The Trouble-Makers (17 page)

It occurred to Katharine that Mrs Quentin—with the best of intentions, like the rest of them—had been interfering as much as anyone; but she felt it would be tactless—as well as futile, at this stage—to point this out.

“Where
is
Mary, by the way?” she asked suddenly,
realising
that she and Mrs Quentin had been sitting there talking for over an hour, and all that time there had been no sound from the rest of the house. “Is she upstairs? I thought she couldn’t have gone to bed, because there were all the lights on everywhere. Every single room.”

Mrs Quentin looked at Katharine pityingly from under her heavy, wrinkled lids. “All the lights on? Yes, I suppose they are. But I told you, didn’t I? Between you, you have been driving Mary insane.”

S
WIFTLY UP THE
lighted stairs ran Katharine. Up, up into a white blaze of light from the unshaded hundred-watt bulb on the little landing; and all the bedroom doors wide open, too, pouring out their quota of shadowless brilliance. On went Katharine, unhesitating, through Mary’s bedroom door, and only then, right inside the room, did she pause.

For the room was empty. Bright, and bare, and empty. No: no, it wasn’t. On the big bed the coverlet was slightly humped by what must be a long, slender shape lying perfectly still. Wisps of Mary’s dark hair were just visible on the far edge of the pillow, the coverlet pulled up smooth and nearly flat over her face. As if she had covered her head, like a child, to shut out the terrors of the night … or as if someone else had covered it for her, after she was asleep….

Katharine’s movements were still swift, but now, quite without her knowledge or volition, they had also become stealthy. With scarcely a sound, she was across the room and lifting the coverlet from Mary’s silent head. Even as she did do, Mary’s eyelids twitched, and she gave a little sigh. So swiftly had it all happened that Katharine experienced the great pulsating relief at these signs of life almost before she had registered the fear from which the slight movements had released her; and she stood, recovering herself, and staring down into Mary’s sleeping face.

For Mary
was
sleeping, of that there was no doubt; and sleeping very deeply, too, for after that single flicker of awareness she had made no further movement. Her breath was soft and even, and her usually anxious, expressive face was blank and calm.

For some reason, Mary must have gone to bed very, very
frightened. Why else would she try to sleep with the light blazing right into her eyes … and with the door wide open … and the window too, on this damp, dismal night, with fog already pricking at your throat? Yes, Katharine confirmed, moving the curtains slightly—wide open, and at the bottom, too, as if to make sure that her screams would be heard….

What screams? Why? Why should Katharine leap to the
conclusion
that this was the purpose of the open window? For what sort of danger, real or imagined, could all this be a preparation?

In the bright silence of the room, Katharine tried to recall Mary’s first words to her when they had met in the Building Site that evening. Katharine had been too much startled at the time to pay much attention, but she remembered them now: “Hush, Katharine, he’ll hear us!” Who was “He”? At the time, Katharine had taken for granted that it referred to the man from under the lamp-post, and had been quick to point out the silliness of anticipating any danger from such a source. But suppose Mary had been referring not to this man at all, but to Alan? Alan, the reserved, the mysterious, the unforgiving? Alan, who had stored up that envelope of hair, dated and labelled? … Who had refused to accept his wife’s confession to the stabbing, and had thereby, in one subtle stroke, made the crime for ever unforgivable?

But forgotten was just as good as forgiven. Better, Katharine assured herself. And as for the hair, perhaps a punctilious, hoarding kind of man like Alan could have done exactly that, with no more motive than to have everything about himself and his life recorded, classified, and dealt with? To him, the labelling, classifying and putting away of such a relic might be a way of getting the whole episode under control, and hence of being able to dismiss it. Just as in his business the only way to get a document off his mind would be to file it in its proper place. Merely thrown away it would be on his conscientious mind for ever.

But who could tell how Alan Prescott’s mind worked? Grim, and tortuous, and resentful unto death, as you would think if you listened to Mary? Or was it a mind baffled, tied
up in its own severities, and longing to be released, as his sister, rightly or wrongly, presented it? Certainly Mary was not the one to know the answer—at first too wayward and
self-centred
, and latterly too frightened, she had never come within a mile of understanding her husband.

Or had she? Once again Katharine found herself up against this blank, impenetrable possibility that perhaps Mary really had good reason for fearing Alan?

The first uneasy wisps of fog were fingering their way into the room now, creeping, clammy and soft, round the edges of the curtains. With a little shiver, Katharine moved back to the window and closed it. For all her care, the noise of it seemed tremendous in the silent house: and Katharine felt oddly shocked at what she had done.

But Mary did not stir; and Katharine stood for a while pondering.

For really, there seemed no point in staying here any longer. It was late; she was growing sleepy. This feeling that she ought to wait till Mary woke was absurd, because Mary wouldn’t wake till morning—why should she? The obvious thing was to go downstairs, say good night to Auntie Pen, and go back home. That is, if Auntie Pen was still there. Was she supposed to be staying the night? Katharine couldn’t
remember
anyone having mentioned it; perhaps she had gone home already.

Everything seemed very quiet. Quiet, that is, if people were awake. You wouldn’t think anything of it if the house had been dark as well as quiet; it was all this light combined with all this silence that seemed so queer.

And then Katharine heard a sound; a sort of shuffling thud. Not from downstairs, though; from the bedroom right next to this one.

