‘Very upsetting,’ she murmured, and felt like a ghost.
Then she wondered absurdly if she could be sharing the hearth-rug with the real plus-foured ghost of Major Phillips, if he too were looking at his photograph just as she was looking at hers.
‘We don’t give the dead a chance,’ she thought. ‘As soon as they are dead we endue them with attributes they would have loathed.’ For a moment she became as wise as the dead and aware that dissolution of the body could not mean destruction of humour and judgment and the sense of fitness.
Her hands stretched out for the hated and flattering photograph, but, before they could reach it, the latch of the little gate clicked and she turned to look out of the window.
A woman in a black and white dress was walking up the path. Before her lumbered a very fat liver-and-white spaniel.
Miss Ranskill reached the front doorstep just as the tail-end of her sister’s skirt whisked round the side of the house. The spaniel, who had stopped to snuffle at a bone, heard the ring of the scraper on the stone flags and cocked up her ears.
‘Whuppet!’ cried Miss Ranskill. ‘Whuppet!’
The stump of a tail wagged first, the bulky hindquarters wagged next, and then, lolloping, lumbering, whimpering, the little dog was home again, home in the sense that Miss Ranskill had longed to be, unquestioned, uncriticised and secure in the lap of love. Its feathered paws waved upwards and its eyes had a windblown look.
‘Everything’s all right!’ said the eyes. ‘Everything’s just the same. I dreamed you were away, but you weren’t after all.’
‘Nona!’ cried a voice from inside the house, ‘Nona!’ And as Miss Ranskill turned her dog-licked face, her sister added, ‘You said Tuesday in your letter. I know you said Tuesday.’
The spaniel, now exhausted by ecstasy, was lying down, muzzle on paws and tail still wagging. Her bracken-brown eyes showed no awareness of stress. All days were the same to her except one day – the Dog’s Day, the day of return.
‘Does it matter? I suppose I got mixed: there was a frightful lot to think about.’
‘I’d meant to have everything looking so nice.’ Edith’s face looked, in spite of the shadow of a moustache on the upper lip, as it had looked when, as a child, she had scowled at the rain on the morning of a picnic.
‘The bed made up and flowers in your room and your old ornaments on the mantelpiece. I’d planned a cosy evening – just the two of us. I’d meant to have a party lunch.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ soothed Miss Ranskill, but it did matter just a little.
Only the spaniel was exactly the same, unaware of dates or bed-linen, confident in the assurance of her nose that her world was complete again, uncritical, accepting and jubilant, she wagged her tail.
‘Come for a walk,’ urged her eyes, ‘don’t go into the silly old house: houses don’t matter. Come for a walk.’
Miss Ranskill longed to accept the invitation, to fasten the lead to the dog’s collar and allow herself to be tugged back into the old familiar ways.
‘Come and talk to me while I get lunch ready,’ said Edith.
She was a bigger woman than her sister; and though her bulkiness had been increased by the starch and vegetables of war-time diet, so that, in spite of her constant activity, she had been obliged to let out her belts, she seemed a washed-out and nerveless edition of her. The likeness between them was provoking to each. Miss Ranskill’s hair was tawnier, her eyes bluer, and her body more trim and taut.
‘I’d planned such a welcome!’ protested Edith.
Miss Ranskill felt as the prodigal son might have done if his father had not seen him from afar and if he had had to bear the reproachful gaze of the fatted calf.
‘Everything would have been ready.’
‘Love is ready,’ insisted the spaniel’s eyes, and the whole netherland of her body wagged violently.
‘I’ll get your letter,’ said Edith, ‘but I’m positive –’
She turned away and hurried down the passage.
It was, perhaps, the best thing she could do; since it was too late now for one to knock at the door and the other to fling it open.
Miss Ranskill felt a faint relief that was mixed with irritability.
She had never, on the island, dreamed of any conventional welcome and had always imagined being at home rather than going there, of slipping naturally into a world of comfort. But she was not to be allowed even to do that before Edith had been proved to be right and she to be wrong over a small matter of dates. What did Monday matter, or Tuesday, in comparison with four years? Edith would be right, of course, but what did that matter either?
