‘You oughtn’t to talk so much.’
‘I must talk.’
‘You needn’t talk now. I’ll write to Emma.’
‘But there’s the inventory. Nona, I wonder if you could go down tomorrow?’
Miss Ranskill’s heart gave an excited little jump. Of course she could go down. It would be lovely to be alone again and in the old house and among remembered villagers, and the friends who had known her since girlhood.
‘I simply don’t think I can go myself.’
Edith’s voice was reproachful and she sneezed pathetically. ‘I know it isn’t in your line’ (the reproachfulness increased), ‘but old Emma would help. She’s quite methodical even if she is slow. I’ll send her a telegram if you think you can go.’
‘Of course I can go.’
‘Very well then, I’ll send her a telegram, or you might, and ask her to spare what time she can. Then you and she and the man from the agents can go over the inventory together. And do try to remember that it does matter if the right number of sheets isn’t returned. You can’t get teacloths now without coupons…. The inventory should be comparatively simple if the Wilsons are as careful as they sound. They’ve always written very nice letters…. Oh! how my poor head aches!’
‘Shall I get you an aspirin and a cup of hot tea?’
‘Oh, Nona, not now, when there’s so much to think about. We’ve got to make arrangements.’
‘It’s no use thinking at a distance. I’ll do all the thinking when I get down there.’
‘The house isn’t the only thing we’ve got to think about. There’s the nephew too.’
‘The Wilsons’ nephew?’
‘No, Philippa’s nephew, Martin, the taller of the twins. He wants to come down next week on indefinite sick-leave.’
‘I see.’
Miss Ranskill’s thoughts skipped to the small spare room. At other times, when the nephews had come home for their short leaves, she had occupied a room in Miss Banks’ house at the other end of the village. She wouldn’t be able to do it again though, because Miss Banks had let the room to a government official, who was employed in the neighbourhood.
‘I’d meant to tell you last night, but I felt so ill. My head was going round and round and I couldn’t think.’
‘Something will turn up.’
‘You don’t understand, and my head’s simply racking.’
Edith was always angry when she was ill. Her mental dominance increased with her body’s powerlessness.
‘Much better let me make you some tea, and then, if you must think, we can both think quietly.’
Miss Ranskill longed to escape from the room and collect her whirling thoughts. These were not concerned with tea-cloths and bed-linen, but with the waiting garden and the empty rooms.
‘Think quietly!’ repeated Edith. ‘You could scarcely call me noisy just now except when I have one of my sneezing bouts and they simply rack me. No, it isn’t the inventory that worries me so much, it’s the wear and tear and what’s fair and what isn’t. We can’t expect them to do too much in war-time: there isn’t the labour and one can’t get the things. But they must replace burned-out saucepans and badly cracked crockery as well as the things that are actually broken. And if they’ve spilled things on the carpets. Are you listening, Nona?’
Miss Ranskill returned from her vision of welcoming fires, clothes drying before a fender and happily-lived-in rooms and looked at her sister.
‘Stained carpets,’ she repeated dutifully.
‘Yes, but now I’ve forgotten what I was going to say next. Hadn’t you better get a pencil and make a list, Nona. After all, it is your house as well as mine.’
So it was. Miss Ranskill had forgotten that. She wasn’t even quite a pauper any more. The Death Duty had been returned, and though she had refused, so far, to touch her share of the joint income, she had earned money in the harvest-field and did Mrs Phillips’ garden now in exchange for her keep. The plan in her mind began to prosper.
‘I don’t know,’ continued Edith. ‘I don’t know if we could let the house again. You’d better talk to the agent about that. The first thing to do is to see that everything’s all right–’
‘Couldn’t we go back and live there?’ asked Miss Ranskill.
‘It’s too big, and it’s too expensive to run, as things are just now. Besides, I couldn’t suddenly throw over all my work in this village even if I could break my agreement with Phillipa. Do get a pencil, Nona.’
Miss Ranskill got a pencil.
For a quarter of an hour she used it dutifully, writing down details about sheets and blankets, china and kitchen utensils.
Ordinarily, she would have been bored, but now her mind was absorbed by household matters. It was important, of course it was, to make sure that the linen for all the beds was in order. She did not speak of what was in her mind until quite late in the afternoon, until the telegram had been sent and answered, trains looked up, and a woman from the village bribed to ‘oblige’ for two or three hours for the next few mornings, so as ‘to do for’ the elder Miss Ranskill.
Then, when Edith, who was feeling a shade better, was sipping Bovril, her sister made an announcement.
‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘So have I, all the afternoon.’
‘I’ve been thinking there isn’t room for me here and there is room there. I could look after that garden, our garden, instead of this one. You know I believe the kitchen garden could be made quite profitable. I could grow vegetables.’
‘But you couldn’t do the house and garden. And think of the expense of heating and lighting just for one.’
‘I didn’t mean just for one. I thought I could take in lodgers.’
‘Lodgers!’ The horror in Edith’s voice was ended by a sneeze.
‘Lodgers!’
‘Babies,’ said Miss Ranskill. If Edith wished the conversation to be a series of single words she could play the same game.
‘Babies?’
‘Mothers.’
‘Nona! But think of the house overrun with babies. And whose babies? You don’t know any babies.’
Miss Ranskill took the questions and objections in turn, beginning with the last one.
‘I could know some babies quite easily. They’d be officers’ wives’ babies. And babies don’t run at first: they couldn’t overrun the house. Besides, some of the lodgers–’
‘I do wish you wouldn’t keep on using that word.’
‘Well, then some of my guests wouldn’t even be born. Even you can’t think that unborn babies could damage a house: they’re completely self-contained.’
‘Nona!’
‘Well, aren’t they?’
‘I don’t understand. Officers’ wives’ babies?’
But Edith’s voice, so her sister noticed, was not quite so horror-stricken as it had been. The word officer overpowered lodger.
Miss Ranskill repeated some of the conversation in the harvest-field on the day when she had met Lucy Mallison for the second time.
She concluded, ‘You’ve only to look at the advertisements in the agony columns to see how many mothers are homeless. They’re taking any sort of jobs – going out as cooks and matrons and helps so that they can keep their children with them.’