My Friend Cousin Emmie Read online

  By this stage in the voyage Roddy had told me that he was twenty-three, while Dee was twenty-four, but I could not rid myself of the impression that Roddy was the older. I think this was because he seemed to me to be so much better balanced than Dee was.

  ‘You are very good for Dee, Roddy,’ I said now. ‘She is much less moody than when we left England.’

  He looked up at me slantwise from under his dark eyebrows, a brilliant mischievous glance.

  ‘She only puts up with me when Twice isn’t available.’

  ‘I know she has a sort of fixation about Twice. I think it is because he is so different from her own father – maybe Twice is the sort of father she would have liked to have.’

  ‘Maybe. Pity we can’t choose our parents.’ He swept the washer on its string in a wide circle over the deck, the kittens dancing after it. ‘But Dee is one of those people who wants to crawl inside somebody and lie down. That’s what she does with Twice. She does it with anybody who will let her do it, and if they don’t let her she crawls inside herself.’

  ‘You are quite a sage, Roddy.’

  ‘No. It’s just that I like people, especially the complex ones like Dee. When she was talking about Twice yesterday, I was trying to tell her that nobody gets all of anybody and that anybody is lucky who can get some of somebody, especially somebody like Twice. I was trying to tell her that he would be a different man if he weren’t married to you’ – he glanced up and swept the string round again – ‘and that she might not like him so much as he would be with you not affecting him.’ He paused for a moment, watching the kittens, and I said nothing. ‘She couldn’t see that. That people can be changed by their relationships. It is interesting to talk to somebody like that who hasn’t a clue about people or human relationships.’

  ‘She hasn’t had much chance, with her mother dying when she was a baby, being at school away in Canada all through the war, and her father being such a stick.’

  ‘I know. She told me,’ he said.

  It astonished me that anyone so young as Roddy could have grasped so quickly and acutely the situation between Twice, Dee and me, and this grasp must have been largely intuitive, for the situation had not been obvious enough to be noticed by any of the other people on the ship, I think. This quality in him drew me towards him, and I was still more attracted by his seemingly altruistic desire to help to ease the situation, for he did not talk of Dee as if he were attracted to her as a young man is attracted to a young woman. He talked of her more as if she were a clinical study or as if she were a problem in human relations who could be handled successfully only by a skilled technique which he was interested to devise and deploy.

  On the day that we crossed the Tropic of Cancer, sailing in water of that saxe blue colour that illustrates the high seas in school atlases and headed for the Mona Passage that would take us through between the islands of Hispaniola into the Caribbean, where the water is of a deeper, clearer blue than the cartographers have yet invented, Roddy achieved a triumph by persuading Dee to unpack her swimsuit, put it on and gambol in the canvas pool as gaily as the young officers and himself. I sat beside Miss Morrison on the gallery above the pool, watching the nonsense in which Twice came to join before lunch, and thanked Roddy from the bottom of my heart.

  ‘There’s that silly little girl,’ said Miss Morrison’s flat voice suddenly, and when I looked at her the face had poked out from under the brown felt carapace. ‘I wouldn’t let her go swimming half naked with that young man and all these young officers. You never know what might happen.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense, Miss Morrison!’ I said, but the face had disappeared between the brownish tweed coat and the felt hat as if, having sent its little dart through the new-found cushioning round the core of my discomfort about Dee, it had withdrawn contentedly into its wintry hibernation. Her hand reached down into the canvas bag and drew out a bar of chocolate, to which she gave her whole attention until just before lunch, when the pool emptied and the swimmers ran away to change. Miss Morrison now took her umbrella in one hand, the bag in the other, rose from her chair and said: ‘They’ll all get their death of cold jumping in and out of that pool.’ She then went down to her cabin to get ready for lunch.

  About three the following morning I awoke and heard the swish of the water past the side of the ship, but I also heard something else, the sinister sound of husky breathing which I had heard for the first time about three months ago when, shortly after we arrived in Scotland from St Jago, Twice had come down with a severe attack of bronchitis. I switched on my fight and sat up. Across the cabin, Twice also was sitting up in bed, his face flushed, his breathing labouring.

