Miss Ranskill turned her face to the window but she did not see the rushing landscapes. She was wondering if she would ever be able to remember that her truth was shocking and evidently not to be borne by a people who, though they had suffered air-raids and mutilations, the destruction of their homes and the death of their kin, yet could not bear to hear oddly-timed laughter or statements of facts beyond their immediate knowledge.
Presently the train had swept past the scarred outskirts of Bath and the crowded station, where men and women in every kind of uniform jostled each other like sheep or stood forlornly by kit-bags.
Then there were more ravaged buildings and then little housebound roads thrust themselves out towards the country. At last there were only farms and grey villages with the green of Somerset in between. The lanes, like all lanes seen from train windows, led to nowhere in particular. The houses only existed as pictures for the benefit of travellers. One might as soon live in one of them as inhabit a cottage in a water-colour sketch. The villages were as fantastic as all railway villages are, the children who waved from the sidings had no existence at all, and it was impossible to think of anyone stepping on to one of the wayside platforms in order to go home. Yet there was a difference – there was something lacking, and for a long time Miss Ranskill wondered what it could be.
When, at last, she remembered, she was rather shocked. It was all very well to play the railway game with villages and stations, but they were going a little too far when they began to play back. It was as baffling as though a baby whom you had addressed as ‘there’s a pretty lamb then’ had suddenly leaped on all fours and followed its mother, the sheep.
She forgot her disgrace and spoke urgently.
‘Why have none of the stations got names?’
‘Because,’ said her neighbour at last, ‘because we do not believe that the Hun has learned geography. A few of us have maps of Germany, but we do not believe that there are any maps of this country outside the British Isles. We removed the names from railway stations on the same glad day that we painted the sign-posts white. We decided it would be a good idea for the invading Hun to mistake Huddersfield for London. We thought it would be a joke to hear him sing, “Oh! Mr Porter, whatever shall we do? The Fuehrer’s taken Birmingham and he thinks he’s taken Crewe.”’
‘Oh!’ said Miss Ranskill. ‘Then how?’
‘It’s perfectly easy, really, because the porters bawl out the names. We do not believe that any of the invading Huns will understand English, nor, of course, will the spies. As a matter of fact, none of our porters speak English either – rather a vicious circle, don’t you think?’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The inhabitants of the garden were declaring war and peace in their several ways.
‘Buzinezz as uzual!’ buzzed a bee as it blundered against a spray of lilac before flying down to settle on the velvet of a wallflower, ‘Buzinezz as uzual!’ Its action released two scents, the sharp of the lilac, the soft of the wallflower. Each, as it drifted through the air, maintained for a moment the peace and permanence of village gardens. Then the bee-swung wallflower flicked against a clump of chives that edged the bed so that a stronger fragrance gave a taste of war. The chives stood stiffly for battle, so did the garland of parsley round the rose-bed on the lawn, and so did the seedling lettuces under the windows of the low red cottage. The aviary that had once sheltered budgerigars told a sad empty little story of the famine that had lasted a week too long for short lives.
The thrush on the rockery rapped out a grace with his snail-shell. The wagtail on the lawn flicked an insolent tail. There was nothing wrong with his world, so the tail remarked with frequency.
Even if the swallows had seen untoward sights during their crossing, their arrow flights suggested no mechanised progress since Crécy. A spider arranged its larder between gate and gate-post with the skill used by its ancestors before any child had learned to say ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum’.
The entry of Miss Ranskill caused some stir in the garden. The spider’s web snapped. The thrush left its snail-shell, the wagtail flicked indignation as it left the lawn; and the bees bumped irresolutely from flower to flower, releasing so many tiny gusts of scent that her nose might have been bewildered if she had not been concentrating so hard on seeing.
So this was where Edith lived, in this contented cottage on an island of flower-bordered lawn. This was where she would live too, she supposed. At any moment the white door might be opened or a window flung up. She put down the cat’s basket and turned to the gate, where stood the boy who had carried her suitcase and tool-bag. She must give him his sixpence so that he could go before the door opened.
