She opened her eyes to see that a stranger had come into the kitchen. Of course she had not heard the door open. He was a man with a facetious and rather gross face; and he was wearing a blue-serge suit. From his expression, she guessed he was arguing, and, though she was reluctant to interrupt the singing of the water, she took the shell from her ear.
Mrs Reid was talking.
‘I shan’t be more than a few minutes more. Somehow I got all behindhand today, and then–’
‘Well, we don’t want to miss the big picture, ducks. Sorry; I didn’t see you’d got a visitor.’
Mrs Reid glanced anxiously at Miss Ranskill, who rose and put the shell back on the mantelpiece.
‘I mustn’t keep you any longer, and anyway, I oughtn’t to stay now. Goodbye, Mrs Reid, and thank you. Goodbye, Colin, thank you for lending me the shell.’
The presence of the cheap-looking stranger made it easier to say goodbye lightly. The hour spent in the Carpenter’s home had had its high and its low moments, and not one of them had been in the least what she had expected. It was easy to go too, because the music of the shell had lifted her to a curious state of ecstasy. The shell was important and the boy was important: nothing else really mattered in that exalted moment. She took three hands, one after the other, into her own. The first was plump and ploppy, the second a little greasy, and the third (Colin’s) was hard and dry and vibrant.
She said goodbye again from the gate and turned her back on the bright geraniums in the flower-beds.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Edith, when Miss Ranskill returned, was not particularly interested in Mrs Reid or her boy.
‘Well,’ she remarked, ‘that’s one thing over, and now you can set your mind at rest. I had been rather dreading the visit for you, but evidently these people are in comfortable circumstances so the best thing you can do now is to put them right out of your mind and try not to think about that dreadful island any more.’
‘It wasn’t so very dreadful, looking back on it.’ Miss Ranskill glanced towards the mantelpiece where a line of blackwood elephants were invading her sister’s territory and pressing close (not unnaturally looking down their trunks, poor things) to another and still more ferocious photograph of the late Major Phillips, this time standing by while some natives packed the paraphernalia necessary to shikari.
‘Looking back on it now, it doesn’t seem to have been so very bad after all. At night, when I can’t sleep, I go over all the–’
‘Then you’d better ask Doctor Fenton to give you something to take. There are quite a lot of non habit-forming drugs that are perfectly harmless.’
‘I don’t know that I want to get out of the habit of thinking about the island though. I’d been wondering–’
Edith’s face was not encouraging, and her sister knew that the plan she had in mind would not be approved. ‘I’d been wondering if we couldn’t ask the little boy to stay for a few days.’
‘To stay? My dear Nona! Whatever for? Besides, where would he sleep? What would Philippa say? Think of the rations and a great boy eating his head off and bringing in mud and banging about all over the place. Besides–’
Miss Ranskill interrupted before the spate of objections confused her.
‘He could sleep in the summer-house in the hammock: it’s lovely weather. And he would bring his ration book: it couldn’t cost much. It isn’t muddy weather. He wouldn’t bang about. If Mrs Phillips objected I might be able to borrow a tent and let him camp in one of the fields. I could camp with him for that matter.’
There followed a silence so long and so ominous that she broke it tremulously, ‘I don’t see why not!’
‘If you knew these children as I do,’ Edith put down the half-finished seaman’s sock, ‘you would know that the idea is absolutely impossible. The village is only just clear of evacuees. I know, if you don’t, that it is perfectly senseless to try to take these children out of their proper places.’
A line from Blake frisked through Miss Ranskill’s mind – ‘White as an angel is the English child.’ But only the child of the upper middle classes, not the little gutter boy, whose kind had disturbed but not, alas, shattered the complacency of householders when they had stormed the English castles. Not the Carpenter’s son either, not even the son of the Carpenter of Bethlehem.
‘From what you’ve told me,’ pursued Edith, ‘this boy had a perfectly good home, even if you didn’t like the mother particularly.’
‘He’s not happy.’
‘Did he say so?’
‘Children don’t say, Edith: they don’t even know. But we know, or ought to, that peevishness is bad for them–’
‘A good dose of medicine is the best thing for that.’
‘Oh!’ Miss Ranskill’s voice rose irritably. ‘If only you wouldn’t be so reasonable always! I was talking about the mother’s peevishness, not the boy’s: he is too patient, and it’s all wrong.’
‘So,’ said Edith, ‘you want to ask him to stay here so that you can tell him how unhappy he is at home and how peevish his mother is. You want to spoil him for a week-end and then send him back to be dissatisfied with his own home; very mistaken sort of kindness, I should think.’
‘I want to talk to him about his father, and–’
‘Surely his mother is the person to do that. I don’t want to damp your enthusiasm, Nona. You ought to know that nobody would be readier to help than I if it were a case of real necessity, if he needed warm woollens or anything of that sort, but you always have had such wild ideas.’
‘I suppose so.’ Miss Ranskill answered conversationally, but her mind was groping for an answer that could be made in words that would not shock.
She knew now how much she had loved the Carpenter, though not in the way that is usually described as ‘being in love’. Slowly and steadily affection had grown between them, with such firmness that she, who had never known wifehood had yet felt herself widowed by his death. Her celibacy had been no bar to the true marriage of their minds; and the attunement between them had been absolute; so that they had become unwitting partners in the third, but not least blessed, state for which matrimony was also ordained – The mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.
Prosperity had meant food and the easy blazing of the beacon fire, a well-balanced fish-hook and the co-operation of wind and tide; adversity had been the snapping of a plank, the escape of a fish and squalling gusts that soaked the kindling. The mutual help had not only been expended on easing the daily struggle for existence, it had lent hope to the fight and eased and released the mind.
The moment she had been left alone on the island, she had known herself inheritor, not only of the boat and the jack-knife and the Carpenter’s ragged clothing, but of his purpose also. The purpose was the restoring of a father to a son. She, to a certain extent, could do that restoring because, for four years, she had shared the mind of the father. She had power to raise the dead, and to foster that part of the Carpenter’s immortality that had been bestowed on the boy at the time of his begetting.