Barbara Euphan Todd
MISS RANSKILL COMES HOME
with a new afterword by
WENDY POLLARD
To Marguerite Steen,
with love and gratitude
CHAPTER ONE
Miss Ranskill sat back on her heels; even that movement was an agony, driving the sand into her sweat-softened skin, but it was the torment of her hands that had forced her to stop digging. The grave was nearly deep enough. It would have to be deep enough because for two hours now she had been fighting the shale. She had tugged at it with frayed fingertips, twisting great flakes from their beds while the pinkish-grey edges of other flakes deepened in colour as they bit into her knees.
She pushed back her hair with one hand, while the other sought the comforting softness of her mouth. She was terribly thirsty, and the sand, gritting from the cracks of her torn fingernails, tasted salty. Yet before she could reach the stream she would have to pass the Carpenter. There was only one stream on the island.
Her left-hand fingers found, in their turn, the solace of her mouth and tongue. It was a child’s attitude she had taken, squatting back on her haunches, her cut fingers in her mouth. She had done to the Carpenter all the things that were necessary. Had done them reverently because she revered him, practically because of what she had once heard, lovingly because she had loved him, though that fact had only come to her while she was digging his grave and after she had dealt with the now inert and helpless body that had never presumed to display more vigour before her than dragging of timber, lifting of stones and thrusting through waves demanded.
I’m a boxer, look. All boxers get to be gentle. They learn to keep the strength in when they’ve got to – part of their training. Bruiser, that’s a word makes me laugh…. Even a heavy-weight walks light like a cat. He learns to ballet-dance before he’s learned to hit. You’ve never seen the ringside women, Miss Ranskill. Enough to make you sick they are, crowding round and thinking they’ll get their kisses while the blood’s still slippery on the gloves. Boxers don’t think a lot of them. Boxers like to do their own wooing – it’s part of their training, see, Miss Ranskill. A boxer’s got to be a wooer all along, got to draw his man close in, seduce him like. No woman need fear to marry a boxer. Fighting and lovemaking go the same way. Boxers don’t want no easy knockouts either. They like to use their skill, Miss Ranskill.
‘Miss Ranskill’, yes, she had always been Miss Ranskill to him since the time he had dragged her chilled water-heavy body out of the sea. The ‘Miss’ and her surname had made her armour against an assault that had never been hinted at. She had called the Carpenter, Reid. His surname seemed to set the right distance between them. At home, on that other island, she had always addressed the village carpenter by his surname, so the distinction had come easily enough.
She had been proud, virtuous and old maidenly. She had cherished the flower of her virginity because all the years of her sheltered upbringing had encouraged that nurturing. To her, at thirty-nine, her chastity had still been a cool white flower, not to be snatched lightly and thrown away. It had remained the same all through the years on the island. She had always been proud of her integrity and of the Carpenter’s also. They had made between them a greater story than the ones usually begotten on desert islands in books.
It occurred to her now, as she shifted sideways, relieving the hurt of her knees and bringing yet another new pain as the sand gritted between calf and thigh, that he had never heard her Christian names – Nona Mary. Supposing she had died first, would he have engraved Miss Ranskill on her tombstone? But then there wouldn’t be a tombstone because there were only rocks on the island. Silly. Why did all these irrelevances keep crowding in at a time like this, futile thoughts and memories when she hadn’t even cried yet? This was the first time she had had time to cry, in a grave – not above it as most people do. Tears washed the sand out of her eyes and the salt stung the sore places that flicked shale had made on her cheeks. Then, as an animal consoles itself by the licking of wounds, as every child, since the world began, has solaced its own distress, she set her tongue working from corner to corner of her mouth, catching her tears and taking those outward and visible signs of the soul’s distress into the body to be its comforter.
Ten minutes later she sagged on to the shale and fell asleep.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon and Miss Ranskill had been asleep for half an hour.
She was trying not to wake now, trying to resist the summons of an insistent fly, buzzing the last message of the Carpenter to her.
‘Please, God, don’t let it be true. Let it be all all right.’
Miss Ranskill kept her eyes shut to give God his last chance of working a miracle. Then she stood up slowly and, helped by the paddle the Carpenter had made, scrambled out of the grave. The paddle was split and frayed by the hours of futile jabbing at the shale. He would have been hurt to see its condition after the weeks of patience that had gone to its making.
You don’t need to dig with it, Miss Ranskill. Anyone would think you was working your allotment ’stead of trying to row. You don’t need to dig with it, see.
Two tears ran down her cheeks, dripped off the end of her chin and were sopped up by the thirsty wood.
It had been such a splendid paddle, considering that the Carpenter had had nothing but his knife to help hands, brain, and the skill begotten when he was first apprenticed.
Not so bad, Miss Ranskill, not bad at all considering. When I think of the song and dance I made as a lad if the steel of a plane was too soft for my liking. We could have done with any old plane here, couldn’t we?
She leaned her weight on the paddle now to ease her aching back and, looking down into the grave, saw that his knife was lying there. Civilised nervousness possessed her for a moment, as it often did even after four years on the island. It wasn’t safe to leave their only valuable treasure there. Then she straightened herself as reality jerked at instinct. She would leave the knife where it was while she went about her other duties. It would make the grave more homely until she had collected leaves and grass for a lining.
Makes it more homely-like, Miss Ranskill, see.
That had been one of his favourite expressions. He used it as he arranged stones round the smoky fire, and when he handed her a shell.
Saucer, see, Miss Ranskill. We mayn’t have cups, but we’ve plenty of saucers. Makes it more homely.
He had loved his English home in a way she had never loved a house.
Slowly, word by word, as he had once laid brick on brick, he built it again for her to see, made her free of it, invited her to the hospitality of the rocking-chair by the steel fender. She could almost smell the nasturtiums in the blue jug and the scent of the rising dough in the crock.
Yes, of course the homelessness had been worse for him than for her.
But now?
For the next hour she walked backwards and forwards from spinney to grave, carrying leaves and moss. Her mind was stilled by the tiredness of her body.
Now she must wash herself before saying goodbye to the Carpenter, who was taking his first rest for many years.
He lay straight and curiously flat in his ragged trousers and the shirt she had rinsed out that morning.
When she reached the stream she drank, dipping the drinking shell in and out of the water, gulping and gasping in the manner of hot thirsty puppies and children.