Miss Ranskill Comes Home

by Barbara Euphan Todd

  ‘Money now, that would be different,’ continued Mrs Reid. ‘I suppose there wasn’t any money?’

  Miss Ranskill had meant to keep the story of the money a secret, but, either because her responsibilities as a trustee began to weigh upon her or because she could not resist watching the effect on Mrs Reid, she answered casually, ‘There was just a little money, but we had to use it.’

  ‘Use it! On a desert island? You said it was a desert island.’

  ‘We used it to keep the fire going one very wild night about two years ago.’

  ‘To keep the fire going! Of all the –’

  In the pause that followed, while Mrs Reid tried to find words to express her contempt of such wantonness, Miss Ranskill’s mind slipped overseas.

  It had been a very wild night. Over and over again, the Carpenter had gone out of his shelter to guide, with the few dry twigs that remained, the spluttering flames from one part of the bonfire to another. He had fanned and protected them as they took their feeble hold.

  It’s no good, Miss Ranskill, I’m beat without a bit of paper or something dry. I’m beat, and it’s how we’ll get it going again once it goes out that baffles me. There’s only one thing for it, my pocket-book or the notes. Which shall it be, Miss Ranskill, eh?

  It was she who had urged the sacrifice of the notes, because she knew that to him the destruction of his pocket-book would have been the burning of all the slender craft that carried his thoughts to harbour. He was a man of few words, and fewer still when they were written. His pocket-book was a patchy record of measurements, expenditure and payments. He would flick over the pages in the evening and make comments on the entries.

  Cabbage, beet, carrot, parsnip, spring onions, lettuce, two-and-eight. We could do with some of those seeds now, eh, Miss Ranskill? And to think how I wasted them. I never could grow the carrots thin enough nor the lettuce neither. And now I’ve got so mean I’ll have a job to sow ’em thick enough if ever I get home again. It’ll not be easy for us to waste anything after all this, Miss Ranskill. I sometimes think I’ll never be able to throw away a bent nail after this without thinking that maybe there’s some poor fellow on a desert island that’d give the next best year of his life for it. Not that my saving’d help him, but you never know – there’s things we don’t understand.

  There were family entries too, for the Carpenter was no diarist. He had had, during the whole of his manhood, one thick bulging pocket-book and that had sufficed.

  Paid Doctor Laine four pounds fifteen. That was when my little lad died. We’ll give that page a miss. Ordered teak from Stiggins. That was for the best door ever I made in my life, Miss Ranskill, a good job that, if ever there was one. What’s this now? Finished floor in vicarage kitchen. There’s a story about that, Miss Ranskill. Let me get it right now.

  No, the pocket-book could not go: it was their library. Despair might rise like a bad phœnix from its ashes, so Miss Ranskill had said, ‘Use the notes. We’re well known on the island now: they’ll all give us credit at the shops.’

  That’s a good one, Miss Ranskill, that’s a good one right enough. I believe you’d make me die laughing if you was dying yourself.

  But there was no time for laughter then if the fire were to be saved. In another minute the dull crackle of notes had been replaced by the gayer crackling of twigs, and a flame had been guided again, this time to take certain hold of the last dry twigs that would dry others before their death.

  As the firelight grew stronger the Carpenter had straightened himself and laughed.

  I felt fine then, Miss Ranskill. Queer, it should take a desert island to make a man feel grand. There was a picture I saw once and a bit in it where a man lights a cigarette with a five-pound note. It nagged me at the time to know what it felt like. I feel grand now, sort of rich.

  Miss Ranskill had felt grand too, because they had maintained their values and not squandered the red gold of the fire. If a ship should pass that night, their beacon would be seen. Tomorrow could be spent in boat-building and not niggling savagely with dry twigs to start a story-book flame.

  Reckless, that’s what we are, Miss Ranskill, but we’ve kept the lending library. Wait till we see their faces at home when we get back and brag about our patent fire-lighters.

