by Jane Duncan
In a flabbergasted way I sank back into my chair, and Twice took refuge by going to the tray in the corner and beginning to mix a glass of orange juice and soda for each of us. Into the silence Cousin Emmie began to speak in her flat toneless voice. ‘As a rule, I never interfere in anybody’s affairs, but when I was sitting in here tonight, waiting for you to come down and she arrived home, I heard all that went on up there, and when I heard her getting hysterical I thought it better to—’ She suddenly stopped speaking, the coffee cup on the way to her lips. ‘She is awake,’ she said, put the cup on the tray and went out of the room and upstairs, hardly seeming to disturb the air as she went.
‘I didn’t hear anything!’ I said angrily to Twice, who merely shook his head.
In two minutes Cousin Emmie reappeared in the doorway and stood looking at Twice. ‘She wants to see you,’ she said.
‘Me?’ Twice looked from Cousin Emmie to me and back to Cousin Emmie again.
‘Yes, you.’ She sat down again behind her coffee tray. ‘You are hurt, of course,’ she said to me, fiddling about with cup and spoon after Twice had gone upstairs. ‘You are hurt because she hasn’t asked to see you. You are a fool. You pay far too much attention to other people. She is a silly little thing, but no sillier than most people,’ and she then took a sip of coffee. ‘You think people can help people, but they can’t – not in important ways. It is a mistake to interfere at all.’
‘You interfered tonight and it was very helpful,’ I said. ‘You stopped her having screaming hysterics.’
‘You can stop people having hysterics and you can set their legs if they break them, but you can’t help them not to be silly. I have watched you doing your best with that little girl ever since we were on that boat and she was being silly about your husband. You should have been your natural self and have given her a good smacking. I would have done.’
‘I bet you would!’ I thought, but I said: ‘What good would that have done? She would probably have run away.’
‘If she had run away she would never have got engaged to this young man,’ Cousin Emmie countered. ‘If she had been her natural self she would never have done it. She only did it because you had been nice to her, as she calls it, and she knew it would please you.’
‘Please me? I didn’t want her to get engaged to Roddy Maclean!’
‘Oh yes you did. Not that young man Maclean specially, but you wanted her to get engaged to somebody and get settled in life and all that sort of thing. So did my cousin, and so did Ian – so did everybody, except me. I am not silly enough to think that anybody can get settled in life. People are never settled till they’re in the grave.’
To listen to her was an odd sensation. There she sat, dipping biscuits in coffee and chewing the mess with her false teeth and making a sloshy, all-too-human and fleshy noise, and yet her toneless expressionless voice had an inhuman detached quality as if the words were issuing from the Sphinx or some other unworldly oracular source.
‘This is nonsense!’ I said forcibly, struggling free of the spell she seemed to be casting over me. ‘I didn’t want her to get engaged—’
‘Yes you did. You wanted her to get settled in some way, and marriage is the way people always think of for settling young women. Everybody wanted it, whether they think they did or not, for her and for that young man too. And all that builds up an influence with people like her. She is still silly enough to think she can please other people. I’m not, I know you can never please everybody, and it is far better just to please yourself.’
‘Are you sitting there telling me that Roddy Maclean proposed to Dee just to please Twice and me and Madame?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m not, and well you know it. In the first place, that young man probably proposed because she is wealthy and he knew he had the influence of all the rest of you backing him up. That young man has a lot of brains and a lot of determination. He has the sense to know what he wants, not like that silly little girl.’
‘I thought you didn’t like him?’ I was silly enough to say.
‘Why should I like him just because he has brains and determination and knows what he wants? Hitler had brains and determination and knew what he wanted,’ she pointed out, dipping half of a biscuit into the coffee cup. ‘That little girl is not in the least interested in men or in getting married.’
