Emma Tupper's Diary

by Peter Dickinson

  “Well done,” she said. “Well done!”

  “It’s all in the mind,” he whispered, shivering as if he had malaria. She took him by the hand, picked up the torch, using her jersey as an oven-cloth, and led him over the uneven floor. Twice they had to stop to light fresh squares of aertex before they stood at the bottom of the crack and stared upwards.

  “We can chimney up there,” said Roddy, hooking the boathook into his belt.

  As he spoke the light changed. At the very top, blinding, a gold bar lanced from side to side, unwavering, flooding the hole with its glory.

  “I’m all right going up,” said Roddy, and led the way.

  It took them almost an hour. The bar of sunlight thinned and vanished, and then a new one shot through another hole. They learnt not to look up, because the dazzle of light made it impossible to see their way clearly down in the shadows of the pit. When they did reach the top Emma had to wedge herself agonisingly across the hole to provide Roddy with a foothold to work inside the beehive of coarse stones with the boathook; he bashed out some of the smaller ones, then levered at a large one. As it gave way the three or four above it fell back thundering into the tunnel. Shaking all over Emma crawled through the gap and looked out over the misty loch to The Huts and the boathouses and the gaunt projection of the Big House. Then she leaned against Darwin’s Pimple and sobbed and sobbed.

  “I say, you are a good guesser,” said Roddy.

  The Mr McAndrew who lived at Fertagh answered their knocking in his pyjamas, and wheedled and clucked dismay as Roddy told him how they’d been for a night walk but managed to come back on the wrong side of the loch. Mary answered the telephone, unsurprised. Stodgily they climbed the hill again and wandered down the far slope, careless of adders, Roddy giggling hysterically when he slithered and fell. Finn had come to meet them in the little cove, using the dinghy with the outboard motor. She asked no questions at all as they stammered back over the still, calm, harmless water.

  Chapter 8

  “SO,” WROTE EMMA, “THERE WAS NO TIME to write that morning. Finn found one of her father’s sleeping-pills, and I ate it. But I went to sleep before we’d finished the argument.”

  It was after breakfast now, and the day looked like clearing, but Emma was determined to get it all written down before the Jaguar came back from Glasgow. Then it would be there, in words, and nothing could change it.

  “In fact I was too sleepy to remember much of the argument,” she wrote, “but I remember what it was about . . .”

  It was about what to do; what to say to the TV people. Andy and Roddy were on one side, Emma on the other, and Finn neutral. Miss Newcombe was still asleep. Emma’s exhausted voice was hoarse and thin.

  “But you can’t, you can’t, you can’t,” she cried. “As soon as they’ve shown the programme you’ll have hordes of people swarming up here . . .”

  “That’s the object of the exercise,” said Roddy.

  “No, it’s not. You aren’t paupers. You’re richer than anyone I’ve ever met. You don’t want people coming up here. They’ll alter the water. They’ll alter the fish and the weeds. The whole balance will change. The thing will die. You’ve got to tell them it was all a joke.”

  “We’ve been through all this,” said Andy. “I am not going to tell them it was all a joke.”

  He was being very quiet and patient, and had been since the first white-lipped fury was over, once Roddy and Emma had persuaded him that their story was true.

  “I’ll tell them,” said Emma.

  “That won’t do any good,” said Roddy. “They’ll expect someone to say that anyway. A bit of controversy’s meat and drink to them. Do the mysterious waters . . .”

  “I’ll show them Anadyomene,” said Emma.

  “That’s the point,” said Finn. “You can’t persuade them my film was a joke, Cousin Emma, unless you can show them how it was taken. Roddy and Andy can’t put on another performance without getting Anna out of the cave. So that’s the first thing for all three of you. You don’t even know if you can. Now, listen: Andy and Roddy can go back to this cave with some car batteries, and have a go at getting Anna out . . .”

  “They’ll be here hours before then,” said Andy. “They’ll want to know where I am, let alone where the monster is. If they see us messing around with a derelict sub on the far side of the loch . . .”

