Emma Tupper's Diary

by Peter Dickinson

  “Yes, he invented that magnet for getting bits of iron out of people’s eyes.”

  “That’s his famous invention, but he invented lots of other things, all sorts of different things. For instance we’ve still got his submarine in one of the boathouses, because he wanted to explore the loch to see if there was a monster in it. But the best thing he did . . .”

  “You mean the best thing he did for people who haven’t got bits of iron in their eyes,” interrupted Finn.

  “Shut up,” said Roddy. “The best thing he did was to invent this scalp lotion for his father-in-law.”

  “And it worked,” said Emma.

  “Not exactly,” said Finn. “We aren’t allowed to say it cures baldness in England, because that would be against the law. And we aren’t allowed to say it doesn’t do anything, because that would make Old Crow a fraud, when he’s the honestest man alive. But it does seem to work beautifully in hot countries at altitudes over eight thousand feet.”

  “I didn’t know there were any,” said Emma.

  “There’s one,” said Roddy. “It’s in Central America, and all the men there are Great Lovers, so they don’t like going bald. For the last fifty years they’ve bought almost all the liniment we make.”

  “And now something’s gone wrong,” said Emma.

  “Right again. There’s been a revolution, and a man called General Hernando something . . .”

  “Kranz,” said Finn.

  “. . . General Hernando Kranz has made himself Dictator.”

  “Perpetual President,” said Finn.

  “It’s the same thing. And he’s quite bald. As a billiard ball. And our liniment doesn’t work on him, even over eight thousand feet. So he’s declared an economic emergency, with tough restrictions on imports. You have to apply for an import quota, and when Old Crow applied for ours he got a letter saying our quota was nil. Not one beastly bottle. Cousin Emma, you have come to spend your holiday with a gang of paupers.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Emma.

  Though Roddy had been telling her the story in a jokey way, he looked as angry as a man Emma had once seen getting out of a car in a Capetown traffic jam, after another car had bumped him from behind.

  “It’s a nuisance Father being away,” said Finn.

  “He’d only tell us to sort it out ourselves,” shouted Roddy. “I’ve a good mind to call an Extraordinary General Meeting. That might make him take it seriously.”

  “Poor Cousin Emma,” said Finn. “Father gave us the company, so Old Crow and Andy and I are directors, but Roddy can’t be one till he’s eighteen. Father and Roddy are the shareholders, but Father’s never there. He doesn’t like to be bothered, and I expect you don’t either. Let’s give it a rest, Roddy.”

  “I expect it’s something to do with taxes,” said Emma. “You being directors, I mean.”

  “That’s what Father says,” said Roddy.

  “He also says it’s educational,” said Finn.

  “But really he doesn’t like to be bothered,” they both said together.

  The big car slowed where three lorries were overtaking each other along the dual carriageway. Andy let the bonnet nose right up under the tailboard of the outer one and pressed his fist on the horn; it must have been a special sort of horn—the outrageous blare of it made talk impossible even in the back of the Jaguar, where most of the other traffic noises had been no more than a gentle drumming.

  “Our Cousin Emma’s a good guesser,” said Roddy, when Andy had edged through the crevasse that opened at last between the lorry and the central crash-barrier, and the speedometer stood at just under 100 mph.

  “Can she guess why Poop Newcombe’s called Poop,” said Finn.

  Hearing the name spoken in full again took Emma back to the moment when Miss Newcombe had floated out of Simon’s office, wide-eyed and wonderful; the very first words she’d spoken had had a funny ring about them—“Hello. Are you Emma? I’m Poop Newcombe.” That was wrong—it should have been . . . been Newcombe Poop. No . . .

  “Nincompoop,” said Emma aloud.

  Roddy whistled, but Finn’s face had a touch of the hard, closed look which Emma had seen earlier.

  “What else?” she said.

  Emma didn’t like this.

  “I think, perhaps, she . . . she takes things,” she said. “Out of shops, I mean. She can’t stop herself.”

  Both the others were looking at her as if she were an enemy spy.

  “You seem to live a long way from shops,” she said.

