It was a kind of cracking sound, and they heard it repeated several times. Then it stopped and they could only catch the noises they had heard before. At last there came another crack, louder this time, and it seemed to them, as they listened, trembling in the dark, as if something were breaking.
‘What is it? What’s happening?’ Gladys cried. ‘My God, I can’t stand much more of this!’ Then her voice rose to a shriek. ‘Oh, what’s that?’
The crash and splintering and heavy thud-thud still rang in their ears. They clung to one another in agony of apprehension. The moments passed, but there came no other sound. The silence, as if heavy with doom, weighed down upon them.
‘What was it?’ The words came from Margaret in a hollow whisper, like ghost talking to ghost.
Gladys gave a choking little cry and Margaret felt the girl’s whole body relax and droop. For a few moments she remained passive, but then suddenly she sprang up and fell on the door in a fury, battering at it with her fists and even kicking it. The next minute her strength had left her and she was in Margaret’s arms, quietly sobbing. Holding her tight and murmuring over her as if she were a child, Margaret was now the comforter and immediately felt better. We’re being child and grown-up in turn, she was thinking; and if we always worked like that, we could all comfort one another through anything.
Gladys was quiet now. At last she spoke, but it was only as if an odd thought here and there were slipping into words. ‘We said we’d have a little flat, somewhere high up, very little and cheap.... You wouldn’t think that much fun, I suppose?’
‘We had one once,’ Margaret told her, gently, ‘when we first began, and we thought it fun.’
‘I shouldn’t have been able to do much at first, but I’d have managed. I’d have liked that. I told him so. Even the little rows would have been a kind of fun. You understand, don’t you?’
Margaret found that she couldn’t reply.
‘There’s a lot of fun in life, isn’t there?’ Gladys went on, very slowly, as if she were talking in her sleep. ‘I’ve had some. But not lately. Somehow if you start missing it, you go on missing it. And it’s so easy to get right off the track of it, just lose the way. We’d missed it, but we’d have found it together. I would anyhow....’