Through the Wall

Chapter 19

Ina Felton was very unhappy. Once your eyes are open you can’t help seeing things, and once you have seen them you can’t go back to the time when you didn’t know they were there. She locked her door, and thought about Cyril in the spare room. And wondered whether he would come and turn her handle and try to get her to let him in.

She stood a long time at her window looking out over the sea, but he didn’t come. It was a relief, but it was the kind of relief which comes when you have made up your mind not to go on hoping any more. The night was lovely-no moon, but light coming from the sky, and the air a dark transparency. She could see the blossom against the garden wall glimmering like a ghost, its rosy colour gone. She could see the slow resistless movement of the tide. It was coming in. Where there had been smooth shining sand, the water deepened. As she stood there she could see how it kept rising, rising, without hurry and without rest. The point of rock which had been clear a little while ago was gone now, the water covered it without a ripple. You couldn’t stop things like the tide, and thought, and what was happening in your life.

She stood there for a long time before she undressed. There was a clock on the floor below-a big old clock with a slow, soft tick, and a slow, heavy stroke for the hours. It stood in the hall, and if she was awake in the night she liked to feel it was there, and that if she listened it would tell her the time. She was awake a good deal in the night, and it was company.

She was turning back her bed when she heard it strike-just the one heavy stroke which meant that another day had begun. She stood there listening, because she had lost count of the time and she was not sure if there would be another stroke.

She was just going to move, when she heard a faint sound on the landing. It stopped her before she had really moved at all, because she knew what it was. The board outside the spare room creaked when you stepped on it. She had heard it every time she came and went, with soap, with towels, with bed-linen, getting the room ready for Cyril. All the other boards were steady. It was just this one that made the sound. She stood quite rigid with her eyes on the handle of her door and waited to see if it would move. The bedside lamp was on. All at once it went tingling through her that it might show a line of light under the door.

Before she knew what she was going to do her hand went out and turned the switch. Then she went over to the door and stood there, a finger on the handle to feel if it would move.

She couldn’t hear anything. The board did not creak again. She had no feeling that anyone was coming nearer. She thought that if Cyril was crossing the landing bare-foot to her door, she would have some feeling. Her heart beat to suffocation, and it came to her that she did not know what the feeling would be. Everything in her couldn’t have changed so much that she would find herself shrinking. Or could it? She didn’t know.

There was another sound. It was nowhere near the door. Perhaps from the stairs. Perhaps even farther away-from the hall. She turned the key in the lock. Then she let her whole hand close on the door knob and turned it too. The door swung in.

The landing was dark and empty. A very faint light came up from the hall. It was so faint that it was really only a thinning of the darkness, but she could see the line of the balustrade which guarded the stairs, heavy and black against the greyness below.

She came out of her room past the short passage which led to the other house. The door at the end of it was bolted top and bottom. There was one of these doors on every floor, and they were all the same, bolted on this side, with a key to turn on the other.

She came to the top of the stairs, but before she could come round the newel-post she heard the sound again, and this time she knew what it was. Someone was drawing back the bolts on the door in the hall.

She stood quite still where she was and listened. There was the same short length of passage that there was upstairs, and the door at the end of it with a bolt at the top and a bolt at the bottom. Since she had heard the sound twice, it would not come again, because both the bolts must have been withdrawn. The only other sound that could be looked for would be the turning of the key on the farther side. But it might have been turned already, before she came out of her room. If it had been, she would not have heard it. She listened to see if she would hear it now.

And then it came-just a faint click, and before she had time to think whether she had heard it or not she knew that the door was opening, and that someone was coming through. There were two people in the passage now, and one of them had come through from the other house. Two people-and one of them was Cyril, who had gone downstairs in the middle of the night and drawn back the bolts.

Her knees shook. She was holding to the newel. She let herself down until she was crouching behind the balustrade. It screened her, but she could see over it. She had let herself down because she couldn’t stand any longer. Not to screen herself, or to see more. But in the result she found herself protected from being seen, and in a better position to see. If there had been a light in the passage now, she would have been able to see the whole length of it.

And then there was a light-the sharp white beam from a small pocket torch. It struck the surface of the door between the houses-old dark paint, rather scratched and chipped. It danced across, and there was no gap at the edge-the door was shut. It slipped like a dazzle on water across a woman’s dark skirt, a woman’s white hand with shining blood-red nails, and came to rest in a trembling circle on the floor.

As soon as Ina saw the hand she knew that it was Helen Adrian who had come through the door in the wall. Anger, humiliation, and pain suddenly rushed in upon her. It was one o’clock in the morning, and Cyril had slipped down to let Helen Adrian in. They were there in the passage now. She could hear them whispering there. It was the faintest of faint sounds, like a stirring of leaves in the wind. The round eye of the torch stared on the floor, and its reflection shook, and moved, and shifted there. There was a row of pegs with coats hanging from them-old raincoats, hers and Marian’s, umbrellas, and a scarf or two. The torch swung up. Cyril had it in his left hand. She saw his right hand come through the beam and unhook one of the coats. Then it came down again. A scarf of Marian’s came down with it. It was a new one she had bought. A square. Very gay and pretty-shades of blue and yellow. It fell right through the beam of the torch, and Ina was vexed, because it was new, and because Marian liked it, and it was one of the very few things she had got for herself. Right in the middle of all that was happening she could feel vexed about Marian’s scarf.

And then she was more than vexed, she was angry. There was a rustling. Helen Adrian was putting on Marian’s coat.

It was just an old raincoat, but she hadn’t any business to come in here in the middle of the night and take it.

The beam of the torch swung out and back across the blue and yellow of the scarf lying there on the floor. She saw Helen Adrian’s arm in the shabby sleeve of the raincoat come down into the light, she saw the hand with the crimson nails. The torch swung round towards the hall. The two people in the passage came that way. Helen Adrian was tying the scarf over her hair. She didn’t quite laugh, but her whisper had a laughing sound. It carried up the well of the stair. Ina heard her say,

“Safe enough now.”

And Cyril said,

“You can’t be too careful.”

It was all just on the edge of sound. It was so nearly over the edge that she might not have heard it at all. Through all the days that followed she was to ask herself what she had really heard. But it always came back to that “Safe enough now,” and, “You can’t be too careful.”

They crossed the hall to the study door, and went in and shut it after them.