My Friend Cousin Emmie Page 5

She looked from him to me and back again.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I am going down to my cabin.’

  She turned and went away, but as she went out I saw her glance at the back of Twice’s head, a glance that accused him of being foully traitorous to abandon her thus for a game of bridge.

  ‘I wouldn’t let it worry you too much, Missis Janet,’ said Roddy’s voice quietly and intimately, and I jerked my head round, realising that I had been staring fixedly at the door where Dee had gone out.

  The words sounded to me as if they were the only normal, reasonable words I had heard spoken since I had come on board this ship, the only words that belonged to the plane on which I lived my life, and my first impulse on hearing them was towards tears of relief.

  ‘It is difficult not to worry about her,’ I said.

  ‘Has she been ill?’

  ‘No. Not exactly.’

  I looked down at the green leather top of the table between us and thought that this young man was of Dee’s generation and that he might be able to understand her better than Twice, and I could if I were to enlist his help, so I looked up at him and told him the circumstances that had led up to her coming on this trip with us. ‘It was all meant to be helpful,’ I ended, ‘but I am beginning to wonder if it wasn’t a ghastly mistake. I do wish she were having a better time.’

  Marion Maclean, Roddy’s mother, was a very sympathetic woman to whom I always found it easy to talk, and although I had never talked intimately with her I always felt that she would be sympathetic if one went to her in trouble. Roddy seemed to have inherited some of this sympathy that I felt to be in his mother, and in him it was a trait strangely feminine in one so masculine.

  ‘She is so self-conscious,’ I said, ‘and she always seems to feel that nobody is interested in her or wants her.’

  ‘It isn’t that exactly,’ he surprised me by saying. ‘She may say that she feels like that, but I think it is more that she is one of these people who wants to be part of a relationship without giving anything of herself away. She wants Twice to give her his whole attention while she keeps herself undivided and intact. It is like wanting to have your cake and eat it too. It can’t be done.’

  ‘You are a bright boy for your age, Roddy.’

  ‘Not very.’ He seemed to withdraw into himself a little, looking down at the table. ‘You don’t have to be very bright to see that Dee has got her wires crossed somewhere. Of course, that’s awfully easy to do at our age.’ He looked up at me suddenly with a grin that was half-rueful, half-mischievous. ‘Youth and all that, you know.’

  ‘It is particularly easy for young women to get their wires crossed as you call it. I was a young woman once and I know. Young men seem to be more fortunate if you are anything to go by.’

  ‘I’ve got no wires to cross,’ he told me lightly. ‘Everything is easy and straightforward for a bloke like me. Dee is rich, isn’t she? I don’t suppose that is any help.’

  ‘No. I don’t think it is.’

  ‘The world is arranged all wrong. Dee is the earnest sort, she craves a mission in life. Now I am the type that should have been born rich. I’d have had a whale of a time!’

  ‘I bet you would,’ I agreed with him.

  While the bridge game went on across the room, Roddy and I now began to read the books we had brought with us, but for the first few moments, although I had my book open, I did not read. I was covertly studying Roddy Maclean, remembering how Twice, earlier, had said that there was something queer about him. To me, Roddy seemed anything but queer; he seemed to be a normal, better balanced person at this moment than any of the rest of us as he sat opposite me reading, with a concentration that was almost palpable, a cheap edition of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. When, earlier, I had remarked upon his choice of reading matter, he had explained that, now that he had completed his engineering studies, he was trying to catch up with a few of the classics which he had never had time to read before. Twice could say what he liked, but I wished that Dee was sitting there as alive and interested as Roddy was in his book and everything about him, instead of as she was, for even now she was probably sitting in her cabin, brooding, as she picked at the corner of her handkerchief.

  I closed my book for a moment and laid it on the table while I took out my cigarettes, and Roddy looked up.

  ‘Cigarette?’ I said.

  ‘Thanks.’ Holding a lighted match across to me, he looked down at the novel on the table. ‘Is that any good?’

  ‘Very good indeed, I think. Would you like to read it when I’ve finished?’