Edith was right. She returned in triumph from the kitchen, and in her hand was the letter her sister had written – a letter full of references to a desert island, a sea-voyage and an air-raid, to police, to delays over identity cards, to official delays over trains.
‘There!’ she pointed to the postscript, ‘you’ve got the time of the train all right, but you do say Tuesday!’
The carpet whispered of ease as she followed her sister out of the room, and the stairs responded to her tread. In the hall, each segment of parquet spoke of the patience and skill of men like the Carpenter. Miss Ranskill felt more alive than she had done since her visit to a war-time shoe-shop.
Whimpering, and an undercurrent of protesting squeaks told that Whuppet had discovered the kittens. So too had Edith, but though the spaniel’s body was quivering with delight as she wuffled her nose among the bewildered, faintly-spitting quartette and groped with her pads and let out whines of welcome, the woman’s was stiff and disapproving.
‘Are they yours? I can’t think what Mrs Phillips will say.’
‘Who is Mrs Phillips?’
‘I thought from your letter that you’d been on a desert island alone with a sort of Man Friday. And now you turn up in brand new clothes and a whole lot of kittens on Monday instead of Tuesday, and what are those?’
Edith pointed to the bag of carpentering tools.
‘Those? Oh! It’s rather a long story. Who is Mrs Phillips?’
‘Philippa Phillips? Well – Nona, what have you done with your shoes? You can’t walk about with bare feet.’
‘Never mind them. Tell me –’
But Edith, grown, so her sister noticed, rather slower in her movements, stumped out of the room.
Miss Ranskill stooped and picked up the tortoiseshell kitten, now wet and tousled by the spaniel’s tongue.
Edith had always been the same, and always would be. Now it was shoes that mattered – shoes for crossing the four-year-old bridge that time had set between them. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams! Must the dreams be trampled by shoe-leather? Why couldn’t they sit and talk and rediscover each other, the unacquainted selves that had accumulated and discarded and experienced? That would be adventure, but Edith had never been in the very least adventurous. Her sister’s mind flung back to an enchanted September morning and magic seen from the schoolroom window.
In Mr Corderoy’s orchard where the boughs lavished gold against a grey-blue sky, the foot of a rainbow quivered among the tree trunks.
‘Look, Edith, look! between the cherry and the pear. Come on!’
‘You’ve joggled my elbow.’
‘But the crock of gold. There’s the very foot of the rainbow. Come on.’
‘You said you’d do stamps today and I’ve got all the hinges ready.’ Edith’s voice had drifted into a whine. ‘I did go black-berrying yesterday and got all scratched and you did promise and I’ve got all my hinges ready.’
‘But just look. It’ll be gone soon.’
For the shimmer of living colour and light was paling already, and the arch soaring above the orchard had lost a trace of its pulsing glory before Edith moved from the table.
‘It’s going now: they always do.’
‘We might get there in time to find the crock of gold.’
‘Gold! That’s only a baby story. You promised to d
o stamps. It’s too bad.’
The rainbow had nearly gone by the time Nona reached the orchard fence. It was not, after all, between the cherry and the pear, though the reluctant ghost of its splendour shimmered for a moment against the bole of an apple tree and faded before she could reach it. A spider’s web did its shining best to hold the magic, so did the dew on the fallen leaves, and so did the light between the branches. But the children might have been there in time and the crock of gold might not have been a story. Nona, cheated of her birthright, the knees of her stockings wet and mouldy, her hands nettled and pricked after futile scrabbling, returned to the schoolroom. There it seemed that the very stamps had become infected by her own resentment. Their edges curled provokingly and the hinges skidded.
‘I’ll give you five Indians for that Hungarian; then we’ll each have a full page.’
‘You can’t have that as well,’ Nona’s voice was savage, for was not Hungary the home of opals and was not opal cousin to rainbow?
‘But we’d each have a page then.’
