by Jane Duncan
‘Look here, Emmie, you’ve no business sittin’ here drinkin’ coffee. You’d better be getting ready to go on that boat next week and mindin’ your own business.’
‘I am minding my own business. I am not going on that boat.’
‘Now, look here, Emmie, your passage is booked on—’
‘I didn’t book it. You did. But I’m not going on it.’ She popped a biscuit into the bag and rose from her chair, turning to me. ‘Are you driving round to my cousin’s? I’ll come round with you.’
‘Right,’ Twice said. ‘I’ll get the car.’
‘My car’s outside,’ snapped Sir Ian. ‘Take it and send it back,’ and he turned his back on us in a pointed way while we went down the steps and got into the Rolls.
We sat in silence throughout the few minutes of the journey, for Cousin Emmie seemed to be wrapped in some secret contemplation of her own and I had nothing that I wanted to say. Madame, who was already at her big desk, greeted me with: ‘Good morning, Janet’ and said ‘Go away, Emmie!’ all in one breath. Cousin Emmie, however, did not go away but sat down in a corner, which made Madame give an exasperated sigh and move her chair so that her back was to her cousin, as if this dismissed her from our presence.
‘I am most upset, Janet,’ she said then, ‘about the termination of this engagement between little Dee and Roddy Maclean. What happened?’
‘They seem to have quarrelled, Madame.’
‘How is Dee’s cold this morning?’
‘Much better, thank you.’
‘Do you suppose that maybe this tiff was because she wasn’t feeling well? Mightn’t they come together again? It seemed so very suitable.’
‘It wasn’t a bit suitable, Lottie,’ said Cousin Emmie. ‘She is a wealthy young woman and that young man hasn’t even got a proper job.’
‘Be quiet, Emmie! What do you feel, Janet?’
‘I think it is very unlikely they will come together again, Madame. In a way I am not sorry the engagement is broken. Dee is very young and immature.’
‘In some ways,’ said Cousin Emmie.
‘Hold your tongue, Emmie! You know nothing about it.’
‘I know more than you, Lottie.’
Madame compressed her lips and drew a long sighing breath through her nostrils.
‘Oh, well, there is little point in discussing it further at the moment, Janet. All is fair in love and war, I suppose.’
‘There’s nothing fair in either of them,’ said Cousin Emmie, and Madame puffed out her chest, got up and went to look down upon this haunting one-woman chorus. ‘Emmie, there are a number of other rooms in the house.’
‘Too many. You couldn’t keep a house this size in England now and quite right too. Nobody needs a house this size. I don’t like big houses.’
‘Emmie, please do retire to the library.’
‘No. The coffee will be here soon and I’d just have to come back.’
Defeated, Madame plumped herself back into her chair, drew a pile of papers towards her and said: ‘Janet, let us get on with this list.’
Madame and I worked for perhaps half an hour before the coffee was brought in, and in the same moment. Nurse Porter arrived with her weekly report.
‘Good morning, Nurse,’ said Madame. ‘Janet, please attend to the coffee for me while Nurse and I do the Clinic Report. Sit here, Nurse. Monday, General Clinic,’ Madame read from the sheet while I poured coffee. ‘Yes. Tuesday, Venereal Clinic. Treatments, male thirteen, female nineteen. Dear me. Thursday, yes. Friday, Emergency call three-thirty pm. What was that, Nurse?’
‘A young woman, Madame, threatening miscarriage. Doctor is up there again this morning.’
‘Oh dear. Poor woman. Who is she?’
‘A girl called Freeman who worked in the Estate office, Madame.’
‘That little girl. I didn’t know she was married!’
‘The girl is not married, Madame.’
‘Not married? And who is the father of the child?’
At Nurse’s words, Madame was immediately enraged and embattled against what she saw as one of the great social evils of the island, the major hindrance to social progress, the problem of the illegitimate child. The Freeman family, being ‘Paradise people’, were what Madame regarded as territory won for social law and order, and that this girl of the family was ‘in trouble’ was the equivalent of the island enemy having, by sneak attack, retaken a part of that territory back into outlawry and disorder.
