by Jane Duncan
On the morning of the Cropover party everything worked up to fever pitch. By seven o’clock all the Estate lorries and all the cars were ploughing up the white dust as they converged on the club with loads of everything, from teaspoons to forms and trestle tables, and every oven in every house was sizzling with cooking meat while every refrigerator was oozing with trifles and jellies. At two in the afternoon the heavens opened, split asunder by a long streak of blue lightning which was followed by a cannonade of thunder that rolled and reverberated round the valley, and then down came the rain in what seemed to be a solid block of water. By three o’clock the roads where the white dust had risen in clouds round the cars an hour before were running like rivers or spreading into lakes, and when Twice’s car came up our driveway, followed by the Rolls, wakes formed behind them as they turned in the inland sea which was our gateway.
‘This is just about the end,’ I greeted them when they jumped from the cars on to the veranda.
‘Not at all, me dear,’ said Sir Ian, shaking a shower bath from his pith helmet all over Dram, who, with a hurt look, picked up Charlie and carried him into the drawing-room. ‘Just a little electric shower – it’ll cool things down an’ lay the dust. We’ll have a splendid evenin’.’
Looking out at the wall of water that hung between me and Dram’s hibiscus clump, it was difficult to believe him, but I had had enough experience now of St Jago’s sudden violence of climate to hope that we might have our party that evening after all.
‘What about havin’ tea, Missis Janet?’ Sir Ian said next. ‘Can’t do any more work until the rain stops.’
‘Where is Dee?’ Twice asked me as the tea was brought.
‘Down in the Bay having her hair done,’ I told him.
Sir Ian, of course, was perfectly right about the weather, for shortly after four the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the clouds parted like grey curtains to show a slit of blue sky, they parted a little more so that the sun came through, and at once turned them from heavy grey to fluffy white and then the wind rose and began to drive them away over the hills in impatient little gusts, like a dog sending home straying sheep.
Twice and Sir Ian had just risen to return to their duties at the club when Nurse Porter drove up in her little black car.
‘Hello, Nurse,’ I said; ‘come in and have some tea.’
‘No, thanks, Mrs Alexander. I have a call. May I borrow your Land-Rover, Sir Ian? I have to go away up into the bush behind Mount Melody, sir.’
‘Certainly, me dear. It’s round at the house and the keys are in it. What’s wrong up there?’
‘Some woman is sick – haemorrhage of some kind, it sounded like, but you know what people are on the telephone. It was her brother that called from the box at Running Cut and we were cut off – the storm likely. But they are our people all right, sir. Freeman is the name. Probably connected with Tony the Millman.’
‘You don’t want someone to go away up there with you, Nurse?’ Twice asked.
‘Certainly not, Mr Twice!’ She turned her car about efficiently, looking a little like Boadicea in a starched white cap. ‘It isn’t far, only a bit rough. See you at the Cropover later. ‘Bye.’ She drove away and Twice and Sir Ian went back to the club.
From my point of view the preparations for the party were now over, the last salad bowl and fruit dish requisitioned and despatched according to Marion’s orders, and the turkey in my oven cooking to schedule, so I went upstairs to lay out Twice’s evening clothes and my own. Twice came back at six o’clock, saying that everything at the club was organised, and began to pour drinks.
‘Dee isn’t back,’ I said.
He turned from the tray and looked at his watch. ‘It’s after six.’
‘I know. Still, we are not due at the Great House until eight and she takes no time at all to dress. That’s one thing.’
We went upstairs, carrying our drinks, had leisurely gossipy baths and dressed, but by a quarter-past seven Dee had still not appeared.
‘She is cutting it a bit fine,’ Twice said, looking over my shoulder into my face in the glass.
‘Go on,’ I said, ‘say it! You hope to God nothing has happened to her!’
‘You are quite right. I’ll say it. I hope to God nothing has happened to her! I hope she hasn’t ran into a landslip on that gorge road after that downpour this afternoon.’
‘Twice!’
‘Wait! What’s that?’ I could hear nothing but the croaking of the tree frogs, the chorus of the crickets. ‘Yes, that’s the Daimler.’ He went to the window. ‘Yes, she’s coming down the south approach like a bat out of hell. I must say she can handle that car.’
In a few moments the car door slammed outside and Dee ran upstairs. I met her on the landing.
‘What happened, darling? Did you mistake the time or have a puncture or what? I’ll turn on your bath.’
She stopped dead and stared at Twice and me in the bedroom doorway.
‘I don’t want a bath. I hadn’t a puncture. I’m not going to this party.’
‘Dee!’
‘I’m not going!’ she said, her voice rising and cracking as it rose.
‘Steady now, Dee,’ Twice said.
‘I’m not going!’
‘But, Dee, why?’
‘I’m not going! You can’t make me! I don’t want to go! I’m not going!’
‘Dee,’ Twice said quietly, ‘nobody is going to make you do anything.’
Her eyes looked from one of us to the other and round the landing as if she were afraid that we would close in on her and drag her to the party by main force.
‘People are always making me do things!’ she almost screamed.
