Miss Ranskill Comes Home

by Barbara Euphan Todd

  The letter to Edith came during an epidemic of influenza.

  Mrs Phillips, just recovered, was striding from Committee to Committee. Her illness had been unnecessarily long because she had insisted on answering her country’s rallying cries by trumpeting through her handkerchief on platforms in draughty halls until her bark had become a very great deal worse than her bite. She had refused to let up or let down, until speechlessness made her work in lecture halls a sinecure. The household had suffered; so, too, had many of the loyal listeners who had received largesse of germs from her cornucopia of a nose.

  Edith’s temperature was at its height when the letter came. She summoned her sister plaintively.

  ‘The tenants have given notice. The ban is being lifted and Lynchurch isn’t in a prohibited area any more. Mrs Staples says the people they sub-let to have gone already, and so have most of the troops. It would happen just now, wouldn’t it? No,’ Edith picked up the letter again, ‘they go tomorrow… . What are we to do, Nona?’

  ‘I don’t see that we can do anything, can we? I suppose the Wilsons, poor things, will have to go on paying the rent till Christmas time. I wish you’d keep your arms under the bedclothes.’

  Edith obeyed petulantly.

  ‘I know, but Mrs Wilson says if we could re-let the house, it would make things much easier for them. I don’t think there’s anything but his pay. I’d hate to take money when they aren’t using the house, but if all the soldiers are going I don’t suppose we’ll have a chance of re-letting. And it’s so bad for a house to be left empty now with winter coming on and everything.’

  Edith produced her next sentence between coughs and chokes, ‘I suppose … old Emma … can see to fires and … things.’ (Old Emma had once been the Ranskills’ housemaid. She was married now, but still in the village.)

  ‘You oughtn’t to talk so much.’

  ‘I must talk.’

  ‘You needn’t talk now. I’ll write to Emma.’

  ‘But there’s the inventory. Nona, I wonder if you could go down tomorrow?’

  Miss Ranskill’s heart gave an excited little jump. Of course she could go down. It would be lovely to be alone again and in the old house and among remembered villagers, and the friends who had known her since girlhood.

  ‘I simply don’t think I can go myself.’

  Edith’s voice was reproachful and she sneezed pathetically. ‘I know it isn’t in your line’ (the reproachfulness increased), ‘but old Emma would help. She’s quite methodical even if she is slow. I’ll send her a telegram if you think you can go.’

  ‘Of course I can go.’

  ‘Very well then, I’ll send her a telegram, or you might, and ask her to spare what time she can. Then you and she and the man from the agents can go over the inventory together. And do try to remember that it does matter if the right number of sheets isn’t returned. You can’t get teacloths now without coupons… . The inventory should be comparatively simple if the Wilsons are as careful as they sound. They’ve always written very nice letters… . Oh! how my poor head aches!’

  ‘Shall I get you an aspirin and a cup of hot tea?’

  ‘Oh, Nona, not now, when there’s so much to think about. We’ve got to make arrangements.’

  ‘It’s no use thinking at a distance. I’ll do all the thinking when I get down there.’

  ‘The house isn’t the only thing we’ve got to think about. There’s the nephew too.’

  ‘The Wilsons’ nephew?’

  ‘No, Philippa’s nephew, Martin, the taller of the twins. He wants to come down next week on indefinite sick-leave.’

  ‘I see.’

  Miss Ranskill’s thoughts skipped to the small spare room. At other times, when the nephews had come home for their short leaves, she had occupied a room in Miss Banks’ house at the other end of the village. She wouldn’t be able to do it again though, because Miss Banks had let the room to a government official, who was employed in the neighbourhood.

  ‘I’d meant to tell you last night, but I felt so ill. My head was going round and round and I couldn’t think.’

  ‘Something will turn up.’

  ‘You don’t understand, and my head’s simply racking.’

  Edith was always angry when she was ill. Her mental dominance increased with her body’s powerlessness.

  ‘Much better let me make you some tea, and then, if you must think, we can both think quietly.’

