Barbara Todd - Miss Ranskill Comes Home

‘It’s the people who’ve been used to things they won’t do without, who are helping Hitler.’

Marjorie stabbed a drawing-pin home. ‘I only hope the police won’t hear of this or they’ll think you were signalling to the enemy.’

‘I’m very sorry. I didn’t know. How could I know? We hadn’t any curtains on the island.’

‘I don’t imagine you had blazing electric light either,’ snapped Marjorie.

‘No,’ Miss Ranskill’s voice had a bite in it now. ‘No, we hadn’t, but we had a fire that burned all day and all night.’

‘Then I should have thought you’d have rigged up some sort of screen,’ said Marjorie. She came over to the bedside now and switched on the light again. ‘That is, unless you wanted to be neutral?’

Miss Ranskill sat up in bed and her voice took on a shrill note.

‘Can’t you understand,’ she said, ‘can’t you try to understand that I didn’t even know about the war till I left the island? I scarcely know anything now. I can’t learn all the new rules if nobody tells me.’

‘Gosh!’ Marjorie’s face looked very young under her tin hat. ‘Gosh! how perfectly awful for you not to know about the war. I’m sorry I snapped, old thing: it’s absolutely my fault for not telling you about the black-out. I say, I mean I just can’t get over thinking of you cooped up on that island with nothing to do all day long. Is there anything else you’d like to know? I could spare five minutes, I think.’

It was quite quiet now that the windows were shut, and Miss Ranskill, awakened from her second sleep, wondered if it would soon be morning. Her fingers curled round the clasp of the new knife: there was familiarity in its smoothness, surety, and a certain comfort. She had taken it to bed with her just as children, newly returned from a summer holiday, tuck shells and pebbles under their pillows.

A clock in the distance struck midnight.

‘It’s morning at last,’ thought Miss Ranskill. ‘It’s tomorrow.’

But now she was not longing for the day any more. Here in the darkness she was comfortable and secure. The hours of sleep had rested her, but she was not quite alive yet for her thoughts tagged about in a random way and she had no check on them. Nor had she any responsibilities or any hopes or fears.

‘I’m a sort of ghost,’ she thought, ‘I haven’t any identity and I’m supposed to be dead. But the Carpenter is really dead…. The island is still there…. Everything on it is the same as it was before we arrived except for the shelters. This morning the same big gull will light on the round rock by the stream and the others will follow.’

Let’s go to the pictures again tonight, Miss Ranskill, shall we? It’s my turn for the plush seat. What are you going to show me this time?

So Miss Ranskill, secure between sheets, played the island game of going to the pictures. And this time she went alone and back to the island to sit by the light of the fire, one cheek glowing from flame and the other icy cold where the wind caught it.

Something was shrieking in the darkness. It was too loud and too despairing for a gull’s cry: no bird could have produced that insistent wavering whine. There was something despairing and demented about it. Miss Ranskill, struggling with sleep, imagined some half-human monster rising from the sea. Scylla or Charybdis might have moaned like that. The wailing sounded more loudly, menacing the island, and she began to fight the sheets whose smoothness affronted skin, now accustomed to the gritting of the sand. She tried to escape from their folds, fighting desperately. Was the monster itself enveloping her? Then, jerking herself from the nightmare to wakefulness, she remembered where she was. It was perfectly quiet: she had only been dreaming.

But it was quiet for no more than a moment. The banshee, or whatever it was, had followed her out of the dream. Once more it raised its unspeakable voice and threatened peace. When its moaning had ended, it was succeeded by a little echo of its own despair.

A child was crying somewhere in the house.

Miss Ranskill stumbled out of bed and into the darkness. She could not find the switch, but at last her fingers met the door-handle and she blundered out into the passage.

Something dreadful had happened. The torment of the siren (unrecognised, of course, and all the more dreadful because of that) still sounded in her mind and the child’s voice was raised to a crescendo.

‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’

Half-way along the passage she groped against another door and pounded against it.

‘Doctor Mallison! Doctor Mallison! Wake up.’

There was no reply, and the child’s voice was raised more insistently every moment. At last she found a switch. Then a strange blue light showed that she was standing at the head of the staircase.

‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’

Her hand was blue on the banister and her bare feet were blue too.

‘It’s a dream,’ Miss Ranskill told herself. ‘I shall wake up in a minute. It can’t be true: nobody has blue lights. Nothing in England makes a noise like that.’

Then, from farther away this time, another voice raised its shuddering cry.

The turn of the stairs screened all but a reluctant gleam from the blue light, but it was enough to show her a small huddle crouching on the lowest stair. It seemed to be shapeless at first, but then a head was raised.

‘Mum! Mum!’ said the little boy.

In another moment her hand was being clutched by a very small one, whose owner said, ‘’Urry, can’t you?’ and tugged hard.

He had a little torch in his hand and its faint gleam showed a green baize door.

‘We’d better look sharp,’ said the small boy, and Miss Ranskill, her hand still held in his insistent clutch, followed as he bumped against it with his shoulder. She dreaded what she might see the other side – murder, perhaps, or torture; but there was only an empty stone-flagged passage with another door at the end.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked, but the only answer was – ‘Come on.’

Then the child opened the other door, switched on a light, and began to plop bare-foot down a flight of stone stairs.

Miss Ranskill closed the door behind her and followed him.

A square case, dangling from a strap, was slung over his shoulders. He was wearing blue-and-white striped pyjamas and his gold-streaked hair was ruffled at the back of his head.

Now they were in the cellar, but it was not at all an ordinary sort of cellar. There was a strip of carpet on the floor. Three camp-beds, each with a bundle of rugs, were stretched along the length of one wall. There was a paraffin stove and a little oil-cooker and a couple of deck-chairs, in one of which was a rather grubby Teddy Bear.

A set of shelves by another wall held a row of books, a row of tins and a white-painted box with a red cross on it. Another shelf made a home for saucepans, a frying-pan, a kettle, crockery and a teapot.

There were candles and a box of matches on a table.

The little boy curled himself into one of the deck-chairs, nuzzled his face against the Teddy Bear and remarked:

‘We’re in time tonight. Mum’ll go to the pictures once too often.’

There were traces of tears on his face, his eyes were shining and a tiny pulse beat under the blue veining of his temple. But now that his crying was over, he was perfectly assured and at home. If he had rubbed his torch and summoned a wailing banshee to appear in a blaze of blue light, Miss Ranskill would not have been more amazed, for, to her, this cellar was an Aladdin’s Cave of delight. If it could have been moved to the island, she and the Carpenter would have had all they could possibly have needed. Here was simplicity and everything that was necessary – all the furnishing in perfection for a desert island.