Through the Wall

Chapter 7

I’ve not made up my mind,” said Eliza Cotton.

A slant of sunlight came in through the window. The fire burned bright in the range. The cat Mactavish sat in front of it with his chin resting upon the oven trivet, which was pleasantly warm. He was full of fish, and he found it agreeable to listen to the voices of Penny and Eliza.

Penny sat on the kitchen table in what she had begun to call their side of the house and swung her legs. She was wearing grey slacks and an old white sweater which had belonged to Felix in his middle teens and had now shrunk several sizes and turned yellow with washing.

Eliza was tall and as flat as a board. She could never have been handsome, but she had probably always had a very competent look. The bone of her nose was high, and the eyes on either side of it appeared to have two of the qualifications ascribed by Mr. Wordsworth to his perfect woman [2]-they were admirably fitted to warn and to command. The poet, it will be remembered, inserts “to comfort” between these rather formidable attributes, but there was nothing about Eliza’s appearance to suggest that this might apply to her. She was mixing something in a basin. She beat hard at a grocer’s egg, looked at Penny in a masterful manner, and repeated what she had just said.

“I haven’t made up my mind. And sitting on my kitchen table is a thing I don’t hold with, so you can just get down.”

Penny leaned sideways, picked up a Sultana, and put it in her mouth.

“Darling Eliza, don’t be cross. When are you going to make it up?”

“When I’m ready. And I’ll say now and nobody’ll get me from it, it wouldn’t take me long if I hadn’t given my word to Mr. Brand.”

“Did you tell him you’d stay?”

“No I didn’t, nor he wouldn’t ask me. What’d there be to stay for, with Mr. Felix all set to marry in haste and repent at leisure? And if you were to tell me you’d be here more than five minutes after that, I’d not believe you, not if you took your Bible oath.”

Penny shook her head.

“I shouldn’t waste a Bible oath on it. I’d go like a flash of lightning. We could go together, darling, and have two rooms, and take in washing or something.”

Eliza beat the egg.

“What I promised Mr. Brand was that I’d wait and see. If Miss Marian Brand was to come here, I was to wait and see how we’d get on. He said likely enough she’d be put on if I didn’t, and he’d like her to get a fair start.”

Penny took another Sultana.

“Electric stoves are all right when you’re used to them,” she said.

“I don’t hold with them. That range on the other side ’ud be all right if it was took in hand.”

Penny caught her breath. Eliza was really thinking about staying. The Sultana began to taste good.

“Mactavish likes the kitchen on the other side,” she said.

“That’s because there’s mice there, which there wouldn’t be if it was used.”

“He might hope they were going to come back.”

“There’d be no good his hoping. I don’t hold with mice. What he likes or don’t like is neither here nor there.”

Penny let this go. She took another Sultana, and was snapped at.

“If I’m to make a plain cake, better have said so to start with and no pretence made. Are you meeting that train or not?”

Penny nodded.

“I thought someone had better. Rather grim, coming to a new place and nobody wanting you.”

“Then you can’t go in those clothes, and high time you was changing.”

“Eliza, you’re a bully.”

“You’ll put on your brown tweed skirt, and a decent jumper, and your tweed coat. The wind’s in the north for all you don’t feel it here. Is Felix going?”

“Eliza-darling!”

“Saving himself to meet her!” said Eliza with a formidable toss of the head.

Penny said, “Of course.” Then she jumped down from the table and got behind Eliza, because all of a sudden she had come over all shaky.

“I don’t know what everything’s coming to,” said Eliza grimly. She had beaten the egg until it was pure froth. She now began to dowse it with sugar. “What Felix wants is to keep a hold of himself, or that temper of his’ll be getting him into trouble some day. It was bad enough when he was a boy, and he’d ought to have been broken of it, and could have been if it hadn’t been for some I could mention that never could leave him alone. If a child’s got a fancy for playing the piano, well, why not let him be? It’s not my fancy, but it takes all sorts to make a world, as they say, and set on music he is, and always will be. Then what’s the sense of nattering after him all the time? ‘Felix, you ought to be out on the beach’-or posting a letter, or going on an errand, or anything except what he’s doing. And, ‘You didn’t ought to practise so much,’ and, ‘Why can’t you play something with a nice tune to it?’ Enough to spoil any child’s temper if you ask me, and done to be aggravating! Puts me in mind of Mactavish with a mouse, and when it’s a poor dumb animal you don’t blame them, but when it’s a yuman being that calls itself a Christian and goes to church regular, then there are things I could say, only I know my place.”

Behind her back Penny said in a small soft voice,

“He’s so unhappy-”

Eliza jerked.

“He gives away to it. He’ll need to watch that temper. Look at the things he’s said! Only this morning Mrs. Bell asks me where she shall start, and I told her, ‘You take and give the front hall and the stairs a good doing,’ and she comes back and tells me she daresn’t. And when I ask why, she can tell me that Felix was on the stairs saying damn his Uncle Martin, and damn someone else that he didn’t go so far as to name, but easy enough to tell it was Miss Marian Brand, and a pity she hadn’t got killed in that railway smash she was in. And, ‘What a way to talk!’ she said. And I sent her over to do the old kitchen. It’s clean enough, for I saw she did it out myself so soon as ever I heard Miss Brand would be coming, but I thought it would get her out of the way, and the men had been in fixing that electric. She went off grumbling-she could see I’d more use for her room than her company. But she’s right, it’s no way to talk nor to let people hear you doing it, and where you’ve got a daily help you’ve got someone that’ll fetch and carry with everything that goes on, and put a bit on to it for good measure.”

Penny said, “He doesn’t mean it.”

Eliza turned round sharp and quick.

“Then he didn’t ought to say it, and you’d better tell him so! Is it true he went so far as to talk about giving Miss Marian Brand a push over the cliff and see if that’d drown her?”

Penny had flushed to the roots of her hair.

“He didn’t mean it. He doesn’t mean anything at all when he says things like that. It’s like screaming out when someone stamps on your foot. The aunts had been stamping about Helen Adrian and-and he can’t bear it.”

Eliza said, “He isn’t the only one. There’s plenty of things we’ve got to bear whether we like it or not. And no call to talk like a murdering lunatic. There’s a piano he can go and bang on if that’s what he feels like, and no harm done. And if you want to catch that train you’d better run.”

Penny ran.