  ‘It’s a new novel, isn’t it? No, thanks.’

  ‘Are you pursuing a policy of classics only?’

  ‘I think maybe it’s better for an engineering type like me with limited time to concentrate on what’s supposed to be the best. But Not for Love,’ he read from the jacket of my book. It’s a wet sort of title, isn’t it?’

  I felt a touch of irritation and thought that, after all, this young man was not the son of Rob Maclean for nothing, for Rob regarded reading, unless it was a scientific paper on the regeneration of steam or the maceration of sugar cane juice, as a waste of time.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I replied.

  ‘Before you pass judgement on that title, I think you want to read a few more classics. It’s a question of knowing enough.’

  ‘Knowing enough?’

  ‘These four words come from one of Shakespeare’s comedies. “Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them but not for love.” ’

  ‘Oh, I see. Yes. That does make it sound a bit less wet. And you think it is a good book?’

  ‘Yes, I do. S. T. Bennett, whoever he or she may be, knows a lot about people and can put into good English what he or she knows.’

  We talked a little longer about books, then read again until there was a stir of movement across the room as the bridge game ended and I looked round as I heard the expressionless voice of Miss Morrison.

  ‘It is a long time,’ she said, ‘since I saw three people play such a poor game,’ whereupon she picked up the canvas bag that lay on the floor by her feet, went out of the room and disappeared down the companionway. Flabbergasted, the three men stared at one another for a moment before they began to laugh, and then Captain Davey said: ‘There’s a crank for you, if you like!’ and I had a mischievous urge to tell him that Miss Morrison knew that that was precisely the word he would use to describe her.

  ‘Where is Dee?’ Twice asked, joining Roddy and me.

  ‘She went down to her cabin right after dinner,’ I told him, picking up my book and cigarettes, ‘and I am going down now. Good night, Roddy.’

  Without waiting for Twice, I set off, but he followed me at once, and as soon as he was inside our cabin, with his back against the closed door, battle was joined.

  ‘The least you could have done tonight was to pay a little attention to that kid along there,’ he said, ‘instead of giggling with that youth Maclean like the parish flirt at the Sunday School Picnic!’

  ‘Oh, well, I haven’t done the least I could have done,’ I said.

  ‘Janet, what the hell is the matter with you?’

  ‘Maybe I am in need of psycho-analysis, or was it for Dee that you recommended that? You listen to me, Twice Alexander. I am not going to get into a shipboard routine of having a nightly row about Dee Andrews and a morningly making-up of our differences in preparation for the next nightly row. As far as Dee is concerned, you continue to go your way and I’ll go mine.’

  ‘Your way being into a shipboard flirtation with a youth half your age? My God, woman, you are forty-two!’

  ‘Not till next March. And can you draw me a scientific diagram to show the difference between my giggling with Roddy Maclean and you giggling with Dee? Except that you don’t giggle. I wish to God you did!’

  ‘Now, Janet, you know perfectly well that the thing of Dee and me is quite different from you and that youth Maclean. He’s attracted to you – anyone with
half an eye can see it.’

  ‘And isn’t Dee attracted to you? A blind man could see her glowering at anyone who says a word to you.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish! I am talking about sex – there is no sex in Dee, but it leaks out of every one of Maclean’s pores!’

  ‘Well, I hadn’t noticed it.’

  ‘We have been through all this before with Don Candlesham. You didn’t notice that either until the whole island was talking and then you said I should have told you. Well, I am telling you about this lot right now at the start!’ he half shouted.

  ‘Stop bawling, Twice. The point is, you are quite wrong about Roddy Maclean. He only talks to me because there is nobody else.’

  ‘So I’m quite wrong, am I? And there is nobody else? There are all the ship’s officers, there’s me, there’s Dee. Wouldn’t it be more natural for him to spend his time with her?’

  ‘If she were anywhere near natural, it might be, but as she is since we came aboard this ship I wouldn’t blame a louse for avoiding her much less a good-looking young man.’

  ‘So he is good-looking?’

