Emma Tupper's Diary

by Peter Dickinson

  “Tourists,” said Major McAndrew. “I am interested that Andy is even prepared to tolerate the idea, lucrative though it might be. Ice-cream kiosks. Parking-lots. Plastic bags blowing about.”

  “I’ve thought about that,” said Andy. “They needn’t come this side at all—they could go up through Fertagh. Andy Fertagh would put up with anything for a share of the loot. We couldn’t stop them looking across here, of course . . . And about Lascaux. You can go there now—they’re screening it all off. We could manage something like that, I’d have thought.”

  “It isn’t just screening the creatures from the people’s breath,” said Roddy. “We’d have to screen the people from the creatures. Father and Finn haven’t smelt ’em. Anyway, I think Andy’s got a scheme there—I’m for it.”

  “Finn,” said Major McAndrew. “This matter of the tourists—you had better revoke your proxy for the moment, as it is more likely to affect you than Cousin Emma.”

  “I hereby revoke my proxy,” said Finn. “I’m against seeing the brutes or letting them see us, even from the top of the hill. My proxy now hereby reverts to Cousin Emma.”

  “But hey,” said Roddy. “You—I mean she was all for the scheme when we were just faking a monster to bring tourists up here.

  “I didn’t really think it would work,” said Finn, “any more than Andy did. I just thought it might keep us out of trouble.”

  “Some hope,” said Roddy.

  “It was those telly-folk,” said Finn, “mooching all over the place as if they belonged. I realised I couldn’t stand it.”

  “Um,” said Major McAndrew. “We appear to have a split vote on the question of whether we can stand tourists. Let us put that aside, for the moment, as it is merely ancillary to Andy’s main proposal. We have not heard any alternative suggestions, but I am sure Cousin Emma has one. Cousin Emma, supposing the place belonged to you . . .”

  “It does,” said Roddy, and explained about the Russian Prince and the trouser salesman. Like all spur-of-the-moment fantasies, it didn’t go quite so well second time through.

  “Not a very strong claim,” said Major McAndrew.

  “Perhaps we could buy her off by giving her the hill with the cave in it,” said Finn.

  “If we were to do that,” said Major McAndrew, “what would your next step be?”

  “Oh,” said Emma. She hadn’t thought this far. “I’d . . . I’d have to find the right people—I suppose I’d ask Daddy to tell me—people to make a thorough study of the creatures in a way that was safe for them. I mean, well, anybody you asked—the absolutely top people in their own fields—they’d come if they knew. I’m sure they would. You’ve got answers to a hundred riddles there about the dinosaurs . . .”

  “Not dinosaurs,” said Major McAndrew. “To judge by Andy’s descriptions, we are discussing an extremely degenerate form of plesiosaur. It is, however, much the same thing.”

  “Aren’t you . . . aren’t you even going to go and look?” said Emma.

  Major McAndrew shook his head.

  “There is a danger that I might become interested,” he said. “I am old. I cannot expect to finish more than one or two more jobs in my life. Panton chrematon anthropon metron einai. That means Man is the measure of all things. Protagoras said it in the fifth century BC, some time ago but the blink of an eyelid in the life of your creatures, Cousin Emma. But I believe it. If I can help solve some boring problem about the behaviour of pests of the cocoa-bean, I shall have done something. Marginally I may even have helped to prevent the species homo sapiens from becoming extinct. I have wasted over fifty years—shut up, Roddy, I don’t count the first eighteen—of a fair brain in a healthy body. I am going to judge this dilemma from a strictly selfish standpoint. My family will tell you that that is how I judge everything. But here it is because I can afford to waste no more of my life. So, first, I will vote with Cousin Emma, against Roddy and Andy, in the matter of the commercial exploitation of the cave. That produces a tied vote, two a side. As chairman of the meeting I am entitled to a casting vote, which I again cast against such exploitation. The peripheral matter of the tolerability of tourists is thus irrelevant. Now we come to the second question, the scientific exploitation of these creatures, in which I am going to vote against Cousin Emma, thus producing another tied vote. As chairman of the meeting . . .”

