by Jane Duncan
‘So I felt, darling. Sit down. You look worn out already. Is it the heat? Do you feel unwell?’
‘No, Sashie, I’m all right. Sashie, it’s Dee!’ I burst out. ‘She is sitting on my spirits like a leaden weight. She is out there and she won’t take part in anything. What the devil is the matter with her?’
Sashie poured tea, looking down at the pot. His face was closed and inscrutable, and I had another surge against Dee because it seemed that she was driving a wedge between my friend Sashie and me, causing a disruption in our relationship as she had caused a disruption between Twice and myself in the early days on board the ship.
‘I have never been so defeated by anybody as I am by that girl!’ I said angrily.
‘Not even Cousin Emmie or young Maclean?’ he asked mischievously, looking up for a moment from the tea he was stirring.
‘I don’t have to live with Cousin Emmie or Roddy Maclean!’
‘True.’ Sashie returned his whole attention to the tea-cup, and there was a prolonged silence until I said pleadingly: ‘Sashie, you are smarter about people than most. What do you think about Dee, really?’
‘Thank you for these words of praise.’ He looked away out across the crowded lawn. ‘If I knew what I thought, my sweet, I should give tongue, being always ready to assist my chums in any way I can, but, like you, I have never been so defeated. And then there is something that is a little unusual about it all – unusual for me, I mean.’ He paused for a moment before he said: ‘I really dislike the child more than I can say.’ He turned to me with his self-mocking smile. ‘I am seldom affected by real dislike of people, so uncomfortable and generally unhelpful.’
‘What is it in her that you particularly dislike?’
‘That is the annoying thing, my sweet. I do not really know. She makes me feel uncomfortable, which is probably reason enough for disliking her. The world is uncomfortable enough without people like Dee in it.’
‘Uncomfortable in what way?’
He wriggled his slim shoulders. ‘As if I were in the presence of an anachronism, rather. It is this thing she has of wanting to be all-in-all to someone and yet having no aptitude to achieve what she wants. She has been born in the wrong time or the wrong milieu perhaps. If she had been born in the Middle Ages, she would have become a nun – had a vocation, you know. A vocation, in a way, is merely a conviction that one is of supreme importance – is all-in-all to the Almighty, a conviction that for some specific purpose God cannot get along without one’s services. Born in a different milieu, she might have chosen to work in service to humanity – missionary work or nursing spring to the mind and she would have been a devoted member of some sisterhood and have ended up sharing a flat with her friend Jonesy that she had trained with and they would have all sorts of little private jokes of their own and be all-in-all to one another.’
‘Like Cousin Emmie and Miss Murgatroyd!’ I said, as if a great white light were breaking over my mind, as indeed from my point of view it seemed to be.
‘Who can Miss Murgatroyd be?’
‘Cousin Emmie’s friend that she shared a flat with, but never mind that now. Sashie, I believe you’ve got something. When Twice goes away and Dee and I are alone in the house, she is quite different. There are none of these moods and nonsense. Sashie, you are clever.’
‘I wouldn’t say that, my sweet. Besides, even if one is right in what one thinks. It is a little pointless. There is nothing much one can do to bring her over to the side of life, for I think that is what one dislikes so – her air of being against the main flow, as it were. She ought to be doing a job of some sort with her temperament, preferably in business of some kind. She has a good brain in that way – she has twice the acumen of Isobel, for instance.’
‘She probably inherited that. Her people have been in the money-making racket for generations.’
Sashie laughed. ‘Darling, I adore your scornful attitude to big business. So rare and refreshing.’
‘I am not scornful of it exactly,’ I said and then added: ‘or maybe I am. After all, what’s the good of all the big business and wealth if you are in a muddle like Dee? At her age I never had a penny, but I was never as damn’ miserable as she is. Well, thank you for the tea, my pet. I suppose I’d better go back to the tomato juice.’
‘The gin will soon be coming up, darling. It’s after twelve. Gin isn’t so sticky. I’ll come out with you. I can possibly be of temporary help with Dee, anyhow.’
‘How?’
‘I’ll get her into the wine store. I am not being self-sacrificial, my sweet. Don and Isobel have nothing in their heads but sailing today and I could do with Dee’s help.’
