Miss Ranskill Comes Home

by Barbara Euphan Todd

  ‘But you mustn’t think of going yet,’ declared Mrs Phillips. ‘We shall manage somehow.’

  Edith too hinted vaguely about ‘future plans’, but was noncommittal about her share in them.

  ‘We might take a cottage together, of course, but cottages are so difficult to get and so expensive. Besides, I feel rather bound to Philippa, I promised to stay with her for the duration, though of course I didn’t know then that –’

  ‘That the sea would give up its dead at such an inconvenient time,’ concluded Miss Ranskill with a glance towards the left-hand corner of the mantelpiece.

  ‘We must take the photograph of that memorial window down.’

  ‘It’s a pity we can’t pawn the window.’

  ‘Nona!’

  ‘Did it cost very much?’

  ‘Well, you see I ordered it after your will was proved and after I’d paid the death duties. Then I was a fool about the house. I didn’t like the idea of profiteering so I let it at a nominal rent. After that the dividends went down and the cost of everything went up, and I made this tiresome arrangement with Mrs Phillips. I – I didn’t like to tell you before, but I signed an agreement with her. It seemed all right at the time, but now – And then, of course, I’m going to return your money as soon as I possibly can. We’ll get back the death duty in time, I suppose, but you know what lawyers are. So, just at the moment, even if I could break with Mrs Phillips, there wouldn’t be enough for the two of us in a cottage. You do see, don’t you, Nona?’

  The conversation, so long avoided, took place three days after Miss Ranskill’s arrival at Mrs Phillips’ house.

  ‘Of course I see, Edith, and I expect I shall get a job quite easily. I thought if I might stay just for a week (oh! spare me a little that I may recover my strength before I go hence and be no more seen) till I’ve got my bearings? And then, I’ve got to go and see Mrs Reid.’

  ‘Surely you could write to her.’

  Edith Ranskill had thriven since girlhood on problems and petty worries; the war had added its longer list – black-out, curtains, evacuees, billeted soldiers, Woolton pies, shortage of daily help, commandeering of houses, non-keeping quality of flour, rough hands, starchy diet, and now – her sister.

  In the past, as one little problem grew stale, it had been succeeded quickly by another, so that her mind had not known a dull moment and even her hours of sleeplessness had been perpetually enlivened. The only impatience shown by her listeners, to whom she told her grievances, had come from the British sense of fair play that made them anxious not to miss their turn in relating their own ridiculously similar worries. Their own difficulties made them sympathetic; for they knew that if they would not listen to Edith she would not listen to them: nothing could be duller than to suffer the egg shortage in silence, in spite of the frequent assurances from America and the great of their own land that the unsung, uncomplaining housewives were being magnificent and the Kitchen Front of Britain an example to the whole world.

  But in Nona Ranskill there was a problem that could not be shared. It had been all very well and even exciting at first when, as a new arrival, she had added importance to the household.

  Miss Hoskins might spread her table with the grocer’s madeira cake (only obtainable by going early to the shop on Friday mornings and only eatable on that day or Saturday, because, by Sunday, each slice was tethered to the main body by slender wisps of something that looked like spiders’ webbing and played queer tricks with the digestion), paste sandwiches, honey and home-made biscuits. Edith need provide nothing but a few stale buns, so long as Nona was there to make up, by her odd reminiscences, for the lack of butter and the weakness of tea. The guests always hoped that something rather shocking might be said about the Carpenter. It was interesting to know someone who had really been on a desert island, though Miss Blake, a keen gardener, was disappointed that Miss Ranskill had not brought any plants back with her. Miss Stocks, whose favourite topics were adolescence, inhibitions and the problems of unmarried mothers, was annoyed that there had been no assaults by savages.

  Even the Woolton pies lost their age-old savour because Nona insisted on their excellence.

  It was difficult to grumble in her presence about the shortage of fish or the poor quality of shoe-leather.

