Miss Ranskill Comes Home

by Barbara Euphan Todd

  Queer thing about this watch is we don’t know whether it’s lost or gained in all these years: water plays odd tricks with works. I’ve never let it run down and I’d been marking down the days by it before you came along to keep me company. Still, we’ll not know till we get to England if we’ve lost two or three days out of life or been given a few extra to play with. What shall we do with ’em, Miss Ranskill, eh, go to the pictures or what? And talking of that, let’s go to the pictures now, shall we?

  ‘Going to the pictures’ had been their favourite game. It had been invented by the Carpenter one evening as they sat round the fire during the first month of their acquaintanceship.

  Tell you what, Miss Ranskill. I’ll shut my eyes and you tell me all about your home till I see it. Start at the beginning when you were a little ’un, and then I’ll do the same for you.

  He had done the same for her, building with slow words all the houses in the small Berkshire village, laying a patchwork quilting of downs, raising a church steeple, thatching the wheat straw roofs, setting out the gardens and opening the school-house door for her so that she could see a little earnest boy, kicking at his desk with rough boots while he carved his initials with his first pocket-knife.

  It was the smell of the pitch-pine sawdust that started me, I reckon. I’d always wanted to go to sea, same as most boys, but carpentering was nearer to hand, and I wanted that too. I got apprenticed easy enough – there was a grant from the school.

  She saw him standing boot-deep in the shavings that curled away from the flying plane, saw his sawdusty hands, the tendrils of wood that clung to his hair and the play of the muscles on his forearms.

  He had gone to sea in the last war and had liked the life.

  Always something to look at and something to do. It was then I started making ships in bottles so’s my fingers wouldn’t get clumsy. Wish we’d a bottle here, Miss Ranskill, so’s I could make you one. Never mind, that’ll have to wait till we get home.

  After the war when the ship was paid off, he had worked for a time in the shipbuilding yards before going back to the village, where he had learned his trade, and taking over what remained of his old master’s business. Then he had married.

  You should have seen Annie then – pretty girl she was. We did very well at first till a new carpenter came and set up his sheds in the village. He could afford to wait for his money and I couldn’t. Then the old folks, the ones that knew the difference between good wood and bad, died off, and the new customers they didn’t like it if you sent in a bill twice, and we’d the children to think about. It wasn’t so easy then.

  Miss Ranskill had known the children very well indeed.

  There was Ada, so pretty that ‘she couldn’t be blamed for wanting a bit of fun,’ fond of shop windows and towns and cinemas and gay clothes. It was hoped that Ada would settle down, but the Carpenter, though loyal, was doubtful.

  I ought to have made more money for Ada since she wouldn’t stay at home or go into service. The shops don’t pay enough wages for girls that have got to find their own lodgings. I did what I could, but it wasn’t enough.

  There was Donald, who died when he was twelve, and there was Colin, who had been ‘just over seven’ when his father saw him last.

  It was just when times got bad that I went to the shipyards again – it was regular money and no bad debts, and the missus got a lodger – schoolteacher she was, and she could pay regular, so it seemed the best thing to do. Then there was the chance of a sea-going job – just for six months, and I took it just in time, before they closed down the yards.

  He had been knocked overboard on a dark night. It was something to do with a winch, Miss Ranskill thought, but she could never understand his sea-language and he always went on to describe his thoughts about Colin when he found himself alone in the dark water.

  I said to myself, it’s not good for a lad to be brought up by women, Colin needs his Dad. I’d have given up long before if it hadn’t been for that. I was just going to give up when that bit of driftwood went by.

  Then, as always, Colin dominated the picture. Colin, handling tools as though he loved them, Colin running down the road to meet his Dad. Whenever she thought of Colin she thought of the Carpenter until they seemed, not like father and son but like two little boys, the one stepping into the other’s shoes and taking his place against the pattern of village life that was so curiously undisturbed by partings or even death, because each family produced more families to live in the same place and inhabit the same houses and inherit the same way of life.