‘That is if she will oblige,’ I said doubtfully.
‘Darling, next to being all-in-all to somebody. Dee likes to make money, and money is positively minting itself in the bars today,’ and as we emerged into the crowded patio bar this was obviously true.
When we reached Madame’s table Sashie’s approach to Dee was absolutely direct in the light of what he had said about her character.
‘Dee, darling, I hate to do this on regatta day, but do you think you could give me an hour in the wine store? Even if you only do lunchtime? Don and Isobel have nothing in their heads but bowsprits and foresails, and we are losing money hand over fist because I can’t keep the bars supplied.’
Her face brightened for the first time that day. ‘Oh, Miss Jan, do let me! I’m just in the way here really.’ She looked along the chattering table. ‘Miss Jan, let me help Sashie. I’d like to. I think these yachts are just a bore!’
‘Just little ships passing in the sunlight,’ said Sashie mischievously, but Dee was too busy trying to overcome my imagined disapproval to notice this.
‘Goodness, if you’d like to spend your day like that, Dee, off you go, but don’t let Sashie slave-drive you!’
‘Oh, nonsense!’ she said, and, light of foot and face, a different person from the sullen lump who had stood beside me all the morning, she went off with Sashie up the lawn.
Much lighter at heart, I returned to my duties at Madame’s side.
‘Darling,’ said Twice, coming up behind me when I was alone for a moment, ‘have you any money on you? I’ve ordered some drinks for a few people and I’ve got nothing but that marked fiver.’
‘But, Twice, I put money beside your hair-brush this morning!’
‘I know but I came away without it.’
‘You are a pest!’ I opened my handbag. ‘I’ve got nothing but this fiver, but here you are. And put it in your wallet. If you lose it, you’ll have to scrounge your drinks for the rest of the day like Martha’s aunt!’
He took out his wallet and, suddenly becoming still, he swallowed jerkily and noisily. I looked at him.
‘The marked fiver’s gone,’ he whispered.
I got up and we both moved away from the table and, involuntarily, we both looked down at the Yacht Club slipway where Roddy, Don and a group of yachtsmen were gathered.
‘When did you check it last?’ I asked.
The note had lain undisturbed for so long that we had become careless, no longer bothering to look in the wallet each evening as we had done for the first day or two after the theft of the housekeeping money.
‘I don’t know. Wait a minute. It was there last Tuesday when I tested that diesel locomotive after the railwayman was killed. The police had to see that I was licensed to drive a locomotive and the fiver was there when I showed them my licence. Since then I haven’t looked.’
‘But, Twice, it couldn’t have gone today. You haven’t had your shirt off here!’
‘He was up at the office on Thursday morning to arrange with Mackie about the sailing,’ he said, looking down at the slipway.
‘You had your shirt off?’
‘I took it off to have a wash and they called me to the telephone.’
We both went on staring down at the Yacht Club, and then my gaze shifted to Marion where she sat still, calm and dignified be
side Madame. ‘Oh well, darling, this isn’t the place to talk about it. Let’s forget it for now. You had better go back to your chaps – they will be thinking you’ve welshed and left them with the bill.’
‘Don’t let it spoil your day.’
‘It won’t do that.’
But it did, of course. The colours of the sky, sea and yacht sails seemed to be less brilliant, the people seemed less carefree, the brightness had fallen from the air.
After lunch, Miss Poynter, who had owned the Peak House before Sashie and Don bought it to turn it into a hotel, took Madame, who was an old friend of hers, and Cousin Emmie away to her little house in the grounds to have a rest from the sun and glare and also a good gossip. Isobel Denholm, who was now occupying one of the tourist bungalows in the grounds, had made the Paradise party free of its facilities for the day and we also had the use of Don’s and Sashie’s bedrooms. I naturally gravitated to Sashie’s bedroom again and, stayed there for quite a long time, he and Dee buzzing in and out in the course of their duties.