But there was no stir from the house, even when the gate had clicked, even while she walked crunchingly up the path, or when her footsteps made the scraper jangle on the flagstone.
She cried, ‘Edith! Edith!’ while her right hand fumbled for the bell-push and her left pounded at the knocker. The clangour of the bell went on for too long: she wanted to hear the running of feet and the creak of the opening door. The silence that followed was too long also, and very unwelcoming. Could she, but then how could she, have missed Edith on that tiny deserted platform? Edith had said in her letter that she would meet the train: the cottage was only two minutes’ walk from the station.
Miss Ranskill rang again, and now the crying of the bell’s voice through emptiness was almost frightening. She knocked until echoes interrupted echoes. Then she went round to the back of the house.
She followed a path that led between shrubs to a small drying-green bordered by currant bushes. Pegged out on the line, as the first proofs of Edith’s habitation, were some underclothes, two striped shirts that she recognised and (signal this time of Edith’s belief in her own death) a very much worn and rather shrunken cardigan of her own. Its colour had faded since the days of peace; it had been clear blue when she had left it behind at home. The little nosegays of flowers on the pockets had been picked off and bright patches showed where they had been. It was all right, of course. It was sensible and practical of Edith to have made use of her clothes. All the same, she need not have flaunted the cardigan on the very day of her homecoming.
‘She’s worn it for a long time too,’ thought Miss Ranskill. ‘She must have begun wearing it almost as soon – anyway, blue never suited her; it always made her look rather sallow. She takes sixes, so she can’t be wearing my shoes.’
She knocked on the back door, rather more sharply than she might have done if she had not seen the line of clothes.
There was something wrong about the ensuing silence. Even if the knock stirred no householder, there should have been the scutter of paws and a bark, sharpened to ecstasy as her voice was recognised. There should have been a bowl of water by the doorstep and a cloth for the drying of feathered pads. Edith was always finicky.
Miss Ranskill stooped down and lifted up the door-mat, but there was no key there. Then she remembered that the door-mat had always been her key-cover and that Edith had used a flower-pot.
‘A door-mat’s so obvious. It’s the first place a burglar would look.’
‘People don’t always think of the obvious. A burglar could get in any way.’
‘A flower-pot’s safer. He’d probably hunt for a bit before smashing the windows.’
‘If he’s going to smash the windows anyway, why not leave the key in the door?’
A butterfly flicked on top of an inverted bee-skep near the door. If she had been a burglar, thought Miss Ranskill, it would probably have given the same delicate hint. She stooped and picked up the key.
The kitchen was very clean, very tidy, but empty of life. She noticed, with a pang, that the old nursery tea-canister with its painting of Queen Victoria, stood on the mantel-shelf. A scar ran across the face of the Queen. She remembered her tears on the day that the new flakes of paint had been sprinkled on the nursery fender. It seemed a very long time ago, and the Queen looked old and more faded now. There was nothing el
se that she recognised except a little lustre jug standing on a tray on the kitchen table. There were two trays, each with its small sugar basin, jug, teapot, plates and toast-rack.
Her heart warmed towards Edith. Here was the first sign of welcome. The sight of a dish marked ‘puppy’ was heartening too, unless, of course, the spaniel had a successor.
Two places were laid in the little dining-room, but the flat bowl of flowers in the middle of the table puzzled Miss Ranskill as much as the mock Jacobean sideboard. It was unlike Edith to behead monthly roses and cram them together in a shapeless mass like so many dollops of pink blancmange. They had always cut sprays of the monthly roses and set them among the sincere blue of forget-me-nots and the lace of cow-parsley. Edith had added a buttercup or two – ‘pink needs yellow.’ They had arranged flowers as though they were growing – ‘I like to bring the garden indoors.’
