But in Nona Ranskill there was a problem that could not be shared. It had been all very well and even exciting at first when, as a new arrival, she had added importance to the household.
Miss Hoskins might spread her table with the grocer’s madeira cake (only obtainable by going early to the shop on Friday mornings and only eatable on that day or Saturday, because, by Sunday, each slice was tethered to the main body by slender wisps of something that looked like spiders’ webbing and played queer tricks with the digestion), paste sandwiches, honey and home-made biscuits. Edith need provide nothing but a few stale buns, so long as Nona was there to make up, by her odd reminiscences, for the lack of butter and the weakness of tea. The guests always hoped that something rather shocking might be said about the Carpenter. It was interesting to know someone who had really been on a desert island, though Miss Blake, a keen gardener, was disappointed that Miss Ranskill had not brought any plants back with her. Miss Stocks, whose favourite topics were adolescence, inhibitions and the problems of unmarried mothers, was annoyed that there had been no assaults by savages.
Even the Woolton pies lost their age-old savour because Nona insisted on their excellence.
It was difficult to grumble in her presence about the shortage of fish or the poor quality of shoe-leather.
All the niggling annoyances that had hedged up so gradually around Edith and her neighbours were new to Miss Ranskill, who had a disconcerting way of ignoring some and kicking against the prickles of others. She, surrounded and almost stifled by women, did not find the war isolating: the village was too thickly populated for her liking. The variety of voices, even more than differences of opinion, fretted her mind into confusion. Inconvenience of buses was no trouble to her either: if she missed one she could walk the four miles to the town. And walk she did, with unhurried stride through dust or mud, her shoes slung round her neck by their laces, as though she were a child gone paddling.
Time was unimportant to her. What did it matter if lunch was an hour early or supper a couple of hours late?
She was difficult about food too. In Mrs Phillips’ household, the rations were divided every Monday morning. There were three little pots for sugar, three little plates for butter, and three little tins for tea. If Mrs Phillips had a four o’clock guest, an extra spoonful from her tea-tin joined the other two spoonfuls in the pot. Edith, in her turn, behaved in the same dutiful way; but Nona would play no such scrupulous games. What was there, she squandered; and was content to drink cold water for the rest of the week. At least, she would have drunk cold water and eaten dry bread, had not the others preferred to victimise themselves and insisted on a martyred sharing-out again.
‘You might try to think,’ so Edith expostulated frequently, ‘I don’t want to seem disagreeable, but really it looks almost greedy to eat all your butter ration at one meal.’
‘It seems greedier to me to make such a fuss about it and niggle it out in tiny bits. When it’s there I eat it: when it’s finished I go without. I don’t want every day to be the same.’
‘But it makes it so awkward for us. Of course I’m delighted to share everything with you, but it’s different for Philippa and she notices.’
‘I don’t want her to, and she doesn’t want to. I don’t interfere with her everlasting bread-and-scrape; why should she bother if I butter half an inch thick one day and don’t butter at all the next?’
‘Because we happen to be living in civilised times.’
‘Do we?’ Miss Ranskill glanced at the headlines of the newspaper by her sister’s side.
After that, she ate dry bread on six days of the week, and on the seventh, after having annoyed her sister and Mrs Phillips by begging them to share her untouched butter ration, finished it off herself and piled marmalade on the top of it.
‘Can’t you see that it’s better,’ she insisted. ‘You must see it’s better to behave as if there wasn’t a war for one day in the week?’
But Mrs Phillips and Edith did not see. Since they must make sacrifices, they preferred to be sacrificed daily by slow stages.
The black-out provided more argument.
‘If we want to mislead the Germans and save our factory towns from bombardment, why can’t we illuminate the villages – different ones every night?’
‘Ours not to reason why,’ barked Mrs Phillips. ‘Ours but to do and die.’
‘But you’d be much more likely to die if you drew back the curtains,’ muttered Miss Ranskill, while Edith, who was always stirred to nervous bustling by the very mention of light, hurried away to make certain that no chink was showing between the bathroom window-frame and its curtain.
Miss Ranskill was quite aware that she was being difficult and tiresome. She tried to explain her points of view both to Edith and to the doctor, who had been called in to deal with her sleeplessness and frequent bouts of indigestion.
‘You see, I thought it was all going to be the same as usual, but now that I’ve arrived in this country, like a new girl coming to school in the middle of the term, I feel confused. I’d looked forward for years to new clothes and bed-and-bath luxuries, but everything I have must be rationed.’
‘But,’ expostulated Edith, ‘of course I’m sorry for you, but really it is the same for all of us. We’re all in this war together.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong: it isn’t the same for me. I’ve come from a primitive life where I’ve learned how to do without things you’d call necessities. I can still do without them easily. I can do without them here, just as I could do without them on the island. I can go barefoot–’
‘But nobody does.’
‘I can manage with two or three garments and very plain food, but I won’t fiddle and faddle and niggle and naggle, and make do and mend, and turn old petticoats into blouses when I’ve got two blouses already: it isn’t sense. And as for being in this war all together, we aren’t. In this village we’re just playing at it.’
‘I’m sure’ – if only Edith’s moustache had been a trifle heavier it would have bristled – ‘I’m sure I don’t play, Nona. I haven’t had an idle moment since the war began. I never allow myself to rest. If only you would take more interest in all the things that are being done in the village, you wouldn’t be so introspective and nervy.’
‘I do all I can in the garden: that seems more important to me than yattering at Committee Meetings.’
It was Doctor Fenton who had suggested garden work as a nerve-soother, and Miss Ranskill worked all day, and through the long light evenings, though every time she handled a spade she was reminded of the frayed paddle with which she had dug the Carpenter’s grave.