Through The Wall

by Patricia Wentworth

  She sipped her coffee and watched him over the rim of the Minton cup. He looked away, stared down at the letters, and said angrily,

  “Have it your own way! It’s all damnable!” Without sitting down he made himself a cup of coffee, gulped it down without milk or sugar, put an apple in his pocket, and went out of the room, banging the door behind him.

  He met Penny Halliday on the stairs and turned an accusing frown on her.

  “You’re late.”

  “About five minutes later than you, darling. Besides, I’ve been turning out the attic.”

  “What for?”

  “Well, Eliza will have to come over here, won’t she? And do you see her turning it out herself?”

  “Did they tell you to do it?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Which of them?”

  “Aunt Cassy has been kind of hinting all round it for days, and yesterday Aunt Florence told me to get on with it.”

  “For Eliza?”

  A look of surprise came and went.

  “I suppose so.”

  He said in his most brutal voice,

  “It isn’t for Eliza, it’s for you.”

  Standing on the step above him, her eyes were almost level with his. They were brown eyes, round and clear. They matched her short brown curls, which she wore in an out-of-date bob. She stood there, small, and slight, and straight, with one hand resting on the banister. She leaned on it and said,

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Helen’s coming on Monday. They’re giving her your room. You’re to have the attic.”

  She had a round childish face and a soft red mouth. Her skin was berry-brown from the tang of the sea air. Sometimes she had a colour that was berry-bright too. She had none now. There was an effect of sternness as she said,

  “Why is she coming?”

  “Sea air.”

  “Is her throat better?”

  He made an angry gesture.

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t know. She’s afraid to try it. They said two months. It’s that now. She’s coming here. If it’s all right, she’ll want to practise.” The sentence came out in jerks.

  She put her hand on his arm.

  “Darling, don’t worry-she’ll be better.”

  She might have been touching a bit of wood.

  “What makes you think so?”

  When he said that his arm jerked. She took her hand away. He went on in an exasperated tone.

  “What’s the good of saying that? You don’t know a thing about it. Nobody does, with voices. These lovely high ones- you never can tell. I don’t know what the specialist said to her. She’s frightened. And I’ll tell you what, she’s got something up her sleeve. There’s that man Mount, he follows her round like a shadow. He’s filthy with money. If she thought her voice was cracking up she’d take him. What else could she do? She won’t have saved a penny. Damn Uncle Martin!”

  “Darling!”

  He said in a tone of concentrated rage,

  “And damn the girl! Why couldn’t she have been killed in that train smash? Talk about luck! She gets all the money and comes out from under a crashed train without so much as a scratch! What price seeing whether she’d drown if I push her over the cliff!”

  Penny put out her hand, but this time she did not touch him. She said, “My poor lamb-” and all at once he put his head down on her shoulder, holding her so hard that it hurt. She stroked his hair, and said the sort of things she would have said to a child.

  “Darling, don’t. Don’t mind so much. I’m here. It’ll be all right. I promise you it will. Only be good, darling, and don’t talk nonsense about murdering people, because you’d be very bad at it. Have you had any breakfast?”

  He said, “Coffee-” in a choking voice.

  “Silly!” She pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and gave it to him. “Here you are. Now you’ll just come down and have some with me, because they’ll be on to me like a pack of wolves if I go in alone. You know, darling, I can just bear your being in love with Helen, but I can’t bear them twitting me about it, and they will if you don’t come and protect me.”

  He scrubbed his eyes and stuffed the handkerchief into the pocket of his slacks.

  “Penny-I’m a beast to you.”

  “Yes, darling, you are rather, but you can study to improve. And I don’t mind a bit about the attic-I don’t, honestly. Only I think your mother is balmy to leave Eliza in the enemy’s camp, because she’ll go over. You see if she doesn’t.”

  “She will anyhow. She hates us. Who wouldn’t?”

  She reached up and kissed him on the point of the chin- a soft, careless kiss, childish and rather sweet.

  “You won’t feel nearly so hateful when you’ve had some breakfast,” she said.

  Neither of them had heard the breakfast-room door open. One of the things which Martin Brand had so greatly disliked was the entirely soundless manner in which both his sister-in-law and her sister moved about the house. One was fat and the other was thin, but it didn’t seem to make a pennorth of difference-you never heard them open a door. One moment you were comfortably alone, and the next there was Florence, or it might be Cassy, looming up out of the silence. And he would maintain to the entire British Medical Association that his hearing was one hundred per cent good.

  Felix and Penny shared his views. Neither of them had heard a sound, yet on dropping back from that light kiss and giving Felix’s sleeve a small persuasive tug Penny was aware of Cassy Remington on the mat at the foot of the stairs, her head cocked, her blue eyes bright and sly. Felix had already seen her. He jerked his arm away and ran down the remaining steps as Cassy said,

  “You haven’t had any breakfast. I was coming to find you. Eliza will be furious if no one eats her herrings.”

