Local Customs

by Audrey Thomas

  Letty wore just a hint of some eau de cologne she had brought back from a holiday in Paris; she used it sparingly but it was always there and when I at last set off for Scotland in the new year she gave me a small handkerchief dabbed with cologne, “to remind you always of your admirer who awaits your return.” I regret to say I left it at the hotel.

  Once up at Urquhart I honestly wondered if I hadn’t been bewitched by her, her white hands, her dainty feet, her silky hair, the way she said my name — “George,” in such an intimate way. It is hard to explain, but to a chap who has spent most of his adult life looking at half-naked women, however lovely (and the young women are truly beautiful), there is something exciting about a woman fully clothed. One can’t help thinking about what’s underneath all those skirts and petticoats. And the women know it; hence the décolletage, if that is the right word, the glimpse of plump shoulders or an ivory neck.

  (There were rumours about Letty, hints of a scandal, but I firmly dismissed all this as just talk, envious talk, because she was admired and successful. In any event, I was in no position to cast stones.)

  The farther north I travelled, the better I could breathe, and once I left Edinburgh, only stopping for a few hours, I lowered the window on the coach, much to the objections of a stern, black-clad couple, who were my only companions for the rest of the journey — or as far as Aberdeen. They shrank from the fresh air as though it were a poisonous effluvia.

  “Just for a moment,” I said, with my best smile. “I haven’t been home in so long.”

  If you have never smelled the Highland air, I don’t know how to describe it to you. If you have spent your entire life in cities, you might be horrified when I said it smelled of coolness, of heather and peat, of the earth and simple things. (Letty’s handkerchief had no place there.) I gulped it, head hanging out, like a schoolboy or a dog.

  “If you please, Sir,” said the stern, black-clad gentleman.

  The dogs recognized me first and set up quite a din. Dusk was falling fast, but there was my father at the door of the manse, holding up a lantern.

  “George. You’ve come at last.”

  I wondered if I was as much a shock to him as he was to me. How could he have aged so quickly since my last visit — his hair a white cloud around his head, his hands that clasped mine so thin. But his smile was just as warm and the fire burned just as brightly in the parlour. He banished the dogs to the kitchen, where they whined and scratched at the door until he relented — “just this once, mind,” he said, although somehow I doubted it was “just this once.” The smell of them almost made me weep.

  My mother died when I was fourteen and shortly thereafter I joined the army. Since then, I had only been back for short intervals and I did not grow up at Urquhart, but in Keith and then, as a schoolboy, in Elgin, where I boarded with the Latin master. So Urquhart wasn’t really “home,” in any historical sense, but Scotland was home and my father was home and a Scottish manse is a Scottish manse; this one had the same air of cheerful frugality as the one where I had spent my earliest years. A little bigger, maybe, with a nice glebe surrounding it, but much the same.

  My mother’s name was Elisabeth and my father had remarried another Elisabeth; it was easy to see that the marriage suited them both. I noticed right away the glances she gave him. Once, after returning to the room with the tea tray (“We’ll just have a wee cup the noo, to take the chill off you and supper later.”) She set everything down on a low table, then stood up again, and touched him lightly on the shoulder. His hand went up and clasped hers. Would Letty and I have anything like this?

  My brother Hugh was a surgeon with the Indian Army, due home on leave in ’38 and my other brother, John, my confidante, the brother I felt closest to, was dead; but my father and stepmother had a son, my half-brother James, who came crashing in about an hour later. He looked like a noisier, more self-confident me at that age, the same wavy red hair, the same rather stocky body. I had not seen him for three years, and he was still a sweet little boy, a “douce laddie” as they would say. He stared at me and I wondered if he were seeing the likeness in reverse (“Is this what I will look like when I am thirty-something?”). He was full of good health and high spirits.

  “How do you do, brother George,” he said, extending a hand that was none too clean. I took it anyway.

  “I’ve been out hunting,” he said.

  “And were you successful?”

  “Two grouse, which I’ve left in the larder. I didn’t take the old dogs,” he explained, “but went alone. They make too much noise. I really need a young dog, Father, and I’ve seen some nice pups in the town.”

  “And who will take care of the young dog when you set out on your adventures?”

  He smiled at us. I could see what a charmer he was.

  “Perhaps he will come with me.”

  “A variation of Dick Whittington and his cat, perhaps?”

  I had a sister who died at twenty-one and my two remaining sisters had married. One was in Elgin and the other in Edinburgh; I had nieces and a nephew I’d never seen. I wondered if James was lonely at all, but it turned out that he, too, had been at Elgin Academy and his final term would start in a few days.

  I soon fell into a pleasant routine and tried to forget about Letty; I knew I would have to get out of this engagement, but I wasn’t quite sure how to do so. For the first few weeks I deliberately ignored the letters she sent, said nothing to my family (I knew my father would wait for me to speak), and spent most of my daylight hours out of doors.

  Letty

  WHEN HE WAS VERY ILL just after we landed, he called out a name in his delirium, at least I thought it was a name. “George,” I said, “you were calling out last night and the night before: ‘Ekosua! Ekosua!’ What does that mean? Is Ekosua a name?”

