My Friend Cousin Emmie

by Jane Duncan

  ‘Yes. And?’ Sashie interrogated inexorably.

  Mackie’s dark eyes flicked shyly from one of us to the other and then sought the corners of the room. ‘Well, I don’t know what happened,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Roddy must have – must have done something – it was Isobel – he must have tried to kiss her or something, but she took a swing at him – gosh, that woman’s as strong as an ox!’

  ‘Of that we are aware,’ said Sashie. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, he went overboard.’

  ‘Shiver my timbers! Do I understand that you three left young Maclean in the Caribbean?’

  ‘Oh, the launch took him aboard,’ Mackie said and suddenly gave a giggle.

  ‘You laugh?’ Sashie enquired mock sternly, and Mackie at once looked apologetic.

  ‘It was Don and Isobel,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  Mackie looked from one of us to the other. ‘Don said, was Roddy at the regatta for sailing or sex, and Isobel said – she said—’ Mackie dissolved into a fit of laughter, recovered a little and added in a Scotticised version of Isobel’s drawl: ‘That one? He don’t think of anything else! It’s my guess he’d do it with a yak!’ Again he looked at each of us in turn. ‘I thought that was funny,’ he ended apologetically.

  ‘Yes, indeed, Mackie,’ Sashie said. ‘Very funny and quite extraordinarily true.’

  Mackie laughed, more at ease now. ‘So we lost a little way rounding the buoy, you see. That’s why it was so tight at the finish. Don could sail these Whitemans out of the water, given a decent crew.’

  ‘Don’t be over-modest, my sweet. You all did very well in spite of your unseamanlike antics and I am very pleased with you,’ said Sashie, now in the character of Madame Dulac.

  When Mackie had gone out, leaving us alone, I said to Sashie: ‘Do I understand that Roddy Maclean is coming into competition with Don as the local parish bull?’

  ‘My dear,’ Sashie said, regarding me with solemnly rounded eyes, ‘compared with young Maclean, poor Don is an utterly broken-down old man. Maclean is in Victoria Court even at lunchtime!’

  Sashie’s manner of saying this, while making me laugh, brought a picture of Victoria Court into my mind, it was built originally by the newly risen merchant princes of St Jago Bay as their fashionable residential area, but had degenerated in the course of some eighty years into the red-light area of the town. In a British city, it would have been called a square rather than a court, for it consisted of some twenty large, three-storey houses enclosed in gardens and forming four sides of a square, with, in its centre, a statue of Queen Victoria, seated plumply on a throne and holding in firm hands the sceptre and orb. Eighty years ago I could imagine the wives and daughters of the wealthy dockside importers and exporters languishing in crinolined propriety at the windows of the upstairs drawing-rooms behind their slowly moving fans or being driven by carriage round the statue to attend a garden party on the other side of the square while the Queen looked out with approval over their stately activities.

  In the early 1950s it was one of my constant treats to be driven through Victoria Court when Twice brought me to St Jago Bay. I found a piquant enjoyment in visualising this place as it once had been and comparing it with how it was now. The gardens, long untended and unwatered, had turned into dusty deserts with a few broken trees, under which lay abandoned wrecks of cars and rough shacks round which a few chickens bathed in the dust among empty cigarette cartons and rusty sardine cans. At the windows, where the ladies had once sat coyly behind their fans, there were now the black and yellow faces of cheerful bawds who called their greetings and invitations to all that passed, while from rooms where, once, the melody of the ‘Lost Chord’ had tinkled across the air while some miss prepared her piece for that evening’s party, there now came the brazen voice of a juke-box, playing the latest importation from New York. And, still, in the centre of it all, plump, unsmiling, impervious to heat or noise, Queen Victoria sat on her throne, the wastepaper and debris blowing around her, her nose chipped, the top of her sceptre gone, an abandoned car tyre hanging like a displaced nebula round the orb in her other hand.

  ‘Roddy may be like me and be morbidly fascinated by the atmosphere of Victoria Court,’ I said to Sashie now.

  ‘Well, I have heard it said that there is often common ground between people where you would least expect it,’ Sashie said.

