A woman in an overall rose from a chair, snatched a cloth from a hook and held out her right hand. Miss Ranskill, staring down at the pink palm, realised that she was expected to produce a penny.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, as her persecutor continued to display that toil-free palm. ‘I mean, I haven’t–’
The attendant shrugged her shoulders and sat down again. The girl smiled so that the slight movement of her mouth altered the progress of her lipstick and sent the flaming colour off the line of her upper lip. That made Miss Ranskill feel a little better.
She moved towards a table that held a powder-bowl, a box of cotton-wool pads and a sapphire and diamond ring. She could powder her nose without paying a penny, she could go on powdering it until the girl had gone. Then, perhaps, the attendant could help her to tidiness. But, before her hand could reach one of the little pads, another and scarlet-nailed hand snatched at the ring on the table.
The movement startled Miss Ranskill into dropping the envelope she had been clutching. Her own name stared up at her from the floor.
If she opened the letter, the reading of it would give her something to do. She need not look at the brutal mirror or pretend that she did not want to take refuge behind one of those white doors, or that she didn’t mind being suspected of trying to steal a ring.
She picked up the envelope and slit it.
HMS Halliard.
Dear Miss Ranskill,
It has occurred to me that you may like to do a little shopping before the bank gives you facilities, so will you, please, accept the loan of the enclosed. My own movements are uncertain, but c/o Admiralty, Whitehall, London, SW1, will always find me.
I hope you will soon recover from the rough and ready treatment you received aboard, and get in touch with your friends.
Here was something kindly and warming, and something, as well, to restore self-respect. Miss Ranskill took one of ten notes from the envelope.
‘I should like a clean face towel, please,’ she said.
‘Haven’t you anything smaller?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘Well,’ the attendant made the announcement proudly, ‘we never have much change at this time in the morning, but I suppose I’ll have to see what I can do.’
Miss Ranskill picked up one of the little pads from its bowl, dipped it into powder, dabbed her nose with it, looked at herself in the glass, and wondered whether to laugh or cry. Peach-coloured powder looked sad and ludicrous against her tanned skin. She dropped the pad back into its box and tried to rub the powder away with another one.
The girl looked at her disdainfully and then addressed the attendant.
‘Could you give me some clean pads?’
‘The box was filled with fresh ones this morning, Madam.’
‘I know, but…’ a thin finger pointed to the bowl, where the pad Miss Ranskill had used showed a peach-coloured dusting, ‘a dirty one has been put back on top of them. I really couldn’t use any of them now.’
The attendant made clicking noises with her tongue, emptied the box of pads into a bin, flounced to a cupboard, took out a packet of new pads and looked scornfully at Miss Ranskill.
‘This is the receptacle for soiled pads.’
It was absurd that the scorn of a lavatory attendant and the insolence of a knock-kneed chit should have had the power, so Miss Ranskill reasoned, to make her feel as ignominious as a disgraced puppy.
What had the attendant seen of the world? She spent her days amongst plugs and taps and porcelain, her life in ministering to the lowest needs of the human body, dependent on their coppers for the price of a seat at a cinema.
And what had the girl got, apart from a slick sophistication and a second-hand complexion that must be renewed eight times a day? Her body was neat and slim – a narrow fashionable little body unsuited to child-bearing or to any other hard labour. Her knowledge of life came mostly from the theatres and light novels. The sea meant a row of bathing-huts and sun-tan cream, a desert island meant a sexy novel. The country meant new tweeds and an evening or two in village pubs where she would pretend to be ‘too rurally rustic with divine yokels’. Tragedy was a spot on the chin, and ‘fun’ meant cocktails and screaming and dancing till dawn.
Feed the two of them on dried fish for a month, set them to boat-building and grave-digging, and what sort of shape would they make of their lives? What would they look like then?
So Miss Ranskill argued and questioned but no answer could help at this moment.
It was ridiculous that, after years of longing for companionship, her greatest wish should be to shut herself away in a lavatory, and that not because of any bodily need, but so that she could be alone – away from the people she had travelled so hardly to see.
She had heard of prisoners battering their heads against the insides of cell doors. Now she wanted to beat on one of those locked doors, force her way in and hide. If only the girl would go away, and if only the attendant, who had presumably gone to find change, would come back! The civilised scent of soap and powder began to stifle her.
She doubled up her hands in an attempt to hide scars and scratches, made suddenly shameful by a girl’s glance.
You should a let me done that, Miss Ranskill. I don’t like to see you roughing your hands. Doesn’t seem right somehow.
Yes, the Carpenter, tired as he was, had respected her hands and what he called her ‘ladyship’, and the remembrance of his solicitude made a magnet for pride. Her own ragged appearance was only a phase in her life. In a week or two she would be restored. But there were people better than herself and as good as the Carpenter who would always be despised and rejected – not for themselves but because of what they wore, not because they had stolen and lived infamously, but because work had roughened their skins, because they blew on their tea or used the back of their hands for table-napkins. They were edged away from in railway carriages because their clothes smelled of their work and the sweat their work brought out, instead of reeking of the civet cat or a whale’s disease.
It was more for the sake of the Carpenter and his kind that Miss Ranskill spoke now.
‘Look!’ she said, spreading out her swollen fingers before the girl. ‘Look at my hands. It wouldn’t matter being unkind if you weren’t unutterably stupid as well.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
The girl’s voice had taken on the high-pitched tone used by certain people in speech to subordinates, but Miss Ranskill’s overmastered it when she spoke again. She might have been a schoolmistress addressing a class of giggling stupids.
‘Look at my hands and think again if your ring would be any use to me. You were afraid I might steal it, but it wouldn’t go over my little finger. Look at my face! I don’t rub lard into it at night.’
‘I – I–’ the girl edged away from the mirror. ‘Really!’
Just then the attendant returned, counted out the change offendedly, put a penny in a slot, performed swift ritual with a towel and sidled away.
And now Miss Ranskill was alone and trembling in a cell six foot long by four wide. The outburst had tired her.