‘I don’t know, Madame. They would not tell me, but I understand that the girl’s father knows and will see Sir Ian about it himself.’
‘I see. Very well. I shall mention the matter to Sir Ian,’ said Madame, making a note. This is most upsetting. Good morning, Nurse.’
The nurse went away and Madame sat staring balefully down at the name she had noted.
‘If it’s that little girl called Lucy that used to bring the letters over from the office,’ said Cousin Emmie through a mouthful of biscuit, ‘that’s in trouble, Ian doesn’t have to go anywhere to find out the man’s name.’
‘Be quiet, Em—’ Madame spun round like a fat little humming-top in her swivel chair. ‘Emmie, what did you say?’
‘That man’s name that got that girl into trouble. I can tell you that.’
‘You?’
‘You won’t like it.’ Cousin Emmie masticated and swallowed the biscuit and took a sip of coffee. ‘But I can tell you.’
‘Then tell me!’ Madame brought her hand down with a slam on the desk top.
‘It’s that young man Maclean,’ said Cousin Emmie, taking another bite of biscuit, ‘the one that this little girl has just broken off her engagement to.’
‘Emmie!’
The voice nearly made me jump out of my skin, but Cousin Emmie went on unmoved with her own train of thought. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if that’s why that little girl broke off the engagement. She should never have got engaged to him in the first place. I wouldn’t have got engaged to him.’
Madame rose from her desk, stumped across the room and stood menacingly over her cousin, who, quite unperturbed, went on eating biscuit and sipping coffee.
‘Emmie, if you knew all this – this rubbish, for I don’t believe a word of it – why didn’t you mention it before?’
‘Why?’
‘Why what? What do you mean?’
‘Why mention something just for the sake of mentioning it? I didn’t know before that you wanted to know about this young man and this girl from the office, Lottie,’ and she took another bite of biscuit.
‘Emmie, stop chewing biscuits and listen to me!’
‘I am listening, Lottie. And biscuits won’t digest if you don’t chew them. I have to be careful at my age.’
‘Emmie, this is scandalous rubbish about this girl and Roddy. What makes you say a thing like that?’
‘Lottie, you think that any woman who isn’t married is a fool, but I am not such a fool that I don’t know about babies. I was a nurse once, after all. I know how babies come to get born, don’t I?’ She stared up at Madame. ‘I nearly told those two they must stop misbehaving themselves on your property and disturbing me on my walks. I don’t like that sort of thing.’
Madame sat staring at Cousin Emmie while she finished her biscuit and drank the last of her coffee. Madame was obviously marshalling all her forces for an attack on her cousin that would throw everything she had said into discredit and she radiated a force that held me rigid in my chair. Not so Cousin Emmie. She put down her cup and rose to her feet.
‘Emmie, where are you going?’
‘Out,’ said Cousin Emmie, and went, turning the corner of the doorway to drift away along the veranda like a withered leaf in a light breeze.
‘Janet, do you think my cousin is mad?’ Madame asked me.
‘No, Madame. Dee told me that she had seen Roddy with a coloured girl. I didn’t see any point in mentioning it.’
‘Janet! I do not understand how you can say such a t
hing so calmly!’ I noticed that she was very pale and that her hand shook. ‘You don’t seem to realise what this means. Roderick Maclean is the son of my manager!’
‘There,’ I thought, although I did not say it, ‘you are only partly right. Roderick Maclean is first and foremost Roderick Maclean.’
‘I realise that, Madame,’ I said aloud, ‘but Roddy is a very handsome young man and Lucy Freeman is a very pretty young girl.’
Suddenly Sir Ian came striding in, his white brows drawn down over his eyes, the eyes themselves at their fiercest.
‘Mother, I’d like a private word with you.’
The old lady looked up at him. ‘Yes, Ian?’
‘Well—’ He looked at me.
‘Is it about Roderick Maclean, Ian? Freeman the Millman has been to see you?’
‘Good God, Mother, how did you find out about this?’
‘Emmie has just told us.’
‘Emmie? How did she know, dammit?’
‘That doesn’t matter, Ian,’ She sighed. ‘Is it true?’