  “I’ve got toothache,” said Finn patiently. “It is agonising. You’ve rushed me in to Fort William. Roddy had an appointment anyway, so you took him too. We will have left Poop behind to show them the monster, only she’ll somehow have got the idea that it’s in Loch Goig. If Poop really dresses up to seduce them, she’ll get them out there in a flash. And once they’ve spent a day with her they’ll find it quite easy to believe that she made a little muddle.”

  “Seeing it’s all Roddy’s fault . . .” Andy began.

  “Shut up,” said Finn. “We’ve finished all that. The only problem is can Roddy manage?”

  “He’ll have to,” said Andy.

  “It’s a lot of down, from what they told us,” said Finn. “Roddy?”

  “I’ll have a go,” said Roddy. “I’m the only one who knows the way.”

  Even through her humming tiredness Emma could hear that he was already locked with terror—stiff at the idea of that first drop into the dark, and then those innumerable leaps and slithers, and finally the small green target of Anadyomene’s hull. He would never make it. And yet she had to get the submarine out, to show the TV people.

  “I’ll go,” she heard her voice saying. “I know the way too. Only I’ll have to have a sleep first.”

  “No time for that,” said Andy.

  “Rubbish,” said Finn. “You can see she’s got to. And you’ve got quite a lot of arrangements to make. You can give her four hours. And another thing, if Roddy runs the big boat, I’ll be able to . . .”

  And then Emma was being shaken awake again, by Finn this time.

  “Eleven o’clock,” she said. “We’ve got to get you clear across the loch before they come. Do you really think you can face it?”

  “I’ll have to,” said Emma. Somehow in her sleep she had made up her mind what to do, and how to do it, but she couldn’t tell anyone, not even Finn. She staggered off to the bathroom.

  On her way back, for luck, she looked into Miss Newcombe’s room. Her goddess was concentrating, like a scholar staring through his magnifying glass at a strange parchment; what she was studying was her own face, reflected three times in a dressing-table mirror. Beside her elbow a flat leather case lay open. Tiptoeing across Emma saw that it was the most elaborate make-up kit you could imagine, almost a laboratory of beauty, silver-topped jars and phials nestling each into its own nook of satin, just as the lenses had nestled in the box in the dark-room.

  “Oh, how lovely!” exclaimed Emma. “I’d love to have something like that. Did someone give it to you?”

  Miss Newcombe turned, dazzling. A faint blush seemed to flow under the delicate film of make-up.

  “I . . . I found it,” she said. “I’ll try and find you one . . . next time I . . . go somewhere. Did-you-know-there-was-a-monster-in-Loch-Goig-isn’t-that-interesting?”

  Emma asked Andy about it while they lay in the adder-riddled heather half-way up to Darwin’s Pimple. Finn, in the woods above the road, had started Ewan’s chain-saw and its noise ripped the valley. That was the signal, so Andy had calmly tucked his yoke of batteries away, taken Emma’s load and hidden that too, then pulled her down beside him. They watched two cars slide along the road, one yellow, one black. The people who climbed out of them were too small to distinguish, though one did look unusually fat; but there was no mistaking Miss Newcombe’s turquoise trouser-suit as she came down the steps to meet them.

  “Will she really be able to stick to her story, without getting in a muddle?” said Emma.

  “Oh, yes, that’s her trouble. She’s too teachable. She specialised in lifting things from places like Asp
reys in Bond Street, with a gang—two men and another woman—who coached her. Nobody—I mean policemen and magistrates and people like that—nobody would believe she didn’t know what she was up to, because the stories were clever and you couldn’t catch her out once she’d learnt them. It was a prison psychiatrist who found out, and Poop’s mother, who’s a charming lady but hopelessly vague and useless and always getting divorced, asked Father what to do, and Father knew a man at the Home Office—Father always knows a man somewhere—and he sort of went bail for her. She’s got a record, but we’ve guaranteed to keep her out of trouble. Trust Roddy to let her off the leash in Edinburgh. If I’d . . .”

  “Andy,” interrupted Emma.

  “Ung?”

  “The feud’s off. That’s part of the deal. I was too tired to tell you.”