Shortly after lunch I had seen the start of the race that Don’s Amaryllis was sailing in and very beautiful she had looked, with her black hull and flame-coloured sails, with the magnificent Don wearing nothing but swimming trunks and the red-haired Isobel in a brilliant jade-green bathing dress, looking like two creatures come forward through time from the dawn of the world when all was flawless. Roddy Maclean and young Mackie were also fine-looking boys, but no male had a chance of drawing a glance when Don was about, especially in a near-naked state, and in any case, I had no wish to look at Roddy Maclean.
I watched the launches go out towards the buoys that were the check-points, I watched the coloured butterflies of yachts get under way, and then retired to Sashie’s bedroom where Twice would fetch me in time to see the finish.
‘So wise of you, darling,’ Sashie said as the afternoon wore on. ‘By the time the evening is over, we’ll all be stretcher cases.’
‘How is Dee, Sashie?’
‘In splendid form and being a marvellous help. All the bars are pulling it in like crazy and not a bottle unaccounted for. When the bars get out of hand the whole place goes mad.’
Dee now arrived, her wine store keys tied firmly to the shoulder-strap of her playsuit. ‘Badge of office,’ she said, flicking them at me. ‘Having a nice day, Miss Jan?’
‘Yes, thank you. And you?’
‘Simply splendid! We are really in business today, aren’t we, Sashie? I’ve sold all twenty-three bottles of that doubtful champagne now. There’s a bunch of tourists having nothing but champagne cocktails.’
‘Yes and they are from the Palace, thank Heaven,’ Sashie said, ‘so one won’t have to see what they look like tomorrow.’
‘The two of you are no better than a couple of Caribbean pirates,’ I told them.
‘Darling, don’t be nasty. I’m going to ask them to bring us a nice cup of tea – so much more wholesome than that champagne.’
We had just poured out a second cup of tea all round when Twice appeared at the bedroom window and shouted excitedly: ‘Come on out, you lot! The first two are rounding the last buoy and Amaryllis is there!
He ran away across the grass, and Sashie put down his cup, saying: ‘Bless my soul!’ and hurried out, with Dee and myself behind him.
The cliff-top, which had been sprinkled with chattering groups of people, many of them not watching the yachts at all, was now bare and everybody was clustered at the rail at the cliff edge. There was a tense excited silence. The bars were empty and untended, for the Negro barmen had joined the crowd at the cliff rail. Sashie whipped the cloth from a table.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘Up here!’
Dee and I got up and looked to the east like the rest of the crowd. Nearer and nearer came the two boats, white feathers of spray flying from their bows, Amaryllis on the shoreward side, her flame-coloured sails almost parallel with the surface of the water and, a little to seaward but bow to bow with her, another boat rigged in brilliant green and white.
‘Well done, Amaryllis,’ said Sashie’s cool unexcited voice, dropping with a tinkle like ice into the vibrant air, to melt away on the hot wave of rising excitement as the two boats cut along to come level with the prow of the Peak Rock. Even Madame, now, was out of her chair like all the others and clinging to the rail as the boats swept past, and in a brilliant flash my eyes photographed Don at the helm of Amaryllis, like sculptured bronze, every muscle seeming to strain forward to push more wind into the already full sails, while Isobel and Mackie lay away out over the water, seeming to be attached to the hull by no more than their toes. The boats swept on, the silence seemed to be sucked after them in their wake as the heads turned to follow them, until suddenly the air was shattered by the shot of a pistol.
‘That’s it!’ said Sir Ian, turning from the rail. ‘Dammit, who won?’ and he took off his sea-goin’ hat and mopped his forehead.
‘I’m damned if I know, sir,’ Twice said.
The air was full of the same question and the same answer while the people turned from the rail, chattering, as the tension broke down and I watched the other boats of the race come straggling along with a loss of urgency that seemed to have reached out to them from the cliff-top.
There was a louder ramble through the chatter and Sir Jan’s parade-ground bellow came: ‘Quiet, everybody!’
‘—class race which has just ended,’ came the voice from the amplifier on the Yacht Club tower. ‘First, Number Five, Amaryllis, St Jago, Captain Don Candlesham. Second, Number Two, Sea Wing, Bermuda, Captain Bruce Whiteman—’
The voice rumbled on, announcing the third and fourth yachts placed, but was lost in a wild babel of voices that rose into violent cheering from all over the Peak lawns, the Yacht Club and the shore of the bay beyond.
