My Friend Cousin Emmie Read online

  Just as Sir Ian was leaving, Sashie de Marnay was driven in in one of the Peak Hotel cars and came skipping gaily up the steps.

  ‘What brings you here in the height of the tourist season and with Christmas just upon us?’ I greeted him.

  ‘Tes beaux yeux, darling, and news, Sir Ian, news! Guess who dropped into the Peak off an aeroplane today?’

  ‘Martha’s aunt after another divorce,’ I said. ‘I give up. Tell.’

  ‘Isobel Denholm!’

  ‘Den – That big red-haired girl from Mount Melody?’ Sir Ian asked.

  ‘That very one, my sweet.’

  ‘By Jove! How is she? Is her brother with her?’

  ‘Redder-haired than ever. No,’ Sashie said, taking the questions in an orderly fashion.

  ‘By Jove! I must get back to the house an’ tell Mother. She’ll be delighted an’ she’s in need o’ delightin’. You know what Mother is about old island families. We’ll have to get Miss Isobel up for Christmas dinner. By Jove, this is splendid!’

  When Sir Ian had gone away, Sashie gave me his mischievous smile and said: ‘Dear me, it is very comfortable to come to the country and meet some nice normal people for a change.’

  ‘If normal you can call us,’ I said. ‘What really brought you away from the big city today?’

  ‘I was over at the settlement by the river arranging about a few vegetables. Your difficult child is not at home today?’

  ‘What makes you think she is difficult?’ I asked, for, although I knew Sashie to be fairly acute, he had surprised me.

  He shrugged his slight shoulders. ‘Ça se voit.’

  ‘Actually, Dee isn’t easy,’ I admitted, ‘but she likes you, by the way. You ought to be pleased. She doesn’t like many people.’

  ‘There is the young Maclean.’

  ‘Yes. She likes Roddy.’

  ‘She must like very divergent types. There could be no two people less alike than young Maclean and me.’

  ‘She likes Twice too.’

  ‘Darling, everybody likes Twice, but I should have thought that liking him and young Maclean she would have written me off as too utterly effete.’

  ‘She asked me only today if you were a homosexual.’

  ‘My dear! What did you say?’ he asked.

  ‘I said you were an affected ass but that I didn’t think you were queerer than that. As a matter of fact, if I had said that you were a homo I don’t think it would have made any difference. She forms her likes and dislikes by some odd standards of her own – like all the rest of us, I suppose.’

  ‘Those you have named are all males, I note.’

  ‘That’s not the standard either. She is fond of that awful old Miss Morrison – Madame’s Cousin Emmie. But let’s not talk about Dee, Sashie. It’s a waste of time with you here to bring the great world into the backwater of Paradise. What goes on at the Peak? I read about the Duke of Grampian in the newspaper. Any other distinguished visitors?’

  ‘The word “distinguished” is a little inexact – all our guests at the Peak are distinguished for something although the somethings may not be to all tastes. We have that drunken woman who writes the plays about existentialism, and a young gentleman who is euphemistically referred to as her secretary. We have two male film stars and three female ones, none of whom speak to each other. We have three pairs of homosexuals and two of Lesbians, and we have old Lady McIndoe again with her eight Pekingese and her kennelmaid. The place is a sink, darling, but an utter sink.’

  ‘Sashie, surely homosexuality is commoner than it used to be?’

  ‘I don’t know. It is becoming more open, perhaps. I don’t mind it really – it is a more social way of controlling the population than the atom bomb, after all.’

  ‘The things you think of! Dee tells me she has been helping you in the wine store. She’s not a nuisance to you, I hope?’

  ‘Quite the reverse, my sweet,’ he assured me. ‘She knows a great deal about wine and can be a tremendous help.’

  ‘Then that’s all right. There isn’t much for her to do here, and there will be less when Crop starts.’

  ‘How does she come to be here?’ he asked.