  Miss Ranskill longed to escape from the room and collect her whirling thoughts. These were not concerned with tea-cloths and bed-linen, but with the waiting garden and the empty rooms.

  ‘Think quietly!’ repeated Edith. ‘You could scarcely call me noisy just now except when I have one of my sneezing bouts and they simply rack me. No, it isn’t the inventory that worries me so much, it’s the wear and tear and what’s fair and what isn’t. We can’t expect them to do too much in war-time: there isn’t the labour and one can’t get the things. But they must replace burned-out saucepans and badly cracked crockery as well as the things that are actually broken. And if they’ve spilled things on the carpets. Are you listening, Nona?’

  Miss Ranskill returned from her vision of welcoming fires, clothes drying before a fender and happily-lived-in rooms and looked at her sister.

  ‘Stained carpets,’ she repeated dutifully.

  ‘Yes, but now I’ve forgotten what I was going to say next. Hadn’t you better get a pencil and make a list, Nona. After all, it is your house as well as mine.’

  So it was. Miss Ranskill had forgotten that. She wasn’t even quite a pauper any more. The Death Duty had been returned, and though she had refused, so far, to touch her share of the joint income, she had earned money in the harvest-field and did Mrs Phillips’ garden now in exchange for her keep. The plan in her mind began to prosper.

  ‘I don’t know,’ continued Edith. ‘I don’t know if we could let the house again. You’d better talk to the agent about that. The first thing to do is to see that everything’s all right –’

  ‘Couldn’t we go back and live there?’ asked Miss Ranskill.

  ‘It’s too big, and it’s too expensive to run, as things are just now. Besides, I couldn’t suddenly throw over all my work in this village even if I could break my agreement with Phillipa. Do get a pencil, Nona.’

  Miss Ranskill got a pencil.

  For a quarter of an hour she used it dutifully, writing down details about sheets and blankets, china and kitchen utensils.

  Ordinarily, she would have been bored, but now her mind was absorbed by household matters. It was important, of course it was, to make sure that the linen for all the beds was in order. She did not speak of what was in her mind until quite late in the afternoon, until the telegram had been sent and answered, trains looked up, and a woman from the village bribed to ‘oblige’ for two or three hours for the next few mornings, so as ‘to do for’ the elder Miss Ranskill.

  Then, when Edith, who was feeling a shade better, was sipping Bovril, her sister made an announcement.

  ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘So have I, all the afternoon.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking there isn’t room for me here and there is room there. I could look after that garden, our garden, instead of this one. You know I believe the kitchen garden could be made quite profitable. I could grow vegetables.’

  ‘But you couldn’t do the house and garden. And think of the expense of heating and lighting just for one.’

  ‘I didn’t mean just for one. I thought I could take in lodgers.’

  ‘Lodgers!’ The horror in Edith’s voice was ended by a sneeze.

  ‘Lodgers!’

  ‘Babies,’ said Miss Ranskill. If Edith wished the conversation to be a series of single words she could play the same game.

  ‘Babies?’

  ‘Mothers.’

  ‘Nona! But think of the house overrun with babies. And whose babies? You don’t know any babies.’

  Miss Ranskill took the questions and
objections in turn, beginning with the last one.

  ‘I could know some babies quite easily. They’d be officers’ wives’ babies. And babies don’t run at first: they couldn’t overrun the house. Besides, some of the lodgers –’

  ‘I do wish you wouldn’t keep on using that word.’

  ‘Well, then some of my guests wouldn’t even be born. Even you can’t think that unborn babies could damage a house: they’re completely self-contained.’

  ‘Nona!’

  ‘Well, aren’t they?’

  ‘I don’t understand. Officers’ wives’ babies?’

  But Edith’s voice, so her sister noticed, was not quite so horror-stricken as it had been. The word officer overpowered lodger.

  Miss Ranskill repeated some of the conversation in the harvest-field on the day when she had met Lucy Mallison for the second time.

