My Friend Cousin Emmie Read online

‘But – but—’ I felt that there was something that I wanted to say but I could not find the words.

  ‘Like people saying the world is a small place,’ she said, picking a raisin out of her cake, examining it closely and then eating it, ‘but it isn’t. Compared to the size of the people in it, it is very big, and to say it isn’t is just idle talk. I don’t like idle talk.’

  I sat staring at her, stunned into silence, and this seemed to suit her admirably, for she said nothing further either. She did not ask for news of her cousins or make any enquiries about Paradise. She simply ate her way through her piece of cake, and then it was time to go below to our cabins to change for the evening.

  I could hardly wait to get below, to see Twice and appraise him of my discovery and generally to blow off in a steam of words my irritation at Cousin Emmie, which seemed, now, to be generating in greater volume than ever.

  ‘. . . and she didn’t bother to write telling them she was coming!’ I ended. ‘Madame will hit the roof when she arrives. You know how Madame hates anything unexpected or disorganised that isn’t her own personal unexpectedness or disorganisation.’

  ‘Just you take yourself along to Sparks’ office after dinner, my pet, and radio your friend Sir Ian,’ Twice told me. ‘The old dame didn’t swear you to secrecy, after all, and you can be a gossipy woman for once. Just say “Miss Emmie Morrison on board coming visit Paradise” I think it will be your good deed for the day.’

  ‘You think so? Madame doesn’t hold with her at all, you know. She is the one who plays chess by telephone from Kensington with a friend in St John’s Wood or somewhere – Cousin Emmie, I mean.’

  ‘All the more reason for giving Madame fair warning of her. It will be easier for the rest of us if the major storm is over before we get to Paradise.’

  Immediately after dinner I sent the cable as dictated by Twice, and before breakfast the next morning Dooley brought Sir Ian’s reply to our cabin: ‘Grateful for news is she travelling alone query reply urgent meeting you customs Ian Dulac.’

  ‘What does he mean, “is she travelling alone”?’ I asked.

  Twice stared at the cable form. ‘What he says, presumably. Is she travelling alone query.’

  ‘Well, is she? Us four passengers and the ship’s company are here.’

  ‘He knows about the ship’s company.’ Twice went on frowning at the form. ‘Reply urgent. Is she travelling alone?’

  ‘I say, I wonder if she has a demon lover and Sir Ian’s afraid she is bringing him to Paradise?’

  ‘Don’t be such a fool! I tell you what – let’s do this.’ He found a piece of paper and wrote: ‘Greetings from all – repeat all – passengers, namely Morrison, Andrews, Maclean, Alexanders.’

  ‘Brilliant! But what if the demon lover’s name is Andrews?’

  ‘You would think of the millionth chance. Let’s risk it.’

  We sent the cable; there was a day and a half of radio silence and the little white ship sailed proudly into the harbour of St Jago Bay to tie up at the newly constructed passenger and cargo wharf.

  ‘Well,’ said Dee, coming down from the bridge with Captain Davey, the pilot and Roddy, ‘did I make a nice job of bringing her in?’

  ‘Splendid thing, this new wharf,’ Captain Davey said. ‘Those old lighters were a menace. Yes, there’s his Old Nibs down there.’ Down below, on the wharf, his ‘Old Nibs’ Sir Ian Dulac, in his immaculate white drill suit and pith helmet, looked like a figure cut from a picture of St Jago of fifty years ago and stuck on to this glossy highly coloured modern picture of the new pier and the St Jago of today. In 1951 the white men of the island no longer wore drill and pith helmets. The modern uniform was light-weight gaberdine in pale grey or fawn and light-weight straw hats, the uniform that Rob Maclean, standing with his wife Marion and youngest son Sandy, beside Sir Ian, was wearing. All about the firm white figure the bustle of tying up the ship went on with much gesticulation and shouting by Negro wharf-hands dressed in khaki drill trousers and violently coloured ‘tourist’ shirts, and behind him stretched the length of the pier, through the Customs sheds to the iron gates beyond which was all the garish colour of the pier market, a blatantly artificial affair set up by the more opportunist Negroes for the fleecing of tourists from cruise ships. They sold ‘native arts and crafts’ in the form of necklaces made from brightly coloured seeds, ashtrays and knick-knacks made from wood or polished ox-horn, and hats and baskets made from sisal and decorated with raffia embroidery. It seemed to me symbolic of this moment in the history of the island that in this second Sir Ian seemed to be superimposed on the scene without being an integral part of it, and yet that, in this same second, he should still dominate it, as a picture, by virtue of the sparkling white suit standing among all the raging colour and sun-baked squalor of the new but already dirty and garbage-laden pier. In 1951 men like Sir Ian were anachronistic figures in St Jago, and yet they still dominated the picture of island life by their long Island lineage which gave them an air of feudal command, by their wealth which was the only god that the new St Jago could as yet recognise and, not least, by their grim integrity which the new St Jago could not understand but, by long tradition, could not do other than respect.