  They still looked at her.

  “Mummy thinks she’s your governess,” said Emma.

  Roddy gave a sudden whoop, threw himself back against the soft brown leather of the seat and sat there whooping and drumming his heels on the gold carpet. Finn smiled, but her face remained secret.

  “Who are you going to tell?” she said.

  “Nobody, of course,” said Emma. She was entitled to be angry at the question, and couldn’t help it showing. Finn relaxed.

  “It’s Roddy’s fault for not coming with her to meet you. Andy Coaches was visiting his son, who’s a Minister at a kirk in Edinburgh, but Roddy should have gone.”

  Roddy stopped drumming his heels and leaned forward, furious again.

  “It was the Directors’ fault for going on so long with their beastly board meeting,” he said. “You’ve only been a Director for two months, but you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be just a shareholder. You’re supposed to run the company for the shareholders. You only think about your beastly selves. Why shouldn’t I know what’s going on too?”

  “All right,” said Finn. “It was General Kranz’s fault.”

  “All right,” said Roddy.

  “Poop lives with us because there aren’t any shops,” said Finn. “Last time they caught her they were going to put her in prison, but Father managed to wangle it. Now she’s dotty about Father, and Father’s rather fond of her, I think, when we’re looking the other way. It’s lucky that Andy likes brainy girls. Mother lives in London because she can’t stand Scotland. She let Roddy grow up enough for her to find out she’d produced one more McAndrew, and not one of her sort, and she went south to play bridge with her friends in Cadogan Square. But it’s quite all right—we all like it that way—it suits everybody.”

  “Now Cousin Emma can tell us what she’s doing, foisting herself off on us for the whole holidays,” said Roddy.

  So Emma explained. As she did so she could almost see her father sitting in his tin-roofed office in far Botswana, trying to coax suspicious Africans to sow better strains of seed, while her mother stumped about in the heat and dust and pointed out, loud-voiced, how wrongly everybody was doing everything. Emma explained about the argument whether she should go to one of the schools in Botswana, as her father wanted, or to a private school for white girls only in South Africa, as her mother wanted. And then the astonishing scholarship to this English school.

  “But it costs too much for me to go home for the holidays,” she said. “Before this I’ve stayed with my uncle, Daddy’s brother, in Dorset, but he makes his money running a caravan site and he’s too busy in the summer to cope with me. Daddy met Major McAndrew at a conference and they settled for me to come up here. But I’ve got enough money to pay for my ticket to Dorset if it doesn’t work.”

  “The English are careful people,” said Finn, laughing. But Emma stared out of the window and watched a town of slate-roofed houses hurtle southwards; they looked ugly but clean, and though their gardens were neat they had fewer flowers in them than English ones. After the houses came fields of black and white cattle, all hurtling southward too under the fury of Andy’s driving; the purplish hills beyond trundled away more sedately because they were further off, but their shapes changed far more swiftly than they would have if Emma’s law-abiding father had been at the wheel. And Emma was hurtling away from him and Mummy to spend her summer holidays with these cousins she had never met, who didn’t bother about speed-limits,
whose own father and mother were somewhere else, who were paupers because of General Kranz but who drove a car like this and had their own submarine in the boathouse. One of the boat-houses. That didn’t sound very poor.

  “Let’s play the game,” said Roddy suddenly. So they taught Emma a complicated family game, guessing words by guessing at the letters in them. After three or four goes in which she did badly Emma thought hard about it and worked out a system which meant you were almost bound to win. Roddy said it was cheating. Finn laughed and suggested a change in the rules. They played that way until Emma found a system for that, too. Roddy was just becoming furious when the car stopped.