‘Have you any idea what she is interested in?’ I asked rather sourly, but I was at once ashamed of the sourness when I remembered that, tonight, this old woman was being very helpful albeit her manner made it difficult to appreciate that helpfulness, so I added: ‘Miss Morrison, you seem to know more about Dee than any of us and I am grateful for anything you can tell me.’
She looked flatly at me for a few seconds before beginning to fiddle with her coffee again. ‘She has talked to me a lot,’ she said. ‘She talked to me because she is the same sort of person as I am although she does not really know it’ – If she heard my sharply indrawn breath she did not show it, ‘—that is, as far as any two people are the same sort. I can’t be bothered with men, and neither can she. Men are always bores like my cousin Ian with all his rubbish about India and this island, or smug bullies like my old father was, or they think that women are only for running a house or going to bed with like that man Maclean.’
With a sudden inner shock, I realised that this last was a crystallisation of something that I myself had long felt about Rob Maclean. ‘That little girl upstairs doesn’t like men either,’ Cousin Emmie was going on. ‘It’s probably because of this father of hers she has told me about, but it’s partly just her nature – the way she is made. That little girl likes women better than men, and another thing is that she likes that big red-haired American girl. And she likes making money, and what she really wants to do is go into that hotel business up at that lunatic asylum place with that girl, and I told her she should just go ahead and do it, but she is afraid of what you are going to think.’
With my mind in a whirl, I caught at the nearest straw. ‘I can’t understand all this rubbish about her being afraid of me and what I think.’
‘It is because she likes you. She likes you more than she likes your husband even, so she is more afraid of you than of him. People are never afraid of people – not really afraid in a deep way – unless they like them.’
And with another little shock I felt that this must be true, for Cousin Emmie herself seemed to fear nobody and she also seemed to like nobody.
‘Did she tell you why she isn’t going to marry Roddy?’ I asked after a moment. ‘What I mean is, did she tell you what she is going to say to Madame and everybody her reason is? Just that she has changed her mind?’
‘I suppose that is what she will say. But quite likely she caught him at some nonsense that brought her to her senses and made her come back here in that state she was in.’
‘What sort of nonsense?’
‘His sort of nonsense,’ said Cousin Emmie uninformatively and pushed the little table with the tray to one side. ‘She will probably tell you all about it now that she has come to herself,’ she said, standing up and popping the last biscuit into the bag. ‘Will your husband drive me home to my cousin’s?’
‘Of course, Miss Morrison. And thank you for being so helpful tonight.’
When I went upstairs to fetch Twice, he was just coming out of Dee’s room, and I waited till he came down to the hall.
‘Dee says you are to come to see her if you would like to,’ he said.
‘Did she tell you anything?’
‘About Roddy? No. And I didn’t ask. She did nothing but apologise for that carry-on when she came home tonight.’
‘Oh well, I’d better go up,’ I said. ‘Miss Morrison is ready to go home. Will you take her?’
‘Of course.’
He turned to the drawing-room door as Cousin Emmie emerged, the bag in one hand, the parasol in the other, the fur about her neck.
‘You have given us a lot of help tonight, Miss Morrison,’ he said, but
she merely looked at him in her blank way. ‘I still don’t know what happened between Dee and Roddy, but I suppose it’s best if we say nothing to anybody for the moment.’
‘My cousin, you mean?’ she asked. ‘I never say anything to her, anyhow, except what has to be said. She would only get angry.’ She pulled her fur more closely about her neck with the hand that held the bag. ‘I expect my cousin will give herself a stroke one of these days, always losing her temper the way she does. You never know what might happen at her age. We’ll go now,’ she ended, looked at me and went down the steps to the car.
Dee was sitting up in bed, her nose red, a flushed fever spot on each cheek, her whole face drooping and lugubrious. All her becoming suntan seemed to have disappeared in the course of a few hours; her skin looked dully sallow against the white pillow behind her, and the hair that had been dressed that morning lay about her head in dank greasy tufts.
‘How do you feel, Dee?’ I asked.
