Emma Tupper's Diary

by Peter Dickinson

  “You lack the aristocratic outlook, Cousin Emma,” said Andy. “Of course only we should be able to see it.”

  He had his mouth full of kidney, but he managed the rebuke very aristocratically indeed.

  “Cousin Emma has something,” said Roddy. “The company ought to . . . What’s the word?”

  “Diversify,” said Finn.

  “We could get Old Crow to fiddle with the liniment and sell it as a sun lotion to the caravanners,” said Roddy.

  “And have them going back to Glasgow with hair all over them?” asked Finn.

  Andy sighed, grown-uply patient.

  “They wouldn’t come,” he said. “What they want is the sea. Why should they come inland once they’ve reached the coast?”

  “The coast’s so crowded,” said Finn.

  “It rains less there,” said Roddy.

  “But if people knew it was here,” said Emma. “There’s always people who want to be a bit different, and if they knew how beautiful it was . . .”

  “There’s other lochs just as beautiful,” said Finn. “Why should they choose this one? What’s so special about it?”

  “Hello,” said Miss Newcombe’s sleepy voice from the door. “Am I too late?”

  She was bare-footed and wore an ivory-coloured quilted dressing-gown. There was sleepy-dust in the corner of her eyes, and she hadn’t brushed her hair or put on any make-up, but Emma adored her all over again looking like that, a sleepy goddess. Mary came running from the kitchen at the sound of her voice.

  “There’s fresh yoghurt made, Miss Poop,” she said, plonking a big bowl on the sideboard. “I kept it back till you woke, so that it would not all be gobbled up by these big mouths. Och, Miss Emma, I was forgetting you—have you space for some yoghurt now?”

  “No thank you,” said Emma, a truthful girl.

  “What were you talking about?” said Miss Newcombe. “Somebody being beautiful?”

  “Something being beautiful,” said Roddy.

  “Oh,” said Miss Newcombe in a disappointed voice.

  “We were arguing about how we could make our loch seem more interesting than other lochs,” said Finn.

  “But it’s got the creature, hasn’t it, Mary?” said Miss Newcombe.

  “Indeed it has,” said Mary.

  Roddy looked as though the whole glorious day had been suddenly spoilt.

  “Something real!” he shouted. “Something to make the beastly tourists come here!”

  “Creature?” said Emma. “Do you mean a monster?”

  Andy laughed.

  “Oh yes, we’ve got one of those,” he said. “It’s made of rafts of weed which get carried up from the bottom by gases from decaying stuff underneath them. They make black hummocks, quite long sometimes, so that you see several things in line that might be the humps of a sea-serpent, and then the gas gets out and they sink again. That’s what all the monsters really are—Loch Ness and Loch Morar as well as ours. How long since anybody saw its head, Mary? Mouth, eyes, teeth?”

  “Och, you’ll not see them and live,” said Mary placidly. “But there was poachers came up from Glasgow when you were in your cradle, Master Andy—an ignorant class of men, as everybody knows there’s no fish worth poaching in our loch. But they brought two boats by night, and nets, and by morning both boats were overturned and three of the men vanished. Those were the last poachers I heard of coming this way.”

  “And the first,” said Roddy, “if everyone knows there’s no fish worth poaching. Hey!”

  Mary had walked round behind his chair while he was talking, and now biffed him hard on the ear with her open palm; then she nodded to Emma and walked out smiling. Roddy rubbed his ear and went on eating his toast.

  “Even if there’s only a story about a monster . . .” said Emma. “I mean there’s only a story about Loch Ness.”

  “That one’s had two hundred years to spread,” said Andy.

  “But things happen so much faster now,” said Emma. “I mean if only you could get your story on television . . .”

  “Cousin Emma,” said Andy, lordly and handsome, “you have only just reached civilisation after a formative childhood in the desert. Understandably you are besotted by the television set. But you will later learn that it cannot do everything—in particular it cannot make one stretch of water which might have a monster in it look more interesting than another stretch of water which might not.”

