Through The Wall (8 page)

Richard Cunningham walked out along the cliff road. He knew that nothing in the world would have prevented him from coming down to Farne and going to see Marian Brand. If he had been twenty, he couldn’t have been more set on doing a foolish romantic thing. If he had been twenty, he wouldn’t have thought about it being foolish or romantic, he would have just done it. Since he was thirty-five, he was fully aware of the folly and on the edge of being able to laugh at the romance. No, that wasn’t true. He would have liked to be able to laugh at it, to keep a back way out in case the whole airy structure crashed and let him down flat after the manner of so many castles in Spain. But he couldn’t manage it. If the castle came down, it came down, but nobody or nothing was going to stop him walking into it with his eyes open.

He told himself, as he had done at intervals during the past month, that he was allowing an obstinate whim to drive him. To which there always came the spontaneous reply that it might not be a whim at all but an instinct. He had seen Marian Brand once as he passed the window of her compartment before the train was wrecked, and once for a moment before he fainted when they had just been dug out of the debris. There had been dust in her hair, and blood on her face. He had talked with her on and off for something like two hours with a smashed railway carriage tilted over them in the ditch which had saved their lives. He had sent her flowers, and a copy of The Whispering Tree. He had written to her three times. During the rush of his business in the States he had found it a refreshment to write those letters. They did not touch on intimacies, but they were intimate because they had been written without taking thought as to what was said or how it would be received. The whole world might have read them, but they could only have been written to one person.

There was the background. And now he was going to lunch with her. Either the thing was an instinct, or it was a folly. He would know at once. It was a lovely May morning with a blue sky and just enough light cloud moving to keep the sea in change instead of that eternal blue glitter which tires the eye.

He came to the white house standing behind its wind-driven shrubs, walked up to the twin blue doors, and knocked on the right-hand one. It was opened. He stood looking at Marian Brand, and she at him.

At once everything was quite easy. He might have been walking up to that front door every day of his life. There wasn’t any castle in the air. There was a welcoming house, and the woman he wanted. It was as simple, as inexplicable, and as comfortable as daily bread. He held her hand and laughed, and said,

“Take a good look at me! I’m clean, which is more than I was when you saw me before.”

She said, “I knew exactly what you would look like.”

“How?”

“I don’t know—I did.”

And then she was taking him through to the study, and they were talking about the house, about his journey, and each of them had so much to say that they were taking turns, catching each other up and laughing about it, interrupting and being interrupted, like friends who have known each other for a long time and don’t have to bother about being polite. It wasn’t in the least the way that Marian had thought it would be. She had been so pleased and proud about his coming, and then quite terrified. If she could have run away and kept a single shred of self-respect she would have done it. She had wondered what they would talk about, and been quite sure that, whatever it was, he would find it dull. And then it didn’t matter. They were easy and comfortable together. She could be just herself. It didn’t matter a bit.

When he asked about Ina she could say just what was on her mind.

“I’m worried about her. I told you about Cyril. He’s gone off in a temper.”

“Because you wouldn’t give him half your kingdom?”

“Something like that.”

“You won’t do it?”

“Oh, no—he’d only throw it away. But Ina’s fretting.”

“Is she fond of him?”

“She was.”

He whistled.

“Like that, is it?”

“She’s very unhappy. I’m afraid she won’t be here for lunch—she’s gone out—” She hesitated, and then went on. “She didn’t tell me—just left a message to say she was going down into Farne to see about a library subscription and wouldn’t be back. She didn’t know you were coming.”

“And you are thinking she may have gone to meet her husband?”

She looked startled.

“How did you know?”

Their eyes met, and he smiled. There was a moment when they looked at one another. Then he said,

“Wouldn’t he come here?”

“Well, I think he would try and get round Ina first.”

“Does it worry you?”

“I don’t want him to make her unhappy.”

“I expect he knows which side his bread is buttered.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then he may behave reasonably now he’s had time to think things out.”

Cyril being reasonable sounded too good to be true. She found herself saying so with a rueful laugh. And quick on that she had a sense of immeasurable relief. She had never had anyone with whom she could talk things over—never in all her life before. Now there was Richard. The feeling didn’t get into words, but it was there.

The bell rang for lunch.

When it was over they went down the garden steps to the cove and watched the tide go down, leaving first wet shingle, and then a stretch of sand with a double line of rocks running out into the shallow sea. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they were silent. It was a very happy, peaceful time.

Coming up the steps, they met Felix and Helen Adrian coming down. She wore grey slacks and a hyacinth-blue pullover, and her hair dazzled in the sun. She might have stepped off the cover of any Summer Number. The steps were narrow. Felix and Helen waited on the lowest of the garden terraces. As Richard Cunningham came into sight, she called out and ran to meet him.

“Richard—darling! Where did you spring from?”

He was pleasant without enthusiasm.

