My Friend Cousin Emmie Read online

  ‘Emmie,’ said Madame in a firm voice one morning when she, Marion and I had met at the Great House to arrange the Christmas Dance at the Estate Club, ‘you must have some dresses made for the festive season. You cannot wear those cast-off rags of mine for ever. You look like the maiden aunt of a vicar.’

  ‘I am the maiden aunt of a vicar,’ said Cousin Emmie flatly. ‘James, Peter’s second boy, became Vicar of Foldesley last year.’

  There was a short charged silence before Madame said: ‘Tchah! Go away, Emmie! Marion, Janet and I have business to attend to.’

  Neither hurt at this summary dismissal nor triumphant at her verbal defeat of Madame, showing no expression of any kind, Cousin Emmie drifted away along the veranda like a dried-up autumn leaf in a light wind.

  ‘Marion,’ said Madame impatiently, ‘get a message down to Mattie Fitt and tell her to come up here with some patterns. Emmie is really an extremely trying woman. Now, let us get on with this entertainment at the club.’

  Matilda Fitt was an island institution. Her clientele was made up mainly of the older ladies such as Madame who had worked out a system over the years by which when they took a holiday away from the island they brought back a few dresses from their favourite shops and these were copied by Miss Matilda in various colours and materials until such time as the ladies paid another visit to the home country and returned with some new designs. The ladies dressed by Miss Matilda by this means bore always upon them the indelible stamp of their home towns, so that old Mrs Buckley represented sartorially her native English cathedral town, Miss Maud Poynter had all the style of New York’s less exclusive stores, and Madame Dulac was, in this outpost of empire, the far-flung battle line of the matron’s department of the best shop in Princes Street, Edinburgh. To slightly younger people like myself and Marion Maclean, this method of dressing was known as ‘clothes by Missfitt’ and the garments themselves referred to as ‘missfitts’. This, however, is a digression.

  During the afternoon following the meeting about the dance I told Dee with some catty enjoyment of Cousin Emmie’s setting-down of Madame by her announcement that she was indeed the maiden aunt of a vicar, for a setting-down or even a momentary silencing of Madame Dulac was not an event to go unremarked or unrecorded.

  Dee was duly amused at my tale, but after a moment she said thoughtfully: ‘I think it is unfair, though, that people don’t like Cousin Emmie just because she has a knack of hitting on the truth.’

  I thought of Cousin Emmie’s prophecy about chills when the swimming-pool was set up on the ship and of how Twice had gone down with bronchitis.

  ‘That’s quite true, Dee. She hits on truths that one wishes weren’t there.’

  ‘Miss Jan, I know you don’t like her, but I do, the more I get to know her. You won’t mind, will you?’

  ‘Dee, don’t be absurd! You have every right to like anyone you choose.’

  ‘Liking people is very difficult. It often puts you wrong with someone else you like.’

  ‘It shouldn’t if people are reasonable. I think it would be wrong of me to mind your liking Cousin Emmie.’

  ‘That’s what Roddy says. He says the world needs all the liking we can do. Roddy says some very queer things.’

  I did not find what Roddy had said ‘queer’, for I thought very much as he did, but this was not the first time I had been astonished by Dee’s quotations of things that Roddy had said to her.

  ‘You like Roddy, don’t you, Dee?’

  ‘Yes. He is kind and good at explaining things, and he’s not all sexy and things.’

  A faint flush suffused her tanned forehead as she spoke the last words, and I noted that this was the first time since we had met her in London that I had heard her mention the word ‘sex’ and I wondered if there was some psychological block in her in this connection. It might account for much of her difficult moodiness, I thought.

  ‘There is another great friend of yours I don’t like,’ she went on in almost a masochistic way as if she were making an unnecessary confession just for the sheer misery of it. ‘Don Candlesham.’

  This made me wonder how wrong people can be about one another, for if Dee had wished to bring my grey hairs through worry to the grave, the best way she could have done it was to form an attachment for Don Candlesham, the most ruthless lady-killer in what I had seen of the western world. I could barely conceal my delight that she disliked him as I said: ‘He is not much of a friend of mine, Dee. I had a bigger fish-wife row with him once than I’ve ever had with anybody in this island.’