  “On a point of order,” said Andy.

  Major McAndrew nodded solemnly.

  “Is there anything in the rules,” said Andy, “which excludes members who have been outvoted on the first motion from casting their votes on the second?”

  “Nothing,” said Major McAndrew. “I was just trying to pull a fast one. How do you vote, Andy and Roddy?”

  “For the motion,” said Andy.

  “Against,” said Roddy. “I don’t see why we should have a load of boffins nosing around on our land if we’re not going to make anything out of it.”

  “So be it,” said Major McAndrew. “We still have a split vote, so as chairman I cast my vote against the motion.”

  “Notice how Father’s got himself four votes,” said Finn. “The Swiss haven’t made him any less slippery.”

  “Cousin Emma appears dissatisfied,” said Major McAndrew.

  Emma bit her lip, fidgeted with her glass and opened her mouth. The words wouldn’t come. She took a sip of wine and tried again. They all waited for her.

  “I can’t understand you,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Here’s something terribly important and you treat it as a game. I know there are more important things, but they don’t make this into . . . into a joke. I think I shall have to go. I’m sorry, but I shall have to go.”

  “A resignation!” said Roddy. “We’ve never had one of those before.”

  “Father’s good as resigned,” said Finn. “Only now and then he comes back and casts four votes.”

  “I hope you won’t go, Cousin Emma,” said Major McAndrew.

  “Oh please not!” cried Miss Newcombe. “Emma’s the only person who . . . oh, nothing. But please can she stay and do. . . whatever she was going to do . . . here?”

  “Let me explain about the game,” said Major McAndrew. “We are, as I believe you have discovered, a somewhat quarrelsome family. But we have survived. Like your creatures, we have adapted, and our adaptation has been to discuss all matters of any importance in this fashion, simply because it makes it much harder to quarrel if you have to quarrel through the chair. Now perhaps you will tell us what you propose to do, supposing you do leave us.”

  “I must write to my father and tell him everything that has happened. I’d ask him what to do next. He knows a lot of scientists. He might be able to think of a way of telling the right ones without letting the story out. Once they knew . . . Oh, I know it’s your hill, your loch, your cave. But suppose one of your questions—about your beetles—suppose the answer to it lay in the territory of some chief who wouldn’t let you come in—Daddy used to have that sort of trouble about tsetse flies—wouldn’t you get there somehow and find the answer? Wouldn’t that be what mattered?”

  “At least she’s addressing her remarks to the chair,” said Roddy.

  “Order,” said Major McAndrew. “Yes, Cousin Emma, I would. In the past I have done exactly that sort of thing. I have lived among people like a friend, and sent their secrets to other people, for what seemed to me at the time the greater good. I know now that it was a much less important matter than my boring doings with beetles, though I believe it to have been more important than Emma’s plesiosaurs. Man is the measure of all things. You present us with a problem, Cousin Emma. In the past we could simply have done away with you, as an inconvenience, but now . . . now Poop won’t let us.”

  “Certainly not!” said Miss Newcombe.

  “On the other hand, I can write to your father and make out quite a good case that you have allowed yourself to be deluded by my children’s persistent use of wild fantasy into inventing your own fantasy and pretending it was real
.”

  “I can write to him too,” said Finn, “explaining what a liar my father is.”

  “He’d believe me,” said Emma. “At least . . . at least he wouldn’t not believe me till he’d come up here to check.”

