Something was very wrong.
Something else was wrong too. In her stupid disappointment over the colouring of a room and the emptiness of a house, she had forgotten the cat and the three little kittens, still humbly crowded into their basket by the gate. She ran out of the house and along the laurelled path. A countryman was walking down the road that led past the cottage. His shoe-leather creaked, and so did the straps below his knees. ‘A hedger and ditcher,’ thought Miss Ranskill as she noticed the bill-hook laid against his shoulder. Soon, she knew, he would be more than a hedger and ditcher: he would be old so-and-so. She would know all about his family and they would pass the time of day together.
‘’Mornin’, Miss.’ A finger jerked up to his cap peak and Miss Ranskill felt comforted as she returned the greeting. He had come alive through one war and was too old to be touched by this one, except through stabs from the wounds and death of the younger generation; and he had seen too many births of spring and too many deaths of winter to be much affected. The hedges increased and shrivelled, leaf by leaf and fall by fall, and he was as persistent as an old cart-horse. All in good time, all in good time, his footsteps beat out a steady rhythm till the sound of them faded away. A swift shadow from a Spitfire’s wing darkened the chalk of the road ahead of him, but he did not look up as the machine whizzed overhead in its rollicking hurry and dipped a wing towards the fields below.
The kittens were mewing in the basket. Soon they and their mother made a little dappled hearth-rug on the patch of carpet before the fender. The room looked better now.
The telephone bell rang sharply and suddenly and Miss Ranskill looked round the room for it. The jangling summons sent her running into the hall, but it was not there nor in the dining-room. Meanwhile, Edith must be ringing up to explain why she had not met the train.
She ran upstairs, pushed through the half-open door of a bedroom and was greeted by a louder shrilling, which ceased as she snatched the receiver from its hook.
‘Oh! is that you Mrs Phillips?’
Of course it wasn’t Mrs Phillips. Who was Mrs Phillips?
‘Mrs Phillips, I just wanted to make sure–’
‘This isn’t Mrs Phillips.’
‘Oh! is it you, Miss Ranskill?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘I wonder if you’d be so very kind as to tell Mrs Phillips that the meeting is at half-past two on Thursday, not at three-thirty. And we do so hope that you’ll be able to come too.’
‘I don’t think–’ began Miss Ranskill.
‘Oh! what a pity! But I know it is your glove-making day. Well, if you will tell Mrs Phillips – thank you so much.’
One couldn’t go on holding a telephone receiver and listening to the low buzzing that hinted at maddening secrecy. Miss Ranskill hung the thing up and looked round another ugly room, made friendly this time by familiar things. The mantelpiece was crowded with objects that had the facile power to bring back a spring morning or a winter afternoon so clearly that she could almost smell the lilac through an open window, and then flick away a season to inhale the scent of chestnuts roasting on a hob. There was the weathercock man and the weathercock woman, who had been prodded with hatpins on the mornings before picnics. There was the mosaic box from Capri, holding as many secrets as Pandora’s casket – all the blue of the grotto and all the shimmering colours of the day. Her own photograph and her own Bible stood on Edith’s bedside table; in fact, the room held more of herself than her sister.
‘I had a lot of things then,’ thought Miss Ranskill, remembering the powder-bowl that the Carpenter had made, and the little besom for her hair. ‘I’d better find my room now and see if that’s crowded as well.’
The room opposite contained nothing that was recognisable. The bed was turned down for the night and a dressing-gown hung on the rail at its foot. She supposed it was one of her sister’s and felt grateful for the preparations, as she remembered how she had longed for the sight of a turned-down bed in the days when the wind had laid a shifting coverlet of sand in the island shelter. Here, too, was a bedside table with another Bible and another photograph on it. From its morocco leather frame the face of an elderly and rather offended-looking Army officer stared at Miss Ranskill. It couldn’t be a joke, Edith’s sense of humour was as orderly as her account book. Anyway, there was nothing at all jocular in that forbidding countenance.
She opened the Bible and read on the fly-leaf the inscription – ‘Philippa Gilroy with love from her Godmother, January 2nd, 1900.’ That told nothing.
And now Miss Ranskill was as baffled as any of the three little bears. ‘Who’s been sleeping in my bed?’ The absurd question drifted into her brain, and she glared at the huffy face in the photograph, before opening the door again.
There was a bathroom behind the third door on the little landing, and the fourth opened into a spare room, looking spare and mean and unwelcoming as such rooms sometimes do, when one guest has left and the next is not expected yet. The bed was humpy with folded blankets, the towel-rail was bare, and there was nothing on the dressing-table except a very unbecoming mirror that reflected Miss Ranskill’s baffled expression most unhappily.
‘Miaou! Miaou!’ The cat had left its squirming family and was coming up the stairs in search of her.
Miss Ranskill took it down to the kitchen, helped it to a saucerful of milk and returned to the drawing-room. She might as well, so she decided, get used to the room before Edith returned home. It must be her home, the boy from the station had led her to it at once, and there was the added evidence of possessions; but who was Mrs Phillips, and who was Philippa Gilroy, and who was the Army officer? Above all, where was Edith?
Nothing in the room could answer those questions, but the arrangement of the mantelpiece gave Miss Ranskill other things to think about.
A clock in a black marble case divided the broad shelf into two separate divisions: each of these was so crowded that it was not surprising that no one object had attracted her notice when she first came into the room.
On one side was a photograph that was twin to the one on the bedside table. Around it were snapshots, some blurred and some hideously distinct of the same man. Miss Ranskill now saw him in shorts, in plus-fours and in ordinary well-filled clothes. One silver cup made it clear that he had been a good golfer, another that he had succeeded in a gymkhana; and a rose-bowl bore witness to the fact that Major Phillips had been held in high esteem by the officers of his regiment and thought worthy of a wedding-present. There were some medals, more Indian knick-knacks and a little silver elephant.
But if one side of the mantelpiece was a shrine, the other was rival to it, and Miss Nona Ranskill herself was the heroine. She nearly trod a kitten to death as she read a framed obituary notice from The Times and learned that ‘the beloved younger sister of Edith Ranskill’ was believed to have been drowned at sea on the date when she had actually been washed ashore on the island.
A bunch of fresh flowers stood before a photograph that had flattered Miss Ranskill on her twenty-ninth birthday. There was another quite large and all too clear photograph of a stained glass memorial window. The figure in the window stood beside a magnolia tree that rose rather surprisingly from a patch of water thick with fish. Their faces gaped up hungrily and with disapproval. A magnifying-glass, which lay beside the frame, helped her to decipher the legend below the fishes. This time, it was final, though it contained a hint that sooner or later the sea was expected to give up its dead and that Nona Ranskill would be included.