“He never learns,” said Finn to Emma. “He can go up but he can’t come down. He’s got stuck in more trees than any boy in Scotland.”
Roddy seemed to regain all his usual aggression the moment he touched the ground, but at the same time he lost his temper. “You wait!” he shouted at Andy. “You wait! I’ll do . . . I’ll do something!”
He rushed out of the boathouse.
“What was that about?” said Andy, pretending to be astonished.
“Showing up his weakness in front of Cousin Emma,” said Finn. “Andy, you’re an oaf.”
“She’d better know in case she goes climbing with him,” said Andy. “Anyway, who talked about spending hundreds of pounds in London when Poop was listening?”
“All right,” said Finn. “All square. Cousin Emma, next time Roddy does something you might admire, try and say so. Don’t cheat—he’ll see through that. Can we see inside Anna?”
“No point,” said Andy. “I forgot to bring a torch—that’s why I didn’t want Roddy smashing around in the dark. I’ll go up and inspect the generator batteries. The trouble is you can never tell if a cell’s just on the verge of going, but I’ll be able to check whether any have actually gone. While Cousin Emma’s flirting with Roddy, you might think about monster-heads; we don’t want anything dragonish—there’s a book of dinosaurs in the billiard-room, or there used to be—you might find something to start you off in that. It mustn’t look as if it came off a shield or out of a fairy story. Got it?”
Emma stood in the sunlight and wondered where to start looking for Roddy. From another of the boathouses she heard a banging and scraping, and went to investigate. Roddy was dragging a dinghy down the slip-way, his face still purple with fury and effort, though every heave only shifted the boat an inch or two over the concrete.
“Can I help?” said Emma. “Are you going for a row?”
“Sail,” panted Roddy. “Take off your shoes and socks and catch hold of the thwart there.”
Between them they moved it a foot at a time, until they were paddling in the chilly shallows. Suddenly the boat was resting on water rather than the grinding concrete and at the next heave slid with such a rush across the glossy surface that Emma sat down in it and rose soaked to the arm-pits, to see Roddy hooting with pleasure.
“Run back to The Huts and change,” he said. “Give your wet things to Mary. I’ll pick you up there. Have you done any sailing?
“No.”
“Good. I’ll teach you.”
Clammy and clinging though her jeans were, Emma stopped on the verandah to look at Miss Newcombe, who was sunbathing. She lay on her face on a lilo while a radio disc-jockey gibble-gabbled softly at her ear. She was tanned, but not to the solid beech-wood brown of the South African heroes and heroines Emma knew; the weaker sun of Scotland had turned her a silky gold all over.
“Dipped in honey,” said Emma.
“Yum yum,” said Finn, coming out of the main door with a big green book under her arm. “What’s happened to you?”
“I fell in the water getting the boat out. Roddy’s going to teach me to sail.”
“Can you swim?”
“A bit.”
“I thought all South Africans . . .”
“I had a sort of eczema, so I wasn’t allowed in the sea. But I’ve been learning at school.”
“Then . . . OK, I’ll come and draw monsters in the bow. Roddy’s a pretty good sailor, but you can get sudden gusts off Ben Goig without a second’s warning. Anybody can capsize on our loch.”
She sounded proud about it. Emma went in and changed, and found a pink-faced girl in the kitchen plucking a chicken. She said she was called Caitlin and showed Emma where to hang her wet clothes. By the time Emma came out, Roddy had his dinghy close up by the road, its tall triangle of sail as yellow as a buttercup and flopping to and fro in the light breeze; he seemed to be arguing with Finn—you could tell from his posture—but they’d settled it by the time Emma was down the steps. Finn tucked herself and her book and her sketching pad into the awkward nook in front of the mast, and Emma climbed in at the stern.
“What was dipped in honey?” said Finn, as though she were changing a conversation which Emma hadn’t heard.
“Miss Newcombe,” said Emma. “She looked like that.”
“Except for being sticky,” said Roddy. “Can’t you call her Poop, for heaven’s sake?”
He obviously had his sulks back.
“I can if she asks me,” said Emma. “Are you sure calling her that doesn’t make her . . . sort of stay like she is?”
“Her real name’s Peony,” said Roddy. “You can’t expect us to call her that!”