  Emma got out with the others and stared at the astounding view, a loch between gaunt hills, and not a house anywhere. The McAndrews lined up by the side of the road with their backs to the loch. “One, two, three, go,” said Miss Newcombe, and they started to climb the hill. It was obviously a race, and Roddy was obviously going to win, so fiercely did he scramble and stride. Andy would be next, going quickly and steadily, and Finn was barely more than walking. Roddy reached a single big rock about two hundred yards up, shouted and turned. He came down much more carefully than he’d climbed. Andy was second at the rock, shouted too, and came down at almost the same pace that he’d gone up at—Emma saw that he might just about catch Roddy before they reached the road. It seemed ages after that before Finn touched the rock, shouted and turned; then she was coming down almost as if she were falling, in huge, sure-footed leaps, with her long orange hair streaming behind her in the wind of her coming. She gave a wild call as she passed Andy a few yards above the tarmac, but Roddy was on the road before her.

  “Nine all,” said Roddy exultantly. “Three more goes and I’ll catch Andy.”

  “It started as a way of stopping car-sickness,” said Finn to Emma. “It was Father’s idea. So we always did it on the way back from the company meetings, which always happened on the first day of the holidays. It means term’s over, you see.”

  “And that means we’ll have to go on doing it till Roddy leaves school,” said Andy. “Tradition can be a terrible taskmaster.”

  His lean, hard face looked quite cool, though not as cool as Finn’s, who had allowed gravity to run most of her race for her. But Roddy was still sweating and panting, which Emma thought odd, considering how carefully he’d come down, though he must have nearly exhausted himself reaching the rock.

  “Shall I drive now?” said Miss Newcombe.

  “Right,” said Andy. “Everybody in! Do you want to sit in front, Cousin Emma?”

  Emma doubted if it mattered where she sat, as Miss Newcombe would probably drive them all in a vague swoop over the next cliff, but she got in on the outside of the front seat. Andy was already in the middle, adjusting the driving mirror so that he and not Miss Newcombe could see out of the back window. Once more the big engine took the car sighingly away.

  In fact Miss Newcombe drove beautifully, almost as fast as Andy but without any of his sense of ferocious bustle. The road was much steeper and bendier, curving round shoulders of mountains or wriggling along steep valleys carved out by some frothy river; but she coaxed the miles away between the beautiful bare hills—not really bare, like Botswana, but almost as much of a desert with a few sheep nosing for grass in the acres of un-nourishing heather. When at last they came to savage Glencoe Andy told Emma the whole story from beginning to end, giving everybody’s name as though he knew them himself and making it all sound as though it still mattered, every burnt roof and every slaughtered child. At Ballachulish ferry Roddy introduced Emma by name to all the crewmen, saying that she was his cousin from Africa, and they shook hands with her and welcomed her to the Highlands. She sat in the back of the car again after that, and Andy drove. A grey, wet fog now covered the hills, so she never saw Ben Nevis, and after Fort William she slept. So it was another surprise to wake up and see the sea on their left, full of little rocky islands, and the sun slanting across them, and bigger islands far out across the water; and to realise that the low hills here were mostly dunes of the same sand as the shore; and then to turn inland to where the much bigger hills reared up, hills which must be rock to make them stand so tall and steep; to wind for miles along a road no wider than a cart-track, with grass growing down the middle; to dip through a little wood of twisted oaks and come out right on the edge of water, where the road ran beside a lake not half mile wide but piercing further and further into the hills as they saw fresh reaches round every bend; and at last to climb out of the car, yawning slightly but headachy no more, in front of the McAndrews’ house.

  The house itself was as much of a surprise as anything, because it was a bungalow with a verandah running along the front, like any South African farmhouse with its stoep; except that this bungalow seemed almost a hundred yards long, and only the road lay between it and the black rocks at the water’s edge.

  A stout woman, grey-haired and grey-faced, was waiting at the top of the steps up to the verandah.

  “Mary, this is my Cousin Emma,” said Andy. “Mary looks after us, Emma, and sees that we don’t starve.”

  “Come you in, Miss Emma,” said Mary in an accent like Andy Coaches’. “It will be fine to have a sane body biding in the house again.”

  Chapter 2

  “YESTERDAY WAS INTERESTING some of the time and ordinary some of the time,” wrote Emma. Outside her window the loch fidgeted under a driving westerly; slanting grey shafts of rain marched across it, but even between them she couldn’t see the far shore. She had been woken in the night by the calls of wild-cats, and then had heard the first swishings of the storm. She wrote the word “wild-cat” on the last sheet of her diary, to remind her to try and see one, though Roddy said he never had, though he’d hunted and hunted. But rare wild animals were just what she wanted.