  ‘Yes, good-looking. If you are even half honest you have to admit that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust him a bloody inch!’

  ‘That doesn’t affect his looks.’ I had taken the pins out of my hair and I turned round on the stool with my hair-brush in my hand, looking down at the dent in the silver. ‘Twice,’ I said, ‘we shouldn’t be quarrlling like this about Roddy Maclean, you know. I know we giggled at dinner, but it was sort of strain and hysteria, what with that old woman eating like a horse and Dee glowering, and then you starting to glower too. Then up in the smokeroom we did ask her to sit with us, and Roddy suggested that we should play Scrabble or something but she wouldn’t. She just went off to her cabin.’

  ‘She probably got the idea you didn’t want her and I hardly blame her.’

  ‘Twice, I think you’re being bloody unfair. I’m not responsible for the ideas she gets!’

  ‘Aren’t you? After larking all through dinner with that young fool?’

  I turned round towards the looking-glass so that my back was towards him. ‘I am not going to talk about this any more,’ I said.

  In the glass I saw him make a sudden violent movement behind me as if he were going to shake me as he had done the evening before, but the impulse died and he sank down limply on the bed.

  ‘I just don’t understand what is happening,’ he said. ‘I just don’t understand any of it.’

  I spoke into the looking-glass, which showed the side of his head as he sat looking down at the floor. ‘I don’t either, but there is one thing that I see and that is that during these years since – since . . .’ I hesitated, for this was something that we never spoke about, ‘. . . since I lost the baby, you and I have been so close together that we have been almost a single person. It was you who did that for us, Twice. It was you who brought me back to life and welded me to yourself that time when I wanted nothing but to die. But two people, no matter how close they are, can never turn into one composite person. We are still two people and we have discovered that we have separate likes and dislikes. You are fond of Dee although she tries your patience at times, but I dislike her and I am repelled by her and I cannot be patient with her at all. I like Roddy Maclean, but he repels you. To accuse me of flirting with him is nonsense and you know it.’

  While I spoke Twice had moved down the bed and now had his arm round me where I sat at the dressing-table.

  ‘Sitting here, I know that,’ he said. ‘Sitting here like this, everything is all right. But up there—’ He rolled his eyes at the ceiling and sighed.

  ‘Up there, this destructive thing I feel in Dee is at work,’ I said, ‘and, heaven knows, that old woman Morrison is no help to anybody either. Come, let’s get to bed.’

  It was a long time after we put our lights out before I slept. I lay listening to the wash of the sea against the side of the ship, listening to Twice’s breathing in the bed alongside mine, and felt very safe and secure. If only, I wished, it were possible to let people pass heedlessly and unheeded by as the Atlantic water flowed past this ship, closing in over its wake so that its passing left no mark, but the sea of life is of a different water from the Atlantic. The Dees create a strain, the Miss Morrisons make you giggle, the Roddys are willing to giggle with you, and before you know where you are the still waters of your life with Twice take on the treacherous swirl of a whirlpool. I made all sorts of resolutions to try harder with Dee and avoid Roddy as much as I could, and it is little wonder that when I did go to sleep I had a nightmare which I have never forgotten, in which Miss Morrison, dressed in Captain Davey’s uniform, ate the steering-wheel of the ship, which was made of ginger-bread; and as the alarm bell for boat stations rang and I was hunting desperately for Twice in the engine-room of the helpless ship, I woke up sweating with terror.

  3

  ‘People are Themselves First——’

  THE NEXT day, it struck me that I was not perhaps the only one of the ship’s company to have resolved upon a mending of ways the night before, for Miss Morrison, having broken out of seclusion by coming to dinner, appeared at breakfast the next morning to the acute embarrassment of one and all, and especially of Captain Davey. She was dressed for the day in her brown tweed coat and skirt, a felt hat of the same brownish non-colour as her faded hair, and came into the saloon carrying the canvas bag in one hand and the brown cotton umbrella in the other, depositing these on the floor on either side of her chair. The captain, and indeed all of us, watched with interest while she ate half a grapefruit, a plate of cereal and a kipper, and some toast; but when she then asked for bacon and eggs, Roddy and Mr Radzow abruptly excused themselves and left, closely followed by Twice and Dee. Gradually, as she demolished piece after piece of toast, the captain and everybody else left the table too, so I also got up.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked then.

