Emma Tupper's Diary

by Peter Dickinson

  “Andy’s turn now,” said Finn. “I wonder what he’ll do.”

  “Can’t you stop them?”

  “Not my business—I’ve always been neutral. The trouble is that Roddy knows how to get Andy’s goat in little ways, like just now, but Andy can’t do it to Roddy so he has to go in for the big stuff. That’s why the rows always look like Andy’s fault, but it isn’t true. It doesn’t usually start on the first day of the holidays, like this—I expect it’s partly because Andy’s love-life is in a mess, and because you’re here, and Father isn’t.”

  “I can go to my uncle,” said Emma.

  “Oh, rubbish, don’t think of it. Father would be furious, and in any case the row will probably blow over as soon as we’ve got Anna going. Hi, Poop, what luck?”

  “I’m a whole pound over,” said Miss Newcombe, in an accent of such horror that she might have found a corpse on her bathroom floor. “I shall have to stop eating potatoes . . . and scones . . . and things.”

  She was wearing slim blue corduroy trousers and a heavy dark blue polo-necked jersey, which made her look like the film-star in those films where the heroine falls into the sea and gets lent some manly fisherman’s kit by the hero who happens to have rescued her—only Miss Newcombe looked real, in a way that those heroines seldom do.

  “It’s all right,” said Finn in a comforting voice. “A quick walk up to Darwin’s Pimple will take it off. It goes as fast as it comes.”

  “Not always,” said Miss Newcombe. “Look, there’s Roddy.”

  “What are you going to do, Finn?” said Emma.

  “Rub brasses in Anna. But I’m not going to reason with Andy, if that’s what you’re getting at. And I advise you not to try your wiles on Roddy, femme fatale though you may be.”

  In a mild breeze they digested their way across the loch. Too soon Roddy started to bark a flurry of captainly orders and the echoing cliff barked back; flustered, Emma got the little jib in and lowered the mainsail without making a mistake, although everything seemed to happen slowly and clumsily; just as she straightened up, panting but pleased with herself among the heaps of canvas, the keel slid with a mild grunt into the shingle of a little cove. It was like being shoved unexpectedly in the back; she floundered to keep her balance, but her feet were still tangled in sail while the top half of her was toppling forward; her thigh banged the thwart; her feet came free just as her wrists plunged into three inches of water; she tried to flip herself onto dryness by way of a handstand, and almost made it, but after teetering for an instant fell helplessly back. When the splash was over she was kneeling in a foot of wet, her whole front drenched and water slopping round her calves. Sulkily she crawled ashore and stood up.

  Roddy was whooping like a gull, and the joke was also simple enough for Miss Newcombe. The sight of her so golden and happy completely wiped out Emma’s crossness, and she laughed too; then she rolled up her jeans so that the wet part was no longer rubbing like sandpaper at her calves and shins, and took off her shoes and socks. Roddy dug in the little locker by the tiller and threw her a pair of rope-soled sandals; she tried them on.

  “I’m afraid they’re a bit big,” she said. “They’re all right for slopping about in, but I can’t climb a mountain like this.”

  “Mountain!” shouted Roddy. “You’re not climbing a mountain. It’s a hummock, a molehill, a blob! Those are mountains!”

  He flung out a pointing arm, like Columbus’s look-out man spying land, and Emma looked across the loch. Now that they were right over on the far side, the steep rise behind Big House no longer formed the skyline. Beyond it had risen a pale ridge, bluish but with white smears of snow along the crest, which vanished at its eastern end into the dark, almost plum-blue wall of the storm-cloud.

  “That one’s Ben Goig,” he said. “Over three thousand feet. You can’t see Loch Goig from here, of course, but its surface is higher than Darwin’s Pimple. We’re only going up a few hundred feet. Come on.”