  ‘There’s Sir Ian,’ I said to Cousin Emmie, who was standing beside me dressed to go ashore in the same clothes that she had worn when she left England and during every day of the voyage – the brown tweed coat and skirt, the felt hat, the brown umbrella and the brown canvas bag – but in honour of the arrival she had added the skins of two small brown animals whose heads kissed each other in death at the back of her neck and whose limp tails hung over each of her shoulders, connected in front, across her scrawny throat, by a frayed brown silk cord. ‘Beside Mr and Mrs Maclean and the little boy,’ I amplified as she made no response, ‘the only white people on the pier.’

  She still made no response but continued to stare down at the crowd and the bustle with a flat, disinterested detachment.

  How anyone who had never landed in St Jago before could be detached from and disinterested in this scene was something that I could not comprehend. I who had been in the port many times, although I had never before landed here from England, having hitherto come out by air, felt a wild thrill of excitement. Four crowded months in Scotland and England had been enough to overlie my mind with a patina less exotic than this. My eyes had forgotten the riotous colour; my ears had forgotten the mixture of raucous clamour and melodious song, which is the sound of the Negro at work; and my nose had forgotten the smell of the island, which is compounded of spices and fermented fruit, the heavy scent of lilies and the foetid stench of human sweat.

  Dee, hopping with excitement, darting from one point of the ship’s rail to another, clinging to Twice’s arm and pointing first to the clamour of the market and then to the white buildings of the luxury Peak Hotel remote on its promontory above the harbour, was making, I thought, the normal reaction to a landing in St Jago. Cousin Emmie displayed neither pleasure nor disappointment, excitement nor undue phlegm. She merely waited, brown and expressionless, for what would happen next, which was the lowering of the gangway.

  As soon as it was in position, Sir Ian, followed by the Macleans, began to climb on board, and as soon as his highly polished black shoe hit the deck he took the pith helmet from his head, lowered his white eyebrows in his ruddy face, strode towards Cousin Emmie and plunged into speech, and I knew that I now was really and truly back in St Jago.

  ‘Now then, Emmie, what’s the meanin’ o’ this? Why didn’t ye write to Mother? Wouldn’t have known ye were comin’, dammit, if I hadn’t accidentally got a look at the passenger list. What the devil ye doin’ here? Tell me that!’

  I think that during the two days since I had known of Cousin Emmie’s status as Cousin Emmie of Paradise, as it were, I had been unconsciously anticipating with pleasure this moment with a spiteful feeling of: ‘Just wait till Sir Ian sees her! That will shake her confounded calm!’ And probably that was why the
great moment of the meeting fell flat. My conviction that Sir Ian would ‘shake’ Cousin Emmie could not have been more erroneous. Slowly and without smile or frown, she looked up into his face with her flat brown eyes and said: ‘So here you are, Ian,’ as if to imply that this was exactly the unfortunate luck that she expected life to hold in store for her. Round about us there was a babel of greeting as the Macleans brought Captain Davey messages from his daughter and welcomed their son, and I was conscious that Twice was doing what should have been my job of introducing Dee to Roddy’s parents, but all this by-passed, me, so fascinated was I at the family reunion between Sir Ian and Cousin Emmie.

  ‘Now then, Emmie,’ he said threateningly in response to her greeting, ‘don’t go standin’ there like a wooden image. What you doin’ here? Tell me that!’

  ‘I just thought I’d come and I came,’ she said, quite unmoved by his fierce aspect; and then, as if she were already tired of the sight of him, she stared away shorewards beyond wharf, market and town to the distant scrub-covered mountains.

  ‘That woman Murgatroyd ain’t with you?’ Sir Ian asked, staring round the deck in a suspicious way.

  ‘No,’ said Cousin Emmie, her eyes still on the distance.

