My Friend Cousin Emmie

by Jane Duncan

  ‘I suppose we did in an unconscious sort of way. Being honest, I did hope in a vague way that she would get married and be off one’s hands, I think.’

  ‘Do I gather that she is homosexual – a Lesbian?’

  ‘I wish I were quite clear in my mind just where the borderline lies between what we call normality and Lesbianism,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t know. I am away out of my depth. But it seems to me that Dee is more of a neuter with a slight tendency towards homosexuality – if the tendency had been strong, surely she would have discovered it in herself long ago.’ I took the pins out of my hair. ‘Lord, I’m tired, but not sleepy tired.’

  ‘Nor me neither forbye and besides,’ Twice said in imitation of Tom at Reachfar, and I smiled at him before I picked up the copy of But Not for Love from the bed beside me.

  ‘Anyhow,’ I said, ‘my worries about Dee are over. Having discovered herself tonight as she seems to have done during her session with Cousin Emmie, she has turned into a different person already. Did you feel that?’

  ‘Yes, I did. All that dreadful touchiness seems to have gone.’

  ‘I know. Twice, this has been a night of queer things, and there is something even queerer that you don’t know about yet.’ Holding the book between my hands, I looked at him across it. ‘Do you know who wrote this?’

  ‘S. T. Bennett, isn’t it. Why?’

  ‘S. T. Bennett is Roddy Maclean.’

  ‘You’re off your nut!’

  ‘Maybe I am, but that is what Dee said and she should know.’

  He stared at me, frowning, before he took the book from me and let it fall open between his hands. He read a line or two.

  ‘It could be,’ he said wonderingly. ‘Yes, it could be.’

  ‘It definitely is, I think. If all that Dee says is true, Rob and Marion are in for a bit of a shock and something of a very pleasant big surprise too.’

  When I had repeated to Twice all that Dee had told me about Roddy, I ended: ‘It all seems quite fantastic, and in a queer way it makes me feel terribly old. When I was at the university it would never have entered my head to tell people that I had passed the degree exam in Physics when I had never even attended the class let alone sat the exam, but that’s what Roddy has done – he has been doing it for five years. I wonder if he has even got a degree in Arts?’

  ‘That hardly matters at this stage when I think of the sort of degree he is going to get when Rob finds out about this,’ Twice said. ‘Rob Maclean is not the sort of bloke you can fool like that and get away with it.’

  I began to laugh. ‘Roddy’s got away with it for five years and I must say I can’t help admiring him for it. And he has made a success of what he set out to do – that will make a difference with Rob, as Cousin Emmie would say. Of course, I’d admire the man who wrote that book no matter what he did, I think.’

  ‘Well, Roddy seems to do plenty, what with his sex life and all.’

  ‘I always liked Roddy and I still like him, sex life and all. And I admire him too. He has got all the guts I never had.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I wanted to write once, when I was his age, but I let people turn me into a nursemaid instead. Cousin Emmie is right. People can be influenced out of their very natures by other people.’

  ‘Maybe you made your people happier than Roddy’s will be when the light breaks over them. The Macleans would rather have an engineer for a son than S. T. Bennett, I bet, especially Rob.’

  ‘Maybe I did make my people happy,’ I agreed. ‘And, anyway, I could never have written anything half as good as this.’

  I picked up the book again, put it on my pillow, took off the rest of my clothes and got into bed.

  ‘You probably couldn’t have,’ Twice said. ‘You’re not ruthless enough. I have always thought that one can’t set the Thames or the heather on fire unless one is ruthless enough not to care about burning out the city of London or all the wild life on the moor.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ I said, ‘but I suppose you are right.’

  11

  A Blown Ostrich Egg

  THE NEXT morning Dee still had a slight temperature and was quite happy to stay in bed, and when I went up to see her after breakfast she was just finishing the writing of a letter. With deliberation, she addressed the envelope, folded the sheet of paper, picked up her engagment ring from the bedside table, dropped it inside and stuck down the flap.