Twice ignored this and went on in a flat calm voice that made me think of the voice of Cousin Emmie. ‘But I think you must give us some excuse to take to Madame. Don’t you feel well?’
He moved a little towards her, and she backed sharply, hitting the wall behind her. Twice stopped moving.
‘I’m all right,’ she said in an eerie whisper now, and then gave a loud sneeze.
She had moved to a spot where the light struck directly upon her face, and I now saw that she was excessively pale, with a high flush burning on her cheek-bones.
‘Dee,’ I said, going towards her, ‘you’ve got a chill! You have a temperature!’
‘Leave me alone! Don’t come wear me!’ She pressed back against the wall.
‘But, Dee, you must let—’
‘Leave me alone! Her teeth began to chatter, she shivered violently and her voice rose now to a shrill cracked shriek. ‘All right! I’ve got a cold! I’m going to bed, but leave me alone!’
‘Now, Dee—’ Twice began sternly.
The high cracked voice now became a throaty husky whisper that to me sounded savage and full of hatred.
‘Leave me alone! I don’t want you! I’m all right!’
‘You’re not,’ said a flat voice from the staircase. ‘You are hysterical.’
Dee drew a sharp breath broken by a sob and spun round, and Twice and I also turned with a jerk to look at the staircase. At the bottom of it, in the dimness, for the hall light had not been switched on, stood Cousin Emmie in the panoply of her old gold velvet, and her little fur made of the two sad, dead little animals, the parasol in one hand and the canvas bag in the other.
‘Where did you come from?’ I asked.
‘I have been here for the last hour. My cousin is in a temper so I came over here. I was in there,’ and she pointed with the parasol at the drawing-room door.
‘Oh – oh – oh!’ shrieked Dee on a piercing note.
‘Stop that,’ said Cousin Emmie, beginning to climb the stairs. ‘You don’t have to go to this party if you don’t want to. Go to bed.’
All three of us watched as if transfixed while she softly climbed the stairs, but when she brought her foot from the top step to the landing. Dee, with a jerk like a coiled spring suddenly released, darted into her room and closed the door
with a bang. Cousin Emmie stopped in front of Twice and me where we stood side by side like part of Stonehenge, fixed her colourless expressionless eyes on us and said: ‘You had better go down there and drink something and get along to my cousin’s. I’ll see to that little girl, I was a nurse once.’ She gave a peremptory rattle on the heavy panel of the door with the bone handle of the parasol. ‘I am coming in,’ she said. To my amazement, amazement that made me clutch at Twice’s arm to convince myself that this was real, the door opened about six inches, Dee gave a gulp and said: ‘All right. Come in, Miss Morrison.’
The door closed; Twice and I stared at one another for a blank moment, and then, speaking no word, we went to the drawing-room and Twice picked up the whisky decanter.
‘What in the world is going on?’ I whispered after taking a sip of whisky and water.
‘Heaven alone knows,’ Twice whispered back.
As a rule, I think that he and I have a reasonably developed sense of the absurd, but it did not strike us as odd that we should be talking to one another in frightened whispers in our own house. At least, while we were doing it, it did not strike us as absurd, and for what must have been about twenty minutes we stood there, in the light of a single lamp in the big room, staring at one another and daring, now and then, to pose scared questions to one another. In the end Cousin Emmie came downstairs and switched on the main lights at the door of the room, and this was as if she had freed us from the spell which, at the top of the stairs, she had cast upon us.
‘It’s quarter to eight,’ she said in her toneless voice. ‘If you are late, my cousin will be in a worse temper than ever.’
She sat down, took off her fur and disposed it on the back of her chair. ‘I don’t want to go to this party. I don’t like parties, especially my cousin’s parties. I’ll stay with this little girl. Is your cook here? To bring us supper?’
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ I felt quite helpless. ‘I’ll go and—’
‘Look here,’ Twice said, ‘if Dee is ill we just can’t walk out—’
‘She is not ill. She has a bit of a cold and she is in a state, but it’s no use you people staying here. That will only make her worse.’
‘Now look here, Miss Morrison . . .’ Twice began in a hectoring voice. ‘If Dee is ill we must get the doctor—’
‘You can send him round from the club if you like,’ Cousin Emmie said, not in the least intimidated or moved in any way. ‘There is not much he can do – probably more harm than good. The fewer people there are fussing round that little girl, the better.’
‘But what is wrong with her?’ I almost shouted. ‘She was all right this morning. Now it’s as if she hates us all!’
‘She does hate you all,’ Cousin Emmie told me flatly. ‘She made a mistake saying she would marry that young man, and she hates herself, and so of course she hates everybody.’
‘Made a mistake?’
‘Yes. She has found out now it was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake from the start. I have never liked that young man.’
I clenched my teeth and stared at Twice who, with teeth clenched, stared back at me.
‘There is no use going on like that because all your plans have gone wrong and she is not going to marry this young man,’ Cousin Emmie told us in her flat way. ‘It is none of your business if she has broken her engagement to him, and don’t you go bothering her about it. You’d better just get along to that party of my cousin’s. I am going to see about supper for that little girl and me.’
