‘He was dead. There wasn’t anybody else there.’
The Surgeon-Lieutenant attempted the bedside manner – a thing he had only heard of in lecture-rooms, read about in books and practised, whenever possible, on his admiring mother. There is not much time or space for that manner among rows of hospital beds or in the Sick Bays of the Navy.
‘So you had to bury the Carpenter?’ he soothed. ‘Yes, of course.’
Miss Ranskill closed her eyes and then snuggled her head into the pillow like a tired dog.
The Surgeon-Lieutenant waited for a minute or two, and then, baulked by her closed eyelids from any more questioning of the interesting case or even more interesting spy, returned to the Wardroom to report that though Barnacle Belle might have delayed concussion or bats or both, in his opinion she was overdoing it.
‘Overdoing it, my foot!’ said the First Lieutenant. ‘It’s perfectly sane to bury a dead carpenter.’
‘All right, but when she first came to she tried to kid me that she’d kidded herself that the barrage balloons were flying whales.’
‘Keep it clean.’ The First Lieutenant, who had given the unwelcoming hospitality of his cabin to Miss Ranskill, yawned and stretched himself. ‘Don’t let’s have obstetrics even if you did get a first in midwifery.’
The Surgeon-Lieutenant grinned sulkily and went along to give a more modified report in the Captain’s cabin.
Commander Wrekin was used, after long years of service, to ministering to the needs of many people, from Mastersat-Arms suffering hurt dignity to ships’ boys whose swelled-headedness must be balanced against homesickness. Nor was woman business kept apart from his jurisdiction even at sea, or likely to be kept apart so long as AB’s continued their requests to ‘see privately on family matters’. The family matters, slowly divulged, usually meant that ‘the wife had been carrying on with a friend’, and that another friend had thought it ‘his duty’ to acquaint Able-Seaman So-and-So of the facts and always when the ship was away from home waters. The usual result was that the harassed AB, after nights of brooding in his hammock, fell foul of some Petty Officer and ‘didn’t seem to have heart for anything somehow, sir.’
Yes, the destroyer’s commander had had to deal with ‘woman business’ often enough, but he found Miss Ranskill baffling.
She received the news that she was the only woman aboard the convoy with little surprise and less embarrassment, remarking:
‘It will be odd to see a woman: for years there was nobody but the Carpenter.’
Little by little, as the days went by and her strength increased, so that their conversations could be longer and more frequent, he was able to piece her story together into a more or less consecutive whole.
She had been on a world pleasure cruise.
‘It was just after the Munich scare and we thought it would be safe. Things were beginning to look very bad though, a few days before my accident.’
That was as much as he heard the first day, because that seemed the moment for him to tell of the outbreak of a war that had made convoys and balloon barrages necessary.
‘I hope the Maginot Line is being a success,’ said Miss Ranskill.
The story of the fall of France and the great evacuation of Dunkirk was as much as she could bear to hear that day.
‘And we had four years of peace,’ she commented. ‘Stolen sort of peace. I’m glad the Carpenter didn’t know. He was at sea in the last war. It doesn’t seem fair for us to have had that separate peace. If I’d only believed war was coming I wouldn’t have bothered about my hat.’
‘No,’ he said, and not interrogatively because her eyes were closing. ‘No, I’m sure you wouldn’t. Well, I mustn’t stay chatting any longer now.’
But before he left the cabin, Miss Ranskill raised her head from the pillow.
‘Wasn’t there a War of Jenkins’s Ear?’ she asked.
‘The Peace of Ranskill’s Hat,’ she muttered, and the sense of irony that had lain so many years dormant roused itself for a moment before she went to sleep.
The next morning she explained herself.
‘It was only a silly little pull-on felt. I didn’t even like it particularly except that it generally stayed on better than the others. It was getting dusk and I was standing alone by the rails on one side of the ship when it blew off. It didn’t go right overboard, I mean, not right down because it caught on a hook or something. I can’t be technical, and, anyway, you don’t count P and O’s as ships, do you?’
‘Well, never mind that though, go on.’
‘I thought I could reach it, so I climbed over the rails and hung on with one hand. Then my foot skidded on some iron or something and I suppose the jerk made me let go.’
‘And then?’
‘Oh! all darkness and choking and then when I came up I think I lost my head and just swam desperately. I’m not awfully good, and clothes make a difference. When I did see the ship she seemed quite a long way away, and I couldn’t make my voice carry. It seemed to scream back into my own face till my throat was sore. Nobody heard…. I tried to follow the white line – the wake, you know, and it seemed to keep stretching out like elastic, getting longer and longer as the ship went further away…. It was dark by then, and I don’t suppose anyone could have seen me even if they’d been looking…. It was awfully lonely swimming in the dark…. I gave up trying to swim fast…. I don’t know how long it lasted…. I got tired…. I suppose I went down because I remember choking and fighting, and then–’
Miss Ranskill’s eyes were wide with horror and Lieutenant-Commander Wrekin laid a hand on the scarred fingers that were doubling up a fold of sheet.
‘Go on,’ he ordered, knowing that she must finish now if she were to have the peace of a mind unburdened.
‘I don’t remember any more. I suppose I was pretty well drowned. When I came to I was lying by a big bonfire and being sick and someone was working my arms about – a man with a beard…. It was the Carpenter.’
Suddenly Miss Ranskill gave a little choking sob. Before she needed it, her listener pulled a white handkerchief from the pocket of his monkey-jacket.
‘Quite clean,’ he said, ‘and don’t mind me. Here, let’s get your pillows better.’
Then as he stooped over her, Miss Ranskill’s hands clutched his coat-lapels, her head butted the hollow of his shoulder, while his arms, practised in such holding of his two small daughters and not so very much bigger wife, went round her quivering body.
Presently she gave him a little push and lay back on the pillows.
‘It was awful of me–’ she said. ‘But–’
‘It wasn’t awful at all. Any woman would want to cry after an experience like that.’
‘It wasn’t that, it was talking about the Carpenter. I never cried on his shoulder…. I never wanted to – till he was dead. It’s awful when a man’s dead and he was the only person who could have comforted you.’
Miss Ranskill stretched out her hand for the handkerchief, but he took it, and dabbed professionally at the last of her tears.
‘Do you good to cry a bit.’
‘It doesn’t really, at least, it won’t any more.’ She took the handkerchief and gave a final dab to her nose. ‘Think if that young doctor had come in!’
It was not a thought that the senior officer cared to brood over, but he replied, ‘Done him a lot of good if he had.’
Miss Ranskill grinned.
‘It would have been rather funny. He hasn’t much sense of humour.’
‘No, he’d probably prescribe soup for you. As a matter of fact that’s what I’m going to order now – a cup of good strong soup.’
And at once the word soup became a rescuer, relieving them both from embarrassment, changing the subject and making the relationship easy again.