“My dear Helen—what a surprise!”

She linked her arm in his.

“Is that all you’ve got to say? Where on earth have you been?”

“In the States.”

“You never wrote me a line! You’re not going in, are you? Come along down to the beach! I’ve got a million things to say to you. This is Felix Brand, my accompanist. I’m staying with his people. And—I suppose you know Marian—”

Felix looked murder at him.

Richard said, “Marian and I are very old friends. You’ll find it lovely on the beach. We’ve just been there. Now we’re going in. If you’re staying here, I expect I shall be seeing you.”

He went into the house with Marian.

Helen Adrian looked after them for a moment before she turned to Felix with a laugh.

Eliza brought tea to the study and said no, Mrs. Felton hadn’t come in, and she didn’t know where Penny was either. She retreated in a vaguely offended manner which Marian guessed might be put down to Miss Adrian’s account. It came over her that here was a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice, and nearly everyone in both houses disliked her cordially. Felix was in love with her, but she had a conviction that he didn’t like her the better for that, or any more than the rest of them.

With this in her mind, she looked up from the tea she was pouring and said,

“Do you know Helen Adrian well?”

It was very pleasant in the study. A light air came through three open windows and brought the scent of flowers. A bumble bee zoomed in, and out again. It was all quite extraordinarily peaceful. He looked at Marian in the old blue and white cotton dress which she had worn for three summers, and which had never pretended to anything but utility, and thought what a restful woman she was to be with, and how she made any place she was in feel like home. Even if he hadn’t fallen in love with her he would have liked her more than anyone he had ever met. It was just as if her thought about Felix had touched him, because he remembered that he had once been in love with Helen Adrian without liking her at all. Without thought or effort he found himself saying,

“I was once in love with her—for a week.”

She said gravely, “Were you?” and gave him his tea.

“I heard her sing. Have you?”

“Just practising with Felix. It’s a lovely voice.”

“The correct expression is that she sings like an angel. People were saying so all round me the first time I heard her, but even that didn’t stop me thinking it was true. And she looked like an angel too—white satin and lilies, and the light shining down on her hair. I went right in off the deep end.”

“What happened?”

He laughed.

“I came to the surface again and discovered that we bored each other stiff.”

Marian lifted her cup to her lips and drank. When she had put it down again she said,

“Do you often do that kind of thing?”

“What kind of thing?”

“Falling suddenly in love, and then out again.”

Well, he had asked for it. He laughed again and said,

“No. And anyhow ‘in love’ is the wrong word. It was more like going under ether. I wouldn’t be talking about it if it had been serious—would I?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice took a note of surprise. “I don’t really know—you—at all.”

“I wonder. I think I know you very well.”

She began to smile, but couldn’t trust her lips. She said in a quiet voice,

“There isn’t much to know. You would soon come to the end of it. Then it would bore you.”

“Would it? If you take most of the things that really matter, they may be profound, but they are fundamentally simple. You don’t get tired of the sun, and the sky, and fresh air, and water, and bread. There is nothing complicated about them. They are always there. If they weren’t, we should die. You don’t get tired of what you need.”

It came out slowly, a bit at a time, more as if he was thinking aloud than speaking.

Before she could say anything there was a step on the flagged path outside. Penny came up the two shallow steps and into the room. She looked as if she had been crying her eyes out. She had tried to wash away the marks with cold water, the bright brown curls on her forehead were damp. She hadn’t bothered with powder or lipstick. She held Mactavish in her arms, and he wasn’t liking it. She said in a small, flat voice,

“Eliza said you wanted me.”

And then she saw Richard Cunningham, and wanted to run away. Only, of course, when you’ve been nicely brought up you can’t, so she came and shook hands instead. Mactavish, whom no amount of bringing up had ever been able to deflect from doing exactly what he wanted to, gave Penny a fierce rabbit kick and jumped down. After which he arranged himself in Marian’s lap, refused a saucer of milk, and remained for some time with his eyes mere orange slits and the extreme tip of his tail flicking to and fro.

Penny drank two cups of tea, said a very few things in that little exhausted voice, and presently slipped away again through the open door.

When she had gone Richard looked at Marian.

“What’s the matter with that nice child?”

There was a spark of anger in her eyes.

“She loves Felix a great deal better than he deserves. Helen Adrian is tormenting them both.”

“Does Helen want him?”

“I shouldn’t think so. He doesn’t even think so himself. She might have taken him if he had come for Uncle Martin’s money, so I’m afraid that goes down to my account.”

“He ought to thank Heaven fasting. He would probably get to the point of murdering her in less than six months. He doesn’t look far off it now.”

“That’s what worries Penny.”

“Is the child engaged to him?”

“No—just brought up with him. She’s some kind of distant cousin. I don’t see how anyone could love Mrs. Brand and Miss Remington, so it’s all gone to Felix.”

