‘It should cure the sleeplessness in time,’ he said, ‘by taking your mind right away from the experiences you have had. Try to think of the garden when you go to bed at night. Don’t let your mind dwell on that island of yours.’
‘No,’ said Miss Ranskill, unable to explain that the island was the one place where she could lay her mind to rest to be lulled by the memory of gulls crying, while the waves lippited along the beach, and the uninterrupting voice of the Carpenter boomed a rather tuneless song.
After the doctor had suggested light nourishing food, and mentioned the suitability of whiting steamed in milk, and had added that in normal times he would have recommended a sea-voyage, Miss Ranskill did not mention her sleeplessness again. He was a kind man. Edith was a kind woman, but incapable of understanding that if her sister could not have the gilt on her gingerbread, she would rather have bread and no ginger.
She grew a little more tired and a little thinner and a little more difficult day by day. Every evening she wrote a letter to the Carpenter’s wife. Every night between waking and sleeping she pictured the postman knocking on the door, she saw the letter being fingered and opened; and she heard it being read aloud to the boy, Colin. But every morning she tore up the letter and threw it into the waste-paper basket in Mrs Phillips’ spare room.
It was impossible to write: words would not carry the right picture. The story she owned was one that must be told by her under the roof that the Carpenter had raised, beside the hearth he had laid, by the light through the window that burnished the nasturtiums on the sill.
She must go soon, and the thought of her journey lifted her through the difficult days though she put off going and stored up the dream in her mind, perfecting it little by little and saving it as a refuge.
Sometimes she felt the delay was not quite fair to the Carpenter’s wife, who might, long ago, have lost hope, and might now be waiting empty-hearted for the gift that Miss Ranskill alone could bring, the gift of the days of her husband’s life.
Yet, surely, he could not have been dead to her through the years of his living; he had lived too strongly for that. Winds, blowing to England, must have carried his life’s breath with them for so long as it lasted. True, Edith had bought a memorial window for her sister; but the link between them had never been so strong as the one which must, surely, have bound the Carpenter’s wife to such a husband. So Miss Ranskill argued to herself night by night and day by day, fearful of admitting her ghost of a fear lest another dream should be tarnished or even broken.
The Carpenter’s cottage shone in her mind. There she might find peace and comfort and kindliness, all of them glowing as the flowers on the window-sill, homely as the little besom on the hearth.
She might even find some sort of work in the village, enough, at least, to pay for board and lodging in Mrs Reid’s cottage. Then there would be a welcome each night, and peace in which she could conjure up the island, and, word by word, restore the Carpenter to his wife and son.
You’ll not have to waste time in coming to see us, Miss Ranskill.
Yet, she was not wasting time, she was cherishing what time might bring.
It would not, she guessed, be possible to continue for very long as Mrs Phillips’ suffered guest.
In the evenings she had the middle chair before the fire, away from the light and beyond knee-warmth. She had the middle place at table, and the last bath at night. There was no hint of establishment.
Mrs Phillips was a possessive woman. She possessed her Committees, she possessed Edith and she still possessed Major Phillips, making herself the trumpet of statements, worn threadbare, even before he had uttered them, many times before his death.
She did not talk of the Country but of ‘My Country’, and she talked of it frequently. The bed in the spare room was never referred to as the spare room bed: it was ‘my nephew’s bed’. Miss Ranskill tossed in it uneasily and considered the war, as though she were turning over an album of photographs, some superimposed one upon the other, some under and some over-developed, some distorted and others freakish. As she reviewed them in her mind’s eye, some of these pictures changed character, so that, at times, the village snapshots, seen through tenderness, became beautiful through their purpose and simplicity. Then she saw the village as a miniature country at war, with the Home Guard as its veteran and boyish defenders. Each cottage became a castle, each housewife obeying orders to save money (though prices had risen), fuel (though war-time joints and vegetable dishes required long cooking), clothing (though the extra work in gardens and houses racked out garments), time (though shopping and mending took longer than they had ever done before), light (though work must be continued into the night and every home was filled with evacuees, bombed-out relatives, or war-working lodgers), petrol (though all private cars had been put up long ago, buses were crowded and shoe-leather poor) became a bulwark on the home front.
At other times she saw a little petty people, strangled by red tape, nagging along, intent on their own tiny quarrels, fretting over the fat ration, playing at war and pretending to be important in their ARP uniforms and gardening dungarees.
The newspapers pandered to her bewilderment too. Side by side on the same page, she would read an account of the horrors of fighting in Russia and see the photograph of a smug child whose mother had withdrawn her from school because of the trifling injustice of a mistress.
Only the Carpenter’s cottage stood secure in her mind during that first fortnight in a war-time village. Now the time was drawing very near when she must put that to the test also.
‘I don’t see why you can’t simply write to that Mrs Reid of yours,’ said Edith. ‘You’ll only harrow yourself; besides, Doctor Fenton said you were to take things easily for at least a month.’
‘I can’t write. I’ve tried, and there’s too much to say.’
‘Well, I shouldn’t get involved. You never know with those sort of people.’
‘I must go,’ said Miss Ranskill, and, staking her future in a sentence, she added, ‘I shall go next Thursday. I can get there and back in a day.’
‘If I were you, I should write first,’ persisted Edith.
‘Don’t forget,’ Mrs Phillips glanced at her husband’s photograph as though seeking counsel from it, and then spoke solemnly, ‘Don’t forget that we are asked not to hamper troop movements. We are asked not to travel unless it is absolutely necessary.’
‘We’re asked to save paper as well,’ snapped Miss Ranskill. ‘Whatever we do we seem to be breaking some rule. I’ve got a choice of breakages, anyway, and I shall go on Thursday.’
Edith looked distressed and apologetic, Mrs Phillips gave a patriotic sigh, impaled a ball of khaki wool on a knitting-needle and left the room in a marked manner.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The first person Miss Ranskill spoke to in the village was a stranger there himself, and obviously proud of it. The second gave directions so assuredly that she felt doubtful at once.
‘I mean Mrs Reid, the Carpenter’s wife,’ she elaborated.
‘Thompson’s the carpenter now. Reid, he’s been dead these four years or more.’
‘No, oh no,’ her heart made silent answer. ‘The Carpenter was alive when those dahlias were in bud. He was singing when that hedge of sweet peas was fresh.’
‘Mrs Reid, though, she still lives in the same cottage alongside the carpenter’s shed. Straight along the road and on the right; you can’t mistake it.’
And now her feet were taking the road his feet had taken. A hobnail from a man’s boot lay shining in the pathway, and she wondered absurdly if it could be the Carpenter’s, until she remembered that even broken nails do not stay for long in village streets. Presently the sound of hammering disturbed her thoughts; and then she saw the shed, standing flush with the pathway, as he had described it so often. She noticed resentfully the board with the name Thompson, and underneath the words ‘Carpenter and Undertaker’.