  ‘Sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘Seem to have got a cold.’

  My first thought was that there was no doctor on this little ship, and my second thought was: ‘There is nobody on this ship, but Miss Morrison!’ Recognising this to be the thin end of the wedge of hysteria, I swung my feet out of bed, and before I could stop myself I had said: ‘Oh, damn and blast that old woman!’

  ‘What old woman?’ Twice croaked.

  ‘Miss Morrison. She said you’d all get chills wallowing about in that pool.’

  I have a morbid terror of illness, for I always tend to be afraid of things that I cannot understand; and although I have a normal housewife’s knowledge of nursing minor ailments, that does not make me any less inwardly afraid. The attack, as it happened, was not a severe one, and Twice was up and about again at the end of two days, although he now eschewed the swimming-pool and became a spectator like Miss Morrison and myself. I mention the attack, however, because of that lurid moment in the early morning when, in the dizzy panic that attacked my mind, the first image to emerge was the sallow expressionless face of the old woman. It invested her with a curious significance for me; it altered her aspect so that I could no longer laugh at her as the ‘Performing Eater’, as Roddy called her, and I found in myself, and at the same time despised in myself, a tendency to surround her with a mental taboo as if she were not merely a sour disgruntled old woman but some sort of oracle.

  When I said that Twice had become a spectator at the water sports in the swimming-pool like Miss Morrison and myself, I do not mean to imply that he sat with us on the smokeroom gallery, for he could not bear to be in the company of the old woman.

  ‘I don’t see why you loathe her so,’ I said to him at bedtime one night. ‘She has a lot in common with you.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘She says that Dee is a silly little thing that needs looking after, which is more or less what you think, and she says that she doesn’t trust Roddy Maclean, which is another thing like you. I differ from her on both counts, but I still don’t loathe her as you do. Why do you?’

  ‘I don’t really know. It is some of your intuition stuff, I suppose. There is something unnatural about her that makes me itch between my scalp and my brain. Why doesn’t she trust Roddy Maclean?’

  ‘Miss Morrison never explains her whys. She just says “I don’t like that young man. I don’t trust him”, and leaves it at that.’

  ‘Stop that croaking! You give me the creeps.’

  ‘Why don’t you trust Roddy, Twice?’

  I felt very grateful to Roddy for the trouble he was taking over Dee, and I would have liked Twice to be grateful to him too.

  ‘There is something queer about him,’ Twice said now, ‘but I can’t put a finger on it. He is the queerest engineering type I have ever met and I’ve met a few. Oh, you can laugh if you like, but he is the first engineer I have ever seen who just isn’t interested in engineering. And there’s another thing – he spends a lot of time with Dee, but I don’t think he really likes her.’

  ‘Then it’s all the more decent of him to bother with her, surely,’ I said. ‘And he seems to be very good for her. She is a lot more reasonable and normal and like her age.’

  ‘I grant you that, but to bother with her when he’s not attracted to her is not reasonable or normal or like
his age. There is nothing more selfish than a virile young man where uninteresting young women are concerned. I was such a bloke once and I know. Say what you like, Roddy Maclean is fonder of you than he is of Dee.’

  ‘Twice, don’t start that nonsense again!’

  ‘I’m not starting it again. I’ve never left off thinking it. I don’t mean any more that there is a thing starting between you as I thought at first, but you have some definite appeal for that youth and he likes you and he can’t help showing it.’

  ‘And he admires you. Aren’t we so lucky to be so liked and admired? No, but seriously, Twice, he told me a very good thing he had said to Dee. He told her that nobody gets all of anybody and that anybody is lucky who can get somebody, especially of somebody like you. It seems that she had been moaning to him that you were neglecting her.’

  Twice smiled. ‘I’ll probably come round to the bloke in the end. We all love ourselves so much that we almost have to love anyone who admires us. But he is still a bloody queer engineer.’

  ‘Oh, people are themselves first and engineers and things afterwards!’ I said impatiently.