  All the niggling annoyances that had hedged up so gradually around Edith and her neighbours were new to Miss Ranskill, who had a disconcerting way of ignoring some and kicking against the prickles of others. She, surrounded and almost stifled by women, did not find the war isolating: the village was too thickly populated for her liking. The variety of voices, even more than differences of opinion, fretted her mind into confusion. Inconvenience of buses was no trouble to her either: if she missed one she could walk the four miles to the town. And walk she did, with unhurried stride through dust or mud, her shoes slung round her neck by their laces, as though she were a child gone paddling.

  Time was unimportant to her. What did it matter if lunch was an hour early or supper a couple of hours late?

  She was difficult about food too. In Mrs Phillips’ household, the rations were divided every Monday morning. There were three little pots for sugar, three little plates for butter, and three little tins for tea. If Mrs Phillips had a four o’clock guest, an extra spoonful from her tea-tin joined the other two spoonfuls in the pot. Edith, in her turn, behaved in the same dutiful way; but Nona would play no such scrupulous games. What was there, she squandered; and was content to drink cold water for the rest of the week. At least, she would have drunk cold water and eaten dry bread, had not the others preferred to victimise themselves and insisted on a martyred sharing-out again.

  ‘You might try to think,’ so Edith expostulated frequently, ‘I don’t want to seem disagreeable, but really it looks almost greedy to eat all your butter ration at one meal.’

  ‘It seems greedier to me to make such a fuss about it and niggle it out in tiny bits. When it’s there I eat it: when it’s finished I go without. I don’t want every day to be the same.’

  ‘But it makes it so awkward for us. Of course I’m delighted to share everything with you, but it’s different for Philippa and she notices.’

  ‘I don’t want her to, and she doesn’t want to. I don’t interfere with her everlasting bread-and-scrape; why should she bother if I butter half an inch thick one day and don’t butter at all the next?’

  ‘Because we happen to be living in civilised times.’

  ‘Do we?’ Miss Ranskill glanced at the headlines of the newspaper by her sister’s side.

  After that, she ate dry bread on six days of the week, and on the seventh, after having annoyed her sister and Mrs Phillips by begging them to share her untouched butter ration, finished it off herself and piled marmalade on the top of it.

  ‘Can’t you see that it’s better,’ she insisted. ‘You must see it’s better to behave as if there wasn’t a war for one day in the week?’

  But Mrs Phillips and Edith did not see. Since they must make sacrifices, they preferred to be sacrificed daily by slow stages.

  The black-out provided more argument.

  ‘If we want to mislead the Germans and save our factory towns from bombardment, why can’t we illuminate the villages – different ones every night?’

  ‘Ours not to reason why,’ barked Mrs Phillips. ‘Ours but to do and die.’

  ‘But you’d be much more likely to die if you drew back the curtains,’ muttered Miss Ranskill, while Edith, who was always stirred to nervous bustling by the very mention of light, hurried away to make certain that no chink was showing between the bathroom window-frame and its curtain.

  Miss Ranskill was quite aware that she was being difficult and tiresome. She tried to explain her points of view both to Edith and to the doctor, who had been called in to deal with her sleeplessness and frequent bouts of indigestion.

  ‘You see, I thought it was all going to be the same as usual, but now that I’ve arrived in this country, like a new girl coming to
school in the middle of the term, I feel confused. I’d looked forward for years to new clothes and bed-and-bath luxuries, but everything I have must be rationed.’

  ‘But,’ expostulated Edith, ‘of course I’m sorry for you, but really it is the same for all of us. We’re all in this war together.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong: it isn’t the same for me. I’ve come from a primitive life where I’ve learned how to do without things you’d call necessities. I can still do without them easily. I can do without them here, just as I could do without them on the island. I can go barefoot –’

  ‘But nobody does.’

  ‘I can manage with two or three garments and very plain food, but I won’t fiddle and faddle and niggle and naggle, and make do and mend, and turn old petticoats into blouses when I’ve got two blouses already: it isn’t sense. And as for being in this war all together, we aren’t. In this village we’re just playing at it.’