  “No, not at all. It’s a local curse word.”

  I didn’t believe him so I asked Brodie. “Is Ekosua a name?”

  “Why do you ask?” He looked quite uncomfortable.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve heard it, more than once; I wasn’t quite sure whether it was a name or a command, or what.”

  “It’s a name, a female name. If you were born on a Monday then one of your names will be Ekosua. A boy would be Quashie.”

  “Hmmm. So did Robinson Crusoe call his Negro servant Friday because that was the day of the week on which he was discovered, or did Friday tell him his name was ‘Friday’?”

  “He would have said ‘Kofi’ or some variant of Kofi, if the island was near Africa, but I don’t think it was.”

  “I have a copy with me; I’ll look it up. It was my favourite book when I was a child.”

  “And mine as well.”

  And so we chatted on and I diverted him from my enquiry about the name Ekosua. George’s country wife, Ekosua — Monday’s child.

  Weeks went by and he didn’t answer my letters. Sometimes I felt as though I had conjured him up and then “poof,” my phantom lover disappeared. I wrote and wrote to him, nearly every day now. George was a gentleman and a gentleman did not behave in this fashion. (A little voice said “Letty, you let him get away.”) Finally I wrote to Whittington. I was terrified the scandalous rumours about me had reached George even up there in the Highlands. No one knew, of course, about our engagement, so there would be no public humiliation, but I would know and that knowledge would kill me. I confided in my closest friend, I had to. I told her I would kill myself if this marriage didn’t come off and I meant it. I knew Maria would tell someone in confidence who would tell someone else in confidence and so it would travel through London. Another broken engagement. “Poor Letty,” said with a smile and a simper. “Or maybe she made the whole thing up?”

  George

  IT WAS WRONG OF ME TO KEEP SILENT FOR SO LONG, BUT I DIDN’T know what to do. Finally I asked my father and Elisabeth for advice. The whole sorry tale came tumbling out, how it must have been a coup de foudre, how I was an absolute nincompoop when it came to women,
how she was the last person I should take out to the Coast; she’d be dead within a month.

  “Have you told her that?”

  “Not in such harsh words, but yes. The men die like flies, and I understand from a letter from William Topp, who is acting president while I’m away, that of the first group of missionaries who arrived in January, only one remains. The missionaries who already resided there were dead before the others stepped on shore.”

  “But you knew about the climate when you asked her to marry you.”

  “I did, I did. And I told her about the snakes and the poison berries, everything I could think of.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said, ‘You can’t scare me.’ This is a woman who lives life in her head; she has no idea … In fact, I think she finds all this ‘exotic.’”

  I put my head in my hands. “What am I to do?”

  Elisabeth said softly, “Do you love this woman, George?”

  “I thought perhaps I did. Maybe I was simply in love with the idea of having an intelligent companion … out there.”

  “Does she love you?”

  “In her own way, I suppose. We haven’t used the word ‘love’ very much.”

  “Well,” said my father, “you must make your own decision. The lady herself has given you an out. She sent you up here to ‘think it over,’ before the engagement was made public. You seem to have thought it over and you do not wish to marry.”

  I could not bear to tell them that her latest letter threatened suicide. I was not a man who took kindly to threats. I told myself that she was merely hysterical — and justly so, considering my long silence — but suppose she meant it? What then? How could I live with myself?

  The day after my talk with my parents, I determined to take a long walk to clear my head and then, that evening, to write to Letty and to tell her in the kindest way possible, that the engagement was off. “My dear sweet Letitia,” I would begin, “There is no nice way of saying this …”

  I hiked to Lossiemouth, taking some bread and cheese and a flask of tea with me, and ate my simple meal leaning against a rock and staring out over the soft brown sand at the ocean beyond. The fishermen here were a hardy lot, but their wives were even hardier, hiking up their skirts and carrying their husbands on their backs, out to the boats, so that their garments would not be wet when they set out on those chill waters. When the men returned with the catch, it was these same women who filleted the fish and smoked them and packed them for transport south. All this as well as their ordinary household duties — meals, children, washing, and so on. They might have been ignorant of anything except their own rather narrow world, but even as a boy I admired them (although their children ran after me hurling stones and insults). What a contrast between these women, with their huge, competent hands and wind-scoured cheeks and the hot-house bloom I had asked to marry me. Strange to think that what I was staring at as I ate the last crumbs of cheese was that same ocean I look out on from Cape Coast Castle. So cold here it could drown a man, in wintertime, in a matter of minutes; so warm over there, it felt like soup.

  “My dear sweet Letitia,” I practised, “I admire you so much, but I cannot find it I my heart to marry you.”

  “Dear Letty, you told me to go away and think about our engagement, to be ‘absolutely sure’ — those were your words — that we were right for one another—”

  “Dear Miss Landon …” No, too cold and uncaring.

  I sat there most of the afternoon, dreading what was to come, cursing myself for ever getting involved with that woman, but knowing I had waited an unconscionable length of time before writing.