The sitting-room was almost frightening in its ugliness. It had yellow-washed walls and powder-blue chair-covers. ‘Sunday school blue,’ thought Miss Ranskill, quoting from her mother and the objections she had raised over their choice of summer ginghams in the nursery days. A mock Jacobean ‘what-not’ was decorated with a scattering of Indian silver knick-knacks. There were anæmic water-colours on the walls. There was an insipid mauve carpet and shiny mauve cushions in the chairs. There were more dollops of flowers – purple and yellow pansies, this time in a black bowl on a walnut occasional table. The sight of her great-grandmother’s sampler suspended from the silver-embossed sheath of a scimitar enraged Miss Ranskill. Edith might have been obliged to take a furnished house, but surely she could have ‘played houses’ in it better than this.
Something was very wrong.
Something else was wrong too. In her stupid disappointment over the colouring of a room and the emptiness of a house, she had forgotten the cat and the three little kittens, still humbly crowded into their basket by the gate. She ran out of the house and along the laurelled path. A countryman was walking down the road that led past the cottage. His shoe-leather creaked, and so did the straps below his knees. ‘A hedger and ditcher,’ thought Miss Ranskill as she noticed the bill-hook laid against his shoulder. Soon, she knew, he would be more than a hedger and ditcher: he would be old so-and-so. She would know all about his family and they would pass the time of day together.
‘’Mornin’, Miss.’ A finger jerked up to his cap peak and Miss Ranskill felt comforted as she returned the greeting. He had come alive through one war and was too old to be touched by this one, except through stabs from the wounds and death of the younger generation; and he had seen too many births of spring and too many deaths of winter to be much affected. The hedges increased and shrivelled, leaf by leaf and fall by fall, and he was as persistent as an old cart-horse. All in good time, all in good time, his footsteps beat out a steady rhythm till the sound of them faded away. A swift shadow from a Spitfire’s wing darkened the chalk of the road ahead of him, but he did not look up as the machine whizzed overhead in its rollicking hurry and dipped a wing towards the fields below.
The kittens were mewing in the basket. Soon they and their mother made a little dappled hearth-rug on the patch of carpet before the fender. The room looked better now.
The telephone bell rang sharply and suddenly and Miss Ranskill looked round the room for it. The jangling summons sent her running into the hall, but it was not there nor in the dining-room. Meanwhile, Edith must be ringing up to explain why she had not met the train.
She ran upstairs, pushed through the half-open door of a bedroom and was greeted by a louder shrilling, which ceased as she snatched the receiver from its hook.
‘Oh! is that you Mrs Phillips?’
Of course it wasn’t Mrs Phillips. Who was Mrs Phillips?
‘Mrs Phillips, I just wanted to make sure –’
‘This isn’t Mrs Phillips.’
‘Oh! is it you, Miss Ranskill?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘I wonder if you’d be so very kind as to tell Mrs Phillips that the meeting is at half-past two on Thursday, not at three-thirty. And we do so hope that you’ll be able to come too.’
‘I don’t think –’ began Miss Ranskill.
‘Oh! what a pity! But I know it is your glove-making day. Well, if you will tell Mrs Phillips – thank you so much.’
One couldn’t go on holding a telephone receiver and listening to the low buzzing that hinted at maddening secrecy. Miss Ranskill hung the thing up and looked round another ugly room, made friendly this time by familiar things. The mantelpiece was crowded with objects that had the facile power to bring back a spring morning or a winter afternoon so clearly that she could almost smell the lilac through an open window, and then flick away a season to inhale the scent of chestnuts roasting on a hob. There was the weathercock man and the weathercock woman, who had been prodded with hatpins on the mornings before picnics. There was the mosaic box from Capri, holding as many secrets as Pandora’s casket – all the blue of the grotto and all the shimmering colours of the day. Her own photograph and her own Bible stood on Edith’s bedside table; in fact, the room held more of herself than her sister.
‘I had a lot of things then,’ thought Miss Ranskill, remembering the powder-bowl that the Carpenter had made, and the little besom for her hair. ‘I’d better find my room now and see if that’s crowded as well.’