  ‘Could Caleb go over to Olympus with this, please, Miss Jan? Roddy won’t have left for the Bay yet.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

  During the night, it seemed to me, Dee had grown very like her father, and the longer I stayed in the room, the stronger the likeness became. She had withdrawn into herself and obviously wished that her engagement and all the events of the night before had never happened, but, this being impossible, she was doing the next best thing, the thing that her father would have done – she was ignoring completely the fact that these things had ever taken place.

  ‘Isobel is moving up to Mount Melody on Monday,’ she said after I had called the yard boy and had despatched him with the letter. ‘It will be all right if I go on Monday too?’

  I felt that this was the merest outward form of politeness and that if I had said that I did not wish her to go on Monday she would merely have smiled faintly at me for being unreasonable and have gone in any case.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘if your cold is better and you feel well enough.’

  ‘I shall be all right now that—all that is over and done with . . .’ and over the writing paper and the envelopes on the bed she made an impatient dismissive gesture with her hands, a gesture like one I had seen her father make many years ago.

  There was an awkwardness between us which, I was aware, was emanating largely from myself. I did not as yet know this new Dee and I felt strange in her presence while she had broken through into some new self-knowledge and the confidence that came with it and was thus in complete control of the situation. I also felt depressed at the element of distance that had developed between myself and someone I had known – or thought I had known – since her childhood.

  ‘You must do as you please, Dee,’ I said, ‘but I hope you will stay in bed for today at least.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll do that. I want to write to Father, explaining everything and telling him about Mount Melody, and I can write in bed as well as anywhere else.’

  As she spoke, she picked up her pen from the bedside table, and I felt that I was dismissed, as her father used to dismiss me in the days when I was his secretary.

  When I went downstairs, Twice was sitting on the verandah and I said to him: ‘Dee is so like that stick of a father of hers that I can hardly believe it.’

  ‘I suppose she is more likely to be like him or her mother than anybody else.’

  ‘But she seems to have turned into a replica of him overnight!’

  ‘I wonder. I don’t believe that people change overnight. Since I saw her an hour ago, I have come to the conclusion that our bringing her to St Jago has been a complete success.’ He grinned at me. ‘Our object was to take her away from the influence of her family and let her be herself. We seem to have achieved it. That the self she is is not what we imagined is beside the point, after all.’

  ‘I suppose that is true. It’s all rather dreary though, like Cousin Emmie saying you never know what might happen.’

  Dram and Charlie, having finished their morning mongoose-hunt in the nearby cane-piece, came into the garden through a hole in the hedge and prepared to settle under their hibiscus clump. I thought of the Pandora, of the sailors giving us Charlie, of the first time I saw Cousin Emmie in the smoke-room and, finally, of the moment on the deck before the ship sailed when I discovered that I really did not want to come back here to St Jago at all. I have noticed that when one is feeling depressed one tends always to think of things that depress one still more.

  ‘I suppose it would have been better if
we had never brought Dee out in the first place,’ Twice said, contradicting what he had said a moment before, ‘but how can one know? It seemed like a good idea at the time. I suppose I had a rush of blood to the head that night I suggested it, but our leave at home had been such a success that I think I felt that we couldn’t put a foot wrong and all that.’

  ‘I know.’ I stared out at Dram and Charlie now stretched out under the hibiscus. ‘Twice, that leave at home last year was a sort of turning point. When I came back here with it behind me, I felt that things would never be the same again. Actually, every single little thing that happens is a turning point. No second is ever the same as any second that went before and what happens in each second alters us, but it is all so minute and gradual that we don’t notice it. It takes a great big thing like a birth or a death or the sort of rediscovery of home that I made during that leave to make one realise this constant process of change. That rediscovery of home was like being born again with better sight, and it put this island into perspective for me. Before we went on leave, this place had the upper hand of me, but when I stood on Reachfar hill and looked at St Jago from there I put the darned thing in its place and it has never regained control of me. And I see now that Cousin Emmie has helped.’