  ‘He isn’t? Everybody seems to think he is. Well, I’m glad, because I think he’s horrid. Cousin Emmie doesn’t like him either,’ she added.

  ‘I didn’t know she had met him.’

  ‘Oh yes. Round at the club one night. He called in when she was there.’

  ‘She comes to the club?’

  Dee laughed. ‘She has to have coffee and a sandwich between dinner and bed, Miss Jan! Sashie de Marnay is nice I though, isn’t he?’

  ‘Very nice, Dee. Now Sashie really is a special friend of mine. I am very glad you like him.’

  ‘Roddy says—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Roddy said Sashie—’

  ‘He said Sashie was a homosexual, is that it?’ I asked.

  ‘A queer was what Roddy said.’ Her face flushed scarlet. ‘Miss Jan, I know it means something queer about sex, but I don’t know what and I couldn’t ask Roddy, but I wouldn’t like it if Sashie was what Roddy made it sound like when he said it!’ she said in a muddled rush, the phrases tumbling over one another.

  For once, I was in full sympathy with Dee, took hold of her hand, which was shaking, and said: ‘Darling, it isn’t true about Sashie, but a homosexual is a person who prefers people of his own sex to those of the other sex, a man who can fall in love with another man.’ She was gripping my hand between both of her own while I went on: ‘ “Queer” is the slang expression that people like Roddy use for it, but that’s rather cheek, really. Why are the Roddys so sure that they are the normal ones and that the others are so queer?’

  She smiled in a tremulous way. ‘I suppose you think it’s qu—’ She stumbled over the word, smiled a little and went on: ‘—queer and terribly ungrown-up of me not to know about this, but – well – I just didn’t.’

  ‘I was older than you are before I knew about it,’ I comforted her, but I was amazed that in her day and age, even in the milieu of her stuffy family, Dee could be so innocent, and found myself thinking: ‘If only she would read a bit more instead of mooning about!’

  Later in the evening I told Twice of this part of our conversation and said: ‘Don’t you think it odd that she knows so little about some things? After all, she didn’t spend all her time in the schoolroom or in the stuffy bosom of the Andrews family. She was out on her own in London for a bit and had some pretty raffish friends if what her aunt told me is true, and yet she didn’t know about homosexuality. Things are different now from when I grew up. You’d think she would have had some sort of clue.’

  Twice frowned thoughtfully before he said: ‘I think people have their own types of knowledge. What I mean is, that facts about things you are interested in stick to you automatically. An engineering fact will stick to me without any effort on my part, and things about literature and language stick to you like leeches where other facts just go over our heads. Dee doesn’t seem to have much interest in sexual matters, unlike most people, so I suppose that anything she saw or heard that was of a homosexual nature just went over her head and didn’t register.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘She is certainly odd about sex. She seems to have some sort of guilt complex,’ for I was remembering that after I had explained to her about Roddy’s and his friends use of the word ‘queer’ she had asked: ‘Is it terribly wrong for people to be like that?’

  ‘There you have me, Dee,’ I told her. ‘I am no good at drawing lines about right and wrong.’

  ‘But Sashie – is
n’t?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  I did not tell her that the reason for Sashie’s mincing, dancing walk was that he had lost both legs while serving as a fighter pilot during the war and that he could walk in no other way on his artificial legs, for this was a closely guarded secret of his, a secret which he screened still further by an affected manner of speech and a choice of clothes more brightly coloured and less conservative than those favoured by most men.

  ‘Sashie is a very shy, private sort of person, really,’ I went on, ‘and that affected manner is a defence more than anything.’

  ‘It works too,’ she said with evaluating appreciation. ‘It works far better than that defiant thing I went in for with the family at home. It makes people leave him alone. They’re scared of him.’

  ‘But you are not?’

  ‘No. I like him. He lets me help him in the wine store.’

  ‘You know about wines?’

  ‘I had to learn about them when Uncle Archie left me the London house. He was quite a connoisseur. He wrote a book about the Bordeaux district and another one about Jerez. The cellar was crammed with wine, so I had to find out which to keep and which to sell and what, the value of it all was.’