“That,” echoed the far cliff, faint on the faint breeze.
“She was called Poop when we got her,” said Finn.
“She’s not a dog!” shouted Roddy, and again the cliff agreed with him.
“What a super echo,” said Emma.
“It just works down this one line,” said Finn. “That’s why grandfather built the Huts there, so that he could do experiments with sound.”
“Father calls her Poop,” said Roddy. “He wouldn’t if he thought it was bad for her.”
“What’s your father like?” said Emma. “What does he do? Why isn’t he here?
“He’s a spy,” said Roddy. “Only they never seem to put him up against a wall and shoot him. That would learn him.”
“What’s he doing now?” said Emma.
“Spying,” said Roddy. “Against the Swiss.”
“Shut up,” said Finn. “Father is short and thin and old, but not old-feeling, except on a few bad days. He was very wild when he was young, so he didn’t marry until he was fifty-five. He was the only son after a lot of daughters, too, which is why we’re a whole generation further up the family tree than you are. He’s never had a job, except during wars. I think he may have been a sort of spy once, but now all he’s interested in is insects. He knows a lot about locusts, and he’s made himself the world’s top expert on a sort of beetle that damages cocoa trees in Africa. He’s at a conference in Geneva now, all about controlling insect pests with other insects which eat the pests. But although he’s never done anything, he’s been everywhere and seen everything and met everyone. If he finds you reading a Bulldog Drummond book he’ll tell how he and Sapper got thrown out of a Marseilles night club one evening; and whenever an Honours List is published he has to spend several days writing to all his cronies who’ve become Lords and things. He loves lords. He’s very clever and very tough. He ought to have been a great man, but somehow he went along a different road.”
“Thank you,” said Emma.
“Father’s a spy,” said Roddy. “He always was and he always will be. When he dies St Peter will meet him at the gate and say ‘Ah, Major McAndrew—we’ve been waiting for you. We just want you to nip down to the other place and find out one or two things for us.’”
Finn and Emma laughed, and then Roddy started his sailing lesson. He was a rotten teacher, as he tried to explain how a sailing boat can go forward even when the wind seems to be pushing it sideways, or worse. He made it very confusing, and he knew it, and that made him shout. But it was interesting for Emma to notice how suddenly the echo of his shouts died when the boat went out of the line along which the cliff funnelled any noise that came to it.
“Show her,” said Finn at last. “Shove the tiller about and let her see what happens. She’ll work out why—she’s that sort.”
After that the morning became comfortable again, and soon Emma was holding the tiller while Roddy played around with the set of the sail. Finn passed aft a sketch of a most plausible monster, thin-necked and tiny-headed, before settling down to read her book. The day drowsed towards noon.
“I say,” said Finn suddenly. “Here’s a bit of luck. Nobody knows why the dinosaurs died out. They all suddenly became extinct at about the same time, and this man thinks it was because the climate got colder. But our loch’s warm, which wou
ld explain why the creature managed to stick it out here.”
“It didn’t feel warm when I sat down in it,” said Emma.
“It would have felt a good sight colder if it hadn’t got warm springs in it,” said Roddy. “You could work the fish in too, Finn.”
“What about the fish?” said Finn.
“There being no big ones.”
“I haven’t seen any fish,” said Emma, peering down into the extraordinarily clear water.
“They’re all up the east end,” said Roddy, pointing down the loch. “It’s shallow there, and full of plankton and weed and so on, and shoals of little fish, but no big ones because the monster eats them. This is the deep end.”
“How deep?” said Emma.
“Nobody knows. It just goes down and down. It’s a great crack, with underwater cliffs on each side.”
“My creature is gentle and herbivorous,” said Finn. “He lives on a special sort of weed which only grows in our loch.”
“How many are there?” said Emma. “Or does it live for ever?
“About six at a time.”
“Wouldn’t it become very in-bred?”
“That’s all right,” said Roddy. “The McAndrews are very in-bred too.”
“No we’re not,” said Finn. “The clan married each other for about three generations between the evictions and the railways, but not enough to make us different from other people. My creature is very in-bred. It lives for about about two hundred years, and the other dinosaurs died out . . . hang on—” she rattled through the leaves of her book and ran her finger down a chart “—sixty million years ago. How many generations is that, Cousin Quick-with-sums?”
