Barbara Todd - Miss Ranskill Comes Home

‘Whuppet!’ cried Miss Ranskill. ‘Whuppet!’

The stump of a tail wagged first, the bulky hindquarters wagged next, and then, lolloping, lumbering, whimpering, the little dog was home again, home in the sense that Miss Ranskill had longed to be, unquestioned, uncriticised and secure in the lap of love. Its feathered paws waved upwards and its eyes had a windblown look.

‘Everything’s all right!’ said the eyes. ‘Everything’s just the same. I dreamed you were away, but you weren’t after all.’

‘Nona!’ cried a voice from inside the house, ‘Nona!’ And as Miss Ranskill turned her dog-licked face, her sister added, ‘You said Tuesday in your letter. I know you said Tuesday.’

The spaniel, now exhausted by ecstasy, was lying down, muzzle on paws and tail still wagging. Her bracken-brown eyes showed no awareness of stress. All days were the same to her except one day – the Dog’s Day, the day of return.

‘Does it matter? I suppose I got mixed: there was a frightful lot to think about.’

‘I’d meant to have everything looking so nice.’ Edith’s face looked, in spite of the shadow of a moustache on the upper lip, as it had looked when, as a child, she had scowled at the rain on the morning of a picnic.

‘The bed made up and flowers in your room and your old ornaments on the mantelpiece. I’d planned a cosy evening – just the two of us. I’d meant to have a party lunch.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ soothed Miss Ranskill, but it did matter just a little.

Only the spaniel was exactly the same, unaware of dates or bed-linen, confident in the assurance of her nose that her world was complete again, uncritical, accepting and jubilant, she wagged her tail.

‘Come for a walk,’ urged her eyes, ‘don’t go into the silly old house: houses don’t matter. Come for a walk.’

Miss Ranskill longed to accept the invitation, to fasten the lead to the dog’s collar and allow herself to be tugged back into the old familiar ways.

‘Come and talk to me while I get lunch ready,’ said Edith.

She was a bigger woman than her sister; and though her bulkiness had been increased by the starch and vegetables of war-time diet, so that, in spite of her constant activity, she had been obliged to let out her belts, she seemed a washed-out and nerveless edition of her. The likeness between them was provoking to each. Miss Ranskill’s hair was tawnier, her eyes bluer, and her body more trim and taut.

‘I’d planned such a welcome!’ protested Edith.

Miss Ranskill felt as the prodigal son might have done if his father had not seen him from afar and if he had had to bear the reproachful gaze of the fatted calf.

‘Everything would have been ready.’

‘Love is ready,’ insisted the spaniel’s eyes, and the whole netherland of her body wagged violently.

‘I’ll get your letter,’ said Edith, ‘but I’m positive–’

She turned away and hurried down the passage.

It was, perhaps, the best thing she could do; since it was too late now for one to knock at the door and the other to fling it open.

Miss Ranskill felt a faint relief that was mixed with irritability.

She had never, on the island, dreamed of any conventional welcome and had always imagined being at home rather than going there, of slipping naturally into a world of comfort. But she was not to be allowed even to do that before Edith had been proved to be right and she to be wrong over a small matter of dates. What did Monday matter, or Tuesday, in comparison with four years? Edith would be right, of course, but what did that matter either?

Edith was right. She returned in triumph from the kitchen, and in her hand was the letter her sister had written – a letter full of references to a desert island, a sea-voyage and an air-raid, to police, to delays over identity cards, to official delays over trains.

‘ There! ’ she pointed to the postscript, ‘you’ve got the time of the train all right, but you do say Tuesday!’

The carpet whispered of ease as she followed her sister out of the room, and the stairs responded to her tread. In the hall, each segment of parquet spoke of the patience and skill of men like the Carpenter. Miss Ranskill felt more alive than she had done since her visit to a war-time shoe-shop.

Whimpering, and an undercurrent of protesting squeaks told that Whuppet had discovered the kittens. So too had Edith, but though the spaniel’s body was quivering with delight as she wuffled her nose among the bewildered, faintly-spitting quartette and groped with her pads and let out whines of welcome, the woman’s was stiff and disapproving.

‘Are they yours? I can’t think what Mrs Phillips will say.’

‘Who is Mrs Phillips?’

‘I thought from your letter that you’d been on a desert island alone with a sort of Man Friday. And now you turn up in brand new clothes and a whole lot of kittens on Monday instead of Tuesday, and what are those?’

Edith pointed to the bag of carpentering tools.

‘Those? Oh! It’s rather a long story. Who is Mrs Phillips?’

‘Philippa Phillips? Well – Nona, what have you done with your shoes? You can’t walk about with bare feet .’

‘Never mind them. Tell me–’

But Edith, grown, so her sister noticed, rather slower in her movements, stumped out of the room.

Miss Ranskill stooped and picked up the tortoiseshell kitten, now wet and tousled by the spaniel’s tongue.

Edith had always been the same, and always would be. Now it was shoes that mattered – shoes for crossing the four-year-old bridge that time had set between them. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams! Must the dreams be trampled by shoe-leather? Why couldn’t they sit and talk and rediscover each other, the unacquainted selves that had accumulated and discarded and experienced? That would be adventure, but Edith had never been in the very least adventurous. Her sister’s mind flung back to an enchanted September morning and magic seen from the schoolroom window.

In Mr Corderoy’s orchard where the boughs lavished gold against a grey-blue sky, the foot of a rainbow quivered among the tree trunks.

‘Look, Edith, look! between the cherry and the pear. Come on! ’

‘You’ve joggled my elbow.’

‘But the crock of gold. There’s the very foot of the rainbow. Come on .’

‘You said you’d do stamps today and I’ve got all the hinges ready.’ Edith’s voice had drifted into a whine. ‘I did go black-berrying yesterday and got all scratched and you did promise and I’ve got all my hinges ready.’

‘But just look. It’ll be gone soon.’

For the shimmer of living colour and light was paling already, and the arch soaring above the orchard had lost a trace of its pulsing glory before Edith moved from the table.

‘It’s going now: they always do.’

‘We might get there in time to find the crock of gold.’

‘Gold! That’s only a baby story. You promised to do stamps. It’s too bad .’

The rainbow had nearly gone by the time Nona reached the orchard fence. It was not, after all, between the cherry and the pear, though the reluctant ghost of its splendour shimmered for a moment against the bole of an apple tree and faded before she could reach it. A spider’s web did its shining best to hold the magic, so did the dew on the fallen leaves, and so did the light between the branches. But the children might have been there in time and the crock of gold might not have been a story. Nona, cheated of her birthright, the knees of her stockings wet and mouldy, her hands nettled and pricked after futile scrabbling, returned to the schoolroom. There it seemed that the very stamps had become infected by her own resentment. Their edges curled provokingly and the hinges skidded.