  The cove was right up against the western end of the cliffs, and Roddy took them up a steep path which twisted back and ran only a foot or two from the drop; he had brought the boathook from the dinghy and used it to thwack the heather every few steps, to frighten the adders away, he said. When they reached the highest point of the cliff the path turned inland, winding southward up the long, dull slope. All Roddy’s impatience frothed up during the climb; he would surge ahead, thwacking and whistling, until he was almost fifty yards in front; then he would lean on his boathook and jeer at the others while they toiled up to him. Miss Newcombe climbed earnestly, frowning and pink in the face, with little drops of sweat beading her delicate skin. Emma, born and bred in a country where they take snakes very seriously indeed, was slowed not only by that ancient dread but also by Roddy’s tiresome sandals, which slithered on the steep places and rubbed her heels at every footstep. In the end she fought the snake-fear down and climbed bare-footed. It took them less than an hour, even so, to come out on to a gentler slope and arrive triumphant at the cairn. Roddy was reading the brass plaque let into its side, so Emma did the same.

  “To the Honoured Memory of

  CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN

  (1809–1882)

  who, first of all men,

  saw what lay

  In the dark backward and abysm of Time.

  A. J. McA. 1890”

  Emma shivered at the mysterious words.

  “Grandfather took a long time to decide to do the right thing by him, didn’t he?” said Roddy. “Eight years after he died.”

  “It’s a funny place,” said Miss Newcombe.

  “What do you mean?” said Roddy.

  “I’ve often wondered . . . when you’re all away . . . I look out and wonder why he didn’t put it on top. Up there.”

  She pointed along the mottled ridge, which continued to slope gently up towards the east, not reaching its highest point for several hundred yards.

  “He had something to hide,” said Roddy in his darkest voice.

  “A body, I expect,” said Emma. “Somebody knew I was the rightful heir.”

  “Bang on, Cousin Emma. It’s old Mother Mulligatawny buried inside there with her crystal ball. She peered into it and saw that in sixty years a rightful heir would get herself born, so she came and blackmailed grandfather, and he did her in.”

  “Poisoned her with liniment,” said Emma.

  “And then he hid her by making her grave conspicuous. Like in Father Brown.”

  “It does smell a bit . . . funny,” said Miss Newcombe. As she sniffed the clean upland air tiny puckers appeared on either side of her delicious nose. Roddy laughed and started to rush about the hillside, bashing the bushes and stooping every now and then to pick something up. Emma stayed where she was and looked about her. Ben Goig shut off the north, and the ridge they were standing on ran east into a muddle of higher hills. She walked round the cairn and looked south; this was a broader valley, with no loch in it; instead, most of the bottom was divided into real fields, among which stood several dwellings. A white house with dark-blue window-frames and doors nestled into a little wood less than a mile down the slope.

  “That’s Fertagh,” said Roddy, rushing up the hill with an armful of small rocks.

  “Does it belong to you—to me, I mean?” said Emma.

  Roddy scowled. He dropped his rocks at the foot of the cairn, chose one from the pile, fitted it into a cranny and banged it tight with another one.

  “It ought to, but it doesn’t,” he said. “Some of the McAndrews fought for Prince Charlie in 1745, and some of us didn’t. When it was over King George rewarded the traitors by giving them the best land, and left the honest men the barren bits. They’re McAndrews down there, and Father is their Chief, but the land doesn’t belong to us. Bother, I was hoping to see the islands. You sometimes can, after rain.”

  Emma followed his gaze towards the west and at first thought she was looking out over another valley, enormously wide and full of mist, to where a couple o
f hills rose. Then she saw that the mist was sea.

  “Those are islands, aren’t they?” she said. “Isn’t that one a funny shape?”

  “Eigg? Yes, it used to be a volcano, and so was Skye, over there, and Ardnamurchan which you can’t see down in the south. But on a good day you can see the outer islands, the Hebrides, sixty miles away. Sometimes when the sun is going down and all the sky is marmalade-coloured you notice that the edge of the sea has a lump on it, and that’s South Uist. What’s the matter, Poop?”

  “I was just wondering. If Mother . . . I’ve forgotten her name . . . died all that time ago you wouldn’t expect her to be still . . .”

  She wrinkled her nose again and sniffed the impeccable air.

  “I rather think it’s another sad story,” said Emma.

