Miss Ranskill covered her eyes with her hands.
‘I can see you’re highly-strung, same as me. I’ve always been a sufferer with my nerves. You’d better drink this down: it’ll steady you.’
‘I’m only crying because – because it should be so much worse for you than for me.’
‘Yes, I was proper upset when they told me Harry had been lost at sea.’ Mrs Reid’s voice took on a tone of pride. ‘I wouldn’t eat a thing for days and days: not a bite passed my lips. And I can tell you I was upset again when the police came. Seemed almost like as though he’d died twice.’
She drank her tea noisily.
‘But doesn’t it seem better to know that he had those extra years of life, even if they were hard ones? I–’ Miss Ranskill’s mind groped vainly for adequate words and only snatched at the commonplace, ‘I made him as comfortable as I could.’
‘I’m sure,’ replied Mrs Reid politely.
‘He talked about you a great deal.’ Miss Ranskill’s voice was pleading. ‘And about the boy and his home.’ She looked round the room. If only her glance could sweep the dust from all those smeary surfaces and her mind’s eye restore the kitchen to what it had once been to her.
‘He always was like an old woman about the house. He was handy too, I’ll say that for him. I had to let the place go a bit after he went. It’s been too much for me altogether, but what can you do in war-time. Yes, I’ve missed Harry about the house, time and again I’ve missed him. I’ll give you another cup of tea when the kettle boils up.’
Miss Ranskill, while waiting for the kettle to boil, tried to talk a little about the life on the island. It was only fair that Mrs Reid should be told as much as possible, though there was little enough to be said and less still that seemed to be understood.
‘Well, fancy that now! Poor Harry!’ was the widow’s favourite expression. Once, she remarked, ‘You’d have thought he’d have built a house while he was about it!’ and once, ‘Fancy him taking all that time to build a boat. He used to be reckoned a smart worker.’
Her eyes kept seeking the clock, once or twice she stifled yawns.
At the end she commented, ‘I shan’t say anything to anyone myself, and if I was you I wouldn’t say anything neither. Folks might think it funny you and him being alone together on the island all those years. And they’d think it funny about me too; lot of Nosey Parkers they are. It’s nobody’s business but yours and mine and the police, is it?’
‘No,’ said Miss Ranskill, and hoped she was not going to be sick.
‘Anyway, there’s no need to say anything to Colin, might upset him, there’s no knowing. It took him quite a while to get over it. Colin’s fanciful. It wouldn’t do to upset him.’
‘But there’s the boat,’ said Miss Ranskill. ‘I wanted him to have the boat that his father made.’
‘Boat!’ The tone of Mrs Reid’s voice reduced the boat to the dead wood it had been before the Carpenter’s skill had coaxed the planks to curving, before water and sun and air had quickened it to the resistance that the sea had failed to break.
‘Boat! What should he want with a boat? Colin’s the chance of something better than that. He’s brains if he chose to use them. We don’t want to go upsetting him now talking about his father.’
‘It doesn’t seem fair,’ thought Miss Ranskill as she watched her hostess pouring water into the teapot. ‘It doesn’t seem fair to cheat him of the years his father was alive.’ But she only said, ‘I shall keep the boat then, I mean, I shall have it kept. Perhaps when the boy is older he might like it. It’s the sort of thing that a boy would like.’
‘Money now, that would be different,’ continued Mrs Reid. ‘I suppose there wasn’t any money?’
Miss Ranskill had meant to keep the story of the money a secret, but, either because her responsibilities as a trustee began to weigh upon her or because she could not resist watching the effect on Mrs Reid, she answered casually, ‘There was just a little money, but we had to use it.’
‘Use it! On a desert island? You said it was a desert island.’
‘We used it to keep the fire going one very wild night about two years ago.’
‘To keep the fire going! Of all the–’
In the pause that followed, while Mrs Reid tried to find words to express her contempt of such wantonness, Miss Ranskill’s mind slipped overseas.
It had been a very wild night. Over and over again, the Carpenter had gone out of his shelter to guide, with the few dry twigs that remained, the spluttering flames from one part of the bonfire to another. He had fanned and protected them as they took their feeble hold.
It’s no good, Miss Ranskill, I’m beat without a bit of paper or something dry. I’m beat, and it’s how we’ll get it going again once it goes out that baffles me. There’s only one thing for it, my pocket-book or the notes. Which shall it be, Miss Ranskill, eh?
It was she who had urged the sacrifice of the notes, because she knew that to him the destruction of his pocket-book would have been the burning of all the slender craft that carried his thoughts to harbour. He was a man of few words, and fewer still when they were written. His pocket-book was a patchy record of measurements, expenditure and payments. He would flick over the pages in the evening and make comments on the entries.
Cabbage, beet, carrot, parsnip, spring onions, lettuce, two-and-eight. We could do with some of those seeds now, eh, Miss Ranskill? And to think how I wasted them. I never could grow the carrots thin enough nor the lettuce neither. And now I’ve got so mean I’ll have a job to sow ’em thick enough if ever I get home again. It’ll not be easy for us to waste anything after all this, Miss Ranskill. I sometimes think I’ll never be able to throw away a bent nail after this without thinking that maybe there’s some poor fellow on a desert island that’d give the next best year of his life for it. Not that my saving’d help him, but you never know – there’s things we don’t understand.
There were family entries too, for the Carpenter was no diarist. He had had, during the whole of his manhood, one thick bulging pocket-book and that had sufficed.
Paid Doctor Laine four pounds fifteen. That was when my little lad died. We’ll give that page a miss. Ordered teak from Stiggins. That was for the best door ever I made in my life, Miss Ranskill, a good job that, if ever there was one. What’s this now? Finished floor in vicarage kitchen. There’s a story about that, Miss Ranskill. Let me get it right now.
No, the pocket-book could not go: it was their library. Despair might rise like a bad phœnix from its ashes, so Miss Ranskill had said, ‘Use the notes. We’re well known on the island now: they’ll all give us credit at the shops.’
That’s a good one, Miss Ranskill, that’s a good one right enough. I believe you’d make me die laughing if you was dying yourself.
But there was no time for laughter then if the fire were to be saved. In another minute the dull crackle of notes had been replaced by the gayer crackling of twigs, and a flame had been guided again, this time to take certain hold of the last dry twigs that would dry others before their death.
As the firelight grew stronger the Carpenter had straightened himself and laughed.
I felt fine then, Miss Ranskill. Queer, it should take a desert island to make a man feel grand. There was a picture I saw once and a bit in it where a man lights a cigarette with a five-pound note. It nagged me at the time to know what it felt like. I feel grand now, sort of rich.