Barbara Todd - Miss Ranskill Comes Home

‘You must get her to tell you all about it,’ added Marjorie. ‘Rex, it is wizard to see you. Have you seen Daddy yet? Have you had any good prangs lately?’

The cellar was very full of people who were all talking at once. Mrs Bostock had joined the company and was shouting descriptions of the quantity, the quality, and the permeating powers of the dust in the kitchen.

Doctor Mallison had returned from the candle-lit bedroom of a woman who had given birth to twins. He was now trying humbly and eagerly to bridge by words the great gulf of years that lay between him and his son. He longed to know him as one man knows another, to forego all relationship, and make a new friend, but he could only sound patronising. Once, when the boy was four, he had looked up from his porridge bowl and said, ‘Hullo, Mallison!’ through milky lips, and, as his father had replied with a grave ‘Hullo, Mallison,’ he had had a vision of a day when they would talk as equals and exchange opinions, forgetting that the years would not lessen the division that lay between them then.

‘What about a whisky and soda?’ he suggested.

‘Bit too early in the day for me, thanks, Dad.’

Sixteen years ago the father had refused toffee for the same reason.

‘How you can eat that muck at this time in the morning!’

He remembered his anger on the day when the boy had spurned his own profession.

‘There’s no future in the air. You’d have fun for a few years and then be done for – nothing to do, but idle your life away.’

‘Depends if there’s a war or not. Anyway, I want to live while I can.’

And now there was a war and the boy was living – while he could.

Doctor Mallison tried to make amends now for all past misunderstandings by saying – ‘I’d give a lot to be doing what you’re doing now.’

The younger man, wary of sentiment, replied. ‘Oh! I don’t know. Better stick to your baby-snatching, Dad, it’s more profitable than bombing them.’

Mrs Brown spoke from her seat in a deck-chair.

‘I’m certain you never bomb babies, Rex. I’m sure none of our boys do.’

Marjorie took up her Casabianca stance.

‘My son must obey his orders, whatever they are.’

‘Oh! they don’t send us out to bomb crèches. Funny, though, we must be lining the pockets of the Hun doctors. Still, I don’t suppose Jerry does Dad’s practice much harm. Bought any boxes of fur coats lately, mater?’

‘Darling,’ begged Marjorie, ‘don’t, even in fun, suggest that I could ever be a war profiteer.’

‘Twenty-five years ago,’ said Doctor Mallison, ‘if I had been making what you’re making now…’

‘Oh! I don’t do too badly as a hired assassin.’

‘Now, Rex,’ Mrs Brown wagged a plump forefinger, ‘you won’t get any nice girl to marry you if you talk like that.’

‘Rex likes engines better than girls,’ announced Marjorie. ‘All the same, he doesn’t mean a word he says: he’s as proud of his uniform as I am of mine.’

Rex gave a slight shudder, and his mother continued:

‘Now, we’d better see about making up beds. Even if the Browns’ house has been blitzed and ours badly shaken we’re not going to give Hitler the satisfaction of keeping us up all night.’

‘You never said their house had been blitzed,’ said Doctor Mallison.

‘Didn’t I?’ said Marjorie casually. ‘But, that’s why they’re here, of course. Mrs Brown was magnificent, quite magnificent. And now we’re not going to talk about that any more, are we, Mrs Brown?’

‘I don’t seem to realise it yet. I’m bound to suffer for it later though, and have a reaction. I’m like that. I always have been. I remember when–’

‘Well, you won’t this time,’ Marjorie’s voice was fierce. ‘Action and reaction are equal and opposite, so we won’t think about them. Come along now, Mrs Bostock, you and I will go and make up some beds: that will take us out of ourselves.’

‘Mike up beds at this time of night indeed!’ shrilled Mrs Bostock. ‘Have you seen the stite of the rooms?’

‘Oh! please don’t bother about beds,’ begged Mrs Brown. ‘If I could just have a blanket I shan’t need anything else. I shall be perfectly warm in my siren-suit.’

She pushed her hands into the pocket of a blue-serge garment that reminded Miss Ranskill of the one-piece pyjama suits worn by small children.

‘I’m sure I don’t know what I should ever have done without this one, though my husband did pretend to be shocked when I bought it. “You’ll be going into rompers next,” he said. Rompers, indeed! “Never you mind,” I said, “the time may come –” Well, the time has come,’ she sighed. ‘Yes, indeed it has.’

Now the girl spoke for the first time, addressing, so Miss Ranskill knew, not the two women but Marjorie’s son.

‘I haven’t anything in the world but what I stand up in – not a single thing.’

She was wearing a brown tweed skirt and a white sweater. Her bare toes showed through the strapping of her childish sandals. Her straight brown hair had a nursery look.

‘You’re luckier than I am,’ said her mother. ‘You’ve all your London things safe in Town.’

‘But I haven’t. I brought them all back.’

‘Whatever for?’

The golden-brown eyes flickered and then looked wary.

‘Oh! just to mend and – and sort over.’

‘If only you’d been in a uniformed job everything would have been easy,’ announced Marjorie. ‘You’d only have had to ask for a new issue of everything.’

‘Yes, and now I haven’t got a rag.’

‘You look–’ began Rex, and then checked by his mother’s stare, supplemented ‘all right’ for the word in his mind. ‘You look quite all right.’

‘But not for always .’

The girl stood in her wedding garments, a Cinderella of a bride.

‘It seems,’ she said, ‘it seems so funny to be The Enemy. Fancy my things being bombed.’

Miss Ranskill had seen that look before in the eyes of a very young rabbit early one morning. It had stopped nibbling clover, raised the dewy quivering nose that could catch a hint of menace more surely than the pink transparent ears. The rabbit’s eyes had spoken. ‘Then there’s something more in my world than clover and dew and mother and all the rest of us. Something bad .’ Then it had terrified itself to a flurry and its white scut had flashed out signals of reproach all the way from the clover-patch to the burrow.

‘Fancy my things being bombed. Somehow I never–’

‘Come on, and let’s dig out blankets,’ said Marjorie, deaf to the words behind the words – ‘Fancy my man being vulnerable!’

Two of the kittens were beginning to open their eyes, but the third, a tortoiseshell, maintained blind indifference to the light that gave shape to the wickerwork around it. In a day or two now, its sisters would discover, by diffident paw-pats, that shapes can be felt, that looming straws can become enchanting playthings, and reward by strokings more pleasurable than the licking of a mother’s tongue. The tortoiseshell kitten was in no hurry, the warmth of its mother delighted it; that was enough for the time.

Miss Ranskill, in her corner of the third-class carriage, felt in much the same mood. Two newspapers lay unopened on the lap of her new grey skirt. Presently she would try to understand their contents, but for the moment it was enough to watch the landscape flicking past, to see the flourishing of the may-flowered hedges and be dazzled by the fields of the cloth of gold.