Things aren’t what you’d think, Miss Ranskill, never have been yet. Seems as though there’s always someone having a game with us. Like as not when I get home I’ll find my little lad’s got the mumps so I’ll not know the shape of his face for a month of Sundays.
The barred light was not a star but the reflection from an oil-stove. She was in a cellar, and she did not know if it were night or morning since she was imprisoned against the light from sun or moon that, with the tides, had been her time-keepers. She groped on the floor until the rattle of matches in a box bespoke an old familiarity.
It must still be night or very early morning, for, when she had lit the candles, she saw that the boy on the bed was still in heavy sleep. Children, she knew, awakened lively as sparrows and at about the same time.
Her throat was dry. There was grit on her teeth and dust on herself, the child, and everything in the cellar. The sharpness of it on her lips recalled her struggle with sand on the day she had buried the Carpenter.
The silence was rather frightening, for the whisper of the boy’s breathing did not reach her, and there was no mockery of gulls to add truth to the Carpenter’s maxim that There’s always someone having a game with you.
Presently the little cat rustled out of the cupboard and reminded her that there were six instead of two to share in this present isolation and three mouths to be fed from the stores. It insinuated itself between her leg and a chair bar and purred cajolingly. It curved itself against the milk-bottle in feline worship, and Miss Ranskill began to count the rows of tins on the shelf opposite. There were two, four, six, eight that held milk. While one part of her mind made mechanical note, another part of it was astray. Eight tins would be enough for more than a week. Supposing that last bomb had been an infernal device, killing everyone else in the country? The four flat tins looked as though they held sardines…. They would get out of the cellar some day, of course. It was only a question of chip by chip, like hacking down a tree, but working at brick not timber. The round tins held soup and the bigger ones salmon, enough, so she calculated, for another week. England would be strange as a deserted island. She remembered reading a book about the last survivor of the world, his tour through the empty shops, his possession of all things and of nothing. Perhaps there would be mice for the cat until they could free themselves. Then there would be a different motor car every day, new clothes and no posterity. The boy could have the Crown of England as a hoop to trundle down the wide emptiness of Piccadilly – rattle, rattle, rattle until moss grew in the streets, though a hoop snatched from a toy-shop might run more smoothly and be just as valuable. The big square tin held tea.
Today or tomorrow (and it might, so she calculated absurdly, be either of those days now) she must count the stores and ration them. Meanwhile, she would dare to be generous to the cat. She filled a saucer full of milk and then crossed the cellar to the shelf where the candles were stored. Light would be the most important thing in this new desolation, where there was no spendthrift sun or wiser moon to lavish and withdraw their gold and silver.
There was more provision in the cellar than there had been on the island, but fewer promises. Its infertility was horrible.
When she had counted the candles in the packets, Miss Ranskill made a detour round the cat so as not to disturb its lapping. So, in the island days, she had always, however tired she had been, moved gently or taken a longer path if the shorter had led past a gull’s feeding-place. She, when hungry, had known despair when a hooked fish had escaped her, and had learned to respect the hunter for food.
She did not know that always in the future she would pause on a pavement till a sparrow had finished its crumb, and that the sound of a thrush breaking snails on a rockery would still her movements.
She wondered if the boy had a large appetite. He was lying very still, his head on the crook of his arm, and his smile told that he was not a prisoner.
There is something terrifying in the isolation of anyone who watches a sleeper, and Miss Ranskill, looking at the slumbering boy, wondered about the feelings of wardens as they glanced through the grilles at night and saw the bodies, meaningless as bolsters arranged by practical jokers, and no more occupied than the clothing in second-hand shops. Sleep, for all prisoners, is the time of triumphal escape. She had sometimes seen the Carpenter lying in his freedom, had wondered if he were at home by the fireside or taking stocks of his tools in the shop with the carpeting of wood-curls, or at sea or still on the island. Sometimes he had been able to tell her in the morning. She had often wondered where the final dream had taken him when he lay, still breathing on the beach, his body performing its mechanical work until the empty exertion exhausted it too much.
It seemed, while she watched, as though the boy too had stopped breathing: the blanket scarcely moved above him. Then a little pucker of his lips told her that his dream was changing and she felt exasperation instead of fear. Children were always selfish. The Carpenter would have been up and about and helping her.
She picked up the cat’s saucer and then rearranged the cups. Whatever the time, one might as well be busy now that sleep had gone. There was no need to be particularly silent either. The other prisoner might just as well be roused.
Two heads are better than one, Miss Ranskill, even if the second’s an addle-pate.
‘Coo!’ The boy sat up and rubbed his eyes with dusty knuckles. ‘Are we going to have cocoa now? What time is it? How did the cat get down ’ere?’
‘The cat’s had three kittens,’ Miss Ranskill told him. ‘And we’re going to have cocoa.’
He scrambled out of bed through a cloud of dust released by the scattered blankets. Except for the dirt that covered his head and pyjamas, he seemed unmarked by the night’s experience. A bomb had mattered a few hours ago: a cat and her kittens mattered now, and there was no more or less excitement over the one than the other.
When Miss Ranskill had refilled the kettle, and while the boy was still half in and half out of the cupboard, she went once more up the cellar stairs to see if the door were as tightly jammed as she had thought. As she pressed her shoulder against the stubborn wood, the voice of the siren was raised in a long gruesome wail that seemed unending.
She hurried down the steps, expecting to find the boy in a state of terror, but, though the monotonous wailing continued, he did not withdraw his head from the cupboard. He was lying on the floor, his dusty legs waving in the air, his toes curling happily.
‘That’s Jane,’ he remarked as Miss Ranskill stooped over him.
‘Is Jane the cat?’ Miss Ranskill tried to sound interested, but her ears were alert for bombs and not for cats’ christenings.
‘Coo! You don’t know much, do you?’ The boy wriggled backwards. ‘Jane’s the All Clear.’
‘The All Clear?’
‘You know, the siren that sounds when the bombing’s over and Jerry’s gone ’ome. We always calls ’er Jane. I’d an aunt just like ’er, always kickin’ up a dust about nothing. Mum ’ates Jane. She can sleep through the Alert, and then Jane goes and wakes ’er after it’s all over. Doctor Mallison says the All Clear’s like the man that shuts the stible door arter the ’orses are gone. What shall we call the kittens?’
‘Shall we call one Tibby?’
The suggestion came from that section of Miss Ranskill’s brain that was not entirely bewildered, but she scorned herself as she spoke.
‘I shall call ’em Montgomery an’ Eisenhower and Beveridge.’
‘Why?’
There was contempt in the boy’s eyes as he replied, ‘Most cats and pups that’s not strays gets called Beveridge or Montgomery or Eisenhower, same as most all dogs is called Winston. That kettle’s boiling now.’