  Heigh-ho, I thought, Dee’s upbringing and education may not have included any handy hints on homosexuality, but trust an Andrews not to lose money on the sale of a cellarful of inherited wine; but this thought was rapidly followed by the idea that it was no wonder that she was subject to moods and irrational fixations. She had been so bandied about and harried by her family and her own nature that she had never had a chance to find herself.

  ‘Miss Jan, do look at Dram carrying Charlie out of the sun!’ she said next, so light-heartedly that it was difficult to believe that she was the same girl of those first days on the ship or the one who had spent the whole forenoon of the day before picking at the corner of a Venetian blind.

  Dram and. Charlie spent all their time together. In the cool of the early morning and in the comparative cool of the last daylight hour, they were wildly energetic, hunting mongoose in the sugar cane and playing their own form of ‘tag’ in the garden, but in the heat of the day they lay in the shade of a round clump of hibiscus on the lawn, and as the sun moved round to invade their shade they moved round the clump to a new spot. Charlie was extremely lazy, and Dram was most frequently the first to get up, stretch himself and seek a cooler spot, and now he picked up Charlie by the scruff of the neck and, carrying him round the shrubs, deposited him tenderly in the new place before lying down beside him. There was something irresistibly comical in the large dog with the limp lazy cat hanging from his mouth walking solemnly and with an almost ritual air round the clump of hibiscus, and Dee and I, more at ease with one another than usual, began to giggle.

  ‘That dog looks silly carrying that cat about like that. It is very unnatural,’ said the voice of Cousin Emmie.

  I felt that a raven had croaked in the bright sunlight as her shadow fell on the veranda floor and the flat voice came to my ears, but Dee said: ‘Charlie likes it, Miss Morrison. If you make Dram put him down he will spit at you.’

  ‘And Charlie is an unnatural name for a cat. I don’t like those unnatural goings-on,’ Cousin Emmie said, sitting down, placing the canvas bag open-mouthed on the floor and arranging the parasol against her chair, while I, feeling that I was being driven against my will by some irresistible force, went through to the kitchen to ask for tea to be brought in.

  When tea was over and Cousin Emmie had chosen a piece of cake for the bag, Dee tactfully took her away for a drive in her car, leaving me gratefully alone, and I found myself thinking of Dee’s many antagonisms to people. Her dislike of Madame Dulac was straightforward.

  ‘She does nothing but bully people and interfere with them – asking in that silly way why a pretty girl like me wasn’t married, just like Aunt Angela and people!’ Dee had said angrily after meeting Madame for the first time.

  It seemed that she regarded Madame as an extension of authority as manifested in her own family at home and disliked her for this reason, but some of her antipathies were less easy to understand, as difficult to understand, indeed, as some of her attachments, such as her attachment to Cousin Emmie, for instance.

  I had not been alone for very long when the Rolls from the Great House drove in and disgorged Sir Ian on the doorstep and he stamped up the steps with a fierce look on his face and said: ‘ ’Afternoon, me dear. Is Emmie here?’

  ‘She was,’ I said. ‘She and Dee went off for a drive about fifteen minutes ago.’

  ‘Dammit, there’s no need for your guests to be drivin’ her about. There are three cars round at the house an’ people to drive her.’

  ‘It’s all right, Sir Ian. She and Dee get along very well together.’

  ‘I wish she an’ Mother got on. House isn’t fit to live in. I can’t think what brought Emmie out here, anyway. ’Smatter o’ fact, I can. Mother’n I are the only ones o’ her generation o’ the family that’s left. She has nobody in England now except a coupla nephews – both parsons an’ not the kind to want Emmie around, an’ now that she an’ this Murgatroyd woman have fallen out she’s feelin’ the draught. I don’t see why they had to fall out at this stage o’ the game.’

  ‘Who is Miss Murgatroyd, Sir Ian?’ I asked, for, although I had heard this name mentioned only twice in my life, it had a special place in my mind, for in memory I could hear Cousin Emmie, at our very first encounter in her cabin in the Pandora, saying: ‘My friend Miss Murgatroyd smoked like a chimney.’ I had paid little heed to this remark at the time, but now that I had seen more of Cousin Emmie – you will notice that I do not say ‘knew’ more of Cousin Emmie – it had a new significance, for Miss Murgatroyd was the only person I had ever heard her refer to as a friend. Miss Murgatroyd loomed in my mind a fabulous unknown, a creature of great power and mystery, the only living creature, it seemed, with whom Cousin Emmie had ever formed a bond.