  I told him how Dee came to be with us and ended: ‘Twice had something of a rush of blood to the head over her’; and then because Sashie and I shared an intimacy that I had with few people, I added: ‘I think Twice regrets more than I do that we have no children of our own, Sashie.’

  ‘This situation of Dee and Twice is worrying you, darling?’

  ‘No, not really, but I do wish I liked her better.’

  ‘She is very difficult to like,’ Sashie said, and it struck me that this very afternoon Dee had used the same words in a different way when she said: ‘Liking people is very difficult’ and I felt that there was a causal relation between her words and Sashie’s.

  ‘You find that?’ I asked. ‘You find her difficult to like?’

  ‘Yes. I am afraid I do, dear.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That is something I cannot tell you.’ He looked at me gravely for once, without a trace of his mischievous, satirical manner. ‘There is something in her that I find antagonistic but I don’t know what it is.’ His face took on its normal, lightly satirical expression again. ‘But, of course, what I feel is not serious. If it amuses her and takes her off your hands to come to us at the Peak, let her come as often as she likes. We are delighted to be of service to our friends in any possible way, as you know.’

  Shortly before Twice came home, Sashie had to leave, and when Twice came in with his usual greeting of: ‘What sort of afternoon?’ I told him of Sashie’s visit, but I did not tell him that we had talked about Dee and this was something that I did not like, although I felt it was better so, because never before had it been part of my life with Twice to have reserves, to have subjects that were not mentioned between us in this way. We did not talk of the loss of our child, it is true, but that was a silence based on a deep tacit agreement between us, while this silence about Dee was based on a deep tacit disagreement between us. Between such silences there is all the difference in the world; and although I had told Sashie that I was not worried, this silence was always present like a little black cloud on the horizon of my mind.

  5

  ‘Nobody Wants Me!’

  NATURALLY enough, it was in the Great House of Paradise that the powerful personality of Madame Dulac flowed at full strength, and Christmas night of 1951 might have been, to all appearances, half a century back in time. The house itself was a lot more than fifty years old, and so was much that it contained, but the whole atmosphere was redolent of the late Victorian period when Madame had arrived from Edinburgh as a bride.

  When she first came to Paradise she had made the Great House look as much like her wealthy Edinburgh home as possible and her taste in interior decoration had never changed, so that in the huge drawing-room the grand piano stood decently clad in its Indian shawl and garniture of silver-framed photographs while a little table beside it was a feature that was of great amusement to Twice and myself. This table was loaded with curios from ‘foreign parts’ – parts, that is, that were foreign to Edinburgh – so that there were several shells that could have been picked up in hundreds on any St Jagoan beach and a palm leaf fan when Paradise bristled with a wide variety of palm trees. India, however, was also represented on this table by a hollowed-out elephant’s foot in which reposed the representative of Africa, which was a blown ostrich egg that shone in the lamplight as smugly as the bald pate of any Victorian paterfamilias.

  The party was a large one, for Madame also retained spacious Victorian ideas of entertaining which, with all the servants and appurtenances of the Great House, she was still able to put into effect, and it was not until after the lavish dinner was over and the women had scattered to various bedrooms that I had an opportunity to speak to Isobel Denholm.

  ‘Hello, Janet,’ she said. ‘Gosh, it’s good to see you again,’ and turned to look at Dee, who
was by my side.

  ‘Isobel, this is Dee Andrews, who’s staying with us at Guinea Corner.’

  The two girls smiled at one another. ‘Madame introduced us before dinner,’ Isobel said, ‘but I didn’t know you were staying with Janet and Twice.’