  ‘Cousin Emmie?’

  ‘By always being in complete control of herself and everything around her. I couldn’t get my feet off the ground and get airborne on the atmosphere of St Jago with Cousin Emmie about. She wouldn’t let me.’

  I went close to the mosquito mesh of the verandah and stood looking out over the garden, over the wall that bounded it, over the cane-fields to the large clump of eucalyptus and mahogany trees on the slight rise where the Great House stood. To the left of the rise with the trees, on the flat plain, lay the sugar factory, its tall smoke-stack an incongruous symbol of modern industrialisation against the primeval bush of the surrounding hills.

  ‘Cousin Emmie is right about this island, Twice,’ I said quietly.

  ‘What does she say about it?’ he asked from behind me, equally quietly.

  ‘She says we white people shouldn’t be here. She says the island doesn’t want us and the Negroes don’t want us. She said the Negroes didn’t want a Cropover party – that they would rather have the money it cost to have a spending spree on their own.’ I stared hard at the black exclamation mark that was the factory smoke-stack, which, as well as being a symbol of modern industrialisation, was, for me, the symbol of Twice’s aspirations as an engineer. He was a young man for the position he held and it was in this green valley that he had proved himself. ‘Cousin Emmie was right,’ I said and turned round. ‘The workers were not one damn interested in that party last night. Eighteen months ago, when we did the Varlets play at the Great House, the people were with us but they are not any more. Eighteen months is a long time in this island. Yesterday the people weren’t with us any more. You see, I know what it feels like when people are really with you and not apart as the servants were yesterday about the Crop-over. I danced at a Harvest Home once when I was a kid of eight and everybody was welded together in one feeling. I know what it feels like to be in the place where one really and truly belongs.’ I felt tears gathering in my eyes and blinked as I said: ‘Oh, it’s all silly, all these associations and memories that one drags through life, and all these influences from the past that flow in on one.’

  ‘It’s not silly,’ Twice said very quietly. ‘These associations with similar things that happened before and the recognition of influences and responses that flow towards us are the only guides we have. It seems to me that you and I are arriving at the same point by devious routes as usual. It is true that the Negroes don’t want the Cropover any more – they want a cash bonus on the Crop instead. And you, although you hesitate to say it, are right about you and me and this job here in the islands. The job is all right – this industrial expansion that is going on is a real thing – but the way we white people live, especially here at Paradise, that’s no good to you or me, darling. It’s gimcrack. It makes me think more than anything of that blown ostrich egg in Madame’s drawing-room. It’s brittle with age, it’s hollow, and at the slightest rock of the table it will fall to smithereens.’

  ‘Twice—’ I began, and then I found myself at a loss for words, while tears began to flow out of the corners of my eyes. ‘Oh, God, I don’t know what’s the matter with me! This is the second burst of tears in twelve hours!’

  ‘I know what’s wrong with you,’ Twice said, ‘but the only words I can think of for it are the old Army ones – you are bloody well fed-up.’

  ‘That’s it. I am bloody well fed-up.’ I dried my eyes. ‘I have no right to be. I’ve got everything in the world any woman could want, but I am fed-up.’

  ‘Heavens,’ Twice said, ‘what a relief it is to have got all this out into the open. I have been thinking about it ever since we came back, and then I would see you here in this house with the servants and a way of life that we can never achieve at home and I’d shove my discontent aside. You see, you are very good at this thing of being mistress of a small but dignified house, Janet.’

  I smiled at him in a watery way. ‘And you are very good at being Caribbean representative of a British firm, Twice, but what’s the point if neither of us really likes it?’

  ‘Exactly. Well, all we have to decide now is what we are going to do.’

  ‘I leave that entirely to you, darling. I think I have made enough trouble for now.’