  Now she was back, and the sight of one of the faces was an ugly thing. Its expression softened the Carpenter’s death to her because, if he had seen it, it would have killed his laughter.

  ‘How much money was there?’ asked Mrs Reid.

  ‘Three pounds ten, in ten-shilling notes. The rest of his money was in the ship.’

  ‘They sent me that,’ said Mrs Reid reluctantly, ‘but I thought there’d have been more. You ought to have stopped him. To think of him lighting fires with his money and Colin outgrowing his boots.’

  It was strange that values should make such a flashing change. In one world the thought of citizens wasting matches could be dementing: in another the idea of islanders feeding a flame with the price of boots could rouse rage. There was not one truth but many. Was it possible for anyone to be innocent of the death of one just man?

  Miss Ranskill answered humbly.

  ‘But, of course, I will give you the money: it was my fire too. And look.’ She dragged the wallet containing the note-book from one pocket and the big silver watch from the other. ‘These were his, I brought them back for you.’

  Mrs Reid stretched out a plump hand and picked up the watch. The rims of her nails were edged with dirt though their surfaces were blood-red with varnish. She smoothed the silver with her finger-tips and Miss Ranskill, remembering how the watch had mirrored the reflection of other fingers, whose nails were blunted and broken by rocks, felt the tears pricking against her eyelids. And now Mrs Reid was crying too, and the tears were making runnels down the powder on her cheeks.

  ‘There’s nobody can say I didn’t miss him,’ she said. ‘And now, seeing this – the times I’ve seen him pull it out of his pocket. I’d best put it away now before Colin comes in. What’s this?’ Her fingers were on the wallet.

  ‘His note-book,’ answered Miss Ranskill. ‘We used the blank pages, but the written ones are all there, though some of them are loose.’

  ‘All these pages to spare and yet you used notes for fire-lighting.’ The indignant jerk of Mrs Reid’s head shook a couple of tears to raise blobs on the sea-stained leather and add their salt to it. ‘The very idea! What next I wonder!’

  ‘What, indeed!’ thought Miss Ranskill.

  Then the door opened and Colin came in.

  He walked straight over to the table. And now the fingers of his right hand were curving round the watch while the fingers of his left smoothed the sea-salt leather of the wallet, stroked and pressed it, as though through them he could learn its story.

  ‘What’s these, Mum?’

  ‘Never you mind. They’ve nothing to do with you, anyway.’

  His fingers, so it seemed to Miss Ranskill, still urged the question.

  ‘Leave them alone, can’t you, and give over fidgeting.’

  The boy’s right hand moved reluctantly, but he raised his left one to his mouth and licked his forefinger.

  ‘It tastes salt,’ he observed.

  ‘And why shouldn’t it be salt? Have you fed the chickens?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve done that.’

  ‘Then give me hold of those.’

  Mrs Reid snatched the watch and the wallet. The former was put to join a débris of pepper-dust, soup-square wrappers, greasy bills, string, cloves and a three-penny magazine in the drawer of the kitchen table. With the wallet in her hand she hesitated, flicked over a page or two, and then walked towards the stove.

  ‘There!’ she said. ‘That’s what it should’ve done a long time ago – helped to make a fire burn better.’

  The salt of the note-book quickened the flames to a blue burning: they licked upwards as though relishing the flavour.

  Miss Ranskill sat very still. She scarcely dared t
o blink lest the movement of her lids should disturb the tears in her eyes so that the boy would see them. His presence tied her tongue as he looked questioningly from her to his mother, and then at the blue-spattered flames.

  ‘What was it, Mum?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing but a bit of old rubbish that should have been burned before.’

  ‘We could have saved it for salvage, couldn’t we?’

  His lips made the question to his mother, but his eyes asked Miss Ranskill, before he moved quickly over to the fireplace. For a moment she was wondering if he were going to attempt a rescue, but he reached up for a big shell that lay on the mantelpiece beside the clock.

  ‘Now what are you after?’ asked Mrs Reid. ‘Oh! that!’

