Barbara Todd - Miss Ranskill Comes Home

‘Oh dear!’ said Miss Ranskill, as once she had said when very wide awake. ‘You should never have tried to lift that rock with your heart in the state it is.’

The Carpenter did not answer.

The next picture was the same, and so was the next and the next. There was no getting away from it. When Miss Ranskill shut her eyes it was inside her lids.

She rushed through the gallery though the cords of the pictures wound themselves about her ankles. Presently she came to the last room of all, and there was no picture – only an unglazed window opening on to a grey-blue sky with a touch of gold hinting through cloud and a white bird lazing in the air.

That was the picture Miss Ranskill saw when she opened her eyes to the sky again and was conscious of the gunwale digging into her shoulder-blades.

There had been sunrises and sunsets, stars at night, birds and clouds by day, but never a wisp of smoke from any funnel.

The weather, so far as Miss Ranskill knew, had been fairly good after the first. Her head ached so that she could not remember much about the voyage except that she had finished the fish and drunk the last drop of water from the last shell, even sucking her skirt afterwards because a sudden lurch of the boat had jerked her elbow. The skirt was soaked with salt water too. She slept now and then, half-sitting, half-lying propped against the thwarts.

Nothing mattered very much any more. There were no other boats on the whole of the sea, but she was too tired to care. She did not even resent the mist that came swirling in shreds and skeins, dowsing the horizon, limpening her salt-stiffened hair and making her shiver and huddle together.

If one got very cold in this mist one might die more quickly.

She got very cold but still she did not die, though the fog came down like a chilling blanket.

Suddenly there came the sort of bellowing that might have been made by a great sea-cow with colic. The bellow was repeated but it conveyed nothing at all to Miss Ranskill, whose brain was now too tired to connect sound or sight with cause. She felt faintly annoyed at having been roused from what she had hoped would be her last sleep.

She huddled herself together, drew her left foot up from the water that covered the bottom boards, and rested her aching head on her hand.

Just then the mist lifted suddenly, and, as the last shreds blew away, she noticed the ships – long grey ships in a long line. High above them, swinging buoyantly, were two silver-grey monsters, immense and bloated-looking. Their entrails dangled from them – ridiculously thin, trailing entrails.

Miss Ranskill laughed as she had not laughed for years. They couldn’t be true, of course. Whales did not float about the sky like that. All the same they were frightfully funny.

She was still laughing when they took her aboard one of the destroyers of the convoy.

‘Delayed concussion, I think, sir,’ reported the Surgeon-Lieutenant as he walked into the Commander’s cabin. ‘She’s had a nasty jab on the side of her head.’

‘How does she seem now?’ asked the Lieutenant-Commander. ‘Sit down, won’t you?’

‘Thank you, sir. Well, she ought to be all right soon, but she’s suffering a bit from shock. We’ve got some soup into her and I’ve given her a shot, and she’ll probably sleep till morning. What I can’t understand–’

The young doctor hesitated and frowned. He was fresh from his medical school and the etiquette that forbids discussion of cases with the laity was strong in him. So too were the facts, so constantly impressed during his three months’ service in HM Navy, that he must make his own diagnosis swiftly and certainly and then take his own responsibility for his cases. Consultants are not supplied to destroyers on convoy duty.

‘Well?’

‘I can’t understand why she’s in such a mess, sir. Her knees and legs are all hacked, and–’

‘If she’s a survivor from some torpedoed ship, you’d expect her to be hacked by floating wreckage or anything.’

‘Yes, sir, of course, but you’d not expect gravel-rash all over her. She looks as though she’s been buried in sand and then pickled in brine. There was sand under her nails and in her ears. And her breath–’

‘ Must you just before dinner? Can’t you be the best friend and tell her when she wakes?’

‘But it smells of fish, sir, fairly reeks of it.’

‘She probably likes fish: some do. Any other wealth of detail about this Barnacle Belle?’

‘Well, sir, her clothes – her underclothes . Damn it, we’ve picked up survivors before, and they’ve never been like that.’

‘If you’re suggesting I should give her gifts of lingerie, I won’t do it. I was brought up conventional-like. Time and again my old Nanny said to me, “Never give panties to pretties unless they’re legworthy.” You’ve told me about her legs. By the way, what’s she wearing now?’

‘Number One’s pyjamas, sir: he’s the smallest.’

‘How romantic, and she’s in his cabin too, isn’t she? Anything else you can think of to make me cast the vome?’

‘No-o, sir – except – I was just wondering if she’s a genuine survivor or if there’s anything fishy about her.’

‘Apart from her breath I should say no, but you should know more about that.’

The Surgeon-Lieutenant smiled politely. He was not yet quite sure of his dignity.

‘I only meant I wondered if she was a spy. One does hear odd things.’

‘I doubt if the Huns, though they have queer ideas of amusement, would hit a woman on the head, roll her in sand, feed her on bad fish and dump her into a boat. The boat’s the only thing that puzzles me. I’ll have another look at it now and I’ll talk to the mermaid in the forenoon if she’s receiving visitors.’

Next morning Miss Ranskill opened her eyes to fluffy white blankets and a glinting of bright-work and mahogany. Gradually her ears attuned themselves to a sort of humming rhythm.

Back in the ship, was she? Oh no, she couldn’t still be pleasure-cruising: it couldn’t all have been a dream. Those sky-borne whales were no nightmare. She closed her eyes because they ached so badly but opened them again three seconds later to the rattle of curtain rings.

A young man was peeping at her from under the shadow of a peaked cap.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘That’s splendid. Are you feeling better?’

Miss Ranskill answered the question with another.

‘Am I in a ship?’

‘Yes, that is–’

‘Then will you please ask the stewardess to come to me.’

‘If there’s anything you want, I–’

‘I want the stewardess, please,’ said Miss Ranskill as firmly as aching throat and swollen lips would allow.

‘I think I had better give you the once-over first. I’m a doctor, you know.’

The Surgeon-Lieutenant produced his thermometer.

It would, he decided, be better not to worry her with the knowledge that she was the only woman aboard. These delayed concussions were tricky things to deal with.

‘By the way,’ he said, after he had shaken down the mercury, ‘by the way, how did you manage to get so sandy?’

Miss Ranskill answered him briefly.

‘I had to bury the Carpenter.’

‘Bury the Carpenter? Why?’

Suspicion made him jerk out the question in his newly-acquired voice of authority. He might have been addressing some scrimshanking rating.

‘He was dead. There wasn’t anybody else there.’

The Surgeon-Lieutenant attempted the bedside manner – a thing he had only heard of in lecture-rooms, read about in books and practised, whenever possible, on his admiring mother. There is not much time or space for that manner among rows of hospital beds or in the Sick Bays of the Navy.