  ‘The thing to do is to complete this tour of duty, of course, if we can bear it at all. The point of this meeting is that a conclusion has been reached in principle, as Somerset would say, the principle being that we want a job at home and are finished with foreign parts. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, Twice, it’s so terribly right!’ Tears once again began to run out of my eyes. ‘This lot are sheer relief,’ I told him.

  ‘I am going to ask Clorinda for some coffee,’ Twice said and disappeared into the house.

  When he came back, I had stopped weeping the silly tears and felt as if I had made a turning out of some endlessly long road, glaring with sun and dust and bordered by twisting jungle into a cool winding track that led over a wide windswept moor.

  ‘I can’t get over the interconnectedness of things,’ I said. ‘All this is bound up in some strange way with Dee and Cousin Emmie, especially with Cousin Emmie. It is as if she had forced me, against my own will, to look at the truth, just as she forced me, last night, to see Dee as she was and not as I wanted her to be.’

  ‘Then it looks as if you are about to be forced to look at some more truth,’ Twice said from where he stood by the table that held the coffee, ‘for here she comes.’

  ‘I don’t care. Not now. And you’ll have to entertain her, anyhow. If she wants to stay. I have to be round at the Great House by eleven. I say, one of us ought to go up and see Dee.’

  ‘She’s all right. I went up while Cookie fixed the coffee. Good morning, Miss Morrison.’

  ‘You are just in time for some coffee,’ I said.

  She sat down, disposing the canvas bag on one side of her and the parasol on the other. ‘How is that silly little girl this morning?’

  ‘A lot better. She is sitting up writing letters.’

  ‘My cousin is in a temper again. She is too old to stay up all night at parties, as I told her. She said you were going round there this morning.’ She looked at me accusingly.

  ‘It’s the appeal for the new TB Ward,’ I said and my voice was apologetic.

  ‘A lot of nonsense. These services should be in the hands of the government and my cousin shouldn’t interfere. She could give money if she wanted to, but that isn’t what she wants – she just wants to interfere.’ She turned to Twice. ‘Are you not round at that factory this morning for once?’

  ‘No. We are on holiday until Monday.’

  Cousin Emmie made a noise between a snort and a grunt, broke a biscuit in half and dipped a half into her coffee
.

  ‘Does that young man know yet that that girl is not going to marry him?’

  ‘She sent a letter to him early this morning,’ I said.

  ‘I thought something like that had happened. I met that Mrs Maclean in her car in my cousin’s avenue when I was coming out. She would be going to tell my cousin about things being broken off. That means my cousin will be in a temper at lunch again.’

  Amid all that had happened, I had given no thought to Marion Maclean’s attitude, and now when Cousin Emmie mentioned her name I was struck anew by her unerring gift for bringing up the unpalatable. ‘I suppose that Mrs Maclean will be in a temper too. I’ve never seen such people for getting into tempers about things that are none of their business. I wouldn’t.’

  ‘I suppose this is another one in a temper,’ Twice said, ‘for here’s the Rolls coming,’ and in a few seconds Sir Ian was on the veranda.

  ‘Good God, you here again, Emmie? Look here, Missis Janet, what’s this about this engagement being broken off? Mother’s fit to be tied!’

  ‘It’s none of her business,’ said Cousin Emmie.

  ‘It’s broken off,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they don’t want to get married, I suppose,’ I said, taking a leaf out of Cousin Emmie’s uninformative book, and at once finding it very effective, for Sir Ian dropped his hectoring tone and said: ‘Miss Dee didn’t say why?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘After all, as Miss Morrison said, it is none of my business or yours, come to that.’

  ‘But what do they mean carryin’ on like this?’

  ‘If you can tell me what anybody means by half the things they do I’ll be very grateful,’ I told him.

  He turned to Twice. ‘She’s as bad as Mother. You’d think all this perishin’ muddle was my fault!’

  ‘It’s your fault as much as anybody’s,’ said Cousin Emmie. ‘I heard you, that time at Christmas, telling that young man that what he wanted was a nice young wife. You and your interfering.’