by Jane Duncan
‘She didn’t. The blight was there the moment that Dee told me about it.’
‘But why, for heaven’s sake? Up to now you have been Roddy Maclean’s chief advocate, but now that he’s in the clear you have to start getting doubtful!’
‘It simply doesn’t feel right, Twice. I have never believed that Roddy was a thief or lazy or shiftless of any of these things, but I do believe that Isobel Denholm is right when she says he would do it with a yak. And Dee is so frigidly cold – it simply feels all wrong,’ I repeated.
‘Oh, you and your feelings!’ Twice said, exasperated, and then added more calmly: ‘Anyway, what can we do?’
‘Nothing, nothing at all, except let things take their course, but I wish to heaven we had never brought her out here in the first place!’
Aware that he was originally and entirely responsible for the fact that Dee was at Paradise, Twice became furious and lashed out at me with: ‘It’s my belief that you are just plain jealous of that girl!’
‘Twice Alexander! You should be ashamed of yourself!’
For the remainder of that day and during many days that followed the atmosphere in the house was as uneasy as if a monkey playing with a cocked and loaded gun were among us, but, as often happens in such situations, Dee, who was the monkey with the gun, was for once at ease and oblivious of any strain at all. She, who had been so sensitive hitherto to every change of voice tone, to the most fleeting facial expression, went along from day to day, gaily unconcerned, very much the happy daughter of the house, accepting all the congratulations that flowed in from St Jago and England, looking forward with a confidence she had never before shown in herself or the future to her wedding in London in the autumn and a lifetime of blissful happiness. Roddy, her now formally affianced, came to Guinea Corner only once, to attend the celebration party which Twice and I gave, and, whether or not it was my morbid imagination, he seemed to avoid me as carefully as most people avoided Cousin Emmie.
As is well known, however, humanity is not so constructed that it can look hard facts in the face for very long at a time, and life connives at this weakness by offering all kinds of avenues of escape, and I, mentally, am endowed with an escape mechanism as instinctive and efficient as that which, physically, characterises the stag or the fox. Quite soon my uneasiness about the engagement was lulled to sleep by the lapping waves of the congratulations and pleasure of all our acquaintance and I began to see myself as a cross between a successful match-making dowager and Cinderella’s fairy godmother and to feel, indeed, that but for my heaven-inspired intervention Dee might have turned into an old woman like Cousin Emmie. And so everything rolled along very happily. Dee went to the Bay most days, and she often went up to Mount Melody with Isobel, where the alterations to the house were now in full swing, for all the ‘horridness’ about Roddy after the regatta had now, like many other things, smoothed away.
About three weeks after Easter Twice went away on another trip, and Dee, who had been going to Mount Melody or the Bay every day, began to hang about the house again. On about the third afternoon I took her firmly to task about this.
‘It is ridiculous! Most days I have to go to some meeting or another of Madame’s, the Clinic Baby Show is coming up and it is working out that you are hanging about here alone half the time, Dee. You and Isobel haven’t quarrelled, have you?’
‘Gracious, no! I told Isobel about Twice going away and wanting to be with you and she quite understands. Isobel is a very understanding sort of person, although you mightn’t think so.’
‘Why mightn’t I think so?’
‘Well, she looks so big and abrupt and sort of careless, striding about like a fugitive from a cattle ranch, as she herself says,’ Dee laughed. ‘But she really understands awfully well about all sorts of things. I don’t think she likes Roddy very much, but we just never talk about him.’
‘Doesn’t it annoy you rather that she doesn’t seem to like Roddy?’ I asked, for, of course, had I been Dee such a thing would have annoyed me so much that I probably would not even speak to Isobel, but it seemed that Dee had much more tolerance, not to say sense, than I had.
‘Why should it?’ she asked. ‘Everybody can’t like everybody. And Isobel doesn’t like any men much – she is almost like Cousin Emmie about them. She distrusts them.’
‘Oh? I thought she and Don were great friends.’
‘Only for things like sailing and water-ski-ing. That’s because they are both good at the same things. Isobel says that marriage is a game for mugs, so we don’t talk about that either.’
‘There seems to be an awful lot of things you and Isobel don’t talk about. Isn’t it all rather a negative business?’