  Now that the regatta was over, the crowds in the grounds and round the bars of the Peak Hotel began to disperse, the visitors from the other hotels, who had spent the day at the Peak because of its advantageous position for watching the sailing, going back to their own places for dinner. The Yacht Club Dance was to be held in the Peak ballroom, but this was confined to members of the club and their guests, and very soon the Peak had settled back into its normal atmosphere of spacious luxury. As the dusk began to fall and the fairy lights came on in the trees outside, Dee came to me where I sat with Twice in the patio bar and said: ‘Miss Jan, will it be all right if I stay for the dance?’

  ‘Of course, Dee. We’ll be delighted if you will stay.’

  ‘Are you glad now that Janet made you bring your dress this morning?’ Twice asked her, smiling.

  There had been a near-scene that morning when we left Guinea Corner, for Dee, like Cousin Emmie, had not wanted to attend the regatta at all, and in the end it was I who put the suitcase in the car with a change of clothing for her.

  ‘I am sorry I behaved badly this morning,’ she said gravely now in response to Twice’s laughing remark. ‘I am sorry I have said horrid things about Don and Isobel, and Sashie too. I have had a really lovely day. Are you two staying on?’

  ‘No, only for dinner,’ I told her. ‘Twice will have an early start tomorrow to get the factory working again, you see.’

  She pouted. ‘That flippin’ factory!’ she said.

  It almost took my breath away, and Twice smiled at her broadly before he said: ‘You couldn’t be more right, Dee. That flippin’ factory! Run away and change.’

  We watched her go away across the lawn to be joined by one or two other young people, and all of them made their way to Isobel Denholm’s bungalow where the younger people were dressing for the evening.

  ‘Can it be that somebody is learning something?’ Twice said to me quietly.

  ‘Could be. Somebody is learning something every minute, I suppose,’ I said, but I was not thinking of Dee.

  I was thinking of this anomalous person Roddy Maclean who seemed to live a life of comparative luxury on next to no income, whom Twice thought could be a thief, whom Dee said was not ‘all sexy and things’, and whom Isobel Denholm said ‘would do it with a yak’, which Sashie said was true, and whom Cousin Emmie ‘did not trust and could not see to the bottom of. And I was thinking that, in Roddy’s own words, nobody gets all of anybody and that none of us, with our various opinions, had managed to get all of Roddy.

  9

  ‘She Knows Nothing About

  Dee Andrews’

  ABOUT three the following morning I heard the door of Dee’s bedroom close as she came in from the dance; at five Twice and I got up, and shortly before six the headlights of Twice’s car went raking down the drive, turned to the right and headed for the factory, while from all round the Compound other headlights gleamed across the park, converging on the same spot at the factory gates. Very shortly the siren blew, the orchestra of the machinery began to hum once more across the valley and Easter and ‘halftime’ were over.

  It was about ten o’clock when Clorinda came out to the garden to tell me that Dee was awake and was asking me to come to her bedroom, a request that made me hesitate, after the maid had gone back to the house, while I wondered what could have happened the night before, and my heart sank down into my gardening shoes. It is typical of the attitude that Dee had induced in me that I could not think of any pleasant reason why she wanted to see me in her room, that I made up my mind at once that we were in the midst of another social and emotional crisis and t
hat this one, which could be discussed only in the privacy of her bedroom, must be much more violent than any that had gone before. Low of spirit and dragging my feet, I made my way upstairs.

  When I went into the room, Dee was not in bed but at the writing-table, very busy and with a letter addressed to her father already completed and standing against the table lamp.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, doing my best to hide my relief, ‘you are very bright and lively after dancing till two in the morning.’

  ‘I woke you when I came in, Miss Jan? I’m sorry. I tried to be quiet.’

  ‘I was awake, anyhow – a bit anxious about getting Twice out in time.’

  She rose from the table, went to the window and stood with her finger at her lip, looking out into the garden. I sat down on the chair she had vacated, lit a cigarette and waited.

  ‘I asked you to come up so that we shouldn’t be interrupted by Cousin Emmie or Sir Ian or anybody,’ she said, speaking with her back to me.

  ‘Yes, Dee?’

  She turned round, interlaced her fingers in front of her, looked down at them and said: ‘Miss Jan, Roddy and I have decided to get married.’

