Patricia Wentworth: Through The Wall

On the second day he rang up the house-agents and got her address. He remembered that she had said Mr. Morton when she was speaking of her employer. “Mr. Morton was kind-he gave me the day off.” The telephone directory did the rest. He persevered until he achieved Mr. Morton himself, and was informed that Miss Brand was not in the office- Miss Brand had been in a railway accident.

Richard Cunningham said,

“Yes, I know. I was in it too. I wanted to be sure that Miss Brand was all right.”

Mr. Morton blew his nose and opined that it had been a providential escape. He didn’t sound like a live wire, but he did sound kind and concerned. Miss Brand was taking a few days off. The experience had naturally been a shock. He was sorry to say they would be losing her services shortly-a change in her circumstances. “Her address? Well-I really don’t know-”

Richard Cunningham said,

“Yes, she told me. We were fellow travellers. My name is Richard Cunningham. I’m in hospital with a couple of broken ribs. I thought I should just like to send Miss Brand some flowers. I don’t think she would consider it intrusive.”

Mr. Morton read the papers. He knew all about Richard Cunningham. He had even read the exclusive interview. He made no further difficulty about giving the address.

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.