  “That’s right,” said Roddy. “A sad, sad story.”

  “Oh good,” said Miss Newcombe. But she still looked puzzled.

  Chapter 4

  “YESTERDAY WAS TERRIFYING,” wrote Emma. She looked out at the loch and thought about its lightless depths, where the underwater cliffs went down and down. It was a day like the first day, with the water still as glass and no belt of steam above it. Noticing that set her wondering about the hot springs, and Finn’s ingenious idea that the warmth allowed the monster to survive the Ice Ages. But if they’d been hot enough for that, wouldn’t the monster have boiled? She had an idea that the ice-cap had been hundreds of feet thick up here in Scotland. She wondered whether there was a book in the billiard-room in which she could check. She was surprised at her own determination to make the monster a possible idea, to find out facts which would prove that it could have happened. Partly this was because she felt that she couldn’t often match the wild inventions of the McAndrews, but she could at least be thorough, and impress them that way; but partly it was because she had caught some of her own father’s obsession with the survival of wild life—in a mad way it would be making up for the trophies in the dining-room and the awful, beautiful tiger-skins in the hall if she could somehow use her wits to make this other imagined creature as real as possible. The mere idea of an animal coming through for sixty million years was comforting, even if it wasn’t true.

  “Yesterday was terrifying.” She nearly crossed the words out again—but they were true. “We had some quite useful ideas at breakfast,” she wrote.

  “We must have a broken net to show them, as well as a film.” said Finn. “And a couple of fishermen with a story of how they were bringing their net in and there was this great thing threshing around which almost capsized their boat before it broke the net.”

  “Good,” said Andy. “Ewan Uphill can do it with Andy Coaches—they can be father and son.”

  “Andy Ghillie’s more telegenic than Andy Coaches,” said Finn. “He’s gnarleder.”

  “He’s nothing like so good a liar,” said Roddy.

  “He lies beautifully in the Gaelic,” said Finn. “It’s just talking English makes him sound so shifty, because he’s not used to it. Ewan can translate—they’ll love that.”

  “Where are you going to get your net?” said Roddy aggressively. “And how are you going to stop them realising there are no fish in the loch big enough to net?”

  “City nits won’t know that,” said Andy. “I’ll shop around for an old net next time I’m in Mallaig—someone’s always got a torn one that’s not worth mending.”

  “I had an idea,” said Emma cautiously. They looked at her.

  “It’s about why no one has heard of the monster before. If you said that it only appears once every twenty-seven years, that means last time was 1944 and the time before was 1917, which were both war years and anyone who might have made a fuss was away fighting.”

  “Very good,” said Andy. “And it helps with something that’s been bothering me. I know telly-folk, and they don’t send camera teams dashing about for fun. They’re far more likely to send a scout up first, and that would mean two lots of faking. But if it only pops up for a few days, at long intervals, they’d have to come up quickly or they’d miss it. We might even be able to tell them where to look for it without giving the show away.”

  “It seems a crazy way for a monster to carry on,” said Roddy.

  “Mating season,” said Finn. “Not every year, every twenty-seven.”

  “Only one of it?” said Roddy. “Some love-life!”

  His wicked glance flashed across at Andy, who luckily missed the look and the meaning.

  “It could be a single bull which had beaten the other males in the herd,” said Emma.

  “Fearsome deep-water battles,” said Finn with relish.

  “And then it swims in a regular pattern across the loch, a bit further each day,” said Emma. “It could be fertilising the eggs, or something.”

  “If we know too much about why it does what it’s doing that’ll look fishy,” said Finn.

  “Right,” said Andy in his officer voice. “This is the way we’ll play it. We’ll think up as water-tight a story as we can, including why it does what it does, but we won’t tell the telly-folk any of the reasons. With a bit of luck they’ll work it out for themselves, and that’ll make them feel so smug that they won’t even consider the possibility that we’ve worked it all out before them.”

  “Besides,” said Finn, “it’s better to have a bit of a mystery. Then they can put on that mysterious voice.”