Dee smiled. ‘No. There are a million things we do talk about. Getting married is the only negative and that is just really because she doesn’t like Roddy and I don’t like Don and Don is the only man Isobel has any use for. But she is an awfully comfortable person to be with and we get on very well together. I mean, we can do things together, like this Mount Melody thing. You ought to see it, Miss Jan! You would never recognise that dark old dungeon of a house. I say, come up there with me this afternoon! We can take a picnic tea.’
‘No, not this afternoon, dear,’ I said. I had never liked Mount Melody, and the drive over the tortuous jungly road that led to it I liked still less. ‘Some other day, perhaps. I have some writing to do this afternoon.’
Dee pouted a little. ‘You and your writing! You seem to me to be always writing. Are you writing a book?’
‘A book? Me? Are you off your head?’
I felt angry with an anger I did not dare to show, for her careless question was an invasion of a strict privacy and a privacy whose very existence I wanted to hide. Ever since I was about eighteen years old I had thought that to write a book must be the most splendid thing in the world, but I had never had any conviction that it was something that I could do. Lack of conviction, however, did not stop me from trying, and most of my free moments were spent at my writing table scribbling away, and the fact that nothing I wrote ever pleased me did not stop me either. This scribbling, it seemed, was something I had to do, and in a guilty secretive way I did it, as if I were practising some furtive and disgraceful petty vice. I could not bear that anybody, even Twice, should know about it, because it seemed such a terribly overambitious thing for someone like me to do. I myself was not ambitious about it; I knew my scribbles had no future, but I felt that no one would believe that I could spend hours doing a thing which I knew to be futureless. People, even Twice, would think either that I had literary ambitions or that I was mad, and either idea was unbearable.
‘What in the world made you think that?’ I asked.
‘It just came into my head.’
‘Well, open your skull and let it out again. Crumbs, do you really think me conceited enough to have literary ambitions?’
‘Not really.’
‘I am afraid my writing is very mundane – mostly letters home and Madame’s reports on her various charities and things. I get all that to do because I can type and Marion Maclean can’t.’
‘Actually it wouldn’t be conceited for somebody as old as you to try to write a book. I mean, you are old enough for things to have happened to you and to have seen a lot of things and places. It’s for somebody of my age that it is conceited and silly.’
‘I don’t agree with you there,’ I said, ‘I don’t think age has much to do with it. It is more a question of the sort of vision a person is born with. Look at Keats, for instance.’
‘Oh, Keats! Poetry!’
‘Don’t you like poetry any more? You used to like it when you were small.’
‘Oh, that.’ She frowned out at the garden. ‘I mean, when you’re grown-up – well, it’s not much use, is it?’
‘It depends on what you mean by use. For me, poetry has a lot of use. It makes me feel happy for one thing, and I can’t think of anything more useful than that.’
‘You are lu
cky.’ There seemed to me to be a faint sneer in her voice and it irritated me. ‘I am afraid I need more than a few lines of poetry.’
‘Then you do need quite a lot,’ I said.
She frowned discontentedly and I had the impression that she was as irritated with me as I was with her. We had come accidentally to the basic difference between us, for there are people who are prone to happiness and people who are not so. I belonged to the first category and Dee to the second, it seemed, and the people of those two categories always act as irritants to one another. But I did not want, at this stage, to quarrel or even argue with Dee on even the most abstract of subjects, so I went on: ‘But you are truly happy in your engagement, Dee?’
‘Oh yes.’ The faint frown and discontent left her face. ‘I am really happy, Miss Jan.’
A few days later I did allow myself to be persuaded to go up to Mount Melody, partly because Dee was so anxious that I should see the alterations and partly because Sir Ian, bored with this second half of Crop, wanted to go himself and bullied me into it one day when Dee mentioned the trip in his presence. Mount Melody was approached by a tortuous and precipitous road that followed the gorge of the Rio d’Oro and a little over a year before Isobel’s grandmother had been killed when her car went over the edge and crashed to the river bed below. Mount Melody, as I remembered it, was linked in my mind with this accident and therefore coloured in my mind by the associations I had made for it. I remembered an old grey stone house with an imposing pillared entrance that led into a dark mahogany-panelled hall, out of which the mahogany staircase led away up into further panelled darkness. I remembered it as a forbidding haunting sort of house where the river, away down in its gorge beyond the terraced garden, sent its voice echoing upwards while the reflection of the water rippled over the ceiling of the vast drawing-room with a horrid uncanniness. It was from the sound of the water that the house had taken its melodious name.