  She concluded, ‘You’ve only to look at the advertisements in the agony columns to see how many mothers are homeless. They’re taking any sort of jobs – going out as cooks and matrons and helps so that they can keep their children with them.’

  ‘But think of the work?’

  ‘There wouldn’t be much work if they did their own rooms and took it in turns to do the cooking. They’d pay a reasonable amount. I could have three mothers and the husbands could come down for leaves. I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Well,’ Edith was weakening. ‘I suppose you could try. It would be better than having the house empty, I suppose. And now that Martin’s coming down on this indefinite sick-leave – you could try it till Doctor Fenton lets you do some proper war-work.’

  ‘Isn’t it war-work,’ said Miss Ranskill, ‘isn’t it war-work to make it possible for the next generation to be born and to have somewhere to go when they are born?’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I

  The walnut tree had finished work for the year, and now its sap was seeping downwards. The last of the leaves, their life-current withdrawn, clung listlessly to the branches or allowed the air to drift them down to settle and whisper among their more impetuous fellows.

  ‘That’s that! That’s that!’ remarked the very last of the nuts as their shells rapped the gravel, and wakened Miss Ranskill.

  The air of her bedroom was moist with the heavy breath of autumn: it carried little whiffs of damp leaves, the scent of late violets, the stable smell of chrysanthemums and little hints from roses that had almost outworn their fragrance. The air also carried excitement with it, and, for a moment or two, she lay with closed eyes, postponing the moment of actual parting from sleep and return, by morning light, to the house she had left all those years ago.

  There was still a little hump in that part of the mattress that met her right shoulder-blade. The bed creaked as she stretched out her legs – that was because the worn hollow in the floor-board had never been repaired.

  She turned her head. Should she open her eyes now and let the mirror on the gate-legged dressing-table be her first welcomer or should she turn to the open window and the walnut tree where a robin (surely the descendant of cheekier and Ranskill-tamed robins) was singing?

  The mirror had held all her changing portraits from childhood to middle-age. From its breath-smudged surface another blue-overalled child had grimaced back, in perfect timing, as Nona Ranskill had contorted her own features. Its little girl had grown smaller and had also backed towards the door – the door that led to goodness-knew-where, step by step as Nona had backed towards the door that only opened on to the familiar landing. She had never been able to catch out the mirror’s child who mocked each movement, slow or fast, jerky or surreptitious, whose features followed hers (she knew by the feel) making simpering or hideous or pathetic ‘faces’.

  She had worked very hard, after reading Through the Looking-Glass, to make friends with the other child who, at times, looked wistfully back, as though she too wanted to play and to take Nona through that other door that led into the enchanted house where the dear feckless White Queen fiddled with her rakish crown, the Red Queen bossed, and the Sheep used fourteen pairs of knitting-needles at once.

  She had tried every method. She had even held up the black kitten, but the other child had produced a Dinah’s daughter too; and each little creature had patted the mirror, prettily, but in vain.

  There was a red-brown mark on the right-hand corner of the mirror. It stood as perpetual memorial to the day when Nona Ranskill had used scissors and pliers to remove the wooden backing, and had then scraped at the paint in order to discover if any magic lay between it and the glass.

  She had been sent to bed for what the governess described as a ‘piece of wanton destruction that a big girl ought to be ashamed of.’ What had that mattered? The other little girl had been sent to bed too, and the pliers and scissors lying on her carpet had proved that she had wanted to break through from Looking Glass Land in order to play with Nona.

  Yes, the mirror was a very old friend and had been quite kind at times when the light was rather dim, though it had been more brutally frank even than her sister Edith, during the half hours she had prepared herself for parties.

  So Miss Ranskill turned towards the window and opened her eyes to the tree, whose branches had thickened since last she had looked at them.

  She was back in her old home, alone in it, free to love its blemishes – the kicked white paint, the protests of the stairs, the doorstep that must surely hold an even deeper puddle in wet weather now that more footfalls had left memorial on it.

  Presently she would get up and make some tea. At nine o’clock Emma, one-time housemaid and now the mother of a growing family, would ‘slip in’ and help ‘Miss Nona’ put things straight after the tenants.