“Thirty thousand. No, three hundred thousand.”
“Too many,” said Roddy. “It’ll have to live longer.”
“Or have more of them,” said Emma.
“There’d have to be more of them anyway,” said Roddy. “Otherwise in all that time you’d be bound to have a point when all six were girls.”
“Eggs,” said Finn. “They could lay eggs which stay dormant for ages, couldn’t they? We ought to have one to show. They might bury them in the sand like turtles.”
“No,” said Roddy. “If you practically never see them, they must be like fish and live deep.”
“I’ve given mine nostrils,” said Finn. “All the dinosaurs were air-breathers. I think.”
“If they laid their eggs near the warm springs,” said Emma, and then . . . Oh!”
A huge white egg popped out of the water beside the boat, patterned with strange ridges. Emma stared, horrified, but only for an instant before the egg spun round and became Miss Newcombe’s bathing-cap.
“Boo!” she said. She must have swum quite a long way under water but was hardly panting at all. “Lunch-time, Roddy. Please tow me home. Andy says that something whatever he was doing . . . is all right.”
“Did he say anything else?” said Roddy.
“I don’t think so.”
Roddy threw her a rope and steered home, frowning. Emma watched Miss Newcombe lazily trailing through the water, like a fish that enjoyed being caught; she rehearsed a few admiring words for Roddy’s sailing, but it was wasted thought because he bungled the landing, thudding the boat into the beams of the jetty. All she could say was “Thank you for teaching me to sail,” but Roddy only scowled worse. He and Andy needled each other all through lunch while Finn read her dinosaur book and Emma told Miss Newcombe about Botswana.
Chapter 3
“I AM BEGINNING to understand about the Scots,” wrote Emma. “And why they murdered each other so much.” She looked out at the loch and wondered whether it was fair to put a thing like a personal quarrel into her diary. To-day it was easy to believe in the hot springs, because a band of mist, or steam, lay a few feet above the gently lurching surface. She could see below the band for quite a long way across the water; and above it the skyline, nocked with Darwin’s Pimple, stood clear; but the far shore and the echoing cliffs were blanked out.
Emma decided that the feud between Andy and Roddy was tiresome but interesting, so she’d put it in; when she’d finished the diary she could always change her mind and re-write the pages where it came. That was an advantage in a loose-leaf diary. Or perhaps the feud would simply clear up now that the rain had gone; when they’d all been cramped together in the hull of Anadyomene, the air had been heavy with bad temper, crackling like the air on the veldt before a thunderstorm.
“It might be something to do with the narrow valleys they live in,” she wrote. “The mountains press in on them, so that they have to break out or fight each other. It was like that yesterday in the submarine.”
Emma was sitting in the triangular cavern of metal, with her back against the motor, carefully rubbing away the verdigris from the rod of the port after pump, which Andy had dismantled for her. The emery paper bit into the green stains until suddenly there were parallel scratches of yellow; as soon as she saw them she took a sheet of finer paper and rubbed with that, holding the metal up every now and then to the light of the bulb that dangled by the hatch. She thought the pumps were oddly beautiful. There was something immensely satisfying about the way their working parts fitted together, so finely made that you could feel the slight suck of metal as you slid a cleaned shaft along the groove it was meant for. And the outsides were decorated with a pattern of vine-leaves and a panel saying “ROPER’S INVINCIBLE EXTRACTOR. FIFTEEN GOLD MEDALS.” There was a picture of the gold medals under the words; you could see the bearded head of Napoleon III on the top one, but the artist had had to overlap the others to get them all in so that only the backs of the royal heads showed, with sometimes a royal ear.
Roddy craned over the motor to see what she was doing.
“They aren’t kings at all,” he said. “They’re all impostors. That one was a sheep rustler, and that one was a forger.”
“What did he forge?”
“Nelson’s Columns, but he could never get them big enough so he only sold a few to very stupid Americans. That’s why he had to earn a bit extra by sitting for fake gold medals.”
“Napoleon the Third was a real impostor, sort of,” said Finn.
“A real impostor and not a fake one,” said Roddy in an explaining voice. “A fake impostor isn’t an impostor at all. He is what he’s pretending to be, and he’s only pretending he isn’t.”