  “He’s the expert,” said Roddy. “His girl’s in the Glasgow studios.”

  “You’re out of date, you nasty little tattler,” said Andy with sudden sharpness.

  “Come on, Cousin Emma,” said Finn. “You’ve had all the ideas. Don’t let him shoot you down.”

  Something about her tone and glance told Emma that it mattered, though she couldn’t guess how. She thought hard.

  “Yes, I see,” she said. “That means . . . that means you’ve got to have something you can actually see in the water. If you had a cine camera . . .”

  “If!” whooped Roddy. “Once Finn’s got going the whole valley rattles with camera shutters from dawn to dusk. She once spent three whole days photographing one stone on the shore.

  “And I got one of the pictures into an exhibition,” said Finn. “Go on, Cousin Emma.”

  “Well, you might be able to wait for one of these rafts to come up, and photograph it, and if it looked real enough you’d have something to show the television people, and if . . .”

  “My dear Cousin Emma,” said Andy, still angry enough to sound sneering rather than teasing, “I doubt if these blobs come to the surface twice in a whole year, and always in different places. You’d have to be within thirty yards of one, camera loaded and ready, for anything to show at all. Fat chance!”

  “Don’t let’s leave it to nature, then,” said Finn. “Let’s do the faking ourselves.”

  Andy started to say something squashing, stopped, snatched a sugar-lump from the bowl, threw it in the air and caught it in his mouth like a lap-dog.

  “Right,” he said when he’d finished crunching it up. “We’ll start from there. It’s an idiot idea, but it’s an excuse to see if Anna will still go. If she will, we’ll try putting a super-structure on her, a monster’s head and neck, and . . .”

  “It’ll have to be pretty strong,” said Roddy. “You’ll need to get Anna out of sight under the water, and when she surfaces she’s got to go fast enough to show a wake behind the neck. I read a book about Loch Ness last term, and much the best picture of their monster, the only one that looks like anything at all, has a wake behind. That means you can see it’s moving.

  “Can do,” said Andy. “We’ll use the fibreglass I bought for the Lotus. Laminate it thick enough on to a wire skeleton and it’ll do. There’ll be a bit of a problem fastening it to Anna, but it ought to be possible. Anything will do for the tail—it’s only got to show in one or two places. We could fill a couple of tractor inner tubes with water until they were barely buoyant and trail them behind Anna . . .”

  “I thought her name was Emma,” said Miss Newcombe. “In fact I’m almost sure it was. You won’t let them do anything you don’t like, will you, darling? They can be very wild.”

  “Anna Di Ommany!” shouted Roddy.

  “No,” said Miss Newcombe. “Emma something.”

  “It’s all right,” said Emma. “They’re not talking about me. I think it’s the submarine, isn’t it?”

  Finn nodded.

  “Victorian scientists had a wild time,” said Andy. “They could study anything they wanted and still have time to keep up with the arts. Grandfather experimented and worked in half-a-dozen different fields, but he still read Homer in Greek while he was waiting for experiments to work. He called his sub Anadyomene, which means ‘coming up from the waves’—you remember that Botticelli picture of Venus wafting ashore in a sea-shell . . .”

  “She looks a bit like Poop,” said Finn.

  “Does she?” said Miss Newcombe with sudden interest.


  “Botticelli’s Venus Anadyomene, yes,” said Andy. “Our Anadyomene, no. Anna’s an ugly old sow, but she works.”

  “Not at all like Poop, then,” said Roddy.

  “Father had her out in 1953 to celebrate the Coronation,” said Andy. “I can just remember. He had to do something, as Clan Chief, so he held a Clan Muster here. It was his excuse for not going to London. Mother was furious.”

  “You were only five,” said Finn, “and stuck in the nursery all day. They wouldn’t have quarrelled there.”

  “She was furious enough to bring it up for years afterwards, whenever they had a row.”

