even although I knew that such accusations were utterly false.

  I did not sleep a great deal that night, and probably Twice did not sleep much either; but when morning came and I knew he was awake, I was afraid to open my eyes because I did not want to quarrel any more and yet knew that the quarrel must continue, although I had no very clear idea of what, precisely, we were quarrelling about.

  The cabin steward came in with a tray of tea, and it was useless for either of us to pretend any longer to be asleep, but when we sat up in our beds we did not look at one another and we did not speak until we were both holding cups of tea and Twice said in a cold, even voice: ‘What did you mean last night when you said Dee was destructive?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it matters what I meant.’

  ‘What you mean is that you don’t know what you meant.’

  I turned my head and looked at him, and his blue eyes looked sternly back at me.

  ‘I know very well what I meant,’ I told him.

  ‘Then what did you mean?’

  ‘I meant what I said – that she is destructive.’

  He looked momentarily exasperated, took a grip on himself and managed to ask calmly: ‘Destructive in what way?’

  ‘In many ways, I suppose, but the obvious one is that she has already destroyed the peace between you and me.’

  He drew a sharp breath and said; ‘You can’t blame Dee because you started throwing things!’

  ‘Oh yes I can and I do. That hair-brush of mine is badly dented with you throwing it into the bathroom – more destruction – but I don’t blame you for that. I blame Dee,’ I said, staring at the wall ahead or me.

  ‘That is simply bloody-minded and unreasonable!’

  ‘These are two characteristics of mine that you have been aware of for years, but bloody-minded and unreasonable or not, I maintain that Dee Andrews is by nature destructive and I don’t want to discuss her any further.’

  ‘But, Janet, don’t you see how impossible all this is? I mean, we have invited her to come with us—’

  ‘You invited her.’

  ‘But damn it, you concurred!’

  ‘I didn’t get a chance to do anything else.’

  There was a prolonged silence while we both drank tea, until Twice laid aside his cup, got out of his bed, came to sit on the edge of mine and said: ‘Janet, you must try to explain to me what has happened.’

  ‘Nothing has happened except that you have convinced yourself that I have been so horrid to your poor little Dee that she is afraid to come out of her cabin.’

  ‘And haven’t you been? When she came in here yesterday to talk to you, you told her to clear out, she says.’

  ‘Yes, so I did. But she didn’t come in here to talk to me. She came in to bellyache because you were talking to the engineers and not to her. That is different from coming in here to talk to me.’

  ‘You don’t feel you are splitting hairs?’

  ‘Perhaps I am, but this is one of the times when the thickness of the parts of a split hair is important – important to me, anyway. But we won’t bother about that at the moment. The point is that you are in a tizzy because here we are with Dee in our ménage and you think that she and I are not going to get along. You are mistaken. She and I will get along all right when she gets hungry enough to come out of her huff and her cabin. She will get along with me – or else!’

  ‘For God’s sake! Why didn’t you say before we left London that you disliked her so much?’

  ‘I couldn’t. I didn’t know about it then.’

  ‘My God, but you can be maddening!’

  ‘There’s no point in blowing your top.’ I told him. ‘It is your fault that she is here, and your fault that I dislike her even more now than I disliked her yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘My fault? For Pete’s sake, why?’

  ‘Because you charged in here last night and attacked me because of her. Do you expect me to love her for that?’

  ‘But, Janet, if you had seen her last night when I came down during dinner! You don’t seem to realise how you can pulverise people, especially a little creature like Dee, with this primitive thunder of yours!’

  ‘It seems to me that a little primitive thunder and thinking is very much in order. As for getting pulverised, doesn’t it occur to you that it can happen to me too although I am nearly five feet nine?’

  ‘You? Pulverised? One might as well attack Ben Wyvis with a toffee-hammer!’

  ‘Have it your own way,’ I told him. ‘But the situation between you, Dee and me will be all right if you cut out the drama and the heroics, Twice. Let’s have no more of your rushing at me asking what I have done to her. Take it from here that I will do to her what I bloody well think fit, that’s all, and you are at liberty to do the same. You can even spend your whole life with her if you like, until such time as I get around to murdering her.’

  ‘I simply don’t know what’s got into you.’

  ‘Dee Andrews has got into me and I have already told you she is destructive. And if you don’t like it, that’s too bad, because you started it But for you, she wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Janet,’ he appealed to me, ‘you realise that you are worrying me quite badly?’

  ‘I didn’t sleep much last night either.’

  ‘But why do you dislike her so?’