They went on talking.

Miss Silver came up from the beach where she had left her niece Ethel Burkett sitting comfortably in the lee of a breakwater with little Josephine digging in the sand beside her. Farne has a very good beach though not a large one. Later on in the year there would not be room to move, but on this May morning Miss Silver considered it very pleasant—very pleasant indeed. She had enjoyed the delightful air and Josephine’s infant prattle. She had recalled with pleasure Lord Tennyson’s poem about the “fisherman’s boy” who “shouts with his sister at play,” and the “sailor lad” who “sings in his boat on the bay,” together with the much less well-known lines about the eagle:

“Ring’d with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.”

Not that Farne Bay could at the moment exhibit a fisherman’s boy sporting with his sister, or even a sailor lad on its at present empty sea, and there was no tradition of its having ever attracted an eagle. But you do not, of course, expect poetry to be literal.

After a couple of hours of the beach and Lord Tennyson, Miss Silver considered that a little movement would be agreeable. Ethel and Josephine could remain on the beach whilst she herself did some shopping. She did not care for the book they had given her at the library yesterday, and she thought she would change it. She would prefer a novel in which the characters had at least heard of the ten commandments and did not begin drinking at ten in the morning after having kept it up for most of the night. Their behaviour under this alcoholic stimulus she considered to be totally lacking in interest.

She came up from the beach and made her way along the front until she came to Cross Street. Up here in the wind she was really very glad of her coat. It did not trouble her in the least that it was now ten years old, and that its black cloth surface had a dingy look in the bright spring sunshine. As the breeze caught it, a breadth of olive-green cashmere came into view beneath. She had found her ribbed woollen stockings a little heavy on the sunny beach, but it was not her practice to change them for lisle thread until May had not only come but gone, and she was really quite glad of them now. On the same principle, she was wearing a winter hat— not the felt which she had bought two years ago, but the one which had been her best until then. For seaside wear she had removed an elderly bunch composed of two pansies in a circle of mignonette, leaving it simply trimmed with loops of black and purple ribbon, rather limp after four years of faithful service. Instead of her usual chintz knitting-bag she carried, as more suitable to the seaside, a bag of black cloth stoutly lined with the shiny black Italian that she had used to make her windows light-proof during the war. The bag had neat cord handles unpicked from an elderly cushion and was both strong and capacious. It contained at the moment one made and one half-made stocking for Derek Burkett, a ball and three two-ounce skeins of grey wool, four steel needles, a purse, a handkerchief, a black and purple neck-scarf, some oddments, and her own and Ethel’s library books.

She turned into Cross Street, and was sheltered from the wind. Really, if she had been going to stay on the Front, she would have had to put on her scarf, but now it would not be necessary, and in any case the library was quite close. She came up the steps, passed through the outer shop devoted to picture-postcards, photograph frames, cheap editions, shrimping-nets, and other miscellaneous articles, and made her way to the rather dark cavern behind it. There were a number of people changing books. She turned to a shelf near the counter and began to scan the volumes on it. Really, people thought of the oddest titles: Four Cold Fishes in a Bath; Crimson Wormwood; The Corpse in the Refrigerator—very distasteful indeed.

She was dipping into Medley for Maurice and wondering if even the author knew what it was all about, when someone just behind her at the counter said, “Yes, a two-book subscription for three months—Mrs. Felton—Mrs. Cyril Felton. And the address is Cove House. It’s on the Ledstow road.” The name struck a chord. Helen Adrian had used it in speaking to her the very day she had received Ethel’s letter begging her to come to Farne. Neither the Christian nor the surname were common ones. Linked, it seemed impossible to suppose that they had no connection with the young man whom Miss Adrian had named as a possible blackmailer.

With Medley for Maurice in her hand Miss Silver turned to take a look at Mrs. Cyril Felton. She saw a pretty girl with a loose coat over a blue linen dress and a bright handkerchief tied over curly dark hair. She would have been prettier if she had had more colour, and if she had not had such a worried, nervous look. She took her receipt from the girl at the counter, put it away in a very new handbag, and drifted over to the far end of the room.

Replacing Medlley for Maurice upon its shelf, Miss Silver moved in the same direction. The books here were of the kind not in extensive demand. People do not come down to a seaside to read statistics on emigration, or works on what to do with the dispossessed populations of Europe. Culling a volume at random from the shelves, Miss Silver found herself with Some Considerations on the Sociological Aspects of Inflation.