  And then there, on the hall table, was a letter from her brother, accusing me of dishonourable behaviour toward his sister, of saying that I had made her ill by my silence, implying, in fact, that I was the cad to end all cads.

  No one could be allowed to attack my honour. I could fight a duel or I could marry her. There really wasn’t any choice.

  I sent off a letter to Letty, apologizing for the long silence, saying I was still terribly worried about her health in that climate, but that if she was game, then so was I.

  Letty

  “WHAT WILL YOU DO WITHOUT FRIENDS to talk to?” they said.

  “Oh,” I said, “I shall talk to my friends through my books.”

  I was about to undertake something new — a series of essays on Sir Walter Scott’s women, beginning with Effie and Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian. Scott had said their story was based on a true tale, where a young woman was accused of infanticide.

  I was also contracted to do some verse illustrations for a new album. I was a dab hand at that sort of thing. If someone handed me an etching of the Fountain of Trevi, I could produce a suitable poem, with just a touch of melancholy, in spite of never having seen the actual thing. Ditto “A Moroccan Maiden” or “A Tuareg and his Camel.”

  “Clothed in his robes of brilliant blue —” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

  I got my wedding without the delights of a wedding. George had said he wanted a quiet ceremony, with no fuss and he preferred we keep our marriage a secret until just before we set sail for the Gold Coast. And so five of us huddled at the front of the church (St. Mary’s, in Bryanston Square) one morning in early June and my brother Whittington did his best to make it a solemn occasion, enunciating every word in his beautiful, deep, clergyman’s voice.

  “Do you, Letitia Elizabeth,” “Do you, George Edward,” take this man, take this woman. I was a proper Quakeress in my demure gown of dove grey peau de soie, but George looked splendid in scarlet. I felt like the female bird must feel, eyeing her mate’s more extravagant plumage. The night before I had a crazy vision of William Jerdan rushing in at the last minute, crying, “This wedding must not go forward” and then recounting our shabby past. A somewhat meagre wedding-breakfast followed and I thanked Heaven for Bulwer’s present of some splendid champagne. He made a nice toast, partly in jest, to the “voyage” upon which we were embarking.

  George had said he could manage a few days’ honeymoon before he went back to his meetings with the Committee. “Fine,” I replied, “I always maintained that if I were ever to marry I hoped the honeymoon trip would extend no farther than Hyde Park Corner.”

  “Oh I think we can stand something a little better than that.”

  “Paris?”

  In the end we went to Eastbourne, to a hotel which had seen better days. No one would know us in Eastbourne. The landlady, too, was in the initial stages of genteel decay: Mrs. Daisy Harkness, a widow. George liked it — lazy walks along the shingle, tramps up the Downs and down the Downs, damp bedsheets in spite of the stone hot-water bottles. A weekend at Browns’ would have suited me better. Servants with white gloves, starched linen in the dining-room, silver chafing dishes. As I have said, it’s not that I care for breakfast — I rarely partake myself — but the idea of breakfast at a first-class London hotel: that, I like. Coming in with George, my arm tucked into his, the other breakfasters looking up — who is that handsome couple? My goodness, it’s L.E.L. There has been a rumour she was married; so that’s the handsome husband.

  My travelling costume, my trousseau, all wasted on the patrons of the Seacliffe Hotel. I could have worn clothes from ten years before. Yet I more and more thought how lucky I was to have found George; it was worth all that tartan material at five shillings a yard and two pairs of good shoes utterly ruined from promenading in the parks and gardens.

  We met a dreadful couple at that hotel in Eastbourne. He was some sort of retired officer from Wydah with a thin, sallow wife; he very reddish, she very yellowish; he very stout, she very thin, like Jack Spratt and his wife. They both tied for the first prize in boredom. Will George be like that, when he’s old? I thought. Even more terrifying, will I be like her?

  Of course she had to warn me about the “terrible dangers” of life in Africa.

  “Do you mean the snakes? The driver ants? The diseases?” />
  “I mean, Mrs. Maclean, the servants. You can’t trust any of ’em. They’ll slit your throat if they get worked up with palm wine or rum and think you’ve done ’em an injury. Keep everything locked up — everything. Be severe. Threaten flogging.” She leaned even closer. “Don’t ever let them touch you!

  “You see, what you will shortly discover is that these creatures have no moral sense, none whatsoever. And as for their customs, their beastliness. Dis-gus-ting,” she said, enunciating every syllable.

  “Do you have no happy memories?”

  “Ha. Not really. Charles does, many. But it’s different for men. Women have to be always vigilant, always on guard. And should you be—” her voice dropped to a whisper “— violated in your dressing-room while your husband is on trek, do you think other black servants will come to your rescue? Not likely.”

  I thanked her for her advice and excused myself. She called after me, “Flannel next to the skin!”

  George stayed down for at least another hour.

  “Awful old bore,” he said.

  “Why, then, did you linger?”

  “Oh well, he wanted to talk. I think he misses all the fun.”

  “The fun?”

  “Yes.”

  I was already in bed, under the damp sheets and damp eiderdown.

  “Come to bed, George, before I freeze to death.”

  He blew out the lamp and whispered, “Dear Letty, I shall be gentle.”