Miss Ranskill Comes Home Read online

  Persephone Book No 46

  Published by Persephone Books Ltd 2003

  First published 1946 by Chapman & Hall

  © The Estate of Barbara Euphan Todd

  Afterword © Wendy Pollard 2003

  Endpapers taken from ‘Sutherland Rose’, a 1946

  screen-printed cotton textured fabric designed

  by Graham Sutherland for Helios

  © Whitworth Art Gallery, the University of Manchester

  eBook-Production: GGP Media GmbH, Pößneck

  ISBN 978-1-906462-31-4

  Persephone Books Ltd

  59 Lamb’s Conduit Street

  London WC1N 3NB

  020 7242 9292

  www.persephonebooks.co.uk

  MISS RANSKILL COMES HOME

  by

  BARBARA EUPHAN TODD

  with a new afterword by

  WENDY POLLARD

  PERSEPHONE BOOKS

  LONDON

  To Marguerite Steen,

  with love and gratitude

  CHAPTER ONE

  I

  Miss Ranskill sat back on her heels; even that movement was an agony, driving the sand into her sweat-softened skin, but it was the torment of her hands that had forced her to stop digging. The grave was nearly deep enough. It would have to be deep enough because for two hours now she had been fighting the shale. She had tugged at it with frayed fingertips, twisting great flakes from their beds while the pinkish-grey edges of other flakes deepened in colour as they bit into her knees.

  She pushed back her hair with one hand, while the other sought the comforting softness of her mouth. She was terribly thirsty, and the sand, gritting from the cracks of her torn fingernails, tasted salty. Yet before she could reach the stream she would have to pass the Carpenter. There was only one stream on the island.

  Her left-hand fingers found, in their turn, the solace of her mouth and tongue. It was a child’s attitude she had taken, squatting back on her haunches, her cut fingers in her mouth. She had done to the Carpenter all the things that were necessary. Had done them reverently because she revered him, practically because of what she had once heard, lovingly because she had loved him, though that fact had only come to her while she was digging his grave and after she had dealt with the now inert and helpless body that had never presumed to display more vigour before her than dragging of timber, lifting of stones and thrusting through waves demanded.

  I’m a boxer, look. All boxers get to be gentle. They learn to keep the strength in when they’ve got to – part of their training. Bruiser, that’s a word makes me laugh… . Even a heavy-weight walks light like a cat. He learns to ballet-dance before he’s learned to hit. You’ve never seen the ringside women, Miss Ranskill. Enough to make you sick they are, crowding round and thinking they’ll get their kisses while the blood’s still slippery on the gloves. Boxers don’t think a lot of them. Boxers like to do their own wooing – it’s part of their training, see, Miss Ranskill. A boxer’s got to be a wooer all along, got to draw his man close in, seduce him like. No woman need fear to marry a boxer. Fighting and lovemaking go the same way. Boxers don’t want no easy knockouts either. They like to use their skill, Miss Ranskill.

  ‘Miss Ranskill’, yes, she had always been Miss Ranskill to him since the time he had dragged her chilled water-heavy body out of the sea. The ‘Miss’ and her surname had made her armour against an assault that had never been hinted at. She had called the Carpenter, Reid. His surname seemed to set the right distance between them. At home, on that other island, she had always addressed the village carpenter by his surname, so the distinction had come easily enough.

  She had been proud, virtuous and old maidenly. She had cherished the flower of her virginity because all the years of her sheltered upbringing had encouraged that nurturing. To her, at thirty-nine, her chastity had still been a cool white flower, not to be snatched lightly and thrown away. It had remained the same all through the years on the island. She had always been proud of her integrity and of the Carpenter’s also. They had made between them a greater story than the ones usually begotten on desert islands in books.

  It occurred to her now, as she shifted sideways, relieving the hurt of her knees and bringing yet another new pain as the sand gritted between calf and thigh, that he had never heard her Christian names – Nona Mary. Supposing she had died first, would he have engraved Miss Ranskill on her tombstone? But then there wouldn’t be a tombstone because there were only rocks on the island. Silly. Why did all these irrelevances keep crowding in at a time like this, futile thoughts and memories when she hadn’t even cried yet? This was the first time she had had time to cry, in a grave – not above it as most people do. Tears washed the sand out of her eyes and the salt stung the sore places that flicked shale had made on her cheeks. Then, as an animal consoles itself by the licking of wounds, as every child, since the world began, has solaced its own distress, she set her tongue working from corner to corner of her mouth, catching her tears and taking those outward and visible signs of the soul’s distress into the body to be its comforter.

  Ten minutes later she sagged on to the shale and fell asleep.

  II

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon and Miss Ranskill had been asleep for half an hour.

  She was trying not to wake now, trying to resist the summons of an insistent fly, buzzing the last message of the Carpenter to her.

  ‘Please, God, don’t let it be true. Let it be all all right.’

  Miss Ranskill kept her eyes shut to give God his last chance of working a miracle. Then she stood up slowly and, helped by the paddle the Carpenter had made, scrambled out of the grave. The paddle was split and frayed by the hours of futile jabbing at the shale. He would have been hurt to see its condition after the weeks of patience that had gone to its making.