  ‘I’m sure’ – if only Edith’s moustache had been a trifle heavier it would have bristled – ‘I’m sure I don’t play, Nona. I haven’t had an idle moment since the war began. I never allow myself to rest. If only you would take more interest in all the things that are being done in the village, you wouldn’t be so introspective and nervy.’

  ‘I do all I can in the garden: that seems more important to me than yattering at Committee Meetings.’

  It was Doctor Fenton who had suggested garden work as a nerve-soother, and Miss Ranskill worked all day, and through the long light evenings, though every time she handled a spade she was reminded of the frayed paddle with which she had dug the Carpenter’s grave.

  ‘It should cure the sleeplessness in time,’ he said, ‘by taking your mind right away from the experiences you have had. Try to think of the garden when you go to bed at night. Don’t let your mind dwell on that island of yours.’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Ranskill, unable to explain that the island was the one place where she could lay her mind to rest to be lulled by the memory of gulls crying, while the waves lippited along the beach, and the uninterrupting voice of the Carpenter boomed a rather tuneless song.

  After the doctor had suggested light nourishing food, and mentioned the suitability of whiting steamed in milk, and had added that in normal times he would have recommended a sea-voyage, Miss Ranskill did not mention her sleeplessness again. He was a kind man. Edith was a kind woman, but incapable of understanding that if her sister could not have the gilt on her gingerbread, she would rather have bread and no ginger.

  She grew a little more tired and a little thinner and a little more difficult day by day. Every evening she wrote a letter to the Carpenter’s wife. Every night between waking and sleeping she pictured the postman knocking on the door, she saw the letter being fingered and opened; and she heard it being read aloud to the boy, Colin. But every morning she tore up the letter and threw it into the waste-paper basket in Mrs Phillips’ spare room.

  It was impossible to write: words would not carry the right picture. The story she owned was one that must be told by her under the roof that the Carpenter had raised, beside the hearth he had laid, by the light through the window that burnished the nasturtiums on the sill.

  She must go soon, and the thought of her journey lifted her through the difficult days though she put off going and stored up the dream in her mind, perfecting it little by little and saving it as a refuge.

  Sometimes she felt the delay was not quite fair to the Carpenter’s wife, who might, long ago, have lost hope, and might now be waiting empty-hearted for the gift that Miss Ranskill alone could bring, the gift of the days of her husband’s life.

  Yet, surely, he could not have been dead to her through the years of his living; he had lived too strongly for that. Winds, blowing to England, must have carried his life’s breath with them for so long as it lasted. True, Edith had bought a memorial window for her sister; but the link between them had never been so strong as the one which must, surely, have bound the Carpenter’s wife to such a husband. So Miss Ranskill argued to herself night by night and day by day, fearful of admitting her ghost of a fear lest another dream should be tarnished or even broken.

  The Carpenter’s cottage shone in her mind. There she might find peace and comfort and kindliness, all of them glowing as the flowers on the window-sill, homely as the little besom on the hearth.

  She might even find some sort of work in the village, enough, at least, to pay for board and lodging in Mrs Reid’s cottage. Then there would be a welcome each night, and peace in which she could conjure up the island, and, word by word, restore the Carpenter to his wife and son.

  You’ll not have to waste time in coming to see us, Miss Ranskill.

  Yet, she was not wasting time, she was cherishing what time might bring.

  It would not, she guessed, be possible to continue for very long as Mrs Phillips’ suffered guest.

  In the evenings she had the middle chair before the fire, away from the light and beyond knee-warmth. She had the middle place at table, and the last bath at night. There was no hint of establishment.

  Mrs Phillips was a possessive woman. She possessed her Committees, she possessed Edith and she still possessed Major Phillips, making herself the trumpet of statements, worn threadbare, even before he had uttered them, many times before his death.