  “1953’s a long time ago,” said Roddy. “Will she still go?”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Andy. “It will have been Andy Coaches’ dad who laid her up, and he’ll have done it as fussily and tidily as if he was burying an uncle. You remember—no, Roddy won’t—what he used to be like about our oiling our bikes at the end of each holidays. We’ll have to check quite a few things, strip the pumps down and probably renew the washers and so on. And she runs off the accumulator cells from our stand-by plant—Cousin Emma, we have our own generator in case of emergencies because the mains electricity comes to us by an eighteen-mile cable over the hills. I’m pretty certain Father bought a complete new set of cells for the Coronation jaunt, though Anna won’t need nearly as many as the house does to get up to mains voltage—about two dozen, I should think.”

  “Isn’t 1953 a long time ago for a battery?” said Finn. “Car batteries only last a couple of years.”

  “These are quite different,” said Andy. “A car battery is made of six cells joined together, little ones. These are individual cells, two volts each, made to last. They’ll take over a thousand cycles of charge and discharge. They may be near the end of their tether, but even so they’ll do us, with luck.”

  “Couldn’t we buy new ones?” said Roddy. “I mean, if it’s only two dozen.”

  “Five quid each,” said Andy. “A hundred and twenty pounds. I don’t mind wasting a bit of my fibreglass, but anything over fifty quid and the party’s off.”

  “Father must have spent more than that on his new batteries,” said Roddy.

  “He needed them,” said Andy. “We didn’t get on the mains till the year after. Besides, we weren’t paupers then.”

  “And anyway,” said Finn, “Mother would have spent a hundred and twenty quid ten times over in London.”

  “How lovely,” sighed Miss Newcombe.

  Andy gave a quick frown at Finn and shoved his chair back with a clatter.

  “Everybody finished?” he said. “Let’s go and have a look at her. Then I’ll be able to see how much we’ve got to do, and whether we can do it with the kit we’ve got here. High time you got dressed, Poop. These are the decent Highlands, girl.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Miss Newcombe and drifted out, while Emma gazed after her. She had said almost nothing, but the room seemed lifeless without her. The boys were out on the verandah by the time Emma came to from her daze. Finn was laughing quietly as she shifted her dirty plate to the sideboard.

  “What’s up,” said Emma, copying her.

  “Andy. Why do you think he’s suddenly so keen on faking a monster? He knows there’s not going to be anything like enough money in it to save the company.”

  “Oh, yes, I see,” said Emma. “He was being squashing, and then he changed his mind. He said it was because he wanted to get the submarine going.”

  “Well, that’s part of it. But the other part is that it might be a way of luring Gabriella up here.

  “The girl Roddy was out of date about?”

  “That’s what Andy says . . . He lives a complicated life.”

  “But what about you?” said Emma.

  “Oh, it’s something to do. It might stop the boys from fighting. The last two holidays have been hell.”

  “That was why you egged me on?” said Emma. “There was a sort of row beginning, wasn’t there?”

  Finn smiled her calm, secretive smile and jumped the five steps from the verandah in one leap. Emma went down more sedately, a little ashamed at her own unwillingness to risk twisting her ankle on the first day of the holidays. The McAndrews, she felt, were the kind who would risk anything for a spur-of-the-moment whim, even Finn who seemed so cool. Perhaps they would soon get bored of having their unadventurous cousin to stay.

  The boys were already far down the road, Roddy running at a pounding sprint by the water’s edge and Andy loping beside him; then the road and shore curved and the corner of the bungalow hid them. By the time the girls reached the corner they had disappeared, presumably into one of the three long, tarred buildings which stood beside a little crooked jetty whose criss-cross supports were mirrored in the motionless loch. Emma stopped on the little bridge over the stream and looked about her in surprise; everything before this had seemed so wild, with the road running between the steep hills and the water and then the bungalow itself; which for all its luxury looked like a temporary building, a lodge in the wilderness. But now, where the stream had washed a wide arena of soil down from the hills, she saw stone buildings—stables and barns and a little row of cottages with ornamental carvings above doors and windows. There was even a squat octagonal tower that could only be a dovecote. The line of the buildings carried her eye away from the loch towards the foot of the bill.