I felt unsure of myself, as if Dee were someone I no longer knew. It was not like meeting a stranger, which one does with an open mind – it was like meeting someone who had undergone a sudden metamorphosis which one had been told about but which was not outwardly apparent.
‘I’ve only got a bit of a cold,’ she said. ‘Miss Jan, I am very sorry about when I came home tonight.’
‘That’s all right, Dee. You were very upset.’
I was very nervous, feeling that I was facing something that I did not understand, and I was also exasperated with myself for being nervous.
‘I should never have got engaged to Roddy,’ she said. ‘It was just like when I got engaged to Alan Stewart. I didn’t really want to do that either – yet I just did it.’
‘Because Roddy and all of us here on Paradise seemed to want it?’ I asked, working on Cousin Emmie’s theory.
‘Yes. That and – well – everybody gets married. At least, most people do.’
‘But you would really rather run a hotel with Isobel?’ I plunged.
‘Cousin Emmie told you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am glad she did, Miss Jan.’ She looked down at her small hands on the sheet. ‘I suppose you think I am – I am queer.’ She looked up, and there was something like a smile on her face as she spoke the word.
I shook my head. ‘No. I’ll be honest, Dee. If I were in your place, I am the sort that would rather marry Roddy than go into business with Isobel, but then I haven’t much of a head for business.’ I felt monstrously awkward and tried to smile as I ended.
‘I don’t know if you’d have married Roddy though,’ she surprised me by saying, ‘even if you didn’t like Isobel better and feel more comfortable with her as I do. Miss Jan, these Macleans are friends of yours and I am going to tell you about Roddy, just so that you will know and maybe be able to help Missis Marion. I like Missis Marion.’
I felt suddenly cold in the warmth of the tropic night as I sat waiting without speaking.
‘Roddy isn’t what his mother and father think he is,’ she said. ‘He didn’t do any engineering at the university. He didn’t do anything except mess about with literature and poetry and things. He hasn’t got his degree in engineering or anything.’
‘But Dee! I – this can’t be – I mean what—’ I heard myself making no sense and fell silent.
‘It is the easiest thing in the world to cheat your parents about things,’ Dee told me calmly. ‘One’s parents never know anything about one – they see one as an embodiment of their wishes or something. Most of Roddy’s brothers have studied engineering as their father and mother wanted, so Roddy just let his father and mother think he was doing engineering too. He is the most frightful liar, anyway.’
‘I see,’ I said, semi-stunned.
‘He lies as a matter of course about anything that suits him, like while he has been engaged to me he has been carrying on with coloured girls down around the Bay and everywhere.’
I at once suspected Isobel of making mischief here and I said: ‘You can prove this about the coloured girls? Or is it hearsay. Dee?’
‘Oh, I could prove it if I wanted to,’ she said and her plain little face showed disgust. ‘That’s why I was in a state when I came home. When I left the Bay this afternoon I took a run up to Mount Melody to see if the rain had done any damage to that part where the wall is down. Roddy was up there with a coloured girl. They were arguing about money. He was saying he had given her enough already. They were in the old coach-house, sheltering from the rain, I suppose.’
‘Oh, Dee!’
‘It’s all right, Miss Jan. I don’t care a bit really – not now, anyway – but it was sort of horrid at the time. I knew he was a bit like that. Since we got engaged he was always wanting me to go to bed and do things with him and so on. And I think he must have done something to Isobel too, although she has never said anything,’ She had been looking down at her hands and now she looked up again. ‘I am only telling you about all this because Missis Marion is probably going to get a bit of a shock about Roddy some day, and if you know now what he is like you will be over your shock by the time hers comes along and be able to help her a bit, maybe. I like Missis Marion,’ she repeated. ‘You see, Roddy is just different from her other sons, like me being different from the sort of daughter Father would have liked to have. Roddy is a sort of artist or something instead of being an engineer like the Macleans wanted. He wrote that book you were reading on the boat, something about love.’