  I could not have been more astounded if she had told me that Cousin Emmie had spent the previous evening dancing the Can-Can in the Peak ballroom, and I could at first think of no word to say, but Dee helped me out by continuing: ‘I suppose you are going to be like the rest and not be pleased, but there it is,’ whereupon her face, which had been composed and pleasant when I entered the room, took on its familiar look of sullen defiance.

  ‘Why in the world shouldn’t I be pleased?’ I said at once. ‘Dee, darling, I’m delighted! I’ve liked Roddy since the moment I met him and I can think of nothing I could like more for you. I simply couldn’t speak at first, I was so pleased!’

  ‘Truly, Miss Jan?’ she asked, her eyes round, her lips tremulous with anxiety.

  ‘Truly and truly, Dee! And you mustn’t have this silly idea that people aren’t pleased. Why shouldn’t they be?’

  She drew away from me, turned away a little. ‘Isobel Denholm isn’t pleased, and neither is Sashie. I could feel it last night when we told them. And Twice will be angry, but I don’t care!’ She was all defiance now.

  ‘Dee, this is nonsense, you know,’ I said, wishing that I had more conviction of speaking the truth. ‘Why in the world should Twice be angry?’

  ‘He doesn’t like Roddy.’

  ‘Oh, that! That was only annoyance because Roddy didn’t fall flat on his face in worship of his blooming old turbines! Twice is quite different about Roddy since he began to do so well in the office in the Bay.’

  ‘Is he really, Miss Jan? Really? I don’t want Twice to be angry, but I’ve got to do something, and Roddy is nice and kind and understanding and people are horrid to him just as they are to me so often and we got engaged last night and I’ve written to tell Father,’ she said with a rush, pointing to the letter that leaned against the lamp.

  Now that the first shock was over, my faculties began to work at their not very bright best, and I felt a slight inward chill at the words ‘people are horrid to him just as they are to me’ and remembered that I had always thought it a grim idea that the males and females in a leper colony married one another for no better reason than that they both had leprosy.

  ‘Who is horrid to Roddy?’ I asked.

  ‘Everybody. His parents and everybody – even Twice; even if it was about the turbines, it is still being horrid. And Don and Isobel were absolutely filthy to him yesterday during the race.’

  ‘Oh? What happened?’

  ‘Roddy made some mistake, pulled the wrong rope or something and they threw him overboard. He might have been drowned!’ she said indignantly, while I smiled inwardly at the difference in the nature of Roddy’s ‘mistake’ as recounted by Dee and as recounted by Mackie. ‘I know Don and Isobel are friends of yours, Miss Jan,’ she went on in the disapproving, censorious manner that came to her so readily and tended to make me feel like a particularly backward child, ‘but I think it is childish and disgusting of people to be horrid and despising to somebody all because of a game going wrong, sailing is only a game, after all.’

  ‘That’s true, Dee, but maybe Isobel and Don did not mean to be horrid and despising as you call it. Maybe they were over-excited with the race and everything. Excitement does distort the vision a bit.’

  ‘It wasn’t excitement during the dance,’ she argued, ‘and Isobel was simply horrid to both of us all evening.’

  I thought privately that Dee would find her life incomplete if it did not contain someone who was being ‘horrid’ to her, just as her engagement to Roddy would be less real to her if nobody was being ‘horrid’ about it, but I said: ‘I should not worry, Dee. I imagine that you and Roddy can get along without Isobel’s approval. Do you think your father will be pleased?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said indifferently. ‘I should think it will be all right. He has always wanted me to get married and the Macleans are quite a good family, aren’t they? Not that it matters. I am going to marry Roddy and that is all there is to it.’

  Again I thought that no action was real for Dee unless she made it in defiance of somebody or something, and when she turned back to the writing-table and picked up her pen I gladly left her and went downstairs.

  With my head in a whirl, I went out to the veranda, and when I saw the brown canvas bag in the corner of the drawing-room beside the feet of Cousin Emmie I regarded her arrival at this moment as a predestined and integral part of my mental turmoil, and quite automatically I turned back, went to the kitchen and asked for some coffee to be brought in.

  ‘My cousin will be round here this forenoon,’ she announced without preamble when I joined her.

  ‘Sir Ian? Good.’