‘ ’fraid so, Mother. There’s a bunch o’ letters an’ everything – young fool!’
The telephone rang and Madame said: ‘Please answer the instrument for me, Janet.’
‘Nurse Porter here,’ the voice said. ‘Mrs Alexander? Would you tell Madame please that that Freeman girl has lost her baby. Doctor says she will be all right. I am leaving for Running Cut now.’
I put down the receiver and conveyed the bald message to Madame and Sir Ian.
‘Oh, well,’ Madame said, ‘perhaps it is for the best.’
‘By God, I’ll take my ridin’ stick to that young bounder!’ Sir Ian blazed. ‘Never liked the fellah! Never could fathom him,’ He swung round on me. ‘Twice never liked him either although he never said anything. Poor Missis Marion! Poor Rob!’ He strode to the door. ‘By heaven, when I catch him, I’ll have the hide off him! Mother, I’m goin’ up to Olympus to see Rob.’
‘Yes, Ian.’
I wanted to get out of the place, away from Madame and the Great House.
‘Will you drop me on your way, Sir Ian?’ I asked.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said impatiently, but I did not care.
12
A Question of Knowing Enough’
‘SIR IAN isn’t coming in for a beer?’ Twice asked, looking up from his drawing-board as I came up the steps and the car drove away. ‘What’s up?’
‘You may well ask. How is Dee?’
‘All right, I was up half an hour ago. She is studying wine catalogues, and last night might never have been. Come on, what goes on?’
I told him what had happened at the Great House, and after giving a long low whistle he began to smile and said: ‘The more I hear of that young devil, the more I like him.’
‘You react in a peculiar way. I don’t say I don’t agree with you, but the rest of this place is against us.’
‘It’s a question of knowing enough, as you are so fond of saying. He simply didn’t hang together as an engineer, but as the bloke who wrote But Not for Love he hangs together more and more.’
‘Implying that engineers are nice respectable types while writers go whoring about getting girls in the family way? People aren’t that easy to sort into groups or that hackneyed as personalities.’
‘It isn’t like that exactly,’ Twice said. ‘It was more that he was all out of kilter as an engineer.’
‘In other words, you had a feeling that he wasn’t really an engineer?’
Twice grinned at me with his teeth clenched. ‘All right. You win. But you never suspected him of being S. T. Bennett?’
‘Never. Thinking back, he was at the greatest pains to lead me away from any idea like that.’
‘I wonder why?’ Twice said. ‘I’ve always understood, though, that people who write, artists and so on, think along different lines from the rest of us. There is no guessing at his motives.’
‘Tangerines,’ I said, following, like Cousin Emmie, a train of thought of my own.
‘Huh?’
Looking at Twice’s puzzled face, I realised that I had spoken the word aloud. ‘When I was a child at Reachfar,’ I explained, ‘old Aunt Betsy used to have a box of tangerines sent to me from London every Christmas. They were the only oranges I ever saw in those days. It was a flat wooden box and held about twenty, and Tom and George used to open it very carefully and ceremonially, levering the lid up with the screw-driver. Inside, there were napkins of soft white paper, printed with gold curlicues, and when I lifted the four points of the napkins, there were the tangerines, every one wrapped in thick silver foil with just its dark orange top showing. Sometimes a thick, oval-shaped, dark green leaf had got into the box.’
‘Go on,’ Twice said.
‘That box was the essence of mystery – beautiful exotic mystery. It had the look, the smell, the colour, the whole atmosphere of another world, a world a million times removed from the human one that I lived in. It made no difference when I was told that peasants beside the Mediterranean Sea grew tangerines for sale as we grew potatoes at Reachfar. At that time tangerines remained for me a manifestation of a more mysterious, more wonderful world.’ I hesitated, feeling suddenly shy. ‘I feel a bit like that about people who write. It’s not the romantic Byronic image I have of them or anything about Bohemians being sexually loose in slovenly rooms on the Rive Gauche. It is that those people live in their minds in a world exotically different from the world my mind knows, like the tangerines when I was a child. I shall be a little scared of Roddy when I see him again. Shall you?’