‘But Not for Lover?’ I squeaked. ‘Rubbish! That is by somebody called S. T. Bennett!’
‘That’s right. That’s the name he writes under.’
‘But that book is good!’ I said stupidly.
‘Is it?’ Dee asked without much interest.
I stared at her. She was away beyond my comprehension. Here was a young woman who had been engaged to a young man who had written a most distinguished novel and she had not even bothered to read it. My mind became side-tracked.
‘Dee, when you were small, you used to read a lot. You hardly read at all now. Why?’
‘It doesn’t get you anywhere,’ she told me flatly, and I suddenly seemed to see an actual physical resemblance between her and Cousin Emmie. ‘Look at Roddy. He has spent five years at the university, and he has nothing to show for it except for knowing a lot of stuff about poetry and this one book. He isn’t even qualified for a decent job.’
I felt that we were getting into deep water. There was no doubt, I told myself, there were deep differences between Dee and me, but this one was deep enough to drown us. Dee considered that Roddy with ‘this one book’ had nothing to show for his five years, and I considered that with But Not for Love Roddy had more to show for his five years than all of us at Paradise could show for all our lifetimes. This is the sort of difference between two people that is beyond all discussion and resolution; there is no bridge that spans this gulf, and there is no explosive that can destroy this barrier.
‘Do his father and mother know about But Not for Love?’ I asked.
‘No. He is scared to tell them because they would find out how he wasted his time at the university. That’s what I meant when I said he was such a liar. He lives by lies.’
‘When did he tell you about the book?’
‘Only yesterday when I told him that we ought to ask Twice to help him to get promotion in Allied Plant.’
I rose to my feet, feeling excessively tired and also, in a strange new way, out of sympathy with Dee who seemed with each second to be growing more like her cold, distant clever father, a man whom I had never liked, but at the same time that this seemed so, I knew that it was not so. It was not Dee who was changing. This cut-and-dried young woman in the bed was Dee as she really was and always had been, but she was stripped now of the attempt to be what I and her family had tried to make her be, just as my own eyes had been stripped of the distorting lens through which I had looked at her.
‘It is long after midnight, Dee. You must go to sleep,’ I s
aid. ‘Have you everything you want?’
‘Yes, thank you. And, Miss Jan, I really know what I am doing about going to Mount Melody with Isobel – it is truly what I want to do. You are not angry about it? We are still friends?’
‘I am not angry, Dee. About going there with Isobel, I am glad you have found what you really want to do, but on the business side of it I hope you will let your father know what you are doing and have a proper agreement about shares and things.’
‘You needn’t worry about that side of it,’ she told me lightly, and I felt that she spoke the truth. ‘You like Isobel, don’t you?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I do, Dee. I have always liked Isobel,’ but I did not say that Isobel, like Dee herself, seemed tonight to be a different person and that all my feelings about her were in a state of suspension.
I left her, and instead of going straight to my bedroom I went downstairs and took But Not for Love from the book shelf, and while I sat with it unopened in my hand I heard Twice come in the back way from the garage and run upstairs. When I went up, he had taken off his shoes and socks and was sitting on the edge of the bed watching himself wriggling his toes, a habit he has when he is thinking. He looked up at me and then down at the book in my hand.
‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them,’ I said, ‘but not for love!’ whereupon I threw the book on to the bed and, to my own disgust, broke down into tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said after a moment. ‘I am sorry to make one more scene tonight.’
‘Go ahead,’ Twice said. ‘I wish males weren’t conditioned from near-infancy not to seek relief in tears. I only took my shoes off to stop me from kicking the furniture to bits.’
‘Unfasten this dress for me, please, darling,’ I said, and when he had undone the back of the long dress I stepped out of it.
‘What happened in that room along there?’ he asked. ‘What’s the score? I gather from that old woman that you and I and Sir Ian and heaven knows who else forced the unwilling Dee into the arms of Roddy Maclean.’