  “You were pretty hysterical. What feud?”

  “You and Roddy.”

  “Oh, that. That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Yes it does. I don’t really want to help you, but I’m doing it for two reasons. One is that Roddy couldn’t have got Anadyomene stuck without me. The other is that you’re going to promise to call the feud off. Roddy’s promised—that’s why I went out with him at all. Now you’re going to promise. I hope.”

  (After all, Emma reasoned, she must let Andy think she had a motive for helping him, or he mightn’t let her crew with Ewan; everything depended on that. If he thought she’d been hysterical the night before, so much the better. Also it would mean she kept her bargain with Roddy, even if later she was going to betray the whole family. Some things are more important than others, but you look after the little things as well if you can manage it.)

  “OK,” said Andy, without thinking about it.

  “That’s not good enough,” said Emma. “How do I know you’ll stick to it? You’re all such liars. What do McAndrews make each other swear by?”

  Andy rolled on his side in the heather and smiled at her. At once she could see why the girls who ran across him in a good mood at Edinburgh University found it difficult to concentrate upon their studies.

  “I’ll stick to it because I like you,” he said. “We can’t have the Tuppers of the world thinking worse of us, can we? Oh, great, Poop’s taking them straight off—I thought we were going to have to stick around here while McTurdle drank five whiskies. I bet he’s spotted the champagne Mary put in with the picnic.”

  Working with Andy, Emma could understand how the Scots had conquered whole empires for the English. Though he was prepared to embark on the maddest enterprise for a whim, once his pride was engaged he worked like a slave to bring it off. And he thought it all out; he had brought the right ropes and pegs and slings to lower them into the shaft with their load, so that they were down safe and easy in twenty minutes compared with the slogging hour she’d taken to climb it that morning. And he was strong, moving easily with his half-hundred-weight yoke of batteries over the treacherous rocks, while Emma carried the torch and the spare torch and a coil of cable and another coil of rope and the satchel of tools and spikes. She was glad of the rest when Andy lowered his yoke at the place where the crevasse widened.

  “You mean you got Roddy down that!” he said.

  “He got himself down,” said Emma stubbornly.

  Andy only grunted.

  “Isn’t there anything you’re afraid of?” said Emma. “The same way Roddy is of heights. I’m terrified of snakes, for instance, and . . .”

  But she couldn’t talk about her fear of being trapped in Anadyomene, with the bottomless cold deeps waiting to receive her. In any case Andy just grunted again, took the tools, and working across the crevasse made a slanting ladder of spikes, up which he climbed with the end of the rope. Emma put the batteries one by one into the sling and he hauled them up. They rested again at the top. Five minutes later they were out of the tunnel into the heat and stench at the back of the cave. Emma flashed her torch among the rocks at their feet.

  “This way,” she said.

  “Sure? It’s easy to make a mistake in a jumble like this.”

  “Roddy made a pointer.”

  She showed him the little pile of stones, shaped like an arrowhead, on the flat rock.

  “He did several of those,” she said. “Anywhere he thought we might get lost on our way back.”

  “Bless his angry heart,” said Andy, settling the yoke of batteries on to the ground. “There’s nothing wrong with him, but sometimes I know just how Romulus felt when Remus jumped over that wall of his.”

  He put out his foot to scatter the pile, then withdrew it and laughed and took the torch. As he flashed the long beam across the ridges of the roof the hidden pack bayed its terror, a shock of sound that made Emma reach out and force his hand down. This was a big, rubber-cased torch with only one switch-position. The noise died away and Andy gave a long, shuddering sigh.

  “I didn’t believe it,” he said. “I didn’t honestly believe it.”

  They moved on, Emma keeping the beam as much as she could on the ground, lighting Andy across the ledges; the steamy reek filled her lungs and the heat made her blouse stick and suck at her ribs and shoulders. Going down became an effort like going up had been—it was moving against the current, the draught of foul air, the current of dread. They said very little. Sometimes, inevitably, the light showed to the watchers down by the water and they yelped their agony. Next time they rested Andy took the torch.

