Barbara Todd - Miss Ranskill Comes Home

You may have been a Miss Independence, but you never thought you’d get to a desert island, did you, Miss Ranskill? Tell you what – it’s all very well playing cinemas, but when we get back to England we’ll have to see each other’s homes, eh? There’s the front bedroom that’s never used only when the wife’s sister comes to stay. We’d make you welcome any time, if you’d honour us by coming, Miss Ranskill.

She too had issued an invitation to stay and had enjoyed the anticipated sight of her elder sister’s face when the visitor arrived. For Edith was a great respecter of persons. Miss Ranskill heard her plaintive voice, saw her rather handsome distressed mouth, slightly moustached.

‘But, Nona, it’s impossible . The man is neither fish, fowl nor good red herring now that you have made a friend of him, as it were. Yes, I know the circumstances are peculiar, but that makes it all the more difficult : people won’t understand . We can’t let him eat in the kitchen with Emma if he’s a visitor – so unsettling for her , and he can’t possibly feed with us . Yes, I know , my dear, but even you must admit it’s an awkward situation. I don’t know how it is, Nona, but you always have managed to do uncomfortable things. I have never before heard of anyone falling overboard in mid-ocean just because they’d dropped their hat over the railings or whatever they were. It will be difficult enough to explain that away without your bringing a great lumbering carpenter to stay in the house. Besides, it was rather a compromising situation, even though the man seems to have behaved very decently . Yes, I know all that, my dear, and he seems a perfectly steady respectable sort of man…. But people will talk in these small villages. Besides, you can’t possibly have anything in common with him. You mustn’t be too democratic.’

That anticipated attitude of her sister’s had seemed as sure and certain as though it had actually been taken; so sure and so certain that Miss Ranskill had made mental retaliation.

‘Nothing in common, oh no! nothing except a drinking shell and a fire and the boat we built together. He used my vest for a fishing-net, and I used his braces when my knicker elastic gave. It doesn’t seem awfully odd to me to ask a man to stay when he’s caught fish in your vest. As for democracy – it was more a mixture of monarchy and communism. He was a monarch – he made the rules and I had to keep them to save my own life. I didn’t know the rules of tree-cutting and fishing and boat-building. I suppose we were communistic in a way – neither of us took the bigger share of fish or anything like that.’

The elder Miss Ranskill would not be embarrassed by the Carpenter now, thought her sister, as she passed the dreary ashes of the fire.

The ends of a few charred sticks showed where the flames had tired to smouldering. They reproached her until her negligence seemed disloyalty to the Carpenter, and she picked up the twig besom to brush them clear of the slab that made the hearthstone.

She remembered how the last time the fire had gone out he had whittled a pile of chips and frayed the ends of thin branches till each made a little brush to decoy and spread the flame before the maddening task of flint-striking began. She had offered to help, but he had not let her. He had always been jealous of his knife.

See now, Miss Ranskill, where’d we be if you broke the blade? Women they’re all right when it comes to scissors, but it needs a man to use a knife the right way. ’Tisn’t as though we could buy another at the shop.

Right way or wrong way, she must use the knife now.

For the first time since the Carpenter had died, Miss Ranskill went into the wattled shelter he had used as a bedroom. His old ragged coat lay, as he had last flung it down, on a slab of stone. In the second before snatching it up, the sight of sleeve-wrinkles, made almost permanent by the movement of his elbows, hurt sharply and unexpectedly.

The left-hand pocket was empty. There was nothing in the right-hand one but a half-handful of fish-hooks chipped from shells and the bones of birds. The breast-pocket held the familiar bulging wallet. There was nothing in the worn lining of the coat, nothing on the stone, nothing on the sandy floor.

Tell you what, Miss Ranskill, if that knife was lost we’d be just about done for. We’d never get on without it. Might as well cut our throats only there’d be nothing to cut ’em with.

She began to panic as she scrabbled among the moss that covered the sandied hollow of his bed.

Where had she last seen it?

Then with a cold sickening jerk that gave a tug to memory she recalled that she had left it in the grave. It must be lying there now with the Carpenter above it and all that fiendish sand on top of all.

Might as well cut our throats with nothing to cut ’em with.

It might have been more bearable if she had flung the knife out to sea, than to know it was lying four or five feet below where she might choose to stand at any time on any day. It would stay there now till rust fretted the fish-oiled blades and joined them to their steel compartments.

If she had dropped it in a crevice between rocks she might have tugged, and levered with other rocks till something gave – even if it were her own heart. But she could never dig in that sand again, never scrabble like a dog till she came to the Carpenter. He would not wish her to see his changing body. Honour and privacy were due to the dead. She could never disturb him now.

‘Never!’ screamed Miss Ranskill. ‘Never! never!’

As she stumbled out of the shelter, her voice shrilled until it set the sea-birds screaming. It seemed to compete with their voices. The wind caught it and blew it backwards. Then the birds came circling, muted for a moment or two by the terrible sound until again the cacophony challenged them and they shrilled and shrieked.

She screamed until her throat ached and until the sounds died to a hoarse groaning, sank to a whispering and stilled.

The silence was more shocking than its raucous prelude – empty and tense.

The birds veered seaward, sickling the blue.

‘What shall I do ?’ gasped Miss Ranskill. ‘What shall I do?’

She sobbed achingly as she staggered back into the Carpenter’s room, sagged to the sand and flummocked against the stone, pressing her cheek against his hollow coat.

Pictures of knives came into her mind, of white-handled pocket-knives snug against green baize in the show-cases of superior shops, of silver knives with mother-of-pearl handles and of the very first knife she had bought for herself with her own pocket-money. It had worn through the linings of so many pockets that she had been ordered to wear it on a string round her neck. With a thought she could feel the rough edge of the string cutting into the back of her neck, but the satisfactory heaviness of the knife itself, jogging against her middle as she ran, had always been comforting. She had never seen a horse without hoping that if it had to get a stone in its hoof it would get it then, so that she, Nona Ranskill, could come to the rescue with the knife that had ‘the thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves with’. But never the horse and the stone and the knife all together, never once! She still had the scar left by the first cut made by the little blade on her forefinger. It was queer that the scar should remain now that there was no knife at all.

At this very moment, no doubt, in hundreds of shops in England people would be buying knives, carelessly unaware of Miss Ranskill’s need. Surely, her thoughts ought to reach them, surely they should glance over their shoulders as the draught whistled under the doors, a draught that was, maybe, a tiny gust of the wind that had blown across the island, streaming Miss Ranskill’s hair and blowing a tear-drop from her face. How long would a wind take to travel from wherever the island might be to the shores of England? Did winds of England travel direct to her, winds whose breezes may have been parted momentarily by a knife held in a gardener’s hand as it passed through the air on its way to trim a rose-bush?