A feeling of importance trickled into Miss Ranskill’s mind, but it was followed by a sense of guilt. It was tactless of her to have remained alive after so much trouble had been taken. Edith, who hated any detail of a plan to be changed, must be annoyed, particularly if she had paid for the window out of her own money and not from the legacy. For Edith had a way of budgeting funds and allowed no overlapping – only sacrificial changes.
‘That’s my new summer dress,’ she used to say, pointing to an asparagus bed, or (showing visitors the kitchen range) ‘That’s my trip to Bruges.’
Miss Ranskill wondered if the stained glass window was the price of her sister’s new teeth, chintz covers for the drawing-room or charity subscriptions for the year. She did not want to be an object of charity, though that might be easier to bear than a new-born relationship with a toothless and martyred Edith.
‘Very upsetting,’ she murmured, and felt like a ghost.
Then she wondered absurdly if she could be sharing the hearth-rug with the real plus-foured ghost of Major Phillips, if he too were looking at his photograph just as she was looking at hers.
‘We don’t give the dead a chance,’ she thought. ‘As soon as they are dead we endue them with attributes they would have loathed.’ For a moment she became as wise as the dead and aware that dissolution of the body could not mean destruction of humour and judgment and the sense of fitness.
Her hands stretched out for the hated and flattering photograph, but, before they could reach it, the latch of the little gate clicked and she turned to look out of the window.
A woman in a black and white dress was walking up the path. Before her lumbered a very fat liver-and-white spaniel.
Miss Ranskill reached the front doorstep just as the tail-end of her sister’s skirt whisked round the side of the house. The spaniel, who had stopped to snuffle at a bone, heard the ring of the scraper on the stone flags and cocked up her ears.
‘Whuppet!’ cried Miss Ranskill. ‘Whuppet!’
The stump of a tail wagged first, the bulky hindquarters wagged next, and then, lolloping, lumbering, whimpering, the little dog was home again, home in the sense that Miss Ranskill had longed to be, unquestioned, uncriticised and secure in the lap of love. Its feathered paws waved upwards and its eyes had a windblown look.
‘Everything’s all right!’ said the eyes. ‘Everything’s just the same. I dreamed you were away, but you weren’t after all.’
‘Nona!’ cried a voice from inside the house, ‘Nona!’ And as Miss Ranskill turned her dog-licked face, her sister added, ‘You said Tuesday in your letter. I know you said Tuesday.’
The spaniel, now exhausted by ecstasy, was lying down, muzzle on paws and tail still wagging. Her bracken-brown eyes showed no awareness of stress. All days were the same to her except one day – the Dog’s Day, the day of return.
‘Does it matter? I suppose I got mixed: there was a frightful lot to think about.’
‘I’d meant to have everything looking so nice.’ Edith’s face looked, in spite of the shadow of a moustache on the upper lip, as it had looked when, as a child, she had scowled at the rain on the morning of a picnic.
‘The bed made up and flowers in your room and your old ornaments on the mantelpiece. I’d planned a cosy evening – just the two of us. I’d meant to have a party lunch.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ soothed Miss Ranskill, but it did matter just a little.
Only the spaniel was exactly the same, unaware of dates or bed-linen, confident in the assurance of her nose that her world was complete again, uncritical, accepting and jubilant, she wagged her tail.
‘Come for a walk,’ urged her eyes, ‘don’t go into the silly old house: houses don’t matter. Come for a walk.’
Miss Ranskill longed to accept the invitation, to fasten the lead to the dog’s collar and allow herself to be tugged back into the old familiar ways.
‘Come and talk to me while I get lunch ready,’ said Edith.
She was a bigger woman than her sister; and though her bulkiness had been increased by the starch and vegetables of war-time diet, so that, in spite of her constant activity, she had been obliged to let out her belts, she seemed a washed-out and nerveless edition of her. The likeness between them was provoking to each. Miss Ranskill’s hair was tawnier, her eyes bluer, and her body more trim and taut.
‘I’d planned such a welcome!’ protested Edith.
Miss Ranskill felt as the prodigal son might have done if his father had not seen him from afar and if he had had to bear the reproachful gaze of the fatted calf.
‘Everything would have been ready.’
‘Love is ready,’ insisted the spaniel’s eyes, and the whole netherland of her body wagged violently.
‘I’ll get your letter,’ said Edith, ‘but I’m positive–’
She turned away and hurried down the passage.
It was, perhaps, the best thing she could do; since it was too late now for one to knock at the door and the other to fling it open.
Miss Ranskill felt a faint relief that was mixed with irritability.
She had never, on the island, dreamed of any conventional welcome and had always imagined being at home rather than going there, of slipping naturally into a world of comfort. But she was not to be allowed even to do that before Edith had been proved to be right and she to be wrong over a small matter of dates. What did Monday matter, or Tuesday, in comparison with four years? Edith would be right, of course, but what did that matter either?
Edith was right. She returned in triumph from the kitchen, and in her hand was the letter her sister had written – a letter full of references to a desert island, a sea-voyage and an air-raid, to police, to delays over identity cards, to official delays over trains.
‘There!’ she pointed to the postscript, ‘you’ve got the time of the train all right, but you do say Tuesday!’
The carpet whispered of ease as she followed her sister out of the room, and the stairs responded to her tread. In the hall, each segment of parquet spoke of the patience and skill of men like the Carpenter. Miss Ranskill felt more alive than she had done since her visit to a war-time shoe-shop.
Whimpering, and an undercurrent of protesting squeaks told that Whuppet had discovered the kittens. So too had Edith, but though the spaniel’s body was quivering with delight as she wuffled her nose among the bewildered, faintly-spitting quartette and groped with her pads and let out whines of welcome, the woman’s was stiff and disapproving.
‘Are they yours? I can’t think what Mrs Phillips will say.’
‘Who is Mrs Phillips?’
‘I thought from your letter that you’d been on a desert island alone with a sort of Man Friday. And now you turn up in brand new clothes and a whole lot of kittens on Monday instead of Tuesday, and what are those?’
Edith pointed to the bag of carpentering tools.
‘Those? Oh! It’s rather a long story. Who is Mrs Phillips?’