My Friend Cousin Emmie Page 4

  There was a short interval of silence from the next room and then Twice came to stand at the foot of my bed.

  ‘Dammit, that girl needs psycho-analysis or something! If you suspected this, as you implied last night, why the blazes didn’t you say something before we got aboard this bloody ship?’

  ‘Darling, I didn’t know how she was until yesterday, don’t you see? You know how slowly my mind works about things. It was only yesterday that the feeling came over me that—’

  ‘Oh, you and your feelings!’

  ‘They are a sight more informative than all your logic and reason!’ I snapped at him. ‘You can’t see anything unless it’s in a geometric design on paper or somebody drives it through your skull with a mallet!’

  ‘There is no point in our having another shouting match,’ he said. ‘Get on with your book and I’ll go back out there, but I’ll bolt that damned door!’

  The afternoon, however, was not a success. I could not concentrate on my book and, judging from the suppressed oaths and impatient shiftings of the chair in the adjoining room, Twice was not very happy either. After about half an hour I rose, put on my coat, fetched Dram, with his kittens cavorting behind him, and went up on deck, where I found Roddy Maclean all alone on the gallery outside the smokeroom.

  ‘Have you seen Dee, Roddy?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. She’s in the little lounge outside the saloon writing letters.’

  Relieved that Dee had not plunged into the grey waters of the Atlantic, I sat down beside him, but before very long Captain Davey, accompanied by an officer called Mr Carter, who was in charge of the dining-saloon, came along and asked me to join them in the smokeroom. They looked so grave that I at once made up my mind that Dee had indeed tried to jump overboard, had been restrained by main force and that I was now being summoned to a drumhead court-martial as her legal guardian.

  ‘It’s this old woman in Cabin Five, Missis Janet,’ the captain said, using the St Jagoan version of my name that he had picked up from his daughter, and I was so relieved that I looked much more interested than I felt in his fifth passenger. ‘She is down there in that cabin doing nothing but eat all day, Carter here tells me. It won’t do, you know. It isn’t healthy,’ he told me accusingly.

  My first impulse was to laugh, for Captain Davey was a big, ruddy-faced traditional-looking sea-dog and his heavy pink jowls positively joggled with disapproval of the old lady’s unseamanlike behaviour. ‘She’ll get a liver a fathom long,’ he continued with an air of dire threat. ‘She’s got to be got up out of there!’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ I said. ‘If that is the way she likes to travel, let her get on with it. Maybe she will come up when we get to warmer water.’

  ‘If she hasn’t died of jaundice by then.’ Captain Davey was lugubrious. ‘Look here, Missis Janet, I wish you’d go down and see her. Nobody’s seen her since she came on board except old Dooley, the cabin steward. She must be some sort of crank and next thing you know she’ll be trying to jump overboard or preach religion to the crew.’

  I did my best to argue my way out of this duty, but Captain Davey was not to be laughed out of or argued out of or in any other way coaxed out of his sense of responsibility for his unseamanlike passenger, and I was borne to the door of her cabin in my straw-in-the-wind way at four o’clock tea-time by Mr Carter and the steward Dooley. Dooley knocked at the door.

  ‘Tea, madam!’

  There was no sound from inside except that of the catch on the door being slipped back. I found myself shivering, apostrophised myself roundly but silently, and Dooley opened the door and went in.

  ‘ ’Afternoon, madam,’ he said. ‘Very nice up on deck today. By the way, Mr Carter, the dinin’-saloon officer, and Mrs Alexander, one of the passengers, is here to see you.’

  ‘What for?’ came the flat voice. It had not even the upward lilt of the interrogative. But for the presence of Mr Carter I would have bolted like a rabbit for the upper-deck, but, as is well known, the men of the British Merchant Service are famed for their intrepidity and also have a great respect for the wishes of their captains, so he seized me by the upper arm and, more or less thrusting me before him, precipitated us both into the small cabin.

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Morrison,’ he said. ‘Just came down, to see that everything was to your satisfaction, you know.’

