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.
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:
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
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 own feet and the track of the boat she would push down to the water’s edge.