  I knew that Isobel was twenty-one and Dee twenty-four, but Isobel looked much the older. Where Dee was a very small creature, Isobel was tall and rangy in a long-legged way that made me think of what I had read of the Amazons. Where Dee’s colouring was faint and delicate, indeterminate and easily submerged as a house sparrow’s can be by the more brightly plumaged birds, Isobel’s brilliant red hair, which stood out round her head in short springy curls, and her vivid blue eyes, flaunted themselves upon the sight with the stridency of a vivid-plumaged cockatoo. But it was not the difference in physical appearance between them that seemed to reverse the order of their ages; it was some emanation from the personality of Isobel. She had changed greatly in the course of a year, I noticed, while she and Dee stood talking together and I powdered my face. The most striking difference was that she was much quieter, stiller. A year ago her manner had been as strident as her appearance, aggressive and brooding by turns, and, largely to annoy her horrid old bully of a grandmother, she had spoken in a slang, interspersed with oaths, that reminded me of early gangster films. A year ago Isobel had been uneasy company, tense, suspicious, alternating between wild gaiety and fits of unbalanced rage, and as I looked at her now and listened to her deep voice, which still had the accent of America but had lost all its stridency, which still had the idiom of America without the slang and coarseness, I found myself thinking: ‘What a blessing that old Mrs Denholm is dead!’

  ‘Everything is very different from last year, Janet,’ she said to me.

  ‘Yes, Isobel. Everything is very much improved, I think, if you want a frank opinion. How is David?’

  She smiled. ‘Improved,’ she said.

  ‘Who is David?’ Dee asked.

  ‘My twin brother. He and I gave Janet and them all here quite a bit of trouble last year.’ She turned to me again. ‘Gosh, but you and Twice and Madame and Sir Ian and everybody were good to us!’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ I said. ‘Let’s go along to the drawing-room.’

  The younger people were dancing, and Don Candlesham and Roddy at once came forward to partner Dee and Isobel, so I went to sit with Madame, Cousin Emmie and one or two of the older women. Miss Matilda Fitt had been faced with something of a problem for her technique of dressmaking when asked to make an evening dress for Cousin Emmie, for the latter, to the best of my knowledge, had brought with her to St Jago no clothes except some shapeless cardigans and the brown tweed coat and skirt. Miss Fitt, therefore, had had to copy Madame’s current evening pattern for Cousin Emmie, and the current pattern was a lowish-necked, sleeveless dress, fairly straight in the skirt, but with flowing panels hanging from the waist in front and from the shoulders at the back. This dress was made in velvet for the winter and chiffon for the summer, and tonight, on Madame, in lilac velvet, it looked very well and very dignified. On Cousin Emmie, in velvet, in the colour undescriptively known as ‘old gold’ – for no textile can have the true colour of metal – it looked like what it was, a misfit in measurement, style, colour and everything else for the woman who was wearing it. To me, it was worse than a misfit, for Cousin Emmie, with the long panels hanging limply about her, made me think of one of those cemetery monuments so common in Scotland, a brown freestone pillar with a brown freestone urn on top that has brown freestone cloths hanging out of it, and all the depression that she tended to induce in me came over me at full strength so that I became so low in spirit that I could have wept.

  Old Mrs Buckley, like Madame, had spent a long married life in the island, and had come to love it, and she had been talking with interest about Twice’s firm’s new branch in St Jago Bay. ‘And this is to be the centre for the Caribbean?’ she continued now. ‘What a splendid thing for the island. Of course, my dear, your husband will be away a good deal but you like it here at Paradise, don’t you?’

  ‘Very much. And the trips will be short, you know. Just hops by air from one island to another.’

  ‘I don’t like all this air travel,’ said Cousin Emmie. ‘You never know what might happen.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense, Miss Morrison,’ Mrs Buckley said. ‘I go home to England by air every second year to see my daughter. It’s splendid! They even give you free champagne!’

  ‘I don’t like champagne. It’s bad for rheumatism,’ said Cousin Emmie.

  ‘Rheumatism, Emmie?’ said Madame, who had been talking to someone else but felt impelled as always to quell her cousin. ‘Nonsense! You can’t get rheumatism here. But when you go back to England eat plenty of parsley. Old Uncle Willie was crippled with rheumatism for years and he almost lived on parsley.’