  She looked at him levelly from the armchair under the window. ‘I would have informed you if it wasn’t,’ she said, not emphatically or rudely or anything but as a bald statement of fact.

  Again I wanted to run. There was a slight clatter as Dooley released too soon his grip on one end of the metal tea-tray so that it fell sharply to the table-top, and then Dooley did run, out into the passage, closing the door behind him.

  ‘Not thinking of coming up on deck for a bit?’ Mr Carter asked her with what I thought was enviable aplomb. ‘It’s geting quite warm already, you know.’

  ‘No,’ she said flatly, staring at him out of her dull eyes for a moment before turning her gaze to me.

  ‘You – you are feeling quite well, Miss Morrison?’ I said nervously, feeling that she was forcing me into speech.

  ‘Yes.’

  I felt that my hands and feet were growing larger by the second and that soon the cabin would not hold them.

  ‘Then that’s splendid,’ I said stupidly, knowing that my attempt to smile was utterly sickly and unsuccessful. ‘I hope you enjoy your tea,’ and I turned towards the door.

  ‘You’d better stay and have some tea now you’re here,’ she said, and I felt rather than heard the words hit me like little pebbles between the shoulder-blades. ‘Tell that man,’ she added to Mr Carter, ‘to bring Mrs Alexander’s tea down here.’

  I turned back from the doorway. Mr Carter turned his back to Miss Morrison, raised his eyebrows at me and then winked. I sat down on the little stool by the dressing-table and said: ‘That will be very nice. Would you do that, Mr Carter, please? And will you tell my husband where I am?’

  ‘Certainly, Mrs Alexander,’ he said and went out. The door closed and there we were.

  Twice knows quite well where I am, I thought, but when Mr Carter tells him he will know that I am not liking this, and maybe he will come and stand in the passage outside or something, for I am really not liking this one bit and she is a quite horrible old woman and I wish I were miles away and . . .

  ‘Is that big man with the white teeth your husband?’ Miss Morrison asked, and, although her tone was as expressionless as ever, she contrived to make Twice sound like an orangoutang.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘That makes a difference,’ she commented.

  This floored me. I longed to ask her the nature of the difference that was made by the relationship between Twice and me, but I could not think of the words to frame the question.

  ‘I saw him with that girl with the brown hair,’ she said; and this is a difficult thing to describe, for, although there was no expression of any kind in her voice, no implication of any sort, the fact that she made the comment at all gave it an undercurrent of sinister meaning, as if Twice were a tycoon in the white slave traffic.

  ‘That is Delia Andrews, a young friend of mine who is travelling with us,’ I told her, laying a definite emphasis on the word ‘mine’.

  She had poured herself out some tea, although Dooley had not, as yet, arrived with mine, and she now began to chew at a sandwich in a ruminative way, staring blankly at the wall ahead of her.

  ‘And there’s a young man up there,’ she said, ‘a good-looking young man,’ and I had the immediate conviction that she disapproved of good looks, and of good looks in young men in particular.

  At that moment Dooley arrived with my tea-tray, and when he had gone out and I was pouring out a cup I thought that there were about ten days of this voyage to go and it would be a pity to quarrel outright with this old woman thus early if it could possibly be avoided.

  ‘It is kind of you to let me have tea with you, M
iss Morrison,’ I said, ‘for maybe you would prefer to be left alone?’

  I was quite prepared for her to tell me flatly that she did so prefer; I visualised myself telling Captain Davey forthright that this was her preference and thus clinching the matter for good and all, so I was pulled up short when she said: ‘I don’t like being alone. I don’t like travelling alone either. I’ve never done it before and I don’t like it.’

  It seems absurd to say that I felt that everything had changed, for, outwardly, nothing had changed at all. The old woman still sat there, her face and voice as flat and expressionless as ever, as she munched at her sandwich; she was as unfriendly and distant as she had ever been; she had merely made one more of her bald statements of fact, but, for me, everything had changed. I think this was because I had found out something about her, something that humanised her – she was travelling alone and she did not like it. In her own words, to know this about her ‘made a difference’.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘But you have friends in St Jago?’