  Penny came down sedately.

  “Felix will eat two, and Mactavish and I will have one between us.”

  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.

  Chapter 8

  After all, Penny hadn’t time to change. She took one look at the clock, snatched her bicycle, and coasted down the hill into Farne, which used to be a fishing village, but managed during the years between the wars to collect a good many rows of small houses, a distressing eruption of bungalows, and a hideous but comfortable hotel. The houses were always cram full. They had been built to let, and let they did at fantastic prices, since the demand was constantly greater than the supply. There was an aerodrome three miles inland, and a consequent run on all possible accommodation within a five-mile radius.

  Penny got to the station just half a minute before the train, flung her bicycle against a wall, ducked under a porter’s arm, and saw Marian Brand and Ina Felton get out of the third carriage from the engine. She hadn’t the slightest doubt as to who they were, because she had seen them both before.

  There was a portrait of Ina hanging in the drawing-room at this minute with a Leghorn hat tied on over her dark curls and a white muslin dress, only the name under it was Isabella, not Ina, Brand. And a miniature of Marian had always stood on the top of Uncle Martin’s chest of drawers-his mother, painted at the time of her marriage when she was just eighteen. So that was why he had left her the money. Penny thought it was very romantic.

  She ran up to them all flushed and friendly and said,

  “I’m Penny. You are Marian and Ina, aren’t you?”

  They collected luggage and got everything on to a taxi, including Penny’s bicycle, because she wasn’t going to pound up that hill and let them arrive alone. They packed in somehow. The friendly glow persisted. Penny chattered.

  “I’m not a cousin. I’m something on the Remington side. I hadn’t any other relations, so the aunts took me. It was very good of them.”

  Her tone betrayed that this was dictated by conscience. After that it brightened again.

  “Uncle Martin was sweet to me. And Eliza-oh, Marian, what are you going to do about Eliza Cotton? Because you’d better have it all ready and say it straight away. She’s a simply angel cook.”

  Marian said, “Who is Eliza?”

  Penny couldn’t believe her ears. The life of the house revolved round Eliza-it always had. Her eyes went quite round with surprise, but she could only get hold of the most inadequate words.

  “She was Uncle Martin’s housekeeper.”

  Marian looked troubled.

  “But your aunts will want her, won’t they? I couldn’t-”

  Penny clutched her with a little brown hand.

  “She isn’t theirs-she’s yours. Mr. Ashton said so. He said she was in your service, and she would have to give you notice if she didn’t want to stay. You won’t let her, will you?”

  “Perhaps she won’t want to stay with us.”

  “She hasn’t made up her mind. But
she will when she sees you. She adored Uncle Martin, and she wants to stay because of Mactavish, and Felix, and me. Mactavish is the cat-he was Uncle Martin’s cat. A Scotch friend of his sent him all the way from Edinburgh in a basket with his name tied around his neck on a label. Eliza adores him. If Mactavish likes you, she will stay. You will have her, won’t you?” She dropped her voice to a confidential note. “I think she has really practically made up her mind, because she has had the sweep, and the kitchen on your side done out twice, and she says there’s nothing wrong with the range except not being used.”

  “Oh-” Marian looked anxious. “Mr. Ashton said he was arranging about an electric stove.”

  Penny nodded.

  “Yes, that’s all right-it’s in. But Eliza doesn’t hold with electrics. Look here, you’ll have to be firm. If Eliza says she’ll stay, the aunts will suggest sharing meals, and her cooking for everyone. Well, she’ll do it for a day or two, but she won’t go on. Just as soon as Eliza has made up her mind, she won’t so much as cook a potato for our side of the house.”

  Marian began to feel appalled.

  “But, Penny-I can’t-”

  “You won’t have to. And you needn’t feel bad about it either. Eliza wouldn’t stay with the aunts if they paid her millions. But she’d like to stay with Mactavish and Felix and me. You see, if she’s next door, and you didn’t mind frightfully, I could come in and see her and Mactavish. He doesn’t really like our side of the house, and I couldn’t bear not seeing him. Anyhow, he wouldn’t leave Eliza, and he does like the kitchen on your side. Eliza says it’s because of mice, but I think he just likes it. She’s got rather a mouse complex, you know. Honestly, she’ll do you awfully well if she makes up her mind to stay. And you don’t need to have a conscience about it, because Mrs. Bell will go on coming to us, and she’s got a sister who can cook and who will come in every day except Sunday, so we’ll be perfectly all right. Look! Just round this next corner you’ll see the house.”

  They turned the corner, and Marian saw Cove House standing waiting for them. There was a wall of heaped stones between it and the road, and two rough pillars to mark the entrance. A few hard-bitten trees and shrubs were huddled low against the wind. Behind them the straggling white house, two stories high and a slanting attic floor above. There were two front doors painted bright blue, with identical knockers and old-fashioned iron bellpulls. Late narcissus were dying off amongst the wallflower in a narrow bed on either side.