  “I think that is probably true. I suspect he might believe you without checking. So now it is clear that we have to persuade you to change your mind. First I will advance two arguments. There is a danger that your group of scientists, however careful, would themselves infect the creatures with some new bacteria, or otherwise imbalance their ecology. That may seem a remote risk, but this is not: you have fallen into the trap of judging all scientists by your father—selfless investigators interested only in expanding the field of human knowledge or in bettering the lot of their fellow men. But scientists, especially scientists of the calibre you would attract to a job like this, are different. Science itself is caught in a trap. In order to attract funds for his work the scientist must publish his findings, publish them before anyone else does. If he is an ambitious scientist, the need is even greater. Last year I read that an astronomer had detected minute traces of carbon monoxide in one area of the heavens. No doubt this was important, but was it important enough to justify his sending a telegram to every observatory in the world engaged in similar work? It struck me at the time that a postcard would have done. But that is how it is. Two men chance on the same drug on different sides of the world; it is the one who gets his discovery into print first who receives the Nobel Prize for medicine. There is thus no hope, no hope at all, that your group would keep their find secret. I am not now pulling a fast one. This is the world I know. And after publication, how long before Andy’s commercial exploitation sets in? Five years? Ten? Even Protagoras would sneer.”

  “But if nobody knows . . .” muttered Emma, caught in the whirlpool of doubt.

  “Yes. The question is whether it is better for your creature to subsist in its own strange way, unknown; or whether it is better to have it thoroughly studied, and probably in the process kill it dead. It would then be known; you could find accounts of it in libraries, casts and skeletons in natural history museums. But it would be extinct, as the dodo is, and the oryx and the tiger almost are. Are you prepared to choose, Cousin Emma? No? Then I am going to help you by casting another vote.”

  “Five?” said Finn.

  “It isn’t a record,” said Andy. “He cast eight one evening when Mother was staying.”

  “Not my vote,” said Major McAndrew and rose carefully from his chair. As soon as he was out of the room Roddy gave a long whistle.

  “Wow!” he said. “I’ve never seen him as nearly cornered as that. My hat, Cousin Emma, I thought you’d got him. He as good as told us he really was a spy, and he’s never let on about that before.”

  “Who’s he gone to fetch, though?” said Finn. “Mary?”

  “He could have rung for her,” said Andy. “I bet it’s Andy Coaches. Andy Coaches is the rightful Chief, but his grandfather got drunk at the Clan Gathering of 1862 and wore his sporran upside-down, so he was deprived of the chieftainship, which his descendants can only resume in times of unprecedented danger.”

  Emma sat in a sort of trance, not noticing how much her throat was hurting again after all the talking. All she wished was that it had been someone else who’d sat in Anadyomene; who was now sitting in her chair. She looked across to where Miss Newcombe was making faces at herself in a spoon, and wondered if it would have been any easier if the creature had been as beautiful as that—beautiful like the Arabian oryx, or even beautiful and dangerous like the tiger—instead of being a living nightmare out of old time. Vermin, Roddy had said. Suppose it were rats. Suppose some disease almost wiped out the rats of the world, and there was only a small colony left on one island . . .

  Roddy and Finn were compiling a list of the disgraceful items that had fallen out of Andy Coaches’ grandfather’s upside-down sporran when Major McAndrew returned. In one hand he carried two dark-grey books; Emma knew them at once by the ripple pattern on the edges of the paper. In his other hand he carried a long skull; Emma knew that too, by the ragged teeth. When he sat down and put the three objects in front of him, Emma saw that the skull had an irregular white star between the eye-holes, a place where something had smashed through the bone and the hole had later been mended with plaster of Paris.

  “I propose to cast my father’s vote,” said Major McAndrew. “Your great-grandfather’s, Cousin Emma. When he died and I inherited, one of the things I inherited was the safe in the laboratory. That had always puzzled me, as he had never let me see inside it although he was a very careless man about his personal possessions. For instance he endured for many years a valet who stole and stole, simply because the man was able to polish my father’s boots to the standard he expected. So I had been unable to imagine what he wanted to lock up. In fact, I found very little in the safe. A number of formulae, and descriptions of inventions of possible commercial value. A number of letters from a woman—not my mother. These books and this skull. The skull has been shot with a heavy calibre bullet, such as he used for big game; you can still just read the date he wrote on it, September 8th, 1890. The books are my father’s diaries for 1889 and 1890, but many of the pages are missing. They have simply been torn out. For instance, though he describes the building of Anadyomene in some detail, he removed the pages saying why he decided to build her. There is even one page missing in the middle of his account of her workings, which must have been to do with the electrical system.”