  “And still,” said Roddy, plummily, “the murky depths of the loch retain their terrifying secret. What further evidence will come to light, to reveal to the world the true nature of the Curse of the McAndrews? Only time can tell.”

  “That’s it,” said Finn.

  “When are we going to take her out?” said Roddy.

  “I’ve had the batteries on charge all night,” said Andy. “It’ll take Ewan and me about an hour to shift them in to Anna and connect up. Then we’ll tow her round to the jetty with the tractor and Finn and I will take her out. We’ll only go far enough to see if she’s watertight, and then we’ll come in again.”

  “You could do that outside her own shed, without all that towing,” said Roddy.

  “No I couldn’t. If I take her out down the big slipway, Ewan can sit at the top with the tree-felling cable run out to the shackle in Anna’s nose. Then if anything goes wrong he can simply haul us out.”

  “I’ll run the tractor,” said Roddy. “You needn’t waste Ewan’s time.”

  “Not on your life,” said Andy. “Not on my life, I mean. I’m not having you larking about on the other end of the tow-rope while Finn and I are underwater.”

  “Have you thought,” said Roddy, “that when your telly-folk are here they’ll smell a rat if you aren’t somewhere about too? And Finn? Who’s going to run Anna then, Mr Big?”

  “I’m taking her out this morning,” said Andy sharply. “See you at the boathouse in about an hour, Finn.”

  He pushed his chair back and stalked out, as though that settled everything. Roddy opened a Coke bottle with a wrench and hurled the cap out through the open window; its small splash spoilt the still surface of the water, but only for an instant.

  But before the hour was up Roddy’s impatience was too much for his dignity. He fussed in and out of Emma’s room until she had to stop writing to her parents and go with him down to the boathouse to see what was happening. They found a big blue tractor chugging to itself outside the door, and as they approached a young man came out of the boathouse and switched it off. He was tall, red-faced and fair-haired.

  “Ewan,” said Roddy, “this is our cousin Emma Tupper. Emma, this is Ewan McAndrew, Ewan Uphill. Emma’s the grand-daughter of the aunt who ran away.”

  “Yess,” said Ewan. “Mary was telling us. It must be grand to come home, Miss Emma.”

  He spoke very softly and shyly, but with no accent Emma could hear apart from a slight lingering hiss where a word ended with an “s”.

  “It’s lovely,” said Emma.

  “How much cable have you
got on here?” said Roddy, fiddling with the levers of the large winch which the tractor carried behind it, like a Victorian lady’s bustle.

  “Hundred and fifty yards,” said Ewan. “Hark to that, now.”

  A whining hum rose from the boathouse. Roddy dashed in, and Emma followed in time to hear the whine beginning to fail as the little propeller of the submarine slowed from a blur to its own shape, and stopped. Andy’s head poked out of the hatch.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Poop, what on earth do you think you’re doing?

  Emma turned and saw Finn and Miss Newcombe in the doorway, Miss Newcombe wearing her ivory-coloured dressing- gown and looking as though she were just going sleepy to bed. Ewan’s red face turned a shade redder, but it was hard to tell whether this was pleasure or embarrassment.

  “Oh, it’s all right,” said Miss Newcombe. “I mean Mary says you’re going to drown yourselves, so I thought I’d better be ready to rescue you. It’s just that this is warmer for waiting around in than my bathing wrap. There’s always such a lot of waiting around—like films.”

  “Mary’s always said we were going to drown,” said Andy, as he climbed out. “Ever since I can remember, the moment any of us even paddled in the loch . . .”

  “It’s that great-aunt of hers who was gifted with the gifts,” said Finn. “Mary feels she’s got to keep the family reputation up by prophesying the odd bit of doom.”

  “Shut up,” said Andy. “Come and look at this.”

  He led them to the very back of the shed, where an ugly, greasy arrangement of large iron cogs was connected to a big drum with steel cable wound many times round it. Andy picked up four bars of wood and slotted them into grooves at the edge of the outermost cog, so that they became four spokes by which the cog could be turned. The whole thing, Emma saw, was a winch like the one on the tractor, but . . .