‘I don’t care.’
For years after that, the lonely Hungarian stamp, dirty at the edges and blurred by tear-stains, bore testimony against Edith, to whom stamps were reckoned by numbers; and never by the magic of their lands, to whom a rainbow lost on Monday was no more important than a pencil found on Wednesday, provided, of course, that Wednesday was drawing-day, and Monday afternoon the time fixed for ‘doing stamps’.
The kittens squawked an end to reminiscence as Edith came into the room. She carried a pair of bedroom slippers and she still looked worried.
‘Put these slippers on while I look at the potatoes.’
‘And then can’t we talk?’
‘Of course. We’ll talk at lunch and afterwards for a bit. A pity it’s pie day. I suppose I could get somebody else, but I’ve got out of the WI Meeting tomorrow because I thought you were coming, and you know what villages are.’
Edith, looking as she always had done, a paler, more annotated and yet expurgated edition of her sister, stirred the heap of kittens with her toe.
‘You don’t have a long-lost sister returning every day!’
‘Oh! Nona, and I’ve never even kissed you or said I’m glad to see you, or –’ Edith stooped down, somehow kissed the damp kitten instead of her sister’s face, rubbed some hairs from her mouth and said, ‘There!’
‘I suppose it would have been different on Tuesday?’
‘Well, better because I’d have got everything prepared, and –’
‘And, I suppose kisses scheduled for Tuesday can’t be expended on Monday.’
‘Nona!’ Edith protested, but her face showed relief that her sister was beginning to understand. ‘Don’t be silly. Let’s come and have lunch, what there is of it. Philippa won’t be back.’
‘Who is Mrs Phillips?’
The question was not answered until the pilchards had been laid out on a bed of lettuce and carried into the dining-room, where they lay for a time side by side with the bowl stuffed full of roses.
Mrs Phillips, so Edith explained and as her sister had already guessed, was the widow of an Army officer. She was the owner of the house and was very kind, very energetic and very patriotic. It was clear that Edith, who did the housework and cooking, half the garden and a certain amount of secretarial work in exchange for board, lodging and the privilege of Mrs Phillips’ society, was afraid of her.
‘But it works very well,’ she told her sister. ‘After my – our house was requisitioned I had to go somewhere and do something. I’m too old for the Forces, and I don’t think I could quite stand up to munitions, and so –’
‘And so you are general servant and gardener and unpaid secretary to Mrs Phillips!’
‘Well, lots of people are, I mean, we all are these days practically.’
‘Does she need so many?’
‘I don’t mean we’re all working for Mrs Phillips, I mean we’re all doing something of the sort.’
‘I saw some advertisements for servants in The Times. Really they were more pleas than advertisements, and cooks seem to be getting about three pounds a week.’
‘Yes, but it’s not quite the same. We share the house and Mrs Phillips does the flowers, and –’
Miss Ranskill looked at the rose-bowl and shuddered.
‘Yes, I know, but she likes them like that and they are her roses.’
‘Do you get afternoons out and evenings off?’
‘No, it isn’t like that exactly. Of course, we can’t both be out at the same time for long because of the telephone. I have to go down to the shop sometimes. I’ve got one or two Committee Meetings too. The arrangement works quite well, really. We aren’t in each other’s way too much, and I have my own things in the drawing-room. Besides –’
Here Edith hesitated.
‘Besides what?’
‘Oh! well, I’m always allowed to have visitors for an odd weekend or so. We share the spare room, I mean we ration our guests. Philippa has one or two nephews and nieces who come here for leaves and things, so, of course, they really have first claim.’
‘I see.’
Miss Ranskill was beginning to see. She understood, too, that it wasn’t entirely Edith’s fault that her unexpected arrival was, so oddly, thought awkward. Mrs Phillips had to be considered and possibly conciliated. There was only one little spare room. Leaves mattered more than the arrival home of a sister, who should have been dead, of course they did: it was Mrs Phillips’ house.
