‘Philippa is thrilled at the idea of meeting you. All her people have lived abroad most of their lives, and she says she finds the village frightfully insular.’
‘All the same,’ persisted Miss Ranskill, ‘she seems to get a good bargain in you. And if those advertisements in The Times are to be believed.’
‘But did you really manage to get The Times regularly on a desert island or did you just call it a desert island? I’ve only had that one letter, you know, and I want to hear everything.’
Miss Ranskill tried, she tried very hard indeed to explain her life on the island, but lunch was finished and cleared and the washing-up was nearly done before Edith understood that there had been no ship-stores, no savages, no passing ship, no wreckage, nothing to read, nothing to sew, and no calendar.
‘But you must have been so terribly bored.’
No, Miss Ranskill hadn’t been bored. She tried to explain the games they had played and to indicate that the Carpenter had been a good companion.
‘But a common – well, ordinary sort of man like that!’
‘He wasn’t ordinary.’
‘Well, not educated.’
‘It depends what you call education. He taught me more than I’ve ever learned in my life before.’
‘But it must have been so awkward sitting down to table – well, I suppose you hadn’t got a table, but sharing meals. A picnic seems even worse, so much more intimate. It must have been dreadful, Nona.’
‘It wasn’t.’ Miss Ranskill’s voice began to give a warning. ‘And I’ve no doubt if I’d asked that he’d have waited on me first and had his own meal afterwards. You’ll be surprised to hear that I didn’t ask.’
‘No? Well, I suppose it would have been a bit difficult. The trouble is that sort of person never seems to think about that sort of thing. Still, I think he might have let you have tea alone, anyway.’
‘There wasn’t any tea, and if you’d been on a desert island you would have been glad of any companion who might sometimes make you forget that the fish you were swallowing was fish.’
Edith hung up the dish-cloth and turned a concerned face towards her sister.
‘Fish! Oh! you poor dear, and I’ve given you fish for lunch. Why didn’t you say?’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mrs Phillips loomed large in the cottage, the village and the nearby town. She had, so she frequently hinted, blue blood in her veins. Certainly some of it showed through the skin of her nose, which was of an aquamarine tint in chilly weather. Her politics were blue and rather bleak; so, though she admitted with generous gesture that the Russians were wonderful, she always added, ‘It seems strange now to think how we talked about “poor brave little Finland”.’ For some time Miss Ranskill, uninformed in recent history, was very perplexed by the statement.
Mrs Phillips’ outlook was Red, White and Blue. She stood stout and stalwart for thin red lines, for British Possessions coloured red, for white feathers (to be given to all men not in uniform), and for true blue of every shade. She believed in the flogging of boys and coloured persons, the shooting of shirkers, the quashing of Jews, the Feudal System, cold baths for invalids, the abolition of hot-water bottles, and (rather curiously) the torture of Adolf Hitler. She softened to horses and she adored dogs, whom she addressed in baby-talk.
Edith Ranskill was terrified of her and Nona Ranskill was not, though she found the frequent references to ‘that man of yours on the island’ almost intolerable.
Mrs Phillips took kindly to the island from the first; though she was obviously disappointed that the Carpenter had not been a native and that Miss Ranskill had not put her foot on his neck.
She admired her new friend’s conduct in building and launching the boat, but so identified herself with life on the island that any listener might have supposed that she had shared in the perils and hardships and sustained Miss Ranskill throughout. She used the Royal ‘We’ when talking of the island as often as she did when speaking to children, animals and the mentally deficient.
‘We don’t grumble about fish, do we? We know how hard it is to catch it,’ and ‘Little jobs about the house are nothing to us after all we have been through.’
In time she came to inhabit the island so largely that Miss Ranskill could scarcely recall it without the added vision of Mrs Phillips, looming along the beaches and taking command of the Carpenter. But when she referred to the ‘day we committed that poor man’s body to the deep’, Miss Ranskill snapped.
After that she was not allowed to forget her status as temporary guest and there was much hinting about the imminence of the nephews’ leaves.
‘But you mustn’t think of going yet,’ declared Mrs Phillips. ‘We shall manage somehow.’
Edith too hinted vaguely about ‘future plans’, but was noncommittal about her share in them.
‘We might take a cottage together, of course, but cottages are so difficult to get and so expensive. Besides, I feel rather bound to Philippa, I promised to stay with her for the duration, though of course I didn’t know then that–’
‘That the sea would give up its dead at such an inconvenient time,’ concluded Miss Ranskill with a glance towards the left-hand corner of the mantelpiece.
‘We must take the photograph of that memorial window down.’
‘It’s a pity we can’t pawn the window.’
‘Nona!’
‘Did it cost very much?’
‘Well, you see I ordered it after your will was proved and after I’d paid the death duties. Then I was a fool about the house. I didn’t like the idea of profiteering so I let it at a nominal rent. After that the dividends went down and the cost of everything went up, and I made this tiresome arrangement with Mrs Phillips. I – I didn’t like to tell you before, but I signed an agreement with her. It seemed all right at the time, but now – And then, of course, I’m going to return your money as soon as I possibly can. We’ll get back the death duty in time, I suppose, but you know what lawyers are. So, just at the moment, even if I could break with Mrs Phillips, there wouldn’t be enough for the two of us in a cottage. You do see, don’t you, Nona?’
The conversation, so long avoided, took place three days after Miss Ranskill’s arrival at Mrs Phillips’ house.
‘Of course I see, Edith, and I expect I shall get a job quite easily. I thought if I might stay just for a week (oh! spare me a little that I may recover my strength before I go hence and be no more seen) till I’ve got my bearings? And then, I’ve got to go and see Mrs Reid.’
‘Surely you could write to her.’
Edith Ranskill had thriven since girlhood on problems and petty worries; the war had added its longer list – black-out, curtains, evacuees, billeted soldiers, Woolton pies, shortage of daily help, commandeering of houses, non-keeping quality of flour, rough hands, starchy diet, and now – her sister.
In the past, as one little problem grew stale, it had been succeeded quickly by another, so that her mind had not known a dull moment and even her hours of sleeplessness had been perpetually enlivened. The only impatience shown by her listeners, to whom she told her grievances, had come from the British sense of fair play that made them anxious not to miss their turn in relating their own ridiculously similar worries. Their own difficulties made them sympathetic; for they knew that if they would not listen to Edith she would not listen to them: nothing could be duller than to suffer the egg shortage in silence, in spite of the frequent assurances from America and the great of their own land that the unsung, uncomplaining housewives were being magnificent and the Kitchen Front of Britain an example to the whole world.