Today, the grey stone front was the same as ever, but when we went in through the portico to the hall the old black mahogany of the panelling shone in brilliant sunlight.
‘My goodness, what have you done? I said to Isobel.
‘We tore the inside wall out of the library on the first floor hall,’ she said. ‘The library is going to be the main bar. The tourists that come to this island aren’t interested in libraries, anyways. it was Dee’s Idea. Dee is terrific at this game, Janet.’ And, as an idea, it was a good one, for the bar-ex-library was at the back of the house and led out through french windows directly and at a higher level than the front entrance to the top terrace of the garden above the river gorge.
Seeing Dee and Isobel together like this, interested in the same project, brought out the difference between them which could not have been more marked in two girls of approximately the same age. Physically, they were as different as two members of the same species could be, for Isobel must have been about twice the size and weight of Dee, and added to this there was the difference between Isobel’s flamboyant red hair and vivid blue eyes and the sombre pale browns of Dee. Yet, Isobel did not have the effect of making Dee look colourless and dull, as Roddy, for instance, with his deeply tanned skin and flashing eyes, tended to do, nor did Dee’s dainty neatness make Isobel look coarse or clumsy. It was more that they complemented one another and threw each other into relief as the brown sturdiness of the stem complements the delicacy of almond blossom while the fragile curves of the petals complement the angular strength of the stems.
‘This is quite an undertaking you have gone in for, Isobel,’ I said, when Dee had taken Sir Ian away to show him something in the sun-bright garden. ‘You are going to have a big job running this place.’
‘I know. I’ll have to get help. Not servants, I mean. That will be easy. I am beginning to wish that David wasn’t so set on being an architect or that Dee wasn’t going back to England. That’s a bright kid, Janet. Any time you want a testimonial as a governess, just you come to me!’
‘I am afraid I had very little to do with her education, Isobel. It was more a question of getting her over a difficult patch when she was a child.’
‘She’s made a bit of a hobby of difficult patches, hasn’t she?’
‘No more than a few others I could mention, Isobel,’ I said with a smile.
‘Okay, I admit everything!’ She laughed and quickly became grave again. ‘But I had more fighting equipment than that little kid,’ she added.
‘Yes, I think perhaps you had.’
‘Janet—’
‘Yes?’
‘No. We’ll skip it. I’m probably prejudiced.’
‘Come now,’ I said, ‘is it about Roddy, Isobel?’
‘I said we’ll skip it.’
‘What is worrying you?’
‘She’s just so – so darned young!’
‘She is older than you are.’
‘That’s true. In some ways, she can give me ten years. But in other ways—’
‘Yes?’
‘Forget it, Janet. As I said, I am prejudiced and I am not being fair, like as not. You see, I’ve come a long ways since last year, when I was hitting it up with Don down at the Peak there. I’ve found out a lot of things about myself since then – I found them out the hard way. That’s where I feel that Dee is a kid – she knows a slew of stuff about planning a hotel and wines and business – her head is bursting with brains and knowledge and hard sense – but – but she knows nothing about Dee Andrews!’
‘The things about Isobel Denholm, Dee Andrews and Janet Alexander are all things we have to find out for ourselves. It seems to me,’ I said, ‘and quite often what you call the hard way is the only way of finding them out.’ I paused. ‘I understand that you don’t care for Roddy Maclean?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Can you tell me why?’
‘No, I can’t. That’s being honest, Janet. It’s one of those things like a mongoose and a rat, and I am not saying Roddy is the rat, either. It’s just that there’s something in him that – that—’ Suddenly she shuddered convulsively before she went on: ‘Do you ever get the feeling that somebody – somebody just doesn’t belong to the same – the same species as yourself? Do you ever get a queer feeling, for instance, when a Negro does something typically Negro?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I agreed a little unwillingly, for I found no pleasure in admitting this, for I imagined that I must make the Negroes shudder when I did something that they found typically white and it is not pleasant to feel that one can induce shudders.
