Through the Wall

Chapter 4

In spite of having been cleaned up by an ambulance party, Marian Brand was not able to avoid arousing a good deal of alarm at No. 52 Sandringham Road, where she and Ina and Cyril inhabited two bedrooms and a sitting-room. The house belonged to Mrs. Deane, who was the widow of a deceased partner in the firm of Morton and Fenwick. She was a nice woman but not characterized by any degree of optimism.

By the time that Ina had begun to wonder what on earth was keeping Marian so late Mrs. Deane was able to supply a number of possible reasons, none of which were calculated to restore cheerfulness and calm. They ranged from an encounter with a lunatic in a railway carriage experienced by the friend of a sister-in-law’s aunt, to the really moving tale of a cousin’s mother-in-law who had been stuck in a lavatory on the Underground and unable to extricate herself until the inspector came round.

“I won’t say she wasn’t a sharp-tongued woman, and I won’t say she wasn’t a good deal worked-up after six hours and wondering what her husband was going to say if she wasn’t there to cook his supper, and I daresay she said more than she ought. Anyhow he took a high tone with her. Said there wasn’t anything wrong with the lock that he could see, and if she’d done the right thing it would have opened easily enough. Well, you can just imagine what she said to that! And he came back with, ‘All right, I’ll show you.’ My dear Mrs. Felton, you won’t believe it, but she went back in with him, and when he went to show her-there was the door stuck like glue again and the pair of them trapped, and there they were till the morning!”

Ina stared in horror.

“Oh, Mrs. Deane, why did she go back?”

Mrs. Deane shook a large and rather untidy head. She had a passion for trying new hair styles culled from a page in a weekly paper headed “Why be dowdy?”, and they were not always very successful. Her faded hair, well streaked with grey, was at the moment disintegrating from the curls in which it had been set. She gave it a casual pat as she said,

“You may well ask! You wouldn’t think anyone would, or him either! But the fact is they’d got each other’s backs up, and neither of them thinking anything in the world except proving they were right and the other one wrong.”

“How grim! What did they do?”

Mrs. Deane gave the hair another pat.

“Stayed there till morning. Mrs. Pratt said she thought she knew something about swearing-her husband had been at sea, and you know what sailors are-but the language that inspector used was beyond anything she’d ever heard in her life. And you can’t really wonder! And after that they had the inspectors go round a lot oftener so it shouldn’t happen again-locking the door after the horse was stolen-because once was enough, I’m sure, and not at all the sort of thing you’d expect to have cropping up constantly, though you never can tell.”

Ina went back to listening at the window which overlooked the street. She didn’t think Marian was locked in a lavatory, and she was quite sure she couldn’t be alone in a railway carriage with a lunatic, because the trains were always crowded till much later than this. But Mrs. Deane’s anecdotes had not been reassuring. There were a lot of other things that could happen to you besides getting locked in and meeting lunatics. Look at what you read in the papers every day. And it was all very well when it was happening to someone who was just a name in a column of newsprint-you read it, and it made a break in the dull everyday things which were happening all round you. And you didn’t mind very much even if it was something rather dreadful, because it didn’t seem real unless you knew the people yourself. But if something dreadful was to happen to someone you knew-if something dreadful was to happen to Marian-Her hands and feet were suddenly cold.

And then she was listening and looking out, because the bus had stopped at the end of the road and people were getting off. One of them was a woman, and she was coming this way. She didn’t look like Marian. The road was not very brightly lighted. The woman passed into the shadowed stretch between the lampposts. Ina opened the window and leaned out. Now she was coming towards the light again- yellow light, spilled like a pool on the damp pavement. It must have been raining.

The woman came into the pool of light, and Ina drew back, catching her breath. Because it was a stranger. It wasn’t anyone she had ever seen before. It wasn’t Marian.

She shut the window and turned back into the room. She was really frightened now. It was after nine o’clock. Marian would never be as late as this unless something had happened. Something-the word was like a black curtain behind which all the imaginable and unimaginable terrors crouched. At any moment the curtain might lift or part. She stood there looking at the clock, whilst the cold spread upwards from hands and feet until she was shivering with it.

At eighteen she had been quite unusually pretty, with dark curling hair, eyes like blue flowers-it was Cyril who had made this comparison-and the fine delicate skin which takes such a lovely bloom in health and fades so soon in illness. Ina was not actually ill, but she had lost her bloom. She led a dull, uninteresting life, and she had no energy to do anything about it. By the time she had tidied up their three rooms and walked round to the shops, where she had to stand in a queue for fish, it was as much as she could do to get as far as the library and change her book. She wouldn’t have missed doing that for anything in the world. Her fatigue would vanish as she took down book after book from the shelves, dipping here and reading there, fleeting the morning away till it was time to go home and make her lunch of whatever had been left over from supper the night before. Sometimes she didn’t even take the trouble to warm it, and then as often as not she would leave it on her plate. Once or twice a week she took a bus at the end of the road and met Marian for lunch at a cheap café, but they couldn’t afford to do it very often. Then she would take the bus back again and spend the afternoon lying on the sofa waiting for Marian to come home. It was Marian who cooked whatever Ina had bought for supper. It was Marian who brought in her stories of what had been happening in the office-who was taking what house-young people getting married-old people going to live with a son or daughter-Mrs. Potter who was putting in a second bathroom and turning the flower-room into a kitchenette so that she could divide her house and let off half of it.