  ‘I don’t like parsley, Lottie,’ said Cousin Emmie, ‘and I don’t like champagne either,’ she added to Mrs Buckley, quite unquelled.

  This party at the Great House was, of course, but the preliminary canter in the Paradise Christmas marathon which could only be described as an annual endurance test, for every house broke out into a rash of parties so that for about ten days one was, as Twice put it in the old soldier’s phrase, ‘either in bed or out of barracks’. The effect of this marathon on myself was one of stupefaction, for, although an occasional social gathering stimulates me, a social whirl literally makes me giddy. I think that this stems from the first ten years of my life spent on the lonely hilltop of Reachfar where visitors were rare treats, and where, for hours at a time, I wandered about with only my dog for company. To be in the company of other people continuously makes me think in my not very scientific way that the atom being bombarded inside the atomic pile must feel as I do when one personality after another makes its impact on me; but instead of breaking and creating a great surge of energy as I understand that the atom does, I merely turn into a benumbed bemused mass and cease to feel any impact at all.

  It was a tradition at Paradise that the Cropping season started on the first Tuesday of the New Year, but New Year’s Day of 1952 was itself a Tuesday so that we had a week to recover from the marathon before being plunged into the dull routine of Crop, when the factory and distillery would be running for twenty-four hours a day and none of the menfolk were happy when out of sight and sound of the plant, so that life became centred in the Paradise valley.

  On the afternoon of the first Saturday of the New Year, having emerged to some degree from the coma which what Madame called ‘the festive season’ had induced in me, I drove with Twice down to St Jago Bay, where he dropped me at the Peak Hotel to visit my friend Sashie. Dee and Roddy had left Paradise in Dee’s car in the forenoon and I did not know where they had gone; but as Sashie and I sat having tea in his bedroom, for this was the height of the tourist season, and even Sashie’s and Don’s private sitting-room was let, I saw Dee standing alone under a tree outside on the lawn, her face heavy and sullen as she picked with her neat little fingers at the rough bark, while, away beyond her, down on the beach, I could see Roddy, Isobel and some twenty young people playing some crude form of water polo.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said to Sashie, ‘look at Dee!’

  ‘I’d just as soon not if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I am beginning to find her uncommonly tiresome. She has been lumping about like that for the last week.’

  In a self-pitying way I began to feel that life was being very hard and cruel to me. I had thought that Dee, squired by Roddy, had found her social feet and that she was enjoying herself, and in the course of the Christmas marathon I had been too stupefied to pay detailed attention to her.

  ‘But what is the matter with her, Sashie?’

  ‘Quite a number of things, I think. Dee is by nature the opposite of a little ray of sunshine. She comes into one’s life like a little cloud of gloom and she has varying degrees of cloud to spread over every situation. Her main trouble at the Peak here, however, is Isob
el Denholm.’

  ‘Isobel? Why? I thought they got along all right. They spent two afternoons together up at Mount Melody this week.’

  ‘Mount Melody is not the Peak, my sweet,’ Sashie said. ‘You see, when Dee used to come down here before Isobel came, she was Don’s and my pet lamb, but since Isobel joined us and Don and I regard Isobel as something of a lamb, too, Dee does not like that. Dee doesn’t want to share anybody with anybody.’

  ‘But, Sashie, it’s too silly! This is how she is about Twice – or was, anyway, while we were on the ship and he was free all day. She wanted him to look at nobody but her. The odd thing is that she doesn’t mind so much his going to work all day, but as soon as he comes in in the evening she gets touchy and ready to think that I want to exclude her and so on. And maybe I do want to exclude her at that, for she monopolises Twice so. Anyway, it is all very straining.’

  ‘How right you are! Far be it from me to complain, but Don simply refuses to be strained and I am left to take the brunt of Dee’s black looks. I feel like forbidding her to enter the place. You see, Isobel is here in a business way. She intends to turn Mount Melody into a hotel, and we have given her the run of this place so that she can see exactly how we work. She has already done a year on the financial side of things in a hotel in New York.’