Through the Wall

Chapter 18

It was while the bus was conveying Miss Silver quickly and easily down the hill to Farne that two young people were making their way in the opposite direction. They had walked out from Farne and taken the footpath which leads across a field to the common land along the cliffs. The path goes no farther because the ground has never been enclosed, being too rough and uneven and continually cut up and worn away into small rifts and combes. There is some growth of rough grass, gorse, and bramble, and though the beach below is private and considered to be inaccessible, it is not really very difficult to climb down and steal a bathe.

Ted Hollins and Gloria Payne were about to scramble down what Ted indicated as “the place Joe and I got over,” when they heard the sound of voices coming up from the beach. Ted stopped, listened, and went on again, moving gingerly and putting out a hand behind him to check Gloria. But when he came to a place where he could see over, there she was, right up against him, her shoulder bunching into his, craning her neck to see what he was looking at. And neither of them could see a thing.

The rift they were in had taken them half way down the cliff, the rest of the way was easy enough. They could see the long inviting stretch of sand left bare by the tide, a ridge or two of piled-up shingle, and then the bulge of the cliff was in the way. They couldn’t see the two people who were standing right down under them where the beach ran in to meet this little combe. There was a man, because it was a man’s voice which they had heard to start with-a man’s voice, but not his words, only the angry echo as if they were something he was chucking about and getting chucked back at him again. But what the woman said was as plain as plain-“All right-go on and do it! You’ve said you’re going to often enough. Go on and murder me if you feel like it!”

Gloria pursed up her mouth and said, “Ooh!” Her lips were so close to Ted’s ear that her breath tickled him. He put up a hand to rub the tickle away just as if she had been a fly, and they both heard the man say, “I will when I’m ready-you needn’t worry about that,” and they heard him go striding away over the shingle with the stones grinding and creaking under his feet.

Since the woman showed no signs of following him, Ted and Gloria made their way back to the top of the cliff, where they talked about how long it would be before there would be a chance of getting a couple of rooms let alone a house, and whether if the worst came to the worst, they couldn’t just make do at Dad and Mum’s. Since Gloria shared a room with a sister and there seemed to be nowhere else for Edith to sleep, it wasn’t a very helpful prospect. And Ted’s landlady wouldn’t take in a wife, not if it was ever so. “Next thing you know, there’s nappies on the line,” was the way she put it. And when Ted up and said, “What’s wrong with that?” Mrs. Crole, she looked at him like any thunderstorm and said, “You wait and see!”

“Reely anyone ’ud think a baby wasn’t human, wouldn’t you?” They had said this to one another quite a number of times, the accepted response being a gloomy “Seems like it.”

“And all they go on saying to us is we’re young.” Ted pitched a pebble over the cliff. “Anyone ’ud think that meant you hadn’t got your feelings, and no right to have them!”

Gloria said, “That’s right.”

They went on talking about themselves.