  “Now listen,” he said. “You’ve got to let me have a look. We’ve got something here that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. We can’t make sensible decisions about it unless we know what it consists of.”

  “But . . .”

  “Cousin Emma, I am going to have a look. You can hide your eyes if you want to.”

  “No. I want to see too. Only, Andy, please don’t make it longer than you have to.”

  She stood beside him on the ledge and he swung the beam out and down. As the screeching echoes filled her skull he flicked it off the water and began to play it along the wet rocks at the edge where the nests were. The moving circle peeled the creatures into the water, unzipped them from the rocks in white foam. They were gone too quick to see, except where the small ones floundered up the slope of weed, but by looking just in front of where the main light moved Emma could see the adults preparing themselves for the leap, clumsier on land even than seals. Ruthlessly Andy played the beam all the way round the dark lake. On the far side its light was too faint to show anything except the glimmering splashes of the dives. When at last he switched the light off the yelling took a long time to die. It was as though the creatures knew he had done it on purpose.

  “Well,” he said quietly, “if you could put on a show like that three times a day, people would come from all over the world to see it.”

  Emma said nothing. In the new dark she saw that there was in fact an element of light, a green, wavering blur to her left, just where Anadyomene lay moored—daylight seeping through the water from the loch outside.

  “It wasn’t a tunnel,” she said. “More of a slit, but this is the widest end.

  “If you got in with the head on,” said Andy, “we should be able to get out with it off easy enough. Provided twenty-four volts will turn the engine, that is. Let’s sit down. I feel like a smoke.

  There were a couple of yelps as his lighter flared, and all the time the welter and splash of the creatures scrambling back to their nests.

  “So that’s it,” said Emma, after a while.

  “What’s what?” said Andy. “Title of a Directory of Famous Inanimate Objects.”

  “They ought to be bigger than they are,” said Emma. “The book says that the dinosaurs could stand short cold spells because they were so huge that they contained enough warmth to put up with some heat-loss . . . is that right?”

  “It makes sense, mechanically speaking.”

  “But Roddy told me there were a lot of volcanoes round here, which must be why there are still hot springs. I expect the
y were hotter once, and when the Ice- Ages came the creatures found this cave and learnt to live in here. They could go outside to hunt under the ice . . .”

  “Not much to hunt,” said Andy. “The ice-cap covered the mountains in Scotland.”

  “But the springs might have been hot enough to keep it melted here,” said Emma. “You get hot lakes in Greenland, I know. But they’d get so used to living in the dark that their skins wouldn’t protect them against the sun any more, and so they’d become afraid of all light. And they could afford to get smaller because they had this heat to come back to.”

  Andy stubbed out his cheroot and stood up.

  “Come on,” he said. “Switch on that light, Cousin Emma, and let’s get cracking. You don’t seem to appreciate that in her way Anna is just as interesting as these reptiles.”

  “No she’s not!” said Emma. “Monsieur Goubet’s original boat would be quite interesting, but nothing like the creatures. Nothing. And Anna’s only a steal.”

  “You’re an unsophisticated Botswanan. Fakes fetch more at Sotheby’s than originals these days.”

  Emma started to say something about Andy having tried to fake a monster, but made a muddle of it. As she led him down the ledges she began to wonder whether the volcanoes had not only provided the hot springs but also made the cave. Eigg had been a volcano, and all huge Skye, and Ardnamurchan. Perhaps some uprush of lava had forced the mountains apart and left these passages, this vast bubble. Not a bronze bubble like Anadyomene, enduring a few pounds of pressure for a few hours, but a stone bubble that had stayed hidden here since long before Man chipped his first tools in the Olduvai Gorge. A bubble that had become the home of the last of the great lizards.

  As they came to the lower ledges it was impossible to hide the torch-beam; again the long yelp rose, and again the creatures exploded into the water from the rimming rocks. She even saw the bigger splash of the furthest one as it plunged down on Anadyomene’s hull, too stupid to have learnt. It might take a whole generation before the creatures discovered that that was not a good place to dive from. No, they could adapt no further. And the whole earth was changing. It would be astonishing if they survived another hundred years, unless . . .