  ‘That’s one God’s blessin’, anyway,’ said Sir Ian and mopped his forehead with a large white handkerchief.

  I passed from disappointment in my expectations regarding this meeting between cousins to something that was strangely like triumph that, after all, the citadel of the calm of Cousin Emmie had not fallen to the onslaught. It pleased me to discover that Sir Ian, who could bully all of us on Paradise Estate, from Rob Maclean, his manager, down to old Ezekiel, his Negro groom, could make no more impression on Cousin Emmie than I could.

  At this moment my attention was distracted by a strange procession that was coming towards us along the deck and was made up of Twice, two seamen and Dram, who was tenderly carrying a ship’s kitten in his large mouth while the other two cavorted round his feet.

  ‘By Jove,’ said Sir Ian, ‘what a dog!’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it, sir,’ Twice said. ‘At home this brute killed every cat at sight, and now look at him.’

  I sank down on a hatch cover, and, with infinite care, Dram deposited the hairy grey-and-white bundle in my lap before sitting down with an expression of besotted pleasure on his face. I am not a cat lover, really, but the kitten was appealing and I stroked it, and at every stroke and every purr Dram gave a satisfied ‘Uff!’ of pleasure.

  ‘That’s Charlie, Mrs Alexander,’ one of the seamen said. ‘Charlie’s ’is favourite.’

  ‘ ’E’s goin’ to miss Charlie, sir,’ the other seaman assured Twice.

  ‘So we just said down below – didn’t we, Andy? – that ’e should get Charlie to take ashore with ’im.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Andy agreed, and they both looked at Twice and me with happy expectation which seemed to be reflected on the face of Dram.

  All I could say was: ‘Thank you very much. It is very kind of you. We’ll love to have Charlie.’

  All I could think was that the world was turning upside-down. The Alexander family had acquired a cat, a thing that, an hour ago, I should have regarded as beyond all possibility or probability, and I felt somehow that I wanted to blame Cousin Emmie.

  4

  ‘Liking People is Very Difficult’

  ALTHOUGH I cannot record an eye-witness account of Cousin Emmie’s reception at the Great House of Paradise by Madame Dulac, who was, if anything, slightly more outspoken than her son Sir Ian, I can record with truth that the reception left her quite unaltered and in no whit abashed. As Dee had done, albeit in a manner quite different, she seemed to undergo an extraordinary physical adaptation to the tropical way of life so that the woman who, on board the Pandora, had moved in a narrow orbit between her cabin, the smokeroom gallery and the dining-saloon, now tramped tirelessly in the tropic heat about the paths and roads of the vast plantation while younger women like Marion Maclean and myself never went anywhere except by car. She had now acquired a beige-figured, black silk dress which had once belonged to the stout little Madame Dulac and which hung in loose superfluous folds about the shrunken form of Cousin Emmie. She also carried, as always, the canvas bag, but the brown cotton umbrella had now been replaced by a large dark green parasol with a heavy bone handle which I remembered noticing, once, in the huge storage cellars under the Great House. The bag, as always, contained a few articles of food-stuffs, and now, in the humid heat, it smelled sourly of cheese or in a sickly way of slightly fermented bananas or oranges, for Cousin Emmie could not pass an orange or a banana tree in any garden without furtively nipping off a fruit or two and popping them into the bag anent some future pang of intense hunger.

  Although at the age of forty-one I should have been old enough to know better, I had never lost, and still have not lost, my childish faith that tomorrow will be a lovely day and it had been my ill-conceived notion while aboard the ship that, as soon as we landed, Cousin Emmie would disappear into the maw of the Great House and go right out of my life, while Dee, escorted by Roddy Maclean, would join in the gaiety of the young social life of the island and stop bothering me. My highland grandmother was reputed to have second sight and to be able to foretell the future, and if I have inherited her gift, as some people have implied from time to time, I can only conclude that I have inherited it in an astigmatic form. The lovely tomorrows that I foresee quite often dawn in sheets of rain which turns to sleet as the day goes on.

  All went well enough in the few days before Christmas, although Cousin Emmie visited me most days for coffee in the forenoon or tea in the afternoon and popped any biscuits that were left over into the bag, a habit which I had thought she would discontinue when in private houses as opposed to ships in which she had paid for her passage, but I still had to learn that Cousin Emmie was impervious to change. Dee, however, made up for the static quality of Cousin Emmie by changing from moment to moment, and I seemed to live in a state of permanent mental breathlessness from my efforts to keep pace.