She drifted out of the drawing-room and turned towards the kitchen, and, having glared at her back, I then glared at Twice before flying upstairs.
‘Dee!’ I called out when I discovered that the bedroom door was locked ‘Dee, I want to see you.’
‘Go away,’ said the voice from inside. ‘Go away. I don’t want anybody but Miss Morrison.’
I did not plead any more. I turned away, but by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs the tears were threatening to ran down my cheeks. Cousin Emmie was emerging from the kitchen. Not wanting her to see my face, I called to Twice: ‘Twice, we’d better go. We are late now. Dee seems to be all right.’ Reluctantly, Twice came out to join me. ‘You’ll be all right, Miss Morrison?’ I called back from the darkness of the veranda.
‘Yes,’ came the expressionless voice. ‘Just tell my cousin that little girl has a chill and I’d rather stay here with her than go to that party.’
I am not going to pretend that I enjoyed Madame’s Cropover dinner. Indeed, I had the greatest difficulty in persuading myself, at times, that it was taking place at all and that I was among those present. My mind was split into two distinct parts, one being the part that was with me here in the Great House in its party atmosphere, the other part having remained at Guinea Corner in the aura of Cousin Emmie.
Twice and I were the last to arrive, and when we told Madame and Sir Ian that Dee had contracted a sudden chill and was unable to come there was an immediate crowding round of the guests with kind enquiries, and, to me, the strangest thing of all was that Rob, Marion and Roddy Maclean were in the forefront of the anxious enquirers. Explaining to them that she had a slight temperature but was not seriously ill, I found that I kept rubbing against Twice’s shoulder to assure myself that the scene at Guinea Corner had really taken place and that Cousin Emmie had actually said that Dee was no longer engaged to Roddy. It would not have surprised me in the least if Dee had suddenly popped up beside me in her new yellow evening dress, thereby convincing me that I had dreamed the events of the last hour. Quite obviously, if Dee did not intend to marry Roddy, Roddy did not as yet know of her non-intentions. As if through a swirling mist that dazzled my eyes and caused my ears to hum I heard Twice say: ‘So if you will excuse us after dinner, Madame, Janet and I will go home and not come round, to the club. It is very kind of Miss Morrison to let us come away like this.’
‘Tchah! Emmie will be perfectly all right,’ said Madame; ‘but I quite understand your anxiety, Twice. These sudden chills can be extremely nasty.’
On the whole, I suppose that we carried the thing off quite well, but I found it very difficult to keep my mind on the conversation at dinner. As soon as it was over and Twice and I were preparing to leave, Isobel cornered me on the dark veranda.
‘Just what is the matter with li’l Dee?’ she demanded, her vivid eyes catching the light from a window and seeming to bore into me.
‘It’s nothing much, Isobel. Just a chill and a shivery temperature, you know.’
‘She was all right this morning at the beauty parlour. When did this start?’
‘Just after she came home,’ I said, and strode past her, away from her suspicious eyes, to the waiting car.
When Twice and I reached Guinea Corner, Cousin Emmie was sitting in her favourite corner of the drawing-room, a tray with coffee and biscuits on a small table beside her, the canvas bag and the parasol also beside her chair. This gave her the transitory air that always characterised her and I found it difficult to believe that, about two hours ago, Twice and I had gone out and had left her in charge of our household.
‘You needn’t have hurried back,’ she said. ‘That little girl is asleep.’
‘How is she?’
‘She has a bad cold in her head, that’s all. She got caught in that rain this afternoon, with no clothes on as usual. I don’t like this climate. You never know what’s going to happen.’
I sat down firmly in a chair opposite to her and said sternly, prepared to stand no nonsense with my way of it: ‘Look here, Miss Morrison, what is all this about Dee not going to marry Roddy?’
‘I don’t see what you mean by all this,’ she said, breaking a biscuit in half. ‘She is not going to marry him because she doesn’t want to.’
‘Why doesn’t she want to?’ I felt that I was shouting with exasperation.
‘She doesn’t like him.’
‘Did Dee tell you this?’ Twice asked.
‘Yes. If she didn’t tell me, how wou
ld I know?’
‘She didn’t say anything to us!’ I snapped. ‘And she doesn’t seem to have said anything to Roddy either!’
‘She is afraid,’ said Cousin Emmie and swallowed a mouthful of coffee. ‘Oh, not of that young man – she will probably tell him tomorrow. But she is afraid of you,’ and she looked from one of us to the other before beginning to pour herself some more coffee.
I was so exasperated that I wanted to shake her. ‘Afraid of us?’ I said, springing to my feet. ‘What the devil has she got to be afraid of?’
‘She is afraid of you going on the way you are going on now because all your plans are upset.’ She looked up at me, a teaspoon held over her cup. ‘But I am not afraid of you and you might as well sit down and control that temper of yours,’ and she took a spoonful of sugar, put it into the cup and began to stir the coffee very slowly and deliberately.