  She knew that Colin would come to think as his father thought, use his hands in the same way and see the same things.

  Yes, Miss Ranskill, you’ll have to see Colin.

  But she had seen him already.

  Go on, Miss Ranskill, it’s your turn now. I want a turn at the plush seat next.

  So she had made him presents of her own comfortable and carefully guarded childhood, set the brass guard round the nursery fire, conjured up the bowls of bread and milk, red dressing-gowns, the smell of soapy flannel, and all the ritual of bedtime when Nona and her elder sister, Edith, had listened to the shouts of the village children playing in the street and had envied them.

  You may have been a Miss Independence, but you never thought you’d get to a desert island, did you, Miss Ranskill? Tell you what – it’s all very well playing cinemas, but when we get back to England we’ll have to see each other’s homes, eh? There’s the front bedroom that’s never used only when the wife’s sister comes to stay. We’d make you welcome any time, if you’d honour us by coming, Miss Ranskill.

  She too had issued an invitation to stay and had enjoyed the anticipated sight of her elder sister’s face when the visitor arrived. For Edith was a great respecter of persons. Miss Ranskill heard her plaintive voice, saw her rather handsome distressed mouth, slightly moustached.

  ‘But, Nona, it’s impossible. The man is neither fish, fowl nor good red herring now that you have made a friend of him, as it were. Yes, I know the circumstances are peculiar, but that makes it all the more difficult: people won’t understand. We can’t let him eat in the kitchen with Emma if he’s a visitor – so unsettling for her, and he can’t possibly feed with us. Yes, I know, my dear, but even you must admit it’s an awkward situation. I don’t know how it is, Nona, but you always have managed to do uncomfortable things. I have never before heard of anyone falling overboard in mid-ocean just because they’d dropped their hat over the railings or whatever they were. It will be difficult enough to explain that away without your bringing a great lumbering carpenter to stay in the house. Besides, it was rather a compromising situation, even though the man seems to have behaved very decently. Yes, I know all that, my dear, and he seems a perfectly steady respectable sort of man… . But people will talk in these small villages. Besides, you can’t possibly have anything in common with him. You mustn’t be too democratic.’

  That anticipated attitude of her sister’s had seemed as sure and certain as though it had actually been taken; so sure and so certain that Miss Ranskill had made mental retaliation.

  ‘Nothing in common, oh no! nothing except a drinking shell and a fire and the boat we built together. He used my vest for a fishing-net, and I used his braces when my knicker elastic gave. It doesn’t seem awfully odd to me to ask a man to stay when he’s caught fish in your vest. As for democracy – it was more a mixture of monarchy and communism. He was a monarch – he made the rules and I had to keep them to save my own life. I didn’t know the rules of tree-cutting and fishing and boat-building. I suppose we were communistic in a way – neither of us took the bigger share of fish or anything like that.’

  The elder Miss Ranskill would not be embarrassed by the Carpenter now, thought her sister, as she passed the dreary ashes of the fire.

  The ends of a few charred sticks showed where the flames had tired to smouldering. They reproached her until her negligence seemed disloyalty to the Carpenter, and she picke
d up the twig besom to brush them clear of the slab that made the hearthstone.

  She remembered how the last time the fire had gone out he had whittled a pile of chips and frayed the ends of thin branches till each made a little brush to decoy and spread the flame before the maddening task of flint-striking began. She had offered to help, but he had not let her. He had always been jealous of his knife.

  See now, Miss Ranskill, where’d we be if you broke the blade? Women they’re all right when it comes to scissors, but it needs a man to use a knife the right way. ’Tisn’t as though we could buy another at the shop.

  Right way or wrong way, she must use the knife now.

  II

  For the first time since the Carpenter had died, Miss Ranskill went into the wattled shelter he had used as a bedroom. His old ragged coat lay, as he had last flung it down, on a slab of stone. In the second before snatching it up, the sight of sleeve-wrinkles, made almost permanent by the movement of his elbows, hurt sharply and unexpectedly.