  ‘Nowhere,’ I said stupidly. ‘At least, I—’

  ‘Then sit down,’ she said and took a roll from a basket, buttered it and popped it into the canvas bag at her feet.

  I sat down obediently while she finished her meal, but I did not know why she had asked me to stay, for she did not speak to me any more until she said: ‘I am ready now,’ and picked up the bag and the umbrella. ‘Where is the best place to sit?’

  I conducted her to the little gallery deck outside the smoke-room, which looked out over the stern of the ship. ‘I think this is nice and sheltered, don’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said without enthusiasm.

  She sat hunched in her chair, her tweed collar rising round her ears to meet the brim of her brown felt hat so that very little of her sallow face showed between, and she did not move or speak for a long time. The roundish hat looked rather like a carapace and it was something like being in the company of a hibernating tortoise and not very cheerful; so I rose and went along past the smokeroom windows to the main deck in the centre of the ship, whereupon I noticed what looked like a second and third good resolution being put into practice. Roddy and Dee were standing by the rail, talking as if Roddy had decided to help Dee over her troubles, and Dee was actually laughing, as if after her solitary cogitations in her cabin the night before she had resolved to be more approachable and sociable. Further along the deck, near the bridge, I saw Twice talking to Captain Davey, who was planing wood for the model ship he was building. I turned back to the gallery and Miss Morrison with a virtuous feeling of not being one to disturb or distract the attention of anybody, especially of Dee.

  I had just sat down quietly and was opening my book when Miss Morrison poked her head out like a tortoise hearing the first rustle of spring and said in a voice like the croak of a raven in mid-November: ‘That is a very silly little girl you have travelling with you.’

  ‘Silly? In what way?’

  ‘No particular way. Just silly,’ she said and retired into hibernation again, while I
sat staring at her helplessly.

  This was the third day out and the days began to settle into a routine, as days at sea, especially in small ships, tend to do, and my part in this routine seemed to be to occupy the little gallery with Miss Morrison for most of the day while, now that we were in warmer water, the others played deck games and splashed about in the canvas swimming-pool which had been set up on the after-deck below our gallery. Dee was still subject to fits of sulks, and I continued to be wary in her presence, but she was a great deal more reasonable in her attitude to Twice, and I discovered that I had Roddy Maclean to thank for this.

  One morning at breakfast Miss Morrison announced that she intended to wash her hair that forenoon and that I would thus be deprived of her company, but I do not think I let her know how delighted I was at this deprivation, how relieved I was to be free of the hibernating tortoise that croaked like a raven about twice between breakfast and lunch and perhaps twice again between lunch and tea. Miss Morrison never made any remark that was cheerful, and three doomful phrases recurred and recurred in her conversation: ‘I don’t like . . .’ and ‘That makes a difference . . .’ and ‘You never know what might happen . . .’, this last being the deepest, most sinister raven’s croak of all that confidently expected the very worst.

  I had just settled on the gallery in solitary luxury with my book when Roddy arrived, looking like a dashing pirate in nothing but blue bathing trunks, leading Dram with his bevy of kittens. Roddy sat down on the deck and began to tease the kittens with a washer tied to the end of a length of string.

  ‘Where is Dee?’ I asked him.

  ‘Up on the bridge steering the ship. It bores me blue. They won’t let you wiggle her about or turn her round or anything – you have to keep her between two points of the compass the whole time.’

  I laughed. ‘Maybe the owners wouldn’t care for it if they found out their ships were going in circles in mid-Atlantic’

  ‘I don’t think she can go in circles. I think you could leave her alone and she’d make for St Jago Bay from sheer force of habit. But steering doesn’t bore Dee. She’d do it all day.’