  ‘She an’ Emmie have been sharin’ a flat in London for about forty years, ever since they came back from Salonika in 1918, anyway, an’ probably before that. Big woman like a camel that wears woollen stockin’s.’

  ‘And they have parted now?’

  ‘Yes, an’ for good, it seems.’

  ‘After getting on together since 1918? What were they doing in Salonika?’

  ‘That was a very fine show in its way. Emmie has a decoration, ye know, an’ I believe the Murgatroyd woman got somethin’ as well. Ye see, me dear, Emmie is the sort o’ black sheep o’ the family – that’s how Mother sees her, anyway. Emmie was always a damn’ nuisance to her people – wouldn’t settle down, ye know, an’ in the end they let her go in for nursin’ and she did very well at it an’ got all her certificates an’ everything, but she was always dabblin’ about with different things an’ got mixed up in the suffragette carry-on an’ all that. That was where she met Fanny Murgatroyd. Fanny! Wish you could see her – more like a camel, as I said. Anyway, Fanny Murgatroyd was a doctor – weren’t many women doctors at that time – and in 1914, when the war started, she an’ Emmie an’ one or two others set up an ambulance unit an’ finished up in Salonika.’

  ‘But I think that’s terrific!’ I said. ‘To look at Cousin Emmie, you wouldn’t think she’d ever been anywhere or done anything!’

  ‘She’s done plenty in her time an’ she’s still doin’ it. Mother ain’t fit to live with.’

  ‘It’s a pity she and Miss Murgatroyd have quarrelled, though. She must find it very odd after such a long time.’

  As is my hot-headed wont, I was becoming more sympathetic towards Cousin Emmie and admiring her more by the second, but let me point out that the Cousin Emmie I was admiring was a gallant figure with a medal pinned to her white nurse’s apron who had braved the mud and malaria of Salonika, a figure I had created for my own delectation and not the old woman who, less than half an hour before, had come croaking on to my veranda, although I did not realise this in tha
t moment. Human relationships are very complex, or, in the words of Dee, ‘Liking people is very difficult’, not for the reason that Dee had given, particularly, but because one is never sure whether one is liking the real person or some glamorised version of that person that one has oneself invented.

  In this moment Cousin Emmie was wearing, for me, a halo of glory.

  ‘The thing that surprises me,’ Sir Ian said, ‘is that Emmie an’ the Murgatroyd woman stuck together for so long. Emmie’s a damn’ queer woman, Missis Janet. She seems to go at everything from the wrong end, if ye see what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t really,’ I told him.

  ‘I’m not good at explaining but say I meet a fellah in a bar or at somebody’s dinner-table, I am prepared to like the fellah until I find out somethin’ that makes me not like him, like meetin’ that fellah Somerset in Twice’s office at the Bay an’ then comin’ to think later on that he’s a bit of a fool, don’t ye know. But Emmie, she don’t go about things like that. Emmie just naturally hates the perishin’ sight of everybody to start with an’ then takes a likin’ to the odd one here an’ there later on. Damned unnatural, I call it.’

  It seemed to me that life would be much simpler if people were less individual in their opinions about what was natural and what was not, but I supposed it was the way of mankind to take oneself as the norm, as Sir Ian was doing now, and regard any deviation from oneself as unnatural; but it also struck me that this tendency of Cousin Emmie’s to dislike at sight and come to liking later, unwillingly if at all, was also descriptive of Dee. When Sir Ian arrived, I had been trying to find reasons for her antipathies, but I now saw that it would be simpler to accept the antipathies as her normal reaction to people and study her few attachments which were the departures from her norm. Looked at in this way, her attitude to myself, which was about ninety per cent hostile, I always felt, was explained. In London she had sought me out because she had had an affection for me when she was a child, but that remembered bond had not held and, seen again in the flesh, I had slipped into the mass of humanity to which she was naturally averse and to which she referred in hostile tones, pouting the word out, as ‘people’. ‘I think people are awful!’ she often said, and: ‘Why is it that people can’t let one alone?’