  She looked out of the window again and saw how the stream beyond the house was roaring under the little timber bridge, pushing a stain of mud-coloured water out into the dark loch. Emma would like to have described all that—her teacher, Miss Sturmer, always gave good marks for scenic description—but too much had happened yesterday, so it would have to wait. She wondered whether Sarah Davidson had done anything as interesting as arguing what to use a loch and a mountain for, or working out a scheme to diddle a TV company, or trying to make an eighty-year-old submarine work.

  The McAndrews ate in a room which at first sight had given Emma a thrill of horror, almost worse than the tiger-skins that hung in the panelled hall. So many beautiful animals had died, in order that their polished horns should jut from these walls—kudu and impala and gazelle, and worst of all an Arabian Oryx—and every one of them shot by her own great-grandfather. She thought it wouldn’t be polite to tell her hosts how wicked the slaughter had been, how few tigers there were left in the world—and even fewer oryxes; but at supper her first night she couldn’t keep her eyes off the trophies.

  By breakfast next day, however, she was growing used to the idea. Tigers, she argued to herself, had been a pest in great-grandfather’s time, and there were probably even quite a number of oryxes before the Arab princes started shooting them with machine-guns out of jeeps; perhaps they could spare one, then. The idea was half-comforting.

  The McAndrews believed in breakfast, “so if we don’t want to come back to lunch, we won’t die of hunger,” as Roddy said when he got up to help himself to more scrambled eggs. On the sideboard there was also porridge and cream, fresh mackerel, bacon, kidneys, grilled tomatoes, brown wholemeal bread baked in the house, butter from the farm, marmalade from Oxford, tea and coffee and milk and Coca-Cola. So Emma tried to eat enough to make up for the lunch that she might have to miss; luckily everything was delicious after stodgy school food.

  The McAndrews talked about General Kranz, or money, or both. Finn had brought back from Edinburgh a big clipping from The Times, given her by Mr Crowe, and she read bits of it to them between mouthfuls; when she reached a paragraph about rumours of CIA support for the Gener
al, Roddy groaned like an old woman with arthritis.

  “No hope of a revolution,” he said. “If he’s a bastion against Communism, Mr Nixon will keep him there for ever, no matter how many great lovers go bald.”

  In the next silence Emma, who had been looking across the still loch to where the mountain basked placid in the sunlight, said “What’s that funny little bobble up there?”

  Finn came round to peer along her pointing arm.

  “That’s Darwin’s Pimple,” she said. “It’s a cairn, a sort of monument made by piling stones together. Grandfather quarrelled with Darwin—he quarrelled with everybody—but a long time after Darwin died he changed his mind and built a cairn to him. He even got Mary’s great-aunt to put a curse on anyone who moved it. She was gifted with the gifts, you see. Mother wanted to move it because she said it looks like a pimple and spoils the line of the hill, but Father said we couldn’t afford to offend Mary by doubting her great-aunt’s gifts and curses.”

  “Does all that belong to you, then?” said Emma.

  “Oh, yes, but no one else wants it. It isn’t any use. There’s forty acres of fertile land for the farm, and a few big patches on this side of the loch which Father has planted with conifers, but nothing except heather will grow on that side at all.”

  “My mother’s brother, the one I was telling you about,” said Emma, “he has a farm in Dorset. His biggest crop is caravans, which will grow on the worst soil on the farm, he says.”

  “Ugh,” said all the McAndrews together.

  “I know they’re hideous,” said Emma. “But you can hide them. He keeps his in a pinewood, and the people who come there like it better than the sites in open fields. If you put caravans in that oak wood we drove through you wouldn’t have to build a road and they wouldn’t have to come to and fro past you, which is the worst thing about my uncle’s farm. You could arrange things so that you never saw them up here except when they were boating, and you could hire the boats to them for that. It’s all so beautiful, and it’s a waste only you being able to see it.”