  Quite suddenly one forenoon just before lunch, when Dee had changed out of her swimsuit into a thin cotton dress and appeared on the little gallery, I noticed that, so gradually that it had been imperceptible, she had changed in the course of the voyage from an ugly little duckling into a pretty little elf. While she stood in the breeze by the gallery rail, drinking orange squash and talking to Mr Radzow, I realised that physically she was of a type diametrically opposed to myself. I am a tall, fairish-skinned woman better suited to the climate of Britain than to the tropics. British clothes suit me – severe clothes made of heavy materials – and my skin and hair thrive and look better in the cold and wind than they do in the heat and humidity of the tropics. Delia, it was now apparent, was exactly the opposite. In London, her skin had looked muddy and sallow and her hair dull, but now the skin had an apricot glow and the hair had sun-bleached streaks in its light brown that were very pleasing above the darker brows and hazel eyes. And the thin cotton dress became her, showing the neatness of the arms and hands and the fineness of the waist, while the small apricot-coloured feet in the flat white linen sandals displayed all their neat elegance that had, in London, been concealed under heavy British winter leather.

  ‘Your Dee is a fetching little baggage,’ I told Twice under cover of the general conversation, for in the pre-lunch half-hour all the ship’s officers who were not on night duty and now asleep joined us on the smokeroom gallery.

  ‘You are not the only one to notice that,’ Twice said, and I followed his glance to Roddy, who was standing alone at the other end of the gallery, his eyes fixed thoughtfully on Dee. ‘That young man has a more natural look in his eye.’

  At that moment Miss Morrison poked out from under the carapace of the felt hat, took a grip with each hand on bag and umbrella, and gave a little cough. She did this every day when she considered that it was high time that we went down to lunch, but the cough coming at the moment when it did, when I was full of a new relief about Dee, made me hear again the flat voice saying: ‘That’s a silly little girl. I don’t like that man Maclean,’ and at its sound in my mind the whole world seemed to change. The sky seemed to darken, the sea to become dull. The music of the waves past the ship’s side became a horrid thrust of ocean against puny steel, and the pleasant shipboard company standing around fragmented into a mere group of people who were all alone and separate in their trials and sorrows. And Dee, the pretty smiling elf, was once more Delia Andrews, the difficult child of a stuffy disapproving family.

  ‘Well, lunch,’ said Captain Davey.

  I got up and, joined the group and we all trooped below, but the wind that swept along the deck seemed to mourn in the wake of the bright moment that had fled.

  That afternoon I lay on my bed in my cabin and read, for I felt that I could not bear another afternoon of Miss Morrison on the gallery, but when I went above at tea-time it was only to be informed that Twice, Dee and Roddy were having tea in the chief’s cabin after making yet another inspection of the engine-room, so there were Miss Morrison and I, tête-à-tête. Having nodded without words to acknowledge my arrival, she ate a considerable amount of bread and butter, tucked what remained away in the bag and said: ‘That girl of yours has been down around the engines all the afternoon.’

  To reply to her felt like scaling the wall of disapproval that she contrived to set up, but I said: ‘Delia is interested in all aspects of ships. She comes of a shipping family.’

  ‘I suppose your husband can look after her,’ she said, as if she grudged the supposition and even the words to express it.

  I felt irritation spark up in me. ‘Why should she need looking after? What in the world can happen to her?’

  ‘You never know what might happen.’

  I cursed myself for giving her this opening for her favourite croak, puffed out an exasperated breath and lit a cigarette while she set about a plate of cake. After some munching without words, she took a sip of tea and then fixed her expressionless eyes on me. ‘But I suppose your husband being there makes a difference.’ She took another piece of cake. ‘I wouldn’t bring a young girl like that aboard like this – not that sort of young girl.’

  ‘What sort of young girl?’ I snapped.

  ‘A young girl like that among all these men. Men don’t understand a young girl like that.’

  ‘A young girl like what?’

  ‘Like her.’