“Shut up,” said Finn. “Napoleon was a waiter before he was an Emperor. He used to boast that he could carve ham thinner than any monarch in Europe, but then he started the Franco-Prussian War and lost it, and his friends weren’t interested in the ham any more. That’s all true. Father told me.”
“When was the war?” said Roddy.
“Eighteen seventy-something. Nearly twenty years before grandfather thought of Anna.”
“He didn’t think of her,” said Roddy. “He pinched the idea from a Frenchman. What was his name?”
“Goubet,” said Andy’s voice above their heads. Emma sensed Roddy going tense, and looked up. Andy’s face was upside down poking through the hatch.
“Get it right,” he said sarcastically. “Monsieur Goubet built two submarines, but they weren’t much good because they wouldn’t stay level in the water. He cast the hull of the first one out of a single bit of bronze, so that he didn’t have any leaky seams, and he had the notion of using an electric motor. Grandfather got him to cast a second hull, for Anna, and he pinched the idea of the motor. But he invented a quite different control system, like modern submarines. He was a clever old cove. Anna works.”
The head, crimson with the effort of its upside-down lecture, whisked out of sight again. Roddy was beginning to relax when a pair of gumboots dangled from the hatch, followed by bare knees, a brown kilt, a naked wet torso and Andy’s head the right way up.
“I’ve had a notion,” said Andy. “Those old batteries are OK, but they might pack it in any moment. It would be far safer to have new ones, and it struck me that what we’re doing i
s really publicity for the company. We could buy some new ones and swing it on the company accounts. It would be allowable against tax, and we’d finish up with twenty-four fresh batteries for the generator.”
“How much?” said Roddy.
“I rang up Fort William. It comes to just over a hundred and thirty quid.”
“You can’t do it!” shouted Roddy, trying to leap up and banging his head on the bronze hull. “You can’t do it!” he said again as he floundered. “It’s the shareholders’ money. You’ve no right to waste the shareholders’ money furthering your own amours. I bet there’s something in the Companies Acts about it. I’ll write to Old Crow and ask him.”
“Vote, Finn,” said Andy nonchalantly.
“No thanks,” said Finn. “It sounds quite a good idea about the tax, if it would work, but you know Old Crow would be against a wangle like that if it came to a vote; and it isn’t right to outvote him on this kind of thing—he’d be terribly hurt.”
“OK,” said Andy, very dignified. “I’ll go and get the best of the old ones. We’ll probably get stuck without any juice, thanks to your pig-headedness, and . . .”
“If it’s going to be dangerous . . .” Emma began.
Andy laughed, dashing and scornful.
“Canny girl. But it shouldn’t be too bad. The pumps are hand operated, so we should be able to float up. In fact I think you probably drive the thing in a slightly buoyant state and use the hydroplanes to force her under, so that if she stops she’ll automatically bob up. Roddy may make us the laughing-stock of Scotland, but he isn’t going to drown us.”
Andy lifted his arms to the rim of the hatch and flicked himself out, supple as a gymnast.
They chattered on until the boots dangled through the hatch again and the rage-storm inside the bronze cave brewed up so that Emma’s skin prickled. Andy used a steel tape to measure dimensions, but left without explaining why. It was very close quarters for four people, as Anadyomene was only built for two. The crew were supposed to sit back to back in the exact centre of the boat, with their heads poking up into the conning-tower so that one could look out through the glass slit forward, and the other through a similar slit towards the stern. They were going to have a lot to do, Emma thought, each with one pair of pumps to work, while the man who faced forward steered and the man who faced aft was in charge of the engine and the flipper-like hydroplanes. All those levers! But if Andy was right about how you made Anna go, it meant you worked the pumps until she was almost sinking, letting water flood in to the four ballast tanks below. After that you left them alone and could concentrate on the other things. It might be possible with practice, but Emma was very glad it wouldn’t be her. Even on dry land the submarine’s hull felt like a prison, a trap; she hated to imagine what it would be like to mutter along below the surface, with the chill water above and below pressing in against every square inch of its hull, seeping through by the propeller shaft and the hydroplane pivots, and waiting—if you got deep, too deep—to crush the bronze bubble as you crumple a sweet-paper in your fist before throwing it away.
Emma Tupper's Diary Page 4