“You remember Maureen Potter, Ina-she was in the sixth when we first went to school. She married someone with a lot of money. She came in with her mother. I think dividing the house was her idea really, and she said at once, ‘You’re Marian Brand, aren’t you? Miss Fisher told me you were working here. How do you like it?’ And she asked after you, and said how pretty you were, and said something about coming to see us. But I don’t suppose she’ll have time-she’s only here for a few days.”

There was never anything more exciting than that. Of course if Cyril was at home, everything was different. Sometimes he came back with plenty of money, and for a few days life became almost too exciting. He made love to her in an exigent, masterful way, he took her out to lunch, to tea, to dinner. And then either the money ran out or he became bored-Cyril found it terribly easy to be bored-and he would go off again with an airy “Goodbye-I’ll be seeing you.” It was worse when he came back without any money at all, because that was when Marian put her foot down and kept it there. Cyril could have house-room, and the same meals that she and Ina had, but no more. If he wanted money for drinks or cigarettes, or even for bus fares, he must earn it. Cyril would stick his hands in his pockets and stride dramatically up and down the sitting-room telling Ina just what he thought about the meanness, the callous hard-heartedness of Marian’s behaviour. Ina could, of course, see his point. A man must have some money in his pocket-he must be able to buy a packet of cigarettes and stand a friend a drink. But she could see Marian’s point of view just as clearly, and sometimes she was tactless enough to say so.

“But, darling, she really hasn’t got it. We only just manage as it is.”

It didn’t go down at all well. Cyril would pause in the current stride and give a sardonic laugh.

“That’s what she tells you! She would! And you take her part! You don’t care how much I’m humiliated!”

At which point Ina was apt to dissolve into tears. Taking one thing with another, the dullness of the times when Cyril was away was preferable to the strain and exhaustion of the times when he was here.

Tonight Ina could forget everything and feel sick with longing for his presence. When he had been away for some time she could, and did, superimpose the hero of her latest novel upon her recollections of Cyril. It helped a lot. And now, when she was feeling so frightened about Marian, she thought how wonderful it would be to have Cyril’s arms round her, and his voice telling her how stupid it was to get the wind up. In the book she had finished at tea-time Pendred Cothelstone had had a very hearty way with feminine fears. The longing she felt was actually a longing for someone who would be hearty about Marian not being in at half past nine after saying she would be back by seven.

Half an hour later it is doubtful whether Pendred himself could have reassured her. Mrs. Deane had been up again with a fresh batch of stories. This time they were about people who had disappeared and were never heard of again.

“There was a gentleman, I forget his name, but he was walking down Victoria Street with his wife-rather a lot of people about and the pavement crowded, so she got a step or two ahead of him, but talking all the time if you see what I mean. Well, presently he didn’t answer something she’d said, and she turned round and he wasn’t there, and from that day to this there wasn’t a word or whisper, or anyone who could say what had happened. Just vanished right there in Victoria Street in the middle of the afternoon. And she never even got to know whether she was a widow or not, poor thing.”

“Oh, Mrs. Deane, don’t!”

“Well, my dear, you can’t get away from it, such things do happen, and no good worrying or upsetting yourself. Never meet trouble half way-that’s what my poor husband used to say, and I daresay he was right, though, I usen’t to agree with him. Better be prepared for the worst, I used to tell him, and then if it turns out all right there’s no harm done.”

It was half past ten before a taxi stopped at the door and Marian Brand got out. She had had to borrow the money to pay for it, because her bag was still somewhere under the wreckage. She thanked the driver, and he gave her his arm to help her out and up the steps, because now that it was all over she was stiff and aching from head to foot. Her key was in the lost bag, so she had to ring the bell. And then there was Mrs. Deane, opening the door on the chain in the manner of one who expects armed burglars, and Ina running down the stairs to push her aside.

“Oh, Marian-where have you been? I thought something had happened. Oh!”

The “Oh!” came as the door was shut and the passage light showed quite unmistakably that something really had happened. The dust and blood had been washed from Marian’s face, but there was a dark bruise on her forehead and a narrow line of strapping above it. There had been so little left of her hat that it had not been worth while to bring it away. The right-hand sleeve of her suit had been wrenched from the armhole, and the skirt was fit for nothing but a rag-bag.

“Marian!”

“Oh, Miss Brand!”

The two horrified faces swam in a haze. Marian heard herself say,

“It’s nothing, really. There was an accident-but I’m quite all right.”

She groped her way to the foot of the stairs and sat down on the second step.