‘As if there was something about them you would never catch up with in a million years and it makes you half-scared of them, half-mad at them?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can get that feeling coming up that awful bush road of yours between here and the gorge. I am afraid of that bush overpowering me and yet I want to attack it with an axe.’
‘That’s it. That’s the way I am about Roddy Maclean. It’s hell in a way. I like Dee. I like Dee a lot, Janet, and I want her to have everything she wants, yet I don’t want Maclean to have her. Oh, let’s forget it. I suppose I am sorta jealous or something. I don’t know.’
I gave a good deal of thought to what Isobel had said, but I came only to the banal conclusion that there was no accounting for people’s personal reactions to other people. Dee did not like Don Candlesham, but I found him a pleasure merely to look at in addition to being quite a pleasant companion. Isobel did not like Roddy, but I still found him a very likeable young man, as I had always done.
10
‘People are Never Settled
Until They are in the Grave’
IN THE first few days of June Twice made another quick trip to Trinidad, and on his return, after a short visit to the factory, he said: ‘Well, we are into the last week of Crop.’
‘Are we? I had no idea we were so nearly through. Twice, that’s marvellous!’
From that moment onwards, it seemed, one could hear the orchestra of the factory losing volume and momentum, a
s if its daemon knew that the time had come for this frenzy of activity to slow down towards a stop. The broad acreage of cane-fields was now like a patchwork quilt made of squares of bright green, Cousin Emmie brown and velvety black, for the cane pieces that had been cut when Crop started had now put on their first new growth; those more recently cut were still covered by the withered blades, and those that were to be replanted had been turned over by the heavy ploughs into a rough black tilth.
In a day or two the engine-noises of the haulage tractors began to die away, which meant that, one by one, as the cane to be hauled grew less, they were being taken off duty and into the transport yard for overhaul for the next year. And then came the day when the last tractors on duty went past Guinea Corner with bunches of flowers tied to their radiators while the drivers and loaders on top of the trailers wore flowers in their hats and sang as they made this last journey of the year to the factory. ‘Two and a half days to go now,’ Twice said, as he came in that afternoon. ‘We’ll grind off the last cane in the yard by tomorrow morning, if all goes well, and the sugar should be in the sacks by midday on Friday.’
‘And then the siren will blow for Cropover,’ I told Dee.
‘And when do we have the party?’
‘The next week, probably on the Friday,’ Twice told her. ‘It takes about a week to get the food organised and so on.’
Exactly as Twice had foretold, with the good fortune that had attended the entire crop, the siren began to blow its long final blast for the year at about a quarter to twelve on the Friday; on that evening Sir Ian called to tell us that Madame had set the celebration of Cropover for the following Friday, and from that moment we all fell into a frenzy of food. There were no catering services in St Jago in those days, and as the week went on nobody spoke of anything except how So-and-so could not deliver that dozen chickens after all, and how the turkey that had been sent to Mrs Grey would not go into her oven, and would somebody else cook it and give her some chickens instead. I am a reasonably competent plain cook for a small household, but food in the tropic heat on the scale provided for one of Madame’s ‘entertainments’, as she called them, simply nauseated and appalled me, and all I could do was to lapse into my childhood state under the command of my grandmother and ‘do what I was told’. Marion Maclean was the officer in charge of the food operation, and she knew that she could rely on me to have a bird or two cooked in my kitchen and bake a cake or two, but apart from this my only function was to receive notes from her, brought by Sandy on his bicycle: ‘Try to rustle up three more large dishes to hold trifles’, or ‘Send Mrs Murphy your egg-beater. She has lost hers’, or ‘Send Dee or somebody to the Great House store-room for that hideous china basin with the purple roses and send it to Mrs Cranston for the fruit salad’. Sandy, it now being the summer holidays, tore to and fro on his bicycle or his pony; Dee and Isobel swept from one house to another with carloads of pans, basins and roasting tins, and round to the club with baskets of china and glass; and Sir Ian and Madame, in the midst of it all, were in their element.