  She did not talk of the Country but of ‘My Country’, and she talked of it frequently. The bed in the spare room was never referred to as the spare room bed: it was ‘my nephew’s bed’. Miss Ranskill tossed in it uneasily and considered the war, as though she were turning over an album of photographs, some superimposed one upon the other, some under and some over-developed, some distorted and others freakish. As she reviewed them in her mind’s eye, some of these pictures changed character, so that, at times, the village snapshots, seen through tenderness, became beautiful through their purpose and simplicity. Then she saw the village as a miniature country at war, with the Home Guard as its veteran and boyish defenders. Each cottage became a castle, each housewife obeying orders to save money (though prices had risen), fuel (though war-time joints and vegetable dishes required long cooking), clothing (though the extra work in gardens and houses racked out garments), time (though shopping and mending took longer than they had ever done before), light (though work must be continued into the night and every home was filled with evacuees, bombed-out relatives, or war-working lodgers), petrol (though all private cars had been put up long ago, buses were crowded and shoe-leather poor) became a bulwark on the home front.

  At other times she saw a little petty people, strangled by red tape, nagging along, intent on their own tiny quarrels, fretting over the fat ration, playing at war and pretending to be important in their ARP uniforms and gardening dungarees.

  The newspapers pandered to her bewilderment too. Side by side on the same page, she would read an account of the horrors of fighting in Russia and see the photograph of a smug child whose mother had withdrawn her from school because of the trifling injustice of a mistress.

  Only the Carpenter’s cottage stood secure in her mind during that first fortnight in a war-time village. Now the time was drawing very near when she must put that to the test also.

  ‘I don’t see why you can’t simply write to that Mrs Reid of yours,’ said Edith. ‘You’ll only harrow yourself; besides, Doctor Fenton said you were to take things easily for at least a month.’

  ‘I can’t write. I’ve tried, and there’s too much to say.’

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t get involved. You never know with those sort of people.’

  ‘I must go,’ said Miss Ranskill, and, staking her future in a sentence, she added, ‘I shall go next Thursday. I can get there and back in a day.’

  ‘If I were you, I should write first,’ persisted Edith.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ Mrs Phillips glanced at her husband’s photograph as though seeking counsel from it, and then spoke solemnly, ‘Don’t forget that we are asked not to hamper troop movements. We are ask
ed not to travel unless it is absolutely necessary.’

  ‘We’re asked to save paper as well,’ snapped Miss Ranskill. ‘Whatever we do we seem to be breaking some rule. I’ve got a choice of breakages, anyway, and I shall go on Thursday.’

  Edith looked distressed and apologetic, Mrs Phillips gave a patriotic sigh, impaled a ball of khaki wool on a knitting-needle and left the room in a marked manner.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The first person Miss Ranskill spoke to in the village was a stranger there himself, and obviously proud of it. The second gave directions so assuredly that she felt doubtful at once.

  ‘I mean Mrs Reid, the Carpenter’s wife,’ she elaborated.

  ‘Thompson’s the carpenter now. Reid, he’s been dead these four years or more.’

  ‘No, oh no,’ her heart made silent answer. ‘The Carpenter was alive when those dahlias were in bud. He was singing when that hedge of sweet peas was fresh.’

  ‘Mrs Reid, though, she still lives in the same cottage alongside the carpenter’s shed. Straight along the road and on the right; you can’t mistake it.’

  And now her feet were taking the road his feet had taken. A hobnail from a man’s boot lay shining in the pathway, and she wondered absurdly if it could be the Carpenter’s, until she remembered that even broken nails do not stay for long in village streets. Presently the sound of hammering disturbed her thoughts; and then she saw the shed, standing flush with the pathway, as he had described it so often. She noticed resentfully the board with the name Thompson, and underneath the words ‘Carpenter and Undertaker’.

  Two diamond-shaped beds filled with geraniums lay behind the prim railings of the cottage, and on each side of the door.

  After she had knocked, her hand sought the smooth comfort of the Carpenter’s watch lying in her coat pocket. She drew it out, but its ticking insisted so loudly against the beating of her heart that she tucked it away again.