‘Not scared exactly but sort of awkward. It’s queer, the Macleans producing a son who writes.’
‘Old Mr Carter wrote and so did Sir Richard,’ I said, remembering people from my past, ‘but with Mr Carter it was shipping and with Sir Richard it was history and these things are sciences as much as arts. It’s the arts that give me the tangerine feeling.’
‘I think there is a great deal in our being what you might call first-generation-educated,’ Twice said. ‘To people like Monica, it is a commonplace to have writers and painters in the family and among their acquaintance. They probably had tangerines every evening with the dessert too, when you think of it. But Rob and Marion are people like us. Their fathers were farmers who left school at fourteen. I wonder how they feel about their writer son?’
‘I don’t think they know.’
‘That’s another thing. Why this secrecy?’
I rose, looked out through the mosquito mesh and spoke with my back to him. ‘In a way, I can understand Roddy’s secrecy although I can’t explain it. It is something to do with being disapproved of – like my grandmother saying that tangerines were all very well but that potatoes were a better staple crop. Maybe Roddy feels that his first-generation-educated parents feel that engineers are a better staple crop than writers. . . . There’s the Rolls coming down from Olympus!’
Twice joined me at the mesh screen and we watched the big car come out of the trees of the Olympus drive, streak along between the fields of cane, pass the gates to the Great House and leave the Estate by the south approach.
‘The Bay, horse-whips and all,’ Twice said.
‘How I hate this place and these people this morning!’ I said. ‘And how I loathe all their bloody certainty that they are so right! I’d rather have old Cousin Emmie than any of them.’
‘Here is a change Indeed!’ Twice jeered.
‘Well, at least she sees straight. . . . What about lunch?’
‘As soon as you like. I have to go down to the Bay office this afternoon. Want to come?’
‘No. I’d better stay with Dee.’
‘That reminds me. She asked me to ask Isobel Denholm to come up this evening. Do you mind?’
‘Not me. If they are going to join forces, if that is what you call it, the sooner they do it the better. I’d like to have the house to ourselves. I tell you what – ask Isobel to come up for the weekend. They are moving up to Mount Melody o
n Monday, anyway, and she will keep Dee out of my hair, maybe. But tell her not to come before six in the evening. I’d like to have the afternoon in peace. And then, Twice, let’s swear a solemn swear to have no more house guests.’
‘There’s not much point. We’re bound to get involved with the first stray dog or cat we see.’
After lunch we both went upstairs to see Dee, who seemed to be very happy and looking forward to Isobel’s visit, but I noticed that there was about her an air of imminent departure, despite the fact that she was in bed, immobile and still sniffly with her cold. Parting sometimes does not wait for the moment when the goodbyes are said, and this was one of those times.
It was my habit in the afternoons, between lunch and tea when the day was at its hottest, to lie on my bed with a book, but today, after Twice had gone, I decided to stay downstairs to be on hand should there be any enquirers after Dee, and I settled myself on a sofa in the drawing-room that stood at right angles to the French window, and opened But Not for Love, which I was starting to re-read in the light of my new knowledge. The hot afternoon died down to the customary silence. Dram and Charlie had moved from the hibiscus clump, which gave no shade from the overhead summer sun at this time of the day, on to the veranda and lay spread side by side on the tiled floor; Caleb had set his garden hose in the notch of a forked stick so that the trickle of water ran down the slope by the roots of a hedge; Cookie, Clorinda and Minna rattled the last saucepan and slammed the last cupboard door before all four servants vanished to the dim cool quiet of their quarters for the afternoon. There was no sound from the factory on this non-working, out-of-Crop afternoon; no voices echoed from the cane-fields, and even the insects were silenced in the heat of the sun. I was reading, with admiration, an evocative description of Glasgow in cold November fog when I became aware that the light in the room had become even more shaded, and, looking over the top of the book, I saw at eye-level where I lay a pair of legs in khaki-drill trousers that ended in feet that wore dirty white tennis shoes. Sitting up and looking up in one movement, I found Roddy Maclean in the frame of the french window. ‘Why, hello,’ I said.