  The left-hand pocket was empty. There was nothing in the right-hand one but a half-handful of fish-hooks chipped from shells and the bones of birds. The breast-pocket held the familiar bulging wallet. There was nothing in the worn lining of the coat, nothing on the stone, nothing on the sandy floor.

  Tell you what, Miss Ranskill, if that knife was lost we’d be just about done for. We’d never get on without it. Might as well cut our throats only there’d be nothing to cut ’em with.

  She began to panic as she scrabbled among the moss that covered the sandied hollow of his bed.

  Where had she last seen it?

  Then with a cold sickening jerk that gave a tug to memory she recalled that she had left it in the grave. It must be lying there now with the Carpenter above it and all that fiendish sand on top of all.

  Might as well cut our throats with nothing to cut ’em with.

  It might have been more bearable if she had flung the knife out to sea, than to know it was lying four or five feet below where she might choose to stand at any time on any day. It would stay there now till rust fretted the fish-oiled blades and joined them to their steel compartments.

  If she had dropped it in a crevice between rocks she might have tugged, and levered with other rocks till something gave – even if it were her own heart. But she could never dig in that sand again, never scrabble like a dog till she came to the Carpenter. He would not wish her to see his changing body. Honour and privacy were due to the dead. She could never disturb him now.

  ‘Never!’ screamed Miss Ranskill. ‘Never! never!’

  As she stumbled out of the shelter, her voice shrilled until it set the sea-birds screaming. It seemed to compete with their voices. The wind caught it and blew it backwards. Then the birds came circling, muted for a moment or two by the terrible sound until again the cacophony challenged them and they shrilled and shrieked.

  She screamed until her throat ached and until the sounds died to a hoarse groaning, sank to a whispering and stilled.

  The silence was more shocking than its raucous prelude – empty and tense.

  The birds veered seaward, sickling the blue.

  ‘What shall I do?’ gasped Miss Ranskill. ‘What shall I do?’

  She sobbed achingly as she staggered back into the Carpenter’s room, sagged to the sand and flummocked against the stone, pressing her cheek against his hollow coat.

  Pictures of knives came into her mind, of white-handled pocket-knives snug against green baize in the show-cases of superior shops, of silver knives with mother-of-pearl handles and of the very first knife she had bought for herself with her own pocket-money. It had worn through the linings of so many pockets that she had been ordered to wear it on a string round her neck. With a thought she could feel the rough edge of the string cutting into the back of her neck, but the satisfactory heaviness of the knife itself, jogging against her middle as she ran, had always been comforting. She had never seen a horse without hoping that if it had to get a stone in its hoof it would get it then, so that she, Nona Ranskill, could come to the rescue with the knife that had ‘the thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves with’. But never the horse and the stone and the knife all together, never once! She still had the scar left by the first cut made by the little blade on her forefinger. It was queer that the scar should remain now that there was no knife at all.

  At this very moment, no doubt, in hundreds of shops in England people would be buying knives, carelessly unaware of Miss Ranskill’s need. Surely, her thoughts ought to reach them, surely they should glance over their shoulders as the draught whistled under the doors, a draught that was, maybe, a tiny gust of the wind that had blown across the island, streaming Miss Ranskill’s hair and blowing a tear-drop from her face. How long would a wind take to travel from wherever the island might be to the shores of England? Did winds of England travel direct to her, winds whose breezes may have been parted momentarily by a knife held in a gardener’s hand as it passed through the air on its way to trim a rose-bush?

  What adventures steel suffered, tempered by fire, shrunk by water, tired by use and revived by rest, keeping its vitality for longer than a man could, whether it was worked for centuries, rested in an armoury or left to rust out its virtue at the bottom of a grave!

  The jack-knife had been chief servant to the Carpenter for years, and he had been its sole employer. He had oiled it with fish-oil, whetted it on carefully chosen stones. Its blade had grown thinner and narrower as the years went by. Every time it was shut, it closed upon a story. Its blade had known the resistance of ships’ tobacco, codline and hemp, as well as unseasoned wood.