  The Paradise year was divided into two precise halves, January to June being the harvesting period when the sugar cane was reaped, the processing plant and rum distillery put into action and the year’s crop of sugar milled and its crop of rum distilled. This was called the In-Crop period, and the months from July to December were the Out-of-Crop period when repairs and maintenance to the plant were carried out and the preparations made for the next year’s crop. In December, therefore, we were just at the end of the Out-of-Crop when the final adjustments to the factory were being made, steam trials being run, boilers, turbines and cranes being tested. And this year on Paradise there was more than the usual pre-crop anxiety and excitement, for this was the second year of a three-year plan of expansion, and while Twice had been on leave Rob Maclean and the other engineers had been installing a chain of five new crushing mills which had been supplied by Twice’s firm in Britain.

  And Paradise, of course, was not Twice’s only concern. He was chief engineer for Allied Plant Limited in the Caribbean area at this time, and, although the Paradise expansion was the biggest scheme he had on hand, there were other schemes in other islands as well as the Allied Plant office in St Jago Bay making calls on his attention. As soon as Paradise went into Crop at the beginning of January, he planned, if all went well, to leave on a tour of the other islands, leaving me at Guinea Corner. I was not looking forward to this, for Twice and I had never been apart since we married, and, besides, I was a little afraid that he might come home from a trip to ask: ‘Where Is Dee?’ and I would have to reply: ‘I buried her under the fig tree in the back garden.’

  In those last few days before Christmas Twice was too busy at the sugar factory to spend much time in the house, so he saw very little of Dee, which was something he appeared neither to notice nor regret, but Dee made up for this, too, as she made up for Cousin Emmie’s static quality, by missing the company of Twice in a way th
at made her pick at the edges of curtains by the hour, and but for Roddy Maclean either she or I would have gone screaming crazy within the first few days at Guinea Corner, for I could not begin to understand the way she could abandon herself to melancholy boredom. When I had been her age I invariably escaped out of boredom into something, and mischief as frequently as anything, and I think I would have preferred it if Dee had been like this, even if she had caused me some anxiety. I would have found anything, I think, less wearing than her moods of gloomy discontented introspection. However, she spent a fair part of each day with Roddy and he took her to the Estate Club and to the Peak Hotel, where he introduced her to most of the young European set. She seemed to be happy enough on these outings, but she had no talent for making friends, and as the days moved on towards Christmas I became more and more grateful to Roddy for bothering with her at all, for he did not seem to be attracted to her now any more than when we were on the ship, so that his interest in her seemed to be actuated by sheer benevolence.

  If, however, I felt that Roddy was benevolent, Twice still distrusted him, and, indeed, the fabric of life was crisscrossed with threads of dislike and distrust. Dee liked Twice and Roddy and was developing a liking for Cousin Emmie, while she disliked both Sir Ian and Madame Dulac and, to some extent I think, myself, while I liked Twice, Roddy and the Dulacs but could raise little enthusiasm for Cousin Emmie or Dee. The small enclosed society being what it was, we all did our best to put a good face on things with the exception of two members. Cousin Emmie tried to put no face on anything and Madame Dulac made no secret of her dislike for her cousin.

  Madame and Cousin Emmie could not have been more different or have been iller bed-fellows. Where Cousin Emmie wandered aimlessly about the estate, Madame was the power and the throne, and her abounding energies were always aimed with tremendous force at some object or another. When Madame was not meting out from her office on the Great House veranda feudal justice to the some four thousand Negroes who depended on Paradise for their livelihood, she was raising funds for a new ward at the hospital in the Bay. When she was not bossing a gang of labourers who were planting a new shrubbery in the Great House garden, she was ringing up the Colonial Secretary about Customs dues or the Minister of Works about the disgraceful state of the North Coast highway. The sight of Cousin Emmie drifting about with her parasol and canvas bag infuriated her, but where others would have quailed, Cousin Emmie drifted on unconcerned. And Madame, time and again, said to Cousin Emmie the very words that I always longed to say but for which I had not the courage and which were: ‘Oh, rubbish, Emmie! Hold your tongue!’ But Cousin Emmie did not take offence and neither did she hold her tongue. The next morning she would give vent to another croak beginning: ‘I don’t like—’