  ‘Not friends,’ she said. ‘Cousins.’

  The precision of this, the differentiation between friends and cousins, had the effect of repressing me again, as if once more I had come up with a bump against a stone wall. Talk, I thought. Get this tea over. Get it behind.

  ‘St Jago is a lovely island. Have you been there before?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you will find it very beautiful. My husband and I are on a sugar estate out there – it is called Paradise and it almost is. We have grown very fond of it.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll like it. I don’t like foreign places and foreigners,’ she said after a moment and took another sandwich. ‘It is difficult enough to know where you are if you stay at home in your own country.’

  ‘Miss Morrison, why did you come on this trip then?’

  ‘I wanted to get away from London for a bit,’ she said, but she did not amplify her statement and we sat facing one another in the small intimate room in silence until I said: ‘Do you mind if I smoke in your cabin, Miss Morrison?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to eat any more?’

  ‘I’ve had two sandwiches and a piece of cake – that is more than I usually eat at tea-time.’

  ‘Then I’ll have the rest from your tray.’ She reached across and tipped the two remaining sandwiches and some cake on to her own plate. ‘You should keep your strength up at sea, and it is silly to waste the food. Smoke if you want to. I don’t smoke myself, but I like the smell of cigarettes. My friend Miss Murgatroyd used to smoke like a chimney.’

  ‘Has she stopped then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve never even tried to stop. It is a bad habit, I suppose, but there it is.’

  ‘It’s no worse than a lot of habits people have, as Fanny – that’s Miss Murgatroyd – says. And if it’s harmful, it harms only yourself. People have a lot of habits that harm other people too, like people that talk too much.’

  I made no comment, virtuously determined not to be accused of having the harmful habit of talking too much.

  ‘Does anybody on this ship play chess?’ she asked next. ‘Or bridge?’

  ‘Well, nobody has played so far, but I am sure some of them do. My husband plays chess and bridge; and the captain plays bridge, I know. Do you play?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I am sure you can get a game after dinner if you come up. Will you?’

  ‘I might,’ she said, as if turning the matter over in her mind.

  ‘We were playing Scrabble after dinner last night,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a spelling game. Quite good fun and not too difficult for non-games people like me. It was the first officer who produced it. He is Polish and I think it widens his English vocabulary.’

  ‘Polish? I don’t like foreigners.’

  ‘He is very nice,’ I said, feeling irritable with her again.

  ‘I didn’t think much of that Captain Davey either,’ she added. ‘He is far too sure of himself.’

  ‘I think I prefer the captains of the ships I sail in to be fairly sure of themselves,’ I said nastily.

  She looked at me out of her pale, expressionless eyes. ‘He is sure of himself about everything, not only ships,’ she said to me firmly. ‘His brain runs along lines like an old tram-car. I don’t like people like that.’

  Captain Davey was by way of being a friend of mine and I could have hit her for being critical of him, but the annoying thing was that what she had said was singularly acute and exactly correct. Captain Davey was a completely conventional example of his race, his age, his class and the service in which he was employed, and his mind would neither embrace nor consider anything or anyone that departed from its accepted norm, such as, for instance, misogynistic old women who preferred meals in their cabins to meals at his captain’s table in the dining-saloon. It was over two years since I had first met Captain Davey, but I had never appreciated this fact about him until now when I sat opposite this old woman in this little cabin, and the fact that she had caused me to reappraise him did not in the least make me like her any better. That is how I am. I will go further and say that I think that that is how humanity is. We do not, in general, care to have the less attractive, more mundane facts which we have contrived to ignore, pushed under our noses, and so I sat staring in front of me, silenced again, wishing that I could say: ‘And Captain Davey doesn’t think much of you either – he thinks you are an old crank!’

  ‘I suppose I had better come up for dinner tonight,’ she said next. ‘If I don’t, that captain will make up his mind that I am a crank. That’s the word he would use – crank.’