  ‘I dislike anybody who can do this to you and me.’

  ‘But she isn’t doing anything!’

  I stared at the hair-brash on the dressing-table, at the dent in its silver back.

  ‘She doesn’t have to do anything. I
dislike her for what she is.’

  ‘For what she is? And what do you think she is?’

  ‘I can’t tell you in words. She is simply something that I dislike.’

  ‘You are talking absolute rubbish!’ he told me angrily. ‘And there is something disgusting about this – about you being jealous because I take an interest in a youngster who is unhappy. I thought you had more stature than that!’

  I drew breath to make some angry retort, but was struck again by the idea that had come to me the night before, the idea that this rupture between Twice and me would please Dee, and I swallowed the words while I stared at the wall and decided that I was going to stop this quarrel, not, primarily, to achieve peace with Twice, but because, by achieving peace, I felt that I would be in some obscure way making a stand against the malign influence of Dee.

  ‘I honestly don’t think I am jealous of her, Twice,’ I said, ‘and I apologise for all the filthy things I have said to you. I don’t mind, honestly, how much time you spend with her, but equally I expect you not to mind how I choose to deal with her. In other words, if she comes in here bellyaching that you are neglecting her, there is liable to be a repetition of what happened yesterday. After all, it is pretty absurd for a girl to come complaining to me that she is being neglected by my husband, don’t you think?’

  Twice smiled a little. ‘She didn’t think of it like that, Janet.’

  ‘Then I think she should have done. This is part of what I dislike in her. She is so damned inept!’

  ‘That is because she is so uncertain of herself.’

  ‘Maybe. Anyway, she is your pigeon. I’ll do my best to cope, Twice, but it would help if you drew her a few diagrams about not coming to me with her complaints about you. Dammit, I think that is what made me so angry yesterday – it is all so complicated – but I’d get mad at anybody who criticised you, and for her to do it was too much altogether.’

  Twice leaned towards me and kissed me on the cheek, then took my hand in his and sat looking down at it. ‘I feel that I am being circumgyrated by subtlety,’ he said, ‘but, anyway, I apologise for last night.’

  ‘So do I. And, Twice, I really will do my best with this thing.’

  ‘I know you will,’ he assured me, ‘but I wish you liked her. It would be so much easier, you being you.’

  ‘Everything can’t be easy in this vale of tears, and right now you had better get dressed and go along to her cabin and make sure that she hasn’t jumped overboard or something.’

  While Twice bathed and shaved, I sat staring at my hairbrush and thinking of the situation. Delia was twenty-four and Twice and I were forty-one – we could have had a daughter of her age, I told myself, but I had no parental feeling towards this girl now although my liking for her as a child had been of a near-maternal kind. She did not even arouse in me the liking that I felt for most young people, the liking that I had felt at once the day before for young Roddy Maclean or for the young seaman who looked after Dram and the kittens.

  As a rule, Twice and I reacted in a similar way to people, and I could think of no other instance of his being drawn towards someone whom I found inimical, and this worried me in a deep-down gnawing way, influencing my every thought about Dee. Twice and I have no children. We married late, I had a miscarriage at my first pregnancy and could not have another child; but by an earlier marriage Twice had a son whom he had not seen since infancy but who must now be only a little younger than Dee. It struck me now that I had always thought that Twice had accepted our childless state just as I had done but that this might not be so. After a bitter struggle, I had arrived at the acceptance, an acceptance reputed to be more difficult for the female than for the male, but it was possible, I now thought, that Twice had not achieved acceptance as I had, after all. Staring at the dented hair-brush, I found myself thinking: ‘If only it had been anyone other than Dee Andrews!’

  2

  Queer Things Happen at Sea

  BY THE time I went up to the dining-saloon Twice and Dee had already breakfasted and were out on deck somewhere, but I had a pleasant meal with Roddy Maclean and went with him to take Dram for a walk afterwards. When he opened the door of the luggage room, two seamen, Dram and the three kittens were in there, the seamen sitting on a bench and Dram lying on the floor, with the kittens jumping and gambolling all over him, playing with his ears and tail, and he did not look in the least enthusiastic when I suggested that he should come up on deck for a walk.

  ‘You’ll ’ave to take ’is kittens as well, Mrs Alexander,’ one of the seamen advised me, and that is what we did, going up on deck in a procession, I leading Dram, and Roddy and the sailors carrying a kitten each while Dram kept a wary eye on them.

