‘Dunno,’ he muttered.
‘Try then. Can you buy knives without ration books or anything?’
Suspicion lightened and interest increased.
‘’Course you can. Anyone knows that!’
‘You’re sure? Tell me what does need ration books?’
‘Cheese, butter, sweets, bacon, soap–’
The boy’s hands were out of his pockets and he was checking off the items on his fingers.
Miss Ranskill listened and tried to memorise the list. He seemed to her to be a very well-informed small boy indeed, a most superior war-child.
‘Sugar, corn-flakes and marge. Oh! and oranges and meat and tinned stuff and jam. Not knives.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I go shoppin’ for Mum. What do you want to know for?’
‘Because if you’d like to, and if you know a shop, we could go and buy new knives now – one for me and one for you.’
‘Coo!’
He knew a shop, of course. ‘Mr Jackson’s just round the corner past the quay.’
Miss Ranskill followed him. She was bare-footed and bareheaded because she had taken off the woollen stockings, the scarf-turban and the suspenders, but quite unselfconscious. Beside the Naval officer and beside the girl with the ring she had looked a figure of fun. Now, hurrying after a bare-foot boy through the poorer quarters of the town she was only a shabby woman with rather peculiar hair.
‘Come on,’ begged the boy as he scuttled round a corner. ‘Here’s Mr Jackson’s.’
The little shop smelled of tar and rope, oil and new leather.
The sight of a single-bladed knife with a horn handle stabbed at Miss Ranskill’s memory and her fingers curved their longing to hold it.
‘Coo!’ said the little boy. ‘Look at that one there.’
The dream of every little boy lay there shining before his eyes – a many-bladed knife with a corkscrew, a thing for making holes in leather, and –
‘A thing for taking stones out of horses’ hooves!’ he chanted. ‘That’s what that’s for. That’s what I want.’
‘Do you meet many horses with stones in their hooves?’
‘You might.’
‘This is cheaper,’ said Mr Jackson, who had noted Miss Ranskill’s clothes. ‘Quite good enough for a boy to lose.’
He fingered a two-bladed knife. The boy glanced at it for a moment. He was hunched up again now, shifting from foot to restless foot, waiting, hoping, terrified.
‘You will?’ said Mr Jackson, and he snapped the elastic that held the grander knife to its sheet.
Miss Ranskill paid and waited till her change was counted out before she put the knife into the boy’s trembling hand.
‘There you are,’ she said, ‘and there’s half a crown to buy sugar for the horse when you’ve taken the stone out of his hoof.’
‘Coo!’
‘You’ll have Lord Woolton after you,’ warned Mr Jackson, ‘talking like that.’
There was a scutter of bare feet on the floor and the boy was away.
Miss Ranskill went to the door and watched him running, knock-kneed, down the street. His heels flew out almost at right-angles. He jumped into a puddle and was splashed with a rainbow of spray.
‘Well, I never!’ said Mr Jackson as she turned into the shop again.
‘No manners these days, have they? Not so much as a thank-you.’
‘Knives are too important for thank-yous. Now I want one for myself, a horn-handled jack-knife, like the one there, only bigger.’
Miss Ranskill pointed to the knife she had first noticed.
‘I think I’ve got one downstairs. I’ll see, if you don’t mind waiting. Beats me the manners of children nowadays, and the boy will have lost his knife tomorrow as like as not.’
‘I hope not. Oh! I do hope not.’
Miss Ranskill answered as the man clattered his way down some stairs.
For to her the gift of the knife had been a symbol. She had thought of it as a talisman with power to save the boy from what she herself had suffered through the loss of a knife. She remembered the Carpenter’s singing of the Lyke Wake Dirge –
His whittling had kept tune.
We couldn’t do much in the hosen or shoon line if a tramp was to come along now, could we, Miss Ranskill. I wouldn’t want to do more than give him a lend of the knife neither. By gum! though, when I get home I’ll give a knife or two to some lads and learn ’em to use ’em. Where’d we be now if I’d not learned, eh, Miss Ranskill? Suppose I were a clerk?
So it was really the Carpenter’s present that was jolting along in the little boy’s pocket, and Miss Ranskill had begun to pay back part of her debt.
‘What about this one?’ Mr Jackson reappeared. ‘Old stock that one is, you won’t find steel like it today.’
Miss Ranskill bought it – a young knife, stiff in the hasp and shiny in the blade. It had no stories to tell, no nick to show where its life had nearly ended and no rust-bite on its nameplate. All the same it felt comforting to her hand, and she was satisfied, for this after all was what she had meant to buy first.
‘Anything else?’ asked Mr Jackson.
‘Nails,’ answered Miss Ranskill recklessly, ‘three-inch and two-inch mostly and a hammer and a pair of pliers, a chisel, a spirit-level and a plane and an axe….’
Here in this shop, at any rate, there seemed a chance of buying some possessions. She had not been allowed to buy what she wanted in other shops, but there would be a certain solace in owning some of the things that had been so needed by her and the Carpenter. She could not have explained, even to herself, how she could provide for the past by laying in stores for the present, but the idea persisted in her mind.
A check came again, this time from the lips of Mr Jackson. It seemed that before buying certain tools he must be certain she was engaged on necessary work. There was danger, he explained, that private customers might buy tools for frivolous purposes.
‘A plane for smoothing one’s cheeks, I suppose,’ murmured Miss Ranskill, ‘or an axe for chopping embroidery cotton! Is boat-building frivolous work?’
‘Oh! if you’re engaged on boat-building–’
‘I’ve finished my boat, but I might want to make something else,’ said Miss Ranskill, in an attempt to be honest, though the hammer, the chisel, the plane, the spirit-level and the axe were more desired by her than dulcimer, harp, sackbut, psaltery or any lovelier-sounding implement.
‘Well, if you women aren’t wonderful!’ said Mr Jackson admiringly, as he began to collect the tools.
Presently she slipped the knife into her pocket, then collected her armful of ringing steel and polished wood and walked out into the street.
A clock told her it was quarter-past four and a crawling taxi reminded her that the new luggage was heavy.
‘Hillrise, Newton Road, please,’ said Miss Ranskill.
She felt, as she settled herself in the corner and laid the axe across her knees, that everything was going to be perfectly all right now. Her bare toes twitched against steel and the new knife satisfied her hand.
CHAPTER SEVEN
And now Miss Ranskill stood outside a prim house. Facing her was a most respectable-looking door and to her right was a trim patch of garden, so precise and squared, edged and tidied that she was astonished to see a row of lettuces in the narrow border beneath the window, where she was quite certain there should be lobelias. In front of the lettuces was a fringe of parsley. Then came a gravel path and another parsley-edged bed full of rows of neatly earthed-up potatoes.