  The last words were spoken irritably, but only Miss Ranskill heard them. The boy was listening to something else. His right hand cupped one ear, his left pressed the big shell to the other.

  ‘He never gets tired of that game,’ said Mrs Reid as she tipped more sugar into Miss Ranskill’s tea. ‘I’ve known the baker knock three times before he’d heard.’ All the same she lowered her voice as she added, ‘It was best not to let him see the note-book. It would never do to upset him now and start him asking questions.’

  The words meant nothing to Miss Ranskill, who was watching the death of the note-book – a death that reduced all the Carpenter’s loyalty and all patient stoking of a fire to the level of child’s play. There was only a small black fluting of paper left, a fluffing of ash and a red glow, and now the powder of the rest settled with a little sigh into the heart of the fire.

  ‘Will you take another cup of tea?’ asked Mrs Reid affably.

  Miss Ranskill shook her head. She was looking at the boy now, noticing how the pupils of his eyes responded to the intensity of his listening, and how the pink curving of the shell lay closely against the dark hair that grew, as his father’s had done, from the undisciplined crown at the back of the parting to a thick smooth sweep in front.

  They say you can hear the sea in a shell, Miss Ranskill, would you like to try?

  Surrounded as she was by the sea then, she had not bothered to make the experiment.

  The boy smiled suddenly, as though enchanted by the song of a siren. He took the shell from his ear and held it out to the visitor.

  ‘You can hear the sea,’ he said gravely. ‘Would you like to try?’

  It was very nearly his father’s gesture, and they were his father’s words.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Miss Ranskill, wondering if he had guessed she was in need of comfort, whether the ashes in the fire meant anything to him and whether it was habit, or some sixth sense that had made him want to listen to the sea just then, and to let her share his listening.

  And now the shell, warm from his ear, lay against her own. The boy and his mother moved silently about the room as the surge of waters deafened her to everything else. They were roaring and the wind was whining and the breakers were crashing inshore. Surely the others must hear too. She released the pressure of the shell. Instantly the crashing eased to a tender shuffling. It was the morning after a tempest and the little waves were tumbling up the beach. She closed her eyes and now she could see the long shifting lines with their silver edges. She was back on the island again: the Carpenter was fishing from the low rocks to the west of the bay while the pebbles frolicked underneath the water before being sucked back with a hushing swish as the waves receded.

  By pressing hard on the shell she could raise a tempest. What an instrument to play! By flexing or unflexing her fingers she could bring any sea-weather to her ears, and be at home on the island again.

  She opened her eyes to see that a stranger had come into the kitchen. Of course she had not heard the door open. He was a man with a facetious and rather gross face; and he was wearing a blue-serge suit. From his expression, she guessed he was arguing, and, though she was reluctant to interrupt the singing of the water, she took the shell from her ear.

  Mrs Reid was talking.

  ‘I shan’t be more than a few minutes more. Somehow I got all behindhand today, and then –’

  ‘Well, we don’t want to miss the big picture, ducks. Sorry; I didn’t see you’d got a visitor.’

  Mrs Reid glanced anxiously at Miss Ranskill, who rose and put the shell back on the mantelpiece.

  ‘I mustn’t keep you any longer, and anyway, I oughtn’t to stay now. Goodbye, Mrs Reid, and thank you. Goodbye, Colin, thank you for lending me the shell.’

  The presence of the cheap-looking stranger made it easier to say goodbye lightly. The hour spent in the Carpenter’s home had had its high and its low moments, and not one of them had been in the least what she had expected. It was easy to go too, because the music of the shell had lifted her to a curious state of ecstasy. The shell was important and the boy was important: nothing else really mattered in that exalted moment. She took three hands, one after the other, into her own. The first was plump and ploppy, the second a little greasy, and the third (Colin’s) was hard and dry and vibrant.

  She said goodbye again from the gate and turned her back on the bright geraniums in the flower-beds.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I

  Edith, when Miss Ranskill returned, was not particularly interested in Mrs Reid or her boy.