  It had been made in Sheffield: its steel had been tempered by men who had never been out of England and who took their girls to the cinemas at nights to see pictures of desert islands.

  ‘Coo!’ they said, when the heroine (her hair freshly waved, as though by some barber of Neptune) was lifted out of the sea by an immaculate and bronzed young man. Her dress was only damp enough to cling prettily to her perfect curves. And the young man, even though his shorts might be a trifle ragged, wore a shirt that must, surely, have been put on clean that morning. That was all that the makers of steel knew about desert islands, but the steel itself had learned everything: it had mirrored cracked fingers and ragged nails. Its steel had been true and flawless, but now it was powerless to help any more as it lay close to the Carpenter’s hand just as it had done through all the years of its working life.

  She felt again in the pockets of the coat. There was just a chance that in her hurry she might have searched one of the pockets twice, that she had only buried the knife in nightmare, but of course she had not.

  The rough tweed caressed her hand as she fumbled.

  Thing I like best about you, Miss Ranskill, you never make a fuss.

  Memory of the Carpenter’s approval lifted her heart a little. Suddenly it became important to him as well as to her that she should not make a fuss. It would be disloyal to their friendship, a denial of the quality in her – the quality he had admired – to make a fuss now. She must continue to be the same person.

  Friendship with him had changed her so that she had, in a way, become a part of him.

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments. Love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds.

  Loyalties were important: they outlive the grave and whatever it is that we label death.

  No use crying for the moon, Miss Ranskill, we’ve got to make shift with what we can get.

  No use crying for a knife either.

  She raised her head from the rough tweed and blinked at the sunlight.

  From the horizon, the sea stretched like a broad scimitar, fretting and chipping the tide’s edge to silver splintering. Its great curving blade took on all the blue-and-grey and white tones of tempering, with gold as well where the sunlight touched it. There was the cutting hurtful blade-edge towards her and beyond, where the blue thick
ened to grey, the harder less acute tempering – the safer stronger side of the blade.

  Mind once more took possession of Miss Ranskill’s body, easing its strain by virtue of that sudden command. She had the boat, which was all ready except for stowage – storage, what was the word? They had meant to go, anyway, and now she would continue the plan. There was work to do in England. She must use the boat the Carpenter had made. The years of his labour must not be wasted. She must find his wife and tell her the manner of his death because she had no right to keep the last years to herself. It was a pity she was so tired, but it didn’t really matter. She would sleep all the better when she got home.

  Beds cried out to her to come and sleep in them, cool beds in summer and warm ones in winter. China tea would be waiting at her bedside in the early morning and she would put her lips to thin-fluted china. There would be thin bread crumbling under its load of butter. There would be flowers to ‘do’ – pink-stemmed primroses to be gathered in woods.

  Now she must hurry. She must be quick, very, very quick over everything before her mind sagged again. She must begin work now if she were to leave the island tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I

  It was early in the morning, but Miss Ranskill had been at sea for some hours. The island would soon be out of sight now. Already, it looked no bigger than a handkerchief – a small grey-blue one with an edge of fluttering white lace.

  So far, thanks to the patient instructions of the Carpenter on two trial trips, she had managed the paddles fairly well. The boat had a tiny mast but no sail – that was to have been made later from her skirt and his shirt.

  Not that we’ll risk a lot of sailing, Miss Ranskill. I’d not trust the stepping of that mast too much. No, we’ll only have a bit of a sail for when the wind’s middling lazy and we’re feeling slack the same. Tell you what though, Miss Ranskill, when we do want a bit of a blow we’ll stick the knife-blade in the mast. That’s a sailor’s trick, and they say it never fails. Yes, we’ll use the knife to call the breeze up, and we’ll sail along looking like mother’s washing-day. Your skirt and my shirt’ll make it more homely-like. Yes, the knife’ll do one more good turn for us.