Glancing at Mrs. Felton, she observed her to be making no pretence of being interested in her surroundings. Her eyes were upon the archway leading to the library. When the bell upon the outer door tinkled she changed colour and looked eager. Upon the entrance in rapid succession of a mother with a small child, a stout elderly person with a shopping-basket, and a provocative young woman with so little on that she might have been expected to die of exposure if it had not been for the oil with which she had smeared her skin, the nervous look returned to Mrs. Felton’s face. It would have been obvious to anyone much less acute than Miss Silver that she had a rendezvous, and that the person whom she was expecting to meet was a man. If it should happen to be Cyril Felton, Miss Silver felt that it would interest her to see him. She therefore moved to an even darker corner and became to all appearances completely immersed in Sociological Aspects.

She had hardly effected this manoeuvre, when Ina Felton caught her breath, ran forward, and then, checking herself, came back again, to snatch a book from the shelves, open it at random, and stand there trying not to look as if she were expecting anyone.

An attractive young man with fairish hair and a roving blue eye came through the arch from the outer shop and looked about him. The eye lit upon the dark-haired girl in the corner. As he strolled over to her, she stopped pretending to read, crammed the book back anyhow, and gazed at him with brimming eyes and changing colour.

“Oh, Cyril!”

So it was the husband. Miss Silver was deeply interested. A goodlooking young man of the type which women often found attractive. Not very steady, she feared. It did not show much yet, but to her experience the signs were unmistakable—weak, pleasure-loving, and selfish. Yes, she thought he might quite easily have turned to blackmail.

He put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and said,

“Hullo, Ina!”

There had been a quarrel, and he was anxious to make it up. He was smiling at her in a manner that was meant to charm, and she was shrinking away from him. Her voice trembled as she said,

“I nearly didn’t come.”

He laughed in a pleasant manner.

“But you did come—so why worry? Look here, how’s the barometer? Marian still angry?”

“She isn’t pleased.”

“Then you’ll have to soothe her down. I’m sorry I lost my temper and all that, but you must allow it’s pretty maddening to have her holding the purse-strings. If you had had half as you ought to have done, we’d have been all right.”

He was speaking quite low, but Miss Silver had excellent hearing. In her elderly dowdy clothes, her attention apparently riveted upon the duller of the dull books, she was just one of those negligible spinsters who haunt the libraries and find a vicarious life upon their shelves. You may be Miss Blank, subsisting in a bed-sitting-room without very much to live for or many people to care whether you live or not, but for a pound or two a year you can battle for lost causes, sail beyond Ultima Thule, ascend into the stratosphere, love and be courted, adorn a glittering throng with your glamorous presence, tumble over a corpse on the mat, probe the mystery of the Poisoned Penwiper, and never have a dull moment. These reflections had occurred to Miss Silver from time to time, but she had no leisure for them at the moment. She merely felt secure in her protective colouring and continued to listen to the conversation of Mr. and Mrs. Cyril Felton.

At the sound of Helen Adrian’s name her interest was doubled. It was Cyril who introduced it.

“Helen Adrian is here, isn’t she?”

Ina said, “How did you know?” and he laughed.

“Because I’ve made it my business to know. I want to see her.”

She was looking at him doubtfully.

“Oh, Cyril—why?”

“Well, it’s just a professional matter, and there’s no need for you to ask a lot of questions about it. And I’m not making a pass at her, so you needn’t be jealous. She’s out for the big money. Means to land it whilst the going’s good, and I don’t mind giving her a helping hand—for a consideration.”

Ina said, “Oh! But she’s having an affair with Felix! I don’t mean anything wrong, of course, but you know she’s staying in the other half of our house with the Brands, and Felix is frightfully in love with her.”

“That won’t get him anywhere, poor devil. Now if your Uncle Martin had left the money to him instead of to Marian, there might have been something doing. Look here—I want to come back to my darling wife and my dear sister-in-law.”

He had a hand on her shoulder and a smile whose charm made the words just a family joke.

“You’ve got to soothe Marian down.”

“Have I?”

“Ina!” He sounded really hurt. “Look here, darling, don’t be silly! I couldn’t be happy away from you if I tried—you know that.”

“You haven’t been very much with me in the last eight years, Cyril.”

“My sweet! Ina—you mustn’t say things like that! You know I’d have given anything in the world to have you with me.”

“Would you?”

“Of course I would! And now, when we can be together, you’re not going to let a silly quarrel keep us apart. Look here, you tell Marian I’m simply frightfully sorry and ashamed about losing my temper. Just ask her to forget about it. Make it right for me to come up this evening. To tell you the honest truth, I haven’t got the price of a bed. If you’ve got a pound on you you’d better hand it over. It’ll look a bit odd if you have to pay for lunch. Make it two if you’ve got it.”

“I haven’t.”

“All right, I’ll have to make do with one. Let’s have it!”

Ina was pale and grave. He hadn’t ever seen her quite like this before. She would come round all right when he made love to her. He took the pound note which she got out of her purse, noted that there was only a little loose silver left, and said lightly,

“Cheer up, darling—there’s a good time coming. I’ve booked a table for lunch at the hotel. The food isn’t bad there, I’m told.”