  You don’t need to dig with it, Miss Ranskill. Anyone would think you was working your allotment ’stead of trying to row. You don’t need to dig with it, see.

  Two tears ran down her cheeks, dripped off the end of her chin and were sopped up by the thirsty wood.

  It had been such a splendid paddle, considering that the Carpenter had had nothing but his knife to help hands, brain, and the skill begotten when he was first apprenticed.

  Not so bad, Miss Ranskill, not bad at all considering. When I think of the song and dance I made as a lad if the steel of a plane was too soft for my liking. We could have done with any old plane here, couldn’t we?

  She leaned her weight on the paddle now to ease her aching back and, looking down into the grave, saw that his knife was lying there. Civilised nervousness possessed her for a moment, as it often did even after four years on the island. It wasn’t safe to leave their only valuable treasure there. Then she straightened herself as reality jerked at instinct. She would leave the knife where it was while she went about her other duties. It would make the grave more homely until she had collected leaves and grass for a lining.

  Makes it more homely-like, Miss Ranskill, see.

  That had been one of his favourite expressions. He used it as he arranged stones round the smoky fire, and when he handed her a shell.

  Saucer, see, Miss Ranskill. We mayn’t have cups, but we’ve plenty of saucers. Makes it more homely.

  He had loved his English home in a way she had never loved a house.

  Slowly, word by word, as he had once laid brick on brick, he built it again for her to see, made her free of it, invited her to the hospitality of the rocking-chair by the steel fender. She could almost smell the nasturtiums in the blue jug and the scent of the rising dough in the crock.

  Yes, of course
the homelessness had been worse for him than for her.

  But now?

  For the next hour she walked backwards and forwards from spinney to grave, carrying leaves and moss. Her mind was stilled by the tiredness of her body.

  Now she must wash herself before saying goodbye to the Carpenter, who was taking his first rest for many years.

  He lay straight and curiously flat in his ragged trousers and the shirt she had rinsed out that morning.

  When she reached the stream she drank, dipping the drinking shell in and out of the water, gulping and gasping in the manner of hot thirsty puppies and children.

  The drinking shell had been the Carpenter’s idea.

  Handy, if we always keep it there, see, Miss Ranskill. We’ll not know ourselves soon with a drinking fountain and a bathing pool. We only need a band and an ice-cream stall to turn the beach to Blackpool.

  She rinsed the shell before returning it to the ledge. They had always left it in readiness for one another.

  Then she plunged her face and head into water that stung the sandied edges of her eyelids and gentled the hard tangles of her hair until it flowed into separate strands again. After that she picked up the clothes she had laid ready and walked down to the tiny creek of sand and flat rock that edged the lady’s bathing-beach.

  She stripped off her one garment, and walked into water that received her tenderly, swirling the sand from sore places, bracing and making her ready for the ordeal to come.

  She let her hair dry in the sun before tugging at it with the blunt wooden comb that had been fretted out by the Carpenter’s knife. He had made her a little brush of quills too – a tiny besom.

  I used to make toy besoms for my lass when she was a little one, Miss Ranskill. Highly delighted she was, but her mother wasn’t so pleased when she smeared cinders across the hearthstone.

  On one of their Christmas Days, at least, on one of the days they thought might be Christmas, he had brought her a shell filled with powdered cuttle-fish and a sort of fuller’s earth dried from the clay of the cliff. There was a pearl grey puff too, bunched from the feathers of a sea-bird. The shell and its lidding shell had been stained with the blood of the bird.

  Face powder, see, Miss Ranskill. You’ve got to look smart on Christmas Day, makes it more homely.

  She did not use the puff now: it would have broken her heart.

  Presently she dressed in the brown tweed coat and skirt that were so shrunken from their waterlogging that the cuffs came halfway up her forearms and the skirt-edge brushed her knees. She had no hat. But she had dressed for the ceremony as well and suitably as she could. No more could be expected from any gentlewoman.

  Then this particularly distressed gentlewoman lifted her tired head, braced her aching shoulders, and, with something of the defiant shyness of a little girl going to receive her first school prize, walked slowly, almost on tiptoe, towards the place where the Carpenter lay.

  III

  In her world before the island, decently brought up people had bathed once a day, washed all over additionally once a day, and sent their linen to the laundry every Monday morning. Those were some of the rules: others were that babies must be baptised within three weeks of birth and the dead buried within three days of death, or, if possible, sooner.

  So she stooped down, grasped the Carpenter’s armpits and began the slow dragging across the sand.

  He was very heavy and his heels and flapping trouser-legs left a trail in the sand. She had not reckoned for that Man Friday marking. How would she be able to bear the sight of it when she was quite alone? She left him and tried to smooth away the sad indentation with her hands, but she only widened the track, making a mock-tactful smudging of his trail. The marks must stay there until wind and rain destroyed that memorial.

  Afterwards she was to remember her last sight of him as he lay (face downwards since she had neither strength nor space to shift him) on the leaves and moss until, handful by handful, the sand covered him up while she muttered remembered snatches from the Burial Service:

  I am the Resurrection and the Life.

