Through the Wall

Chapter 13

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.”