  “Oh!” she said. “What’s that?

  Set at a right-angle to the line, close under the hill and looking out over the arena and the loch, stood a house. It was huge and it was blind; not a window along the wide front reflected the day. Every pane of glass was gone.

  “That’s Big House,” said Finn. “What we live in now is called The Huts. Grandfather built The Huts as a laboratory, and moved down there after the fire. He was going to rebuild Big House, but he never got round to it.”

  “How long ago?”

  “1887. Andy says grandfather spent the insurance money on setting up the company, but that’s nonsense. He was a rich man already, because his father had made a lot of money out of building railways. He didn’t build them himself, of course—he invested money in them; it was a frightful gamble, but he was lucky and he built Big House to celebrate. Come and look at Anna.”

  After the sparkling light of the morning the inside of the smallest boathouse seemed dark as a cellar. Dimly in the light from the door Emma could see what looked like a railway goods-wagon—the result, perhaps, of one of her great-great-grandfather’s successful gambles. Then she saw that the wheels were too small and too close together, and that the bulk above them was the wrong shape for any sort of tank, pointed at the end and jutting out so far that it would be bound to bash into the next wagon in the train. She heard Andy’s voice in the darkness, and a scraping noise. Then a slit of dazzling light opened at the far end of the shed, and widened as Andy, wading in water up to his knees, heaved a big door open. The boathouse faced east, so that the sunlight bounced blindingly off the water, and made silver ripple-patterns flow along the underside of Anadyomene’s dull hulk.

  Yes, there were rails, but they ran at a steep angle straight down into the loch; the wheels were part of a sturdy cradle on which the submarine lay. Anadyomene was a dull greenish colour, but not the green of paint—rather the green of old cannon outside museums. She was a bit longer than two beds placed end to end—say fifteen feet—and fat. Emma had expected something cigar-shaped, like a U-boat, but this was a pointed blob. A man could almost have stood upright in the middle of her, if he got his head into the much smaller blob on top. This second blob, shaped like a squashed bowler-hat, must be the conning-tower; there was no deck by it; the hull immediately began its curve down to the points at either end, and a mirror curve ran up to the points from below. At Andy’s end, the point nearest the water, there were four rigid fins and a ridiculous little propeller that looked as if it would hardly have driven a toy boat. When Emma walked up to the top of the shed and looked along the hull s
he saw that it was exactly circular, with the conning-tower squatting on top; she also saw that in the front of the conning-tower there was a narrow strip of thick green glass, shaped like the visor-slit in a knight’s helmet. So this was a submarine you could see out of, supposing you could see anything under water. Towards the back of the hull, like the flippers of a turtle, two large flat plates jutted out. Andy was meditatively waggling one of them slightly up and down when Roddy fetched a rough wooden ladder from two hooks on the wall, bonked it boomingly against the hull and scampered up.

  “Hold it,” said Andy as Roddy started to fiddle with the heavy catch of the lid on top of the conning-tower.

  “Who says?” said Roddy, and lifted the lid.

  At once Andy dashed up the ladder, caught him by the belt of his jeans and pulled him towards the propeller. Roddy, straddling the hull, clung to the rim of the conning tower until Andy began to tickle him. As soon as he let go Andy started to shove him along the curve of the hull, which grew steeper and steeper, though there was never any danger of his falling But though he could easily have jumped down he tried uselessly to cling to the gripless metal, shouting “Stop it! Oh stop it!” until Finn picked up the ladder and took it along to the stern. When Roddy’s foot reached it she seized his heel and placed it on a rung.

  “Other leg,” she said. “Come on, Roddy. Other leg. You won’t fall.”

  Shiveringly Roddy swung his other leg over and Finn felt it on to the rung for him; he worked himself by inches on to the ladder and came slowly down; none of the time had he been more than six feet above the ground. Andy stood on the hull above them, hands on hips, grinning like a handsome buccaneer who has just fed his favourite enemy to the sharks.