  “He didn’t want anyone to know he was going to use her at night,” said Emma. “He probably wrote more about putting in a searchlight than he would have if he’d just wanted her for day-time. He must have heard the wild-cats calling at night, and somehow realised that they weren’t.”

  “The echo!” said Andy. “Big House was burnt in 1887, so he won’t have started to sleep down here till after that. I’ve sometimes thought those calls were coming from the middle of the loch!”

  “And so have I,” said Major McAndrew. “We live and learn. I think it is safe to deduce that he found his way into the cave, shot his specimen, and then came to many of the same conclusions that Cousin Emma has about the likelihood of the creature’s survival if exposed to the full impact of Victorian inquisitiveness. He was a remarkable man in many ways. I wish I had liked him more. Be that as it may, he locked the skull away and, to make doubly sure, destroyed the relevant material in his diary. I have always known there was some sort of a creature in the loch, because of the skull.”

  “That’s why you backed Mary up about us not swimming much!” said Finn.

  “Certainly I decided that it would be unwise to cross any of the local superstitions about the loch.”

  “And he put a stopper on the other entrance,” said Roddy. “Darwin’s Pimple.”

  “I wonder how he killed it,” said Andy. “Not easy, with only one other person in Anna. It would have to be in the dark, and then he’d have to hack the skull off somehow—he couldn’t have got the whole body into Anna.”

  “I bet the other ones ate what he left,” said Roddy. “They have that sort of mean look, which people do have who eat their relations.”

  He gnashed his teeth convincingly at Finn, but it only reminded Emma how much there was still to know, how little they’d been able to discover in their brief plunge into the dark abysm. Did they eat their dead? What did they do with the bones? Drop them instinctively in the gulf? How . . .

  “Well, Cousin Emma,” said Andy. “Has the old tempter changed your mind? I must say I’m going to start looking for a girl who has an overwhelming tendency to agree with everything I say, and hope that some of that factor is inherited by the kids. Then I shan’t have any of this split-vote trouble. We’ll raise a little brood of yes-men.”

  “It’s interesting that Emma’s grandmother was the only one who had the nerve to say No to grandfather,” said Finn. “Some of that factor’s been transmitted.”

  “
Well, Cousin Emma?” said Major McAndrew.

  “I don’t know. If he . . . Can we go to bed? I might know what I think in the morning.”

  Chapter 10

  EMMA WAS BURNING HER DIARY. Then, at least, she would be able to start learning to pretend that none of it had ever happened.

  She knelt by the grate holding each sheet carefully horizontal so that the line of flame moved very slowly across it, only a little yellow at the peaks, but a beautiful intense blue where the flame met the paper. The blue was curved like a liquid, like a blue wave, and under it the paper was red for half an inch before it fissured, curled, turned black and dropped in the grate. When each sheet was down to a little triangle of white round her thumb she let it fall; the wide margins she had left meant that there was no writing on the triangle. Then she read the next sheet carefully through, lit another match (which was extravagant, but . . .) and started the march of flame at the top left-hand corner.

  Once a tear fell on the middle of a sheet, blotching the firm curves of a word, making them hairy and fuzzy. When the flames reached that place they sidled round it and joined up again where the paper was dry, so that when she let the final corner of that sheet fall there was a different-shaped piece of unburnt paper already lying in the hearth; it had the shape of a creature, but not the creature—more like the elephant Babar with floppy wings. Emma turned the piece over to see what the one word saved had been: it was part of “although”—no comfort at all. But it wouldn’t betray anything either.

  As she was burning page eight the flame wavered as if the draught had changed, and then recovered. When she let that corner fall a voice above her head said “What are you doing, Emma?”