Perhaps this island would be better in the morning too. Always, no matter how wearily a day had ended or how fiercely the night had raged, the silver wash of morning had brought revival. It had been the same in the old life too: memories of disastrous tea-parties, smashed china and turmoil of spring-cleaning had never seemed so bad when remembered over early morning tea.
Miss Ranskill closed her eyes, content to feel that she need not open them again until the sanity of daylight freshened her mind.
‘Put out that light!’ Somebody was shouting in the street below, it was a menacing cry and was repeated by a voice with a snarl in it. ‘Put out that light! Lights! Lights! Lights!’ So might the kin of sailing men have shouted to the wreckers years ago in this very same part of the country.
‘Put out that light!’
Miss Ranskill turned over and, in her half sleep, visualised the bobbing lantern and the ship drawing nearer and nearer to the rocks, while merciful men, savage in their fury against a murderer, scrambled towards him and threatened till their throats ached.
‘Put out that light!’
The handle rattled, the door was burst open and Marjorie pounded into the room.
Miss Ranskill closed her eyes more firmly, and wished she could close her ears as well. Her gathering dreams would be shredded by any more conversation.
‘Are you mad? Are you quite mad?’
Something clicked, darkness followed, the bed was shaken, and the end of the room near the window became noisy with bumpings and rattling as curtain-rings tinkled and things were knocked over.
‘I should have thought… I mean, especially after what’s happened with the police and everything…. This house of all houses…. As ARP warden I’ve always prided myself on having an absolutely watertight black-out.’
The room was still in darkness except for the faint torchlight that showed Marjorie’s right hand as she stabbed the drawing-pins back into place.
‘Do you mean I shouldn’t have drawn the curtains?’
‘Of course you shouldn’t!’
‘I’m sorry, I only wanted more air. I’ve been so used to sleeping almost in the open.’
‘It’s the people who’ve been used to things they won’t do without, who are helping Hitler.’
Marjorie stabbed a drawing-pin home. ‘I only hope the police won’t hear of this or they’ll think you were signalling to the enemy.’
‘I’m very sorry. I didn’t know. How could I know? We hadn’t any curtains on the island.’
‘I don’t imagine you had blazing electric light either,’ snapped Marjorie.
‘No,’ Miss Ranskill’s voice had a bite in it now. ‘No, we hadn’t, but we had a fire that burned all day and all night.’
‘Then I should have thought you’d have rigged up some sort of screen,’ said Marjorie. She came over to the bedside now and switched on the light again. ‘That is, unless you wanted to be neutral?’
Miss Ranskill sat up in bed and her voice took on a shrill note.
‘Can’t you understand,’ she said, ‘can’t you try to understand that I didn’t even know about the war till I left the island? I scarcely know anything now. I can’t learn all the new rules if nobody tells me.’
‘Gosh!’ Marjorie’s face looked very young under her tin hat. ‘Gosh! how perfectly awful for you not to know about the war. I’m sorry I snapped, old thing: it’s absolutely my fault for not telling you about the black-out. I say, I mean I just can’t get over thinking of you cooped up on that island with nothing to do all day long. Is there anything else you’d like to know? I could spare five minutes, I think.’
It was quite quiet now that the windows were shut, and Miss Ranskill, awakened from her second sleep, wondered if it would soon be morning. Her fingers curled round the clasp of the new knife: there was familiarity in its smoothness, surety, and a certain comfort. She had taken it to bed with her just as children, newly returned from a summer holiday, tuck shells and pebbles under their pillows.
A clock in the distance struck midnight.
‘It’s morning at last,’ thought Miss Ranskill. ‘It’s tomorrow.’
But now she was not longing for the day any more. Here in the darkness she was comfortable and secure. The hours of sleep had rested her, but she was not quite alive yet for her thoughts tagged about in a random way and she had no check on them. Nor had she any responsibilities or any hopes or fears.
‘I’m a sort of ghost,’ she thought, ‘I haven’t any identity and I’m supposed to be dead. But the Carpenter is really dead…. The island is still there…. Everything on it is the same as it was before we arrived except for the shelters. This morning the same big gull will light on the round rock by the stream and the others will follow.’
Let’s go to the pictures again tonight, Miss Ranskill, shall we? It’s my turn for the plush seat. What are you going to show me this time?
So Miss Ranskill, secure between sheets, played the island game of going to the pictures. And this time she went alone and back to the island to sit by the light of the fire, one cheek glowing from flame and the other icy cold where the wind caught it.
Something was shrieking in the darkness. It was too loud and too despairing for a gull’s cry: no bird could have produced that insistent wavering whine. There was something despairing and demented about it. Miss Ranskill, struggling with sleep, imagined some half-human monster rising from the sea. Scylla or Charybdis might have moaned like that. The wailing sounded more loudly, menacing the island, and she began to fight the sheets whose smoothness affronted skin, now accustomed to the gritting of the sand. She tried to escape from their folds, fighting desperately. Was the monster itself enveloping her? Then, jerking herself from the nightmare to wakefulness, she remembered where she was. It was perfectly quiet: she had only been dreaming.
But it was quiet for no more than a moment. The banshee, or whatever it was, had followed her out of the dream. Once more it raised its unspeakable voice and threatened peace. When its moaning had ended, it was succeeded by a little echo of its own despair.
A child was crying somewhere in the house.
Miss Ranskill stumbled out of bed and into the darkness. She could not find the switch, but at last her fingers met the door-handle and she blundered out into the passage.
Something dreadful had happened. The torment of the siren (unrecognised, of course, and all the more dreadful because of that) still sounded in her mind and the child’s voice was raised to a crescendo.
‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’
Half-way along the passage she groped against another door and pounded against it.
‘Doctor Mallison! Doctor Mallison! Wake up.’
There was no reply, and the child’s voice was raised more insistently every moment. At last she found a switch. Then a strange blue light showed that she was standing at the head of the staircase.
‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’
Her hand was blue on the banister and her bare feet were blue too.
‘It’s a dream,’ Miss Ranskill told herself. ‘I shall wake up in a minute. It can’t be true: nobody has blue lights. Nothing in England makes a noise like that.’
Then, from farther away this time, another voice raised its shuddering cry.
The turn of the stairs screened all but a reluctant gleam from the blue light, but it was enough to show her a small huddle crouching on the lowest stair. It seemed to be shapeless at first, but then a head was raised.