Patricia Wentworth: Through The Wall

Well, I think that is all I have to say, except to wish you well and hope that on the balance what I have done will turn out to be for your happiness. It would seem like a mockery to sign myself yours affectionately, but I believe that I might in other circumstances have come to feel affectionately towards you.

Martin Brand

P.S. If you want to live in the house, it can easily be divided. I do not recommend this, but it may prove difficult to dislodge my dear sister-in-law and her sister.

On reading this over I find that I have not mentioned Penny Halliday-probably because I was dealing with disagreeable relations and neither of these two words is applicable, since she is merely a connection of the Remingtons and has so far shown no signs of taking after them. Pray do not develop a conscience on her account. She is quite reasonably provided for.

Mr. Ashton came back into the room as she finished reading the letter. Some colour had come into her face. There was a look of distress in her eyes. To his “Is anything the matter, Miss Brand?” she responded with more animation than he would have expected.

“He’s so bitter-so unhappy!”

“Well, I don’t know that I should agree with that. He had a kind of sardonic humour. I think he got a good deal of pleasure out of exercising it.”

Her flush was already fading. It had embellished her a good deal. She did not speak. She was folding the letter and putting it away in her bag.

Mr. Ashton said, “Is there anything you would like to ask me?”

She looked up then. He thought she had remarkably fine eyes of an unusual clear grey colour without any trace of blue.

“He says in the letter that I will have a power of appointment over half the estate. Will you tell me what that means?”

Mr. Ashton smiled benevolently.

“It means that you can leave half of it to anyone or anything you like.”

“And the rest?”

“Under the will half of the estate is settled. That is to say, if you marry and have children, it will go to them. The other half you can do what you like with. If you die without children, that half which is settled will be divided between the other relations, Mrs. Alfred Brand, her son Felix, and her sister Miss Remington-half of it to Felix, and half between the two sisters. They are his second cousins, besides the connection through Florence ’s marriage to Alfred Brand. In the last resort, he did not really want the money to go out of the family. You cannot dispose of that part of the estate. It goes to your children, or it goes back to the family. I knew your uncle for thirty years. He might, and did, talk in an embittered manner about his relations, but he would never have allowed family money to go out of the family. You should, of course, consider making a will in the near future.”

Marian Brand never knew what made her say what she did. Her mind was in a curious state. She spoke without conscious thought. She said, “What would happen if I didn’t make a will-if I was run over on the way home, or something like that?”

Mr. Ashton continued to smile. He said in his pleasant voice,

“A very unlikely contingency, I hope.”

She went on looking at him.

“What would happen?”

“The unsettled part would go to your sister. The settled part would be divided as I said.”

She took a long sighing breath and said,

“I see-”

Mr. Ashton spoke briskly,

“Now what about that banking account?”

The compartment had been full when they left Victoria. The usual clutter of people who have been up to town for a day’s shopping and come piling into third-class carriages with bulging bags and tired feet. If you were one of the early ones you got a seat and had other people more or less standing on you. If you ran it fine you jostled the people who were standing in the narrow strip between the seats, or in the corridor if it was a corridor train.

Marian Brand had been in good time. She had the inside corner seat facing the engine. There was not so much crowding as there often was. Every seat full of course, but only three people standing, and all quite hearty-looking men. They stood as near the window as they could get and exchanged occasional remarks. On Marian’s left was one of those women who take up too much room in trains. She bulged and wheezed. She had three shopping-bags which were all quite full.

Marian looked through the glass pane on her other side and saw the corridor going away to a diminishing point, and the row of windows beyond it. It was her eyes that saw the standing men, the stout woman, the flashy girl in the other corner seat, the long receding line of the corridor, but her mind did not really register any of these things. They remained external images which conscious thought rejected because it was far too busy to be concerned with them. A man passed the window, coming up from the end of the corridor. She saw him in the same way that she had seen the other things. His passing meant no more to her than if she had seen a shadow go by.

The man was Richard Cunningham. As he walked along the corridor he saw a woman looking in his direction. There was no reason why he should notice her. The train was full. Each of the corridor windows presented him with a view of people packed like fish-faces pale, flushed, pretty, plain- old, young, middle-aged-a cross section of humanity so closely squeezed together that individuality and interest were lost. There was no reason why he should see one face and remember it. But he saw Marian Brand, checked for a moment, and passed on. When he had reached the first-class compartment which was his aim and had taken the last remaining seat, her face was still there, as vividly present as if it was she who was sitting opposite to him and not the blonde woman who was a little too blonde, a little too waved, a little too lavish in the matter of pearls. Nothing could have presented a more drastic contrast to the face he had seen at the window. He could see it still quite plainly. He contemplated it with an interest which had nothing sentimental about it. He was thirty-five, and though there is no age-limit for folly, he was by many years past an inclination for casual encounters.

He had no idea why this woman’s face should catch his attention. She was not beautiful-or was she? That was one of the points which interested him. She was certainly not pretty. Her clothes were the shabby clothes that are chosen for their wearing qualities and must be worn for as long as they can be made to look decent. No indication, therefore, of the character or taste of the woman who wears them, except in so far as the choice of something dark, plain and hardwearing is an indication of character. He dismissed the clothes. She had a good brow-good bones altogether, a certain line from cheek to chin, a certain balance. He put her age at twenty-five, perhaps a year or two more, perhaps a year or two less. She hadn’t lived soft. There was no bloom on the smooth, pale skin. But there were no lines either. That would be something to do with the shape of the bones beneath, but a good deal more to a habit of mind. A woman with a face like that didn’t fuss about trifles, didn’t fuss at all. She would do what she had to do, endure what she had to endure. He thought there had been a fair amount of enduring. She had the look of it in her eyes-patience. It was a look which moved him whenever he encountered it, in a child, in an animal. Sometimes it was the pitiful patience that doesn’t hope any longer. This was the other kind, the patience which rests on strength. It endures because in the end it will conquer.

He pulled himself up with half a laugh. Word-spinning! Well, it was his trade. If your brain stopped spinning you stories, you would stop being able to write them. But he couldn’t remember being so caught by anything in the way of an external impression for…He stared back across the years, could find no bridge to the other side. The impression appeared to be unique. It came to him with a shock that the word external was wrong. The whole thing went much deeper than that. He did just know that her hair was dark and her eyes were grey, but all that had nothing to do with his vivid sense of her.