  We went up to the upper after-deck outside the smokeroom, which was no more than a gallery screened on three sides to a height of some four feet with steel mesh, and there the men put the kittens down and I unhooked Dram’s lead; and although normally he was full of energy and ran miles in the course of a day, he at once lay down again and began to play with the kittens.

  ‘It’s all very disconcerting,’ I said to Roddy. ‘His whole character seems to have changed.’

  ‘It must be love,’ Roddy said, ‘or maybe it’s the sea. They always say that queer things happen at sea.’

  I found Roddy an amusing and agreeable companion, very relaxed and easy, the exact opposite of the tense, and self-consciously self-centred Dee; and while she and Twice went about the ship, Roddy and I sat contentedly on the little gallery. Dee and Twice spent most of the forenoon on the bridge, for the Pandora was an informal little ship, and Dee, I gathered, was allowed to take over the wheel from the steersman on duty and keep the ship on her tied course between two points of the compass while Twice and Captain Davey or whatever officer was on duty sat about yarning.

  In this way the forenoon passed, and at lunch Dee looked happy, but she spoke to hardly anyone at the table except Twice, which made me feel slightly irritable. Her monopolisation of him was so complete that she seemed to me to resent his addressing a word to anybody else, and it amazed me that Twice seemed to be unaware of this fixation of hers. Or was he aware of it and flattered by it? But this thought I dismissed as being derogatory of him, and I concluded that he was unaware of the degree of her fixation, while I, probably, was exaggerating Dee’s wish to monopolise him. When lunch was over, the three of us sat on at table for a little after Roddy and the officers had gone – the old lady was again having lunch in her cabin – and Dee said: ‘Captain Davey is a friend of yours, isn’t he, Miss Jan?’

  It was the first direct remark she had made to me since our exchange in the cabin the day before, and even as she spoke the words I was aware that she was being consciously magnanimous in thus addressing me, displaying to Twice her generous forgiveness of my ‘nastiness’ to her of the day before.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘His daughter Dorothy came out to spend a holiday with Twice and me just like you now, and she married the estate schoolmaster at Paradise and—’

  ‘Just quite unlike me!’ Dee broke in. ‘You needn’t think you are going to marry me off to the first man who comes along, because you’re not!’ Whereupon she rose from the table and marched out of the saloon.

  ‘The little brat!’ said Twice, frowning at the glass-doors that swung shut behind her.

  ‘The inept little fool to do that in front of Twice!’ I thought, but aloud I said: ‘Wait a minute, Twice. Maybe that was partly my fault. I should have remembered how sensitive she is about this marriage thing when she has just broken her engagement to Alan Stewart and everything.’

  ‘But if she is going to fly off like that all the time, life is just not going to be possible! Damn it, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it!’

  ‘Oh, darling, she’ll settle down,’ I said, and then I laughed. ‘Dash it, everything is getting wrong end up on this ship. Last week nobody would have convinced me that Dram would fall in love with a bunch of kittens, and last night nobody
would have convinced me that I would ever take Dee’s side against you, but here I am doing it. Look here, you’d better not sit here talking to me. That will only make things worse.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! I’ll sit and talk to you any time I like!’

  ‘Twice, you have got to humour her during the voyage, at least. Never mind me. I’m all right. I’m going down to the cabin to have a flop with my book. All I ask is that you keep her out of there!’

  ‘I am not going to spend my days humouring her, as you call it,’ Twice said, his chin sticking out in its aggressive way. ‘I’ve got some work to do, and I am coming down to the cabin to do it, and that is that.’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Please yourself.’

  Down below, I got on to my bed with my book, and Twice took his brief-case out to the writing-table in our sitting-room and set to work, but it was not very long before I heard the tap at the door and Dee was in there.

  ‘Twice, aren’t you coming up to the bridge?’

  ‘Not this afternoon, Dee. I want to go through these specifications.’

  ‘It isn’t that. You are angry because I was rude after lunch.’ With exasperation I thought that she was less adult than she was when I knew her at eight years old.

  ‘Yes, you were rude. But I’m not angry about it. It isn’t that important.’

  I did not at all like the sound of Twice’s voice and put the eiderdown back in preparation for sudden intervention.

  ‘I am sorry I was rude, Twice.’

  ‘Then that’s all right.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to be.’

  Twice did not speak, but I heard an impatient rustling of the papers he had been studying.

  ‘Aren’t you coming up on deck?’ she persisted as if she felt that he must come in return for her apology.

  ‘No. I have work to do, Dee.’

  ‘Then I’d better go.’ Her voice was dreary and I heard her feet go away along the passage dragging in a discouraged way.