  For I am a stranger with thee: and a sojourner as all my fathers were.

  Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  Then, feeling nothing but the sore aching of her body Miss Ranskill filled in the grave, using the paddle when her hands failed.

  Many hours later the moon laid a silver finger along the sea. It pointed towards her dishevelled form as she lay asleep.

  A ship went by – the first that had been near for years. But for the first night since the Carpenter came to live on the island the fire was out.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I

  Miss Ranskill awoke in the chill of the dawn. She shivered, and then shifted her position on the damp gritting sand. For a few moments she tried to convince herself that she was still on the edge of nightmare and that soon she would hear the Carpenter’s whistle as he put fresh wood on the fire.

  Thought I’d be up a bit earlier, Miss Ranskill, and make a long day of it. There’s nothing left for us to do now but provision up the boat and wait for weather if we need to. Just think, it won’t be long now before you’ll be thinking of having an early morning cup of tea in England. No more cold water for you.

  But there was no whistling, no voice, no cracking of wood, and, as every ruffle of the sea was set glittering by the rising sun, she remembered clearly and more clearly. She could not lie there for any longer, watching the sea and cheating her mind with memories. She must get up, change her clothes and occupy herself. Her limbs ached from cold and exertion, but, as she stretched them, every little nag of pain dragged some of the hurt from her mind.

  She stood up now and took off her coat and skirt so as to shake the sand from it.

  She was a tallish woman, rusty-haired and with jackdaw blue eyes. Her figure and type demanded tailored tweeds, good silk shirts, flat shoes and hat-shaped hats. She was one of a company whose members are to be seen going to meetings, whistling to dogs, talking to children and giving tea-parties in every English village. Her kind are at home and at their best on their own ground only, and their ground is the English countryside. They are as clean as soap, water, unheeded mud of lanes and the turned earth of gardens allow.

  Miss Ranskill had always looked her best on September mornings when crisp air pinked her cheeks, when her sweaters were new and her tweeds fresh from the cleaners.

  Now she stood bare-legged and bare-footed, shins and knees hacked by shale, her hair so stiffened by salt water and sand as to look wooden. She was wearing what remained of a pair of grey lock-knit knickers. They were laddered and torn: the elastic at the knees had long since shrivelled away and that at the waist was supplemented by a pair of knotted braces, whose tags, hanging down in front, suggested the skeleton of a sporran. From her waist upwards she was naked, but the blue-veined whiteness of her breasts, gleaming between the tanned skin above and below, told that they were not used to the sun.

  When she was washed ashore she had been wearing two pairs of knickers (she had always been an absentminded dresser), a vest, a brassiere, a knitted jumper, and the tweed coat-and-skirt – nothing else but shoes and stockings. Some- how she had managed to make her clothes last, or, at least, hang together, by never wearing skirt and knickers at the same time except on Sundays. Her top half had been more easily covered by vest, brassiere, jumper or coat. It had taken her two years to appear before the Carpenter in brassiere with no coat. She only did it then because the vest had been used as a fishing-net, and both jumper and coat were wet. So the light and shades of her body with its dark arms and shoulders, paler diaphragm and immaculate breasts were also the chart of her modesty.

  There was no need for that now that the Carpenter had gone, leaving, so far as her eyes could see, no sign of his being except a trail that led from the shuffled sand where she had slept to the mound she had heaped above him. Soon, but only for a little time, there would be another trail – a track made by her ow
n feet and the track of the boat she would push down to the water’s edge.

  ‘But not today,’ said Miss Ranskill to herself, ‘and not tomorrow: perhaps not for quite a long time. I must get used to being by myself first for a bit. The sea would be too lonely yet.’

  She felt more content now that she had made up her mind. She would keep the fire going, catch and dry some more fish, tidy the Carpenter’s grave and recover her strength for a little while.

  There was, after all, no very great hurry, and it would be sensible to check over her provisions in a seaman-like way. It would be as well, too, to take a few trial trips in the little boat.

  There’s no hurry, Miss Ranskill, see. You’ve not got a train to catch.

  No, there was not any hurry, but she must see to the fire now. She picked up her coat and skirt and began to walk along the shore. Already, thoughts of occupation were renewing the elasticity of her mind.

  It’s a queer thing to say, Miss Ranskill, but I’ve smiled to think of all the work that the dead give to the living. Regular slave-drivers they are in their hurry to be buried. They keep us busy all right, almost as if they knew what was good for us. Mourning to get and pies to bake and all the sorting up afterwards. Wouldn’t do for those that’s left behind if they packed up their trunks before going, and then set out by train to Heaven.

  Well, there would not be much sorting-up to do in the stone and wattle shelter that had been the Carpenter’s bedroom. He had left little behind him but a blurred catalogue from an ironmonger’s shop, a leather wallet of sea-stained snapshots and newspaper cuttings, an indelible pencil, a pouch that had once held tobacco, and a watch that had, by a miracle, survived its long sousing.

  ‘I must take the watch to his wife,’ thought Miss Ranskill as easily as though she were contemplating a journey from one English town to another. ‘She’d like to have it.’