  ‘No. Lottie.’

  ‘Madame Dulac? Why?’

  ‘She has heard about this engagement between that little girl of yours and that man Maclean,’ Cousin Emmie said as if this were a lugubrious eventuality which I ought to have foreseen. ‘You know what people like my cousin are like.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I contradicted her snappishly. ‘There are times when I don’t know what anybody is like.’

  ‘My cousin thinks that engagements are causes for congratulations and funerals are occasions for condolences.’

  ‘And aren’t they?’

  She picked up a biscuit, examined it doubtfully, returned it to the plate and chose another. ‘No,’ she said then. ‘Only some of them – not many.’

  She left me to ponder this, making no other remark until she had drunk two cups of coffee and popped the last biscuit, the one she had formerly discarded, into the bag, whereupon she took up the bag and parasol, rose to her feet and said: ‘I don’t like that woman Maclean.’

  ‘Marion?’ I said, my hackles rising at once.

  As if I had not spoken, Cousin Emmie pursued her train of thought, looking past me and out to the garden. ‘She is the ambitious sort. I wouldn’t be surprised if she put that son of hers up to proposing to that silly little girl.’

  ‘Really, Miss Morrison, I have never in my life heard such malicious rubbish—’ I had begun, preparing to pay off all my scores against Cousin Emmie in one furious tirade ending by forbidding her to set foot in my house again, when the Rolls drew up outside to disgorge Madame, Sir Ian and Marion Maclean.

  ‘There they are, just like I told you,’ croaked Cousin Emmie, and she drifted out through the French window into the back part of the garden leaving behind her the impression, as she so often did, that she had not been humanly present at all but was a manifestation of some superhuman agency such as Fate or one’s conscience.

  By the time Twice came home for lunch all my guests had gone, Dee had left to meet Roddy for lunch in the Bay, and I was sitting alone in a state of utter bemusement in a corner of the veranda. When Twice came leaping up the steps and said: ‘Big news, what?’ I regarded him dully and did not speak.

&
nbsp; ‘Where’s Dee?’ he asked then.

  ‘Gone to lunch in the Bay with her intended.’

  ‘Does one gather that you are displeased?’

  I raised my hands and let them fall again, saying nothing.

  ‘Janet, what has happened?’

  ‘Apart from my being stunned by the unlikely then bombarded into pulp with congratulations, nothing.’

  ‘You are uneasy about this?’

  ‘Very. Aren’t you?’

  ‘No. It seems to me to be quite a good answer. Roddy is the only one of us who can make any shape at handling her and I believe they’ll be happy. He seems to me to be—’

  ‘No longer a petty pilferer and gambler whom you don’t trust?’

  ‘Oh, I thought you’d heard! It wasn’t Roddy who was pilfering. It was that little girl Freeman in the office – they caught her red-handed on Thursday afternoon.’

  I sagged in my chair. ‘Why I don’t rise up and murder you all I don’t know. When did you hear they had caught the Freeman girl?’

  ‘This morning. I thought the news would have got here by grape-vine by now. I suppose the engagement put it out of all their heads.’ I stared straight in front of me, making no comment, and Twice went on: ‘I feel like apologising to Roddy for the things I thought about him. I believe the boy has a lot in him and probably he and Dee will—’

  ‘It seems to me,’ I broke in, ‘that you, in common with a lot of other people, have got your feet ’way, ’way off the ground, Twice. I think that having become disenchanted, as you call it, with Dee yourself, you are jumping at this as a solution. I have never seen Roddy as you did, and I still don’t see him as you do – as a potential and suitable husband for Dee. I don’t like this thing at all. In fact, I think it stinks!’

  Over the pre-lunch beer we became very heated indeed while I adduced all my reasons for distrusting the situation between Dee and Roddy, from the fact that they seemed to have come together primarily because of other people’s ‘horridness’ to both of them, through Dee’s opinion that Roddy was not ‘all sexy and things’ as opposed to Sashie’s knowledge of his intimacy with Victoria Court down to Cousin Emmie’s suggestion that Roddy had been ‘put up’ by Marion to marrying Dee for her money. At this last, Twice became really angry and said: ‘I might have known it was that bloody old woman who put this blight on you!’