The room opposite contained nothing that was recognisable. The bed was turned down for the night and a dressing-gown hung on the rail at its foot. She supposed it was one of her sister’s and felt grateful for the preparations, as she remembered how she had longed for the sight of a turned-down bed in the days when the wind had laid a shifting coverlet of sand in the island shelter. Here, too, was a bedside table with another Bible and another photograph on it. From its morocco leather frame the face of an elderly and rather offended-looking Army officer stared at Miss Ranskill. It couldn’t be a joke, Edith’s sense of humour was as orderly as her account book. Anyway, there was nothing at all jocular in that forbidding countenance.
She opened the Bible and read on the fly-leaf the inscription – ‘Philippa Gilroy with love from her Godmother, January 2nd, 1900.’ That told nothing.
And now Miss Ranskill was as baffled as any of the three little bears. ‘Who’s been sleeping in my bed?’ The absurd question drifted into her brain, and she glared at the huffy face in the photograph, before opening the door again.
There was a bathroom behind the third door on the little landing, and the fourth opened into a spare room, looking spare and mean and unwelcoming as such rooms sometimes do, when one guest has left and the next is not expected yet. The bed was humpy with folded blankets, the towel-rail was bare, and there was nothing on the dressing-table except a very unbecoming mirror that reflected Miss Ranskill’s baffled expression most unhappily.
‘Miaou! Miaou!’ The cat had left its squirming family and was coming up the stairs in search of her.
Miss Ranskill took it down to the kitchen, helped it to a saucerful of milk and returned to the drawing-room. She might as well, so she decided, get used to the room before Edith returned home. It must be her home, the boy from the station had led her to it at once, and there was the added evidence of possessions; but who was Mrs Phillips, and who was Philippa Gilroy, and who was the Army officer? Above all, where was Edith?
Nothing in the room could answer those questions, but the arrangement of the mantelpiece gave Miss Ranskill other things to think about.
A clock in a black marble case divided the broad shelf into two separate divisions: each of these was so crowded that it was not surprising that no one object had attracted her notice when she first came into the room.
On one side was a photograph that was twin to the one on the bedside table. Around it were snapshots, some blurred and some hideously distinct of the same man. Miss Ranskill now saw him in shorts, in plus-fours and in ordinary well-filled clothes. One silver cup made it clear that he had been a good golfer, another that he had
succeeded in a gymkhana; and a rose-bowl bore witness to the fact that Major Phillips had been held in high esteem by the officers of his regiment and thought worthy of a wedding-present. There were some medals, more Indian knick-knacks and a little silver elephant.
But if one side of the mantelpiece was a shrine, the other was rival to it, and Miss Nona Ranskill herself was the heroine. She nearly trod a kitten to death as she read a framed obituary notice from The Times and learned that ‘the beloved younger sister of Edith Ranskill’ was believed to have been drowned at sea on the date when she had actually been washed ashore on the island.
A bunch of fresh flowers stood before a photograph that had flattered Miss Ranskill on her twenty-ninth birthday. There was another quite large and all too clear photograph of a stained glass memorial window. The figure in the window stood beside a magnolia tree that rose rather surprisingly from a patch of water thick with fish. Their faces gaped up hungrily and with disapproval. A magnifying-glass, which lay beside the frame, helped her to decipher the legend below the fishes. This time, it was final, though it contained a hint that sooner or later the sea was expected to give up its dead and that Nona Ranskill would be included.
A feeling of importance trickled into Miss Ranskill’s mind, but it was followed by a sense of guilt. It was tactless of her to have remained alive after so much trouble had been taken. Edith, who hated any detail of a plan to be changed, must be annoyed, particularly if she had paid for the window out of her own money and not from the legacy. For Edith had a way of budgeting funds and allowed no overlapping – only sacrificial changes.
‘That’s my new summer dress,’ she used to say, pointing to an asparagus bed, or (showing visitors the kitchen range) ‘That’s my trip to Bruges.’
Miss Ranskill wondered if the stained glass window was the price of her sister’s new teeth, chintz covers for the drawing-room or charity subscriptions for the year. She did not want to be an object of charity, though that might be easier to bear than a new-born relationship with a toothless and martyred Edith.
Miss Ranskill Comes Home Page 17