‘Philippa Phillips? Well – Nona, what have you done with your shoes? You can’t walk about with bare feet.’
‘Never mind them. Tell me–’
But Edith, grown, so her sister noticed, rather slower in her movements, stumped out of the room.
Miss Ranskill stooped and picked up the tortoiseshell kitten, now wet and tousled by the spaniel’s tongue.
Edith had always been the same, and always would be. Now it was shoes that mattered – shoes for crossing the four-year-old bridge that time had set between them. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams! Must the dreams be trampled by shoe-leather? Why couldn’t they sit and talk and rediscover each other, the unacquainted selves that had accumulated and discarded and experienced? That would be adventure, but Edith had never been in the very least adventurous. Her sister’s mind flung back to an enchanted September morning and magic seen from the schoolroom window.
In Mr Corderoy’s orchard where the boughs lavished gold against a grey-blue sky, the foot of a rainbow quivered among the tree trunks.
‘Look, Edith, look! between the cherry and the pear. Come on!’
‘You’ve joggled my elbow.’
‘But the crock of gold. There’s the very foot of the rainbow. Come on.’
‘You said you’d do stamps today and I’ve got all the hinges ready.’ Edith’s voice had drifted into a whine. ‘I did go black-berrying yesterday and got all scratched and you did promise and I’ve got all my hinges ready.’
‘But just look. It’ll be gone soon.’
For the shimmer of living colour and light was paling already, and the arch soaring above the orchard had lost a trace of its pulsing glory before Edith moved from the table.
‘It’s going now: they always do.’
‘We might get there in time to find the crock of gold.’
‘Gold! That’s only a baby story. You promised to do stamps. It’s too bad.’
The rainbow had nearly gone by the time Nona reached the orchard fence. It was not, after all, between the cherry and the pear, though the reluctant ghost of its splendour shimmered for a moment against the bole of an apple tree and faded before she could reach it. A spider’s web did its shining best to hold the magic, so did the dew on the fallen leaves, and so did the light between the branches. But the children might have been there in time and the crock of gold might not have been a story. Nona, cheated of her birthright, the knees of her stockings wet and mouldy, her hands nettled and pricked after futile scrabbling, returned to the schoolroom. There it seemed that the very stamps had become infected by her own resentment. Their edges curled provokingly and the hinges skidded.
‘I’ll give you five Indians for that Hungarian; then we’ll each have a full page.’
‘You can’t have that as well,’ Nona’s voice was savage, for was not Hungary the home of opals and was not opal cousin to rainbow?
‘But we’d each have a page then.’
‘I don’t care.’
For years after that, the lonely Hungarian stamp, dirty at the edges and blurred by tear-stains, bore testimony against Edith, to whom stamps were reckoned by numbers; and never by the magic of their lands, to whom a rainbow lost on Monday was no more important than a pencil found on Wednesday, provided, of course, that Wednesday was drawing-day, and Monday afternoon the time fixed for ‘doing stamps’.
The kittens squawked an end to reminiscence as Edith came into the room. She carried a pair of bedroom slippers and she still looked worried.
‘Put these slippers on while I look at the potatoes.’
‘And then can’t we talk?’
‘Of course. We’ll talk at lunch and afterwards for a bit. A pity it’s pie day. I suppose I could get somebody else, but I’ve got out of the WI Meeting tomorrow because I thought you were coming, and you know what villages are.’
Edith, looking as she always had done, a paler, more annotated and yet expurgated edition of her sister, stirred the heap of kittens with her toe.
‘You don’t have a long-lost sister returning every day!’
‘Oh! Nona, and I’ve never even kissed you or said I’m glad to see you, or–’ Edith stooped down, somehow kissed the damp kitten instead of her sister’s face, rubbed some hairs from her mouth and said, ‘There!’
‘I suppose it would have been different on Tuesday?’
‘Well, better because I’d have got everything prepared, and–’
‘And, I suppose kisses scheduled for Tuesday can’t be expended on Monday.’
‘Nona!’ Edith protested, but her face showed relief that her sister was beginning to understand. ‘Don’t be silly. Let’s come and have lunch, what there is of it. Philippa won’t be back.’
‘Who is Mrs Phillips?’
The question was not answered until the pilchards had been laid out on a bed of lettuce and carried into the dining-room, where they lay for a time side by side with the bowl stuffed full of roses.
Mrs Phillips, so Edith explained and as her sister had already guessed, was the widow of an Army officer. She was the owner of the house and was very kind, very energetic and very patriotic. It was clear that Edith, who did the housework and cooking, half the garden and a certain amount of secretarial work in exchange for board, lodging and the privilege of Mrs Phillips’ society, was afraid of her.
‘But it works very well,’ she told her sister. ‘After my – our house was requisitioned I had to go somewhere and do something. I’m too old for the Forces, and I don’t think I could quite stand up to munitions, and so–’
‘And so you are general servant and gardener and unpaid secretary to Mrs Phillips!’
‘Well, lots of people are, I mean, we all are these days practically.’
‘Does she need so many?’
‘I don’t mean we’re all working for Mrs Phillips, I mean we’re all doing something of the sort.’
‘I saw some advertisements for servants in The Times. Really they were more pleas than advertisements, and cooks seem to be getting about three pounds a week.’
‘Yes, but it’s not quite the same. We share the house and Mrs Phillips does the flowers, and–’
Miss Ranskill looked at the rose-bowl and shuddered.
‘Yes, I know, but she likes them like that and they are her roses.’
‘Do you get afternoons out and evenings off?’
‘No, it isn’t like that exactly. Of course, we can’t both be out at the same time for long because of the telephone. I have to go down to the shop sometimes. I’ve got one or two Committee Meetings too. The arrangement works quite well, really. We aren’t in each other’s way too much, and I have my own things in the drawing-room. Besides–’
Here Edith hesitated.
‘Besides what?’
‘Oh! well, I’m always allowed to have visitors for an odd weekend or so. We share the spare room, I mean we ration our guests. Philippa has one or two nephews and nieces who come here for leaves and things, so, of course, they really have first claim.’
‘I see.’
Miss Ranskill was beginning to see. She understood, too, that it wasn’t entirely Edith’s fault that her unexpected arrival was, so oddly, thought awkward. Mrs Phillips had to be considered and possibly conciliated. There was only one little spare room. Leaves mattered more than the arrival home of a sister, who should have been dead, of course they did: it was Mrs Phillips’ house.