  ‘Well,’ she remarked, ‘that’s one thing over, and now you can set your mind at rest. I had been rather dreading the visit for you, but evidently these people are in comfortable circumstances so the best thing you can do now is to put them right out of your mind and try not to think about that dreadful island any more.’

  ‘It wasn’t so very dreadful, looking back on it.’ Miss Ranskill glanced towards the mantelpiece where a line of blackwood elephants were invading her sister’s territory and pressing close (not unnaturally looking down their trunks, poor things) to another and still more ferocious photograph of the late Major Phillips, this time standing by while some natives packed the paraphernalia necessary to shikari.

  ‘Looking back on it now, it doesn’t seem to have been so very bad after all. At night, when I can’t sleep, I go over all the –’

  ‘Then you’d better ask Doctor Fenton to give you something to take. There are quite a lot of non habit-forming drugs that are perfectly harmless.’

  ‘I don’t know that I want to get out of the habit of thinking about the island though. I’d been wondering –’

  Edith’s face was not encouraging, and her sister knew that the plan she had in mind would not be approved. ‘I’d been wondering if we couldn’t ask the little boy to stay for a few days.’

  ‘To stay? My dear Nona! Whatever for? Besides, where would he sleep? What would Philippa say? Think of the rations and a great boy eating his head off and bringing in mud and banging about all over the place. Besides –’

  Miss Ranskill interrupted before the spate of objections confused her.

  ‘He could sleep in the summer-house in the hammock: it’s lovely weather. And he would bring his ration book: it couldn’t cost much. It isn’t muddy weather. He wouldn’t bang about. If Mrs Phillips objected I might be able to borrow a tent and let him camp in one of the fields. I could camp with him for that matter.’

  There followed a silence so long and so ominous that she broke it tremulously, ‘I don’t see why not!’

  ‘If you knew these children as I do,’ Edith put down the half-finished seaman’s sock, ‘you would know that the idea is absolutely impossible. The village is only just clear of evacuees. I know, if you don’t, that it is perfectly senseless to try to take these children out of their proper places.’

  A line from Blake frisked through Miss Ranskill’s mind – ‘White as an angel is the English child.’ But only the child of the upper middle classes, not the little gutter boy, whose kind had disturbed but not, alas, shattered the complacency of householders when they had stormed the English castles. Not the Carpenter’s son either, not even the son of the Carpenter of Bethlehem.

  ‘From wha
t you’ve told me,’ pursued Edith, ‘this boy had a perfectly good home, even if you didn’t like the mother particularly.’

  ‘He’s not happy.’

  ‘Did he say so?’

  ‘Children don’t say, Edith: they don’t even know. But we know, or ought to, that peevishness is bad for them –’

  ‘A good dose of medicine is the best thing for that.’

  ‘Oh!’ Miss Ranskill’s voice rose irritably. ‘If only you wouldn’t be so reasonable always! I was talking about the mother’s peevishness, not the boy’s: he is too patient, and it’s all wrong.’

  ‘So,’ said Edith, ‘you want to ask him to stay here so that you can tell him how unhappy he is at home and how peevish his mother is. You want to spoil him for a week-end and then send him back to be dissatisfied with his own home; very mistaken sort of kindness, I should think.’

  ‘I want to talk to him about his father, and –’

  ‘Surely his mother is the person to do that. I don’t want to damp your enthusiasm, Nona. You ought to know that nobody would be readier to help than I if it were a case of real necessity, if he needed warm woollens or anything of that sort, but you always have had such wild ideas.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Miss Ranskill answered conversationally, but her mind was groping for an answer that could be made in words that would not shock.

  She knew now how much she had loved the Carpenter, though not in the way that is usually described as ‘being in love’. Slowly and steadily affection had grown between them, with such firmness that she, who had never known wifehood had yet felt herself widowed by his death. Her celibacy had been no bar to the true marriage of their minds; and the attunement between them had been absolute; so that they had become unwitting partners in the third, but not least blessed, state for which matrimony was also ordained – The mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.