‘Philippa is thrilled at the idea of meeting you. All her people have lived abroad most of their lives, and she says she finds the village frightfully insular.’
‘All the same,’ persisted Miss Ranskill, ‘she seems to get a good bargain in you. And if those advertisements in The Times are to be believed.’
‘But did you really manage to get The Times regularly on a desert island or did you just call it a desert island? I’ve only had that one letter, you know, and I want to hear everything.’
Miss Ranskill tried, she tried very hard indeed to explain her life on the island, but lunch was finished and cleared and the washing-up was nearly done before Edith understood that there had been no ship-stores, no savages, no passing ship, no wreckage, nothing to read, nothing to sew, and no calendar.
‘But you must have been so terribly bored.’
No, Miss Ranskill hadn’t been bored. She tried to explain the games they had played and to indicate that the Carpenter had been a good companion.
‘But a common – well, ordinary sort of man like that!’
‘He wasn’t ordinary.’
‘Well, not educated.’
‘It depends what you call education. He taught me more than I’ve ever learned in my life before.’
‘But it must have been so awkward sitting down to table – well, I suppose you hadn’t got a table, but sharing meals. A picnic seems even worse, so much more intimate. It must have been dreadful, Nona.’
‘It wasn’t.’ Miss Ranskill’s voice began to give a warning. ‘And I’ve no doubt if I’d asked that he’d have waited on me first and had his own meal afterwards. You’ll be surprised to hear that I didn’t ask.’
‘No? Well, I suppose it would have been a bit difficult. The trouble is that sort of person never seems to think about that sort of thing. Still, I think he might have let you have tea alone, anyway.’
‘There wasn’t any tea, and if you’d been on a desert island you would have been glad of any companion who might sometimes make you forget that the fish you were swallowing was fish.’
Edith hung up the dish-cloth and turned a concerned face towards her sister.
‘Fish! Oh! you poor dear, and I’ve given you fish for lunch. Why didn’t you say?’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mrs Phillips loomed large in the cottage, the village and the nearby town. She had, so she frequently hinted, blue blood in her veins. Certainly some of it showed through the skin of her nose, which was of an aquamari
ne tint in chilly weather. Her politics were blue and rather bleak; so, though she admitted with generous gesture that the Russians were wonderful, she always added, ‘It seems strange now to think how we talked about “poor brave little Finland”.’ For some time Miss Ranskill, uninformed in recent history, was very perplexed by the statement.
Mrs Phillips’ outlook was Red, White and Blue. She stood stout and stalwart for thin red lines, for British Possessions coloured red, for white feathers (to be given to all men not in uniform), and for true blue of every shade. She believed in the flogging of boys and coloured persons, the shooting of shirkers, the quashing of Jews, the Feudal System, cold baths for invalids, the abolition of hot-water bottles, and (rather curiously) the torture of Adolf Hitler. She softened to horses and she adored dogs, whom she addressed in baby-talk.
Edith Ranskill was terrified of her and Nona Ranskill was not, though she found the frequent references to ‘that man of yours on the island’ almost intolerable.
Mrs Phillips took kindly to the island from the first; though she was obviously disappointed that the Carpenter had not been a native and that Miss Ranskill had not put her foot on his neck.
She admired her new friend’s conduct in building and launching the boat, but so identified herself with life on the island that any listener might have supposed that she had shared in the perils and hardships and sustained Miss Ranskill throughout. She used the Royal ‘We’ when talking of the island as often as she did when speaking to children, animals and the mentally deficient.
‘We don’t grumble about fish, do we? We know how hard it is to catch it,’ and ‘Little jobs about the house are nothing to us after all we have been through.’
In time she came to inhabit the island so largely that Miss Ranskill could scarcely recall it without the added vision of Mrs Phillips, looming along the beaches and taking command of the Carpenter. But when she referred to the ‘day we committed that poor man’s body to the deep’, Miss Ranskill snapped.
After that she was not allowed to forget her status as temporary guest and there was much hinting about the imminence of the nephews’ leaves.
Miss Ranskill Comes Home Page 18