  II

  Three weeks later, Miss Ranskill awoke suddenly in the dark hours of the morning.

  Recently, she had always wakened happily, assured (as when she was a child on Christmas morning) that something lovely had happened, secure in the knowledge that she was home again.

  For everything had been going smoothly, and even the inventory had been correct. Lucy Mallison would be coming in a few weeks. Later a friend of hers, who had one small child and was expecting another, would join the party. Miss Ranskill had answered a third advertisement and the reply might come any time.

  There would be a Christmas tree in December. There would be socks hung on the ends of cots. The old house, accustomed to children since the days of Queen Anne, would be contented again. Its stairs would respond with little excited creakings to the sound of small footsteps and its echoes would be happy.

  The war news was better too. The Allies were heading towards Rome. The triumphant salvoes from the big guns in Russia sounded more frequently now.

  There seemed just a hope that the unborn children, soon to be lying in their cradles in the friendly house, might make their first staggering footsteps into the way of peace.

  Yet, this morning’s awakening was alarming. She had been dreaming of the island and something had startled her. This time it was not the cry of a gull, winging to the very edge of sleep and hovering on the horizon where dreams merge into wakefulness.

  There was something wrong this time. There was a surge of water in her ears. Waves were hurrying towards her, summoning restlessly – ‘Hush! Hush! Hush!’ Those were the little ones shuffling up the shingle. ‘Cr-ash! Cr-ash! Crash!’ She could almost hear the big ones curling before they deafened. ‘Hush! Hush! Hush!’

  If only they would hush and give her the chance to listen to whatever it was she ought to hear.

  Yet she was awake and she was in bed. Her feet felt the sheets and her ribs were conscious of her right elbow’s pressure. She raised her head from the pillow and the surging died away.

  After all, she had only been cupping her ear with her hand. That was all. Her hand had been curved like a sea-shell and she had heard the sea again, as once she had heard it through the shell from the mantelpiece in the Carpenter’s kitchen.

  She repeated the exper
iment. Once more the swirl of waters overpowered her thoughts and again she heard the insistent – ‘Hush! Hush! Hush!’

  She closed her eyes, but sleep had been sent away by the water-music.

  She thought of Colin, the Carpenter’s son, and wondered if he were in distress. She pictured him standing, barefooted in the little kitchen, pressing the shell to his ear, listening (Hush! Hush! Hush!) for the comfort that only she could bring.

  That was nonsense, of course, a silly sentimental idea. The boy would be in bed now and asleep.

  If there were such a thing as telepathy, it would not need the invocation of a sea-shell and the hand of a middle-aged woman cupped against her ear.

  She switched on the lamp beside her and the clock on the table told her that it was three o’clock.

  Could ye not watch with me one hour?

  But an hour of watchfulness had nothing to do with Colin. That was the sentence she recalled when the night bombers flew across the house and she remembered the cry of another Carpenter’s son in a dark garden. There were no bombers overhead tonight.

  She could hear the rain slushing from the walnut tree, but she had no sense of comfort. As a rule, wild or wet weather added to her happiness, making her realise her bed and the security of walls.

  She turned out the light and lay for some time in that state of restless confusement that is not quite sleep and not quite consciousness. Presently, the squalling of a cat drifted her into dreaming.

  Colin was running down the village street. A tin-can was tied to his pyjama coat and children with rat-like faces pelted him with sea-shells, crowding and scrabbling, making a Pied Piper of a nightmare.

  Now he was in a boat, the boat his father had made. He was baling out water with a sea-shell, but the water was gaining. Waves were rushing over the bows and every wave had a rat’s face. The water was snapping. White teeth and white spray were indistinguishable.

  Miss Ranskill shrieked, and this time her own voice awakened her.

  Memories of the boy dominated her all the time she was dressing. Certainty of his need took possession of her. She scarcely realised, even, that she had put on her only tidy coat and skirt instead of her gardening clothes.