Barbara Todd - Miss Ranskill Comes Home

‘It tastes salt,’ he observed.

‘And why shouldn’t it be salt? Have you fed the chickens?’

‘Yes, I’ve done that.’

‘Then give me hold of those.’

Mrs Reid snatched the watch and the wallet. The former was put to join a débris of pepper-dust, soup-square wrappers, greasy bills, string, cloves and a three-penny magazine in the drawer of the kitchen table. With the wallet in her hand she hesitated, flicked over a page or two, and then walked towards the stove.

‘There!’ she said. ‘That’s what it should’ve done a long time ago – helped to make a fire burn better.’

The salt of the note-book quickened the flames to a blue burning: they licked upwards as though relishing the flavour.

Miss Ranskill sat very still. She scarcely dared to blink lest the movement of her lids should disturb the tears in her eyes so that the boy would see them. His presence tied her tongue as he looked questioningly from her to his mother, and then at the blue-spattered flames.

‘What was it, Mum?’ he asked.

‘Nothing but a bit of old rubbish that should have been burned before.’

‘We could have saved it for salvage, couldn’t we?’

His lips made the question to his mother, but his eyes asked Miss Ranskill, before he moved quickly over to the fireplace. For a moment she was wondering if he were going to attempt a rescue, but he reached up for a big shell that lay on the mantelpiece beside the clock.

‘ Now what are you after?’ asked Mrs Reid. ‘Oh! that !’

The last words were spoken irritably, but only Miss Ranskill heard them. The boy was listening to something else. His right hand cupped one ear, his left pressed the big shell to the other.

‘He never gets tired of that game,’ said Mrs Reid as she tipped more sugar into Miss Ranskill’s tea. ‘I’ve known the baker knock three times before he’d heard.’ All the same she lowered her voice as she added, ‘It was best not to let him see the note-book. It would never do to upset him now and start him asking questions.’

The words meant nothing to Miss Ranskill, who was watching the death of the note-book – a death that reduced all the Carpenter’s loyalty and all patient stoking of a fire to the level of child’s play. There was only a small black fluting of paper left, a fluffing of ash and a red glow, and now the powder of the rest settled with a little sigh into the heart of the fire.

‘Will you take another cup of tea?’ asked Mrs Reid affably.

Miss Ranskill shook her head. She was looking at the boy now, noticing how the pupils of his eyes responded to the intensity of his listening, and how the pink curving of the shell lay closely against the dark hair that grew, as his father’s had done, from the undisciplined crown at the back of the parting to a thick smooth sweep in front.

They say you can hear the sea in a shell, Miss Ranskill, would you like to try?

Surrounded as she was by the sea then, she had not bothered to make the experiment.

The boy smiled suddenly, as though enchanted by the song of a siren. He took the shell from his ear and held it out to the visitor.

‘You can hear the sea,’ he said gravely. ‘Would you like to try?’

It was very nearly his father’s gesture, and they were his father’s words.

‘Thank you,’ said Miss Ranskill, wondering if he had guessed she was in need of comfort, whether the ashes in the fire meant anything to him and whether it was habit, or some sixth sense that had made him want to listen to the sea just then, and to let her share his listening.

And now the shell, warm from his ear, lay against her own. The boy and his mother moved silently about the room as the surge of waters deafened her to everything else. They were roaring and the wind was whining and the breakers were crashing inshore. Surely the others must hear too. She released the pressure of the shell. Instantly the crashing eased to a tender shuffling. It was the morning after a tempest and the little waves were tumbling up the beach. She closed her eyes and now she could see the long shifting lines with their silver edges. She was back on the island again: the Carpenter was fishing from the low rocks to the west of the bay while the pebbles frolicked underneath the water before being sucked back with a hushing swish as the waves receded.

By pressing hard on the shell she could raise a tempest. What an instrument to play! By flexing or unflexing her fingers she could bring any sea-weather to her ears, and be at home on the island again.

She opened her eyes to see that a stranger had come into the kitchen. Of course she had not heard the door open. He was a man with a facetious and rather gross face; and he was wearing a blue-serge suit. From his expression, she guessed he was arguing, and, though she was reluctant to interrupt the singing of the water, she took the shell from her ear.

Mrs Reid was talking.

‘I shan’t be more than a few minutes more. Somehow I got all behindhand today, and then–’

‘Well, we don’t want to miss the big picture, ducks. Sorry; I didn’t see you’d got a visitor.’

Mrs Reid glanced anxiously at Miss Ranskill, who rose and put the shell back on the mantelpiece.

‘I mustn’t keep you any longer, and anyway, I oughtn’t to stay now. Goodbye, Mrs Reid, and thank you. Goodbye, Colin, thank you for lending me the shell.’

The presence of the cheap-looking stranger made it easier to say goodbye lightly. The hour spent in the Carpenter’s home had had its high and its low moments, and not one of them had been in the least what she had expected. It was easy to go too, because the music of the shell had lifted her to a curious state of ecstasy. The shell was important and the boy was important: nothing else really mattered in that exalted moment. She took three hands, one after the other, into her own. The first was plump and ploppy, the second a little greasy, and the third (Colin’s) was hard and dry and vibrant.

She said goodbye again from the gate and turned her back on the bright geraniums in the flower-beds.

Edith, when Miss Ranskill returned, was not particularly interested in Mrs Reid or her boy.

‘Well,’ she remarked, ‘that’s one thing over, and now you can set your mind at rest. I had been rather dreading the visit for you, but evidently these people are in comfortable circumstances so the best thing you can do now is to put them right out of your mind and try not to think about that dreadful island any more.’

‘It wasn’t so very dreadful, looking back on it.’ Miss Ranskill glanced towards the mantelpiece where a line of blackwood elephants were invading her sister’s territory and pressing close (not unnaturally looking down their trunks, poor things) to another and still more ferocious photograph of the late Major Phillips, this time standing by while some natives packed the paraphernalia necessary to shikari.

‘Looking back on it now , it doesn’t seem to have been so very bad after all. At night, when I can’t sleep, I go over all the–’

‘Then you’d better ask Doctor Fenton to give you something to take . There are quite a lot of non habit-forming drugs that are perfectly harmless.’

‘I don’t know that I want to get out of the habit of thinking about the island though. I’d been wondering–’

Edith’s face was not encouraging, and her sister knew that the plan she had in mind would not be approved. ‘I’d been wondering if we couldn’t ask the little boy to stay for a few days.’