  I could have screamed with frustration and exasperation, for she seemed to crystallise all my vague fears and nebulous sense of responsibility for Dee, turning them into sharp needle-points that stabbed at my mind, and it seemed unjust that she should be able to do this and yet withhold from me any guidance that might help me.

  ‘Rubbish!’ I said angrily. ‘Dee is a much-travelled, sensible young woman.’

  This is what I wished were true, and I said it vehemently as if I could thus make it to be true, but Miss Morrison had contrived to make me more aware than ever that it was far from true, and for this I could cheerfully have killed her, but being too inhibited to kill my fellow-passengers on transatlantic ships, I changed the subject, albeit abruptly.

  ‘Two more days and we’ll be landing in St Jago Bay,’ I said.

  Miss Morrison took another piece of cake, took a bite out of it and looked without enthusiasm out to sea.

  ‘Are you coming out to spend a holiday?’ I asked, for, although the voyage was nearly over, neither I nor anyone else aboard the ship knew any more about her than her name and the fact that she had cousins in St Jago. Ships are proverbially as conducive as barbers’ chairs to the exchange of life histories and hospital experiences, but Miss Morrison seemed to have neither life history nor hospital experience. I have a strong dislike of prying openly into people’s reserves, although I spend much of my time studying chance acquaintances and trying to deduce facts about them, so that hitherto I had asked Miss Morrison no direct questions; but today she had annoyed me so much that I thought I would try to pay her out by making enquiries about her, a thing that I felt she would dislike intensely.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I never go for holidays. I don’t like them.’ The going was hard and heavy, I thought, but I had the energy of real annoyance to bring to my task.

  ‘Oh, of course. You said earlier that you were going to visit your cousins.’

  ‘I may not visit them. I’ll see when I get there.’

  Obstinate old beast, I thought, but I’ll break you down yet into open rudeness if nothing else.

  ‘I know most of the English people in St Jago,’ I pursued doggedly. ‘Who are your cousins?’

  ‘They’re Scots – not English.’

  ‘Then I am bound to know them, being a Scot myself. Who are they?’

  I felt that I shouted the last three words: ‘WHO ARE THEY?’ while hitting Miss Morrison three dull thuds upon the head with a rubber truncheon, but I could no
t have done, for she merely stared at me over her piece of cake with her face as void of expression as ever and said: ‘Charlotte Dulac. She married a foreigner. And her son Ian.’

  In truth and in fact, it was Miss Morrison who hit me, and it might as well have been over the head with a rubber truncheon. Ringing from left to right through my bemused brain was the voice of Madame Dulac, the owner of Paradise Estate where Twice and I lived, saying: ‘Emmie Morrison, my cousin in London – a quite impossible person, my dear,’ and ringing from right to left was the barking voice of her son, Sir Ian, saying: ‘Old Cousin Emmie – mad as a perishin’ hatter, Missis Janet.’

  ‘Why,’ I heard myself say in a voice that mingled all the irritation, annoyance and exasperation of these shipboard days with relief that Miss Morrison had human, flesh-and-blood relations and was not some supernatural monster out of the ocean, ‘you are Cousin Emmie!’

  I stared at her in wide-eyed amazement. I would not have been any more disconcerted in that moment if the ship’s siren had blown and Neptune himself had risen from the deep surrounded by a court of mermaids and tritons with wreathed horns; but Cousin Emmie merely helped herself to the last piece of cake and looked at me as expressionlessly as ever.

  ‘I had a letter from Madame just before we sailed,’ I said. ‘How odd that she didn’t mention that you were sailing too. She must have forgotten.’

  Cousin Emmie swallowed a mouthful of cake and said: ‘I didn’t bother to write saying I was coming. I don’t like writing letters,’ and she took another bite of cake. ‘She married a foreigner but he’s dead now. Just as well. I don’t like foreigners.’

  ‘But you must have heard Twice and Roddy Maclean and me mention Paradise!’ I expostulated, following my own train of thought.

  ‘That doesn’t make any difference.’

  ‘But it is a point of contact, a common factor between us all!’

  ‘No it isn’t.’