  I was so stunned by this that I do not think I spoke another word to her, and when Dooley came in to take away the tea-things I took my opportunity and ran like a stag for my own cabin.

  I was still there when Twice came down to wash before dinner. I had already changed and sat looking at him while he came in without speaking, took off his shirt and frowned at his own face in the mirror, took off a shoe and frowned at the sea beyond the window.

  ‘I don’t like that youth Maclean,’ he said suddenly. ‘There is something queer about him.’

  I emitted a long howl, flapping my fingers in front of my mouth to make a noise like a Red Indian warcry.

  ‘Are you off your nut?’ he asked.

  ‘Probably. There is an old woman in Cabin Five. There is something queer about her too. In fact, this ship is a floating loony bin. What, specifically, is queer about Roddy Maclean?’

  ‘He knows no more about engineering than a hole in the wall.’

  ‘Aha! The ultimate in the diagnosis of insanity. All those who know nothing about engineering are ipso facto dotty. That’s what’s wrong with me! I know nothing about eng—’

  Twice threw a shoe with a bang on to the floor. ‘Can you possibly stop being unfunny?’ he asked.

  ‘Look, Twice,’ I said gravely, ‘can’t you recognise an escape mechanism when you see one? I spent the afternoon in Cabin Five with a queer old woman to oblige Captain Davey. Then I came in here and sat thinking about Dee, and now you come in and say Roddy Maclean is queer. My hours and my days are being devoured by queer people and I’m sick of it, and I don’t give a damn for any of them, and I don’t want to talk about them, and that’s all that’s to it!’

  Twice went into the bathroom and slammed the door, and I wanted to burst into tears, but, instead, I went off up to the smokeroom, where I sat talking to Roddy Maclean, watching for queerness to break out of him like ectoplasm until the others gathered for dinner, trying to evade the haunted feeling I had that some intangible wedge was being driven inexorably through the fabric of the relationship between Twice and myself.

  Miss Morrison, to Captain Davey’s gratification, at first, appeared in the saloon for dinner, but by the time she had eaten her way through the third course I found that he was looking at me as if to blame me for bringing
this hungry death’s head to the feast. Miss Morrison sat beside him, in the brown tweed coat and skirt in which she had come on board, eating prodigiously and speaking no word unless asked a direct question, and even then, sometimes, she would make no reply other than a flat stare, which indicated that the question was too basically silly to merit an answer.

  Further down the table. Dee sat playing about with her food, her face downcast, a sullen aura all about her, while Twice talked to the chief and Mr Radzow; but even while he talked I could see that Twice was only too aware of the sulky silence that was Dee alongside of him. The effect of Miss Morrison’s prodigious eating and ill manners, Captain Davey’s accusing glances, Dee’s sulky lumpishness and Twice’s discomfort altogether had on me was to make me slightly hysterical, and it seemed that the atmosphere round the table had a similar effect on Roddy Maclean, who sat beside me, with the result that he and I became more and more uproarious. I do not know how it began, but very soon we were playing a game of conversing in nothing but literary quotations and, dazzled with our own brilliance, we screamed with laughter at one another while Roddy said to me: ‘Mesee, Madam, you have a pretty wit!’ and I replied with a coy: ‘Oh, Mr Rochester!’ It was when we recovered from this fit of laughter that I saw Twice, very unamused, glaring up the table at me, and in the same instant I saw a small mean light of triumph flash into Dee’s eyes, betokening her pleasure in Twice’s annoyance with me. Although I admitted in my mind that he had every reason to be annoyed with my puerility, this little flash of malice had the effect of making me more strained, hysterical and puerile than ever.

  When dinner was over we repaired to the smokeroom, and Captain Davey and Miss Morrison settled down to play bridge against Twice and the chief while Roddy and I sat down in a far corner of the room, as far from the earnest bridge table as possible, for Miss Morrison, although saying nothing, contrived to convey that this would be no light-hearted game.

  ‘Sit down, Dee,’ I said.

  ‘Like to play Scrabble?’ Roddy asked, looking up at her where she hovered between us.