I am one of those people who are never up with the hounds of local affairs, and it was only now that I became apprised of the knowledge, through listening to the talk around me, that the Bermudan yacht Sea Wing, owned and manned by the four sons of an American oil magnate and the race terror of the Caribbean, had arrived in St Jago Bay the day before. Over the weekend and during this morning I had heard the name Sea Wing being bandied about, but only now was it borne in on me that it was regarded as a great piece of luck that the Whiteman brothers should arrive in St Jago for our regatta and that the race in which their boat was entered was regarded as an exhibition of seamanship in which the other boats only ‘went along for the ride’. It was Sea Wing’s habit to go everywhere about the islands, break all local records and sail away with her sun-tanned crew, leaving a wonder and a dream behind, and today, although the Whiteman brothers were popular heroes, there was among the St Jagoans that satisfaction of the utterly unexpected coming true, the satisfaction that a circus audience feels when the clown suddenly springs at a bare-backed horse and gives an astonishing exhibition of trick riding.
I sat watching the happy people as they all relived again and again the moment when the boats swept past the prow of the cliff, and Sashie said: ‘Well, well, just fancy our little boat and her comic crew going and doing a thing like that!’
‘I didn’t see Roddy as Amaryllis went past,’ Dee said, and, now that I thought of it, I had not seen him in the boat either in that thrilling moment.
Dee and Sashie were turning away when Don came striding up from the Yacht Club, breaking quickly away from group after group of people who gathered, laughing, round him, and he broke into a run as he reached the summit and would have gone straight past us up to the hotel had not Sashie said mischievously: ‘I told you to go to the bathroom before the excitement began, dear!’
Don halted and gave Sashie that look of half-amusement, half-exasperation that so often passed between them.
‘Congratulations, Don,’ I said. ‘I gather that it was a splendid victory.’
Don’s handsome face darkened. ‘Amaryllis won the race,’ he said shortly. ‘We sailed her like a dodgem car at a fun fair!’ and he strode a
way across the grass and into the hotel.
‘Dear, dear,’ said the irrepressible Sashie, ‘temper!’
Young Mackie now came up the cliff, his shoulders bright pink and sparkling with salt crystals. ‘Sashie, could I possibly have a bath? I’m not the bronze Apollo sort.’
‘But of course, dear,’ said Sashie in the voice of an old family nannie, ‘and then you will come to me and I will paint those shoulders with my nice cool lotion. You look like a parboiled lobster. Come along.’
We all repaired to the hotel, Dee disappeared, presumably to her wine store, and Sashie, Mackie and I went to Sashie’s room, where he put Mackie into his bathroom and shut the door. ‘And just you stay there, Janet, like a good girl. You have had enough sun today too. Nannie will be right back when she has seen what all those naughty servants in the kitchen and the bars are doing.’ He bustled out, and by the time he reappeared, followed by a waiter with a tray of drinks, Mackie had come out of the bathroom and I was anointing his shoulders with sunburn lotion from Sashie’s big bottle which was an old and valued acquaintance of mine.
‘That’s right,’ said Sashie comfortably, still in his nannie’s role, ‘and you are not too badly scorched, Mackie, dear, and you will feel much better in a little while after a nice little drink. Now, be a good boy and confess everything – but everything – about the race. Don is locked in his bathroom in the naughtiest temper and won’t come out and I simply cannot have the nursery getting all out of control like this.’ He handed Mackie a whisky and soda. ‘Come now, what happened?’
Mackie was a shy inarticulate young man with bright dark eyes that always tried to look round corners to right or left of him when his shyness overcame him, which was fairly frequently.
‘Oh, nothing much,’ he mumbled.
‘Of course not, dear,’ said Sashie, ‘One doesn’t suppose it was anything much. The point is, what was it?’
‘Well,’ said Mackie, taking a deep breath as he realised that Sashie would not free him until he had answered, ‘we were rounding the outmost buoy, you see, and we all – Roddy and Isobel and I, I mean – well, the boom came round and we got in a bit of a muddle; that is – well, we got in a bit of a muddle.’