For one bizarre moment Katharine fancied that Mary, as she lay sleeping so quietly there, must be dreaming: dreaming that Katharine was standing by her bed listening to a noise in the next room. Don’t let her be having a
nightmare
, Katharine almost prayed, for there is no limit to what
may happen next in a nightmare…. But then the full absurdity of her fancy swept over her. Rousing herself, rubbing her eyes, she moved softly towards the door and peered out on to the landing.

The completeness of the anticlimax almost made her reel back against the bed. Whatever furtive figure she had expected to see tiptoeing from the adjoining room, it was not this one—tall, loose-limbed, and already falling over the flex of Angela’s reading lamp that trailed across the doorway.

“Sorry to startle you,” apologised Stella in a noisy whisper, “but Auntie Whatsit said I could just barge up and say goodbye to Angela. You know—give her a good luck message from Jack and Mavis. That sort of thing. I hear she’s going away tomorrow.”

“What do you mean, you barged up?” asked Katharine sourly, still not recovered from her shock. “I didn’t hear a sound. You must have crept up on tiptoe. I don’t call that ‘barging’!”

Stella looked affronted.

“Well, all right, I
walked
up, then. Let’s not argue about a word. You know, when people start quibbling about words, I always just simply agree with them, because I know they must be on edge about something. It’s nothing to do with the word at all.
Whatever
word I’d used you’d have picked on it because you’re in a nervy sort of state, I can see. Anyway, you were making a lot of noise yourself, opening or shutting windows or something. It’s no wonder you didn’t hear me.”

Right on all counts as usual—or at least totally insulated against any possibility of being wrong, which was very nearly the same thing. And anyway, it was none of Katharine’s business—it wasn’t
her
house that Stella was prowling round at this time of night. But all the same, it seemed odd. Who would call to say goodbye to a child often at nearly midnight?

“But isn’t Angela asleep?” Katharine voiced her doubts guardedly, curiosity and reproof mingling in her tones. “It’s very late, surely?”

“Yes, she is, as a matter of fact,” answered Stella lightly.
“I only thought she might be awake because I happened to notice that her light was on. Anyway, I’ve left a note for the poor little thing. I thought that a little message from really
secure
children, like Jack and Mavis, would give
her
a feeling of security in the midst of all this upset.”

You didn’t, thought Katharine disagreeably. You thought that the contemplation of Angela undergoing all this upheaval would give you a lovely, superior feeling about how much better cared for Jack and Mavis are, and how much better a mother you are than Mary.
I
know…. You can’t kid me…. You don’t even think you can…. Set a thief to catch a thief….

The two women eyed each other cautiously under the glaring light bulb—and Katharine suddenly realised that Stella had just as much reason to wonder about her, Katharine’s, motive for being here as she had to wonder about Stella’s. Curiosity, of course, they could both recognise in each other. But was Stella discounting Katharine’s real concern for Mary—just as Katharine was discounting the possibility that there was an element of real kindness in the mixed motives which had prompted Stella to leave a friendly message for Angela to find, with surprise and pleasure, when she woke in the morning?

“Of course,” Stella was saying, “Jack and Mavis don’t actually know about any of it yet, but I know they would want me to write a note on their behalf. It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, how really happy, secure children can understand the feelings of an insecure one much better than another insecure child can? I suppose it’s because they’re better able to
face
things … to release their sympathies in valid directions….”

Even while Katharine longed to hit Stella over the head with Mary’s heavy silver hairbrush, she still found herself, maddeningly, having to remember that Jack and Mavis were in fact quite pleasant, well-disposed children, who probably
would
want the note written. One expects, as if of right, that all boasting should be empty—that the boaster should always
be a hollow sham, covering up his inadequacies by his
bragging
. It comes as an unpleasant shock, every time, when the boaster turns out to be quite a competent person with quite a lot to boast about. And you couldn’t get away from it, Jack and Mavis
were
nice children in spite of their mother’s praises of them; and she
was
giving them quite a good life, in spite of her ceaseless advertising of the fact. After all, there must be something to be said for having a mother who unfailingly assumes that you are the best children, your home the best home, your father the best father, your school the best school, and even your coffee-grinder the best coffee-grinder, in the whole world. Less to be said for having a neighbour like that, of course: I don’t actually have to
like
it, reflected Katharine with relief, as Stella’s barbed panegyric hissed to a stop and she set off down the stairs, the steps and banisters creaking in agonised chorus at her painstaking efforts to be quiet.

Katharine had been going to follow her, but now she stood still, listening all over again, for she fancied she had heard a sound from Mary’s room. But she did not move immediately; whatever was going on, she did not want Stella to come back and get involved in it: Stella would be back up those stairs like a ball on a piece of elastic if she once got any inkling that anything more was going to happen tonight. So Katharine waited until she heard the front door close, and then hurried softly back into Mary’s room.

Once again the room was full of damp night air and wisps of fog: once again the window was open at the bottom: and Mary herself, intent and furtive, was clambering softly back into bed. She glanced up at Katharine without surprise.

“You shouldn’t have shut the window,” was all she said. “People keep
on
shutting it—it’s so tiresome. I
like
it open.”

She sat, hands clasped round her knees under the
bedclothes
, and stared accusingly at Katharine. Her shoulders were bare above her flimsy nightdress, and Katharine could see that already she was shivering.

“But it’s so cold, Mary,” she objected, moving in the direction of the window. “And foggy, too. You’ll be frozen.” She reached up towards the sash once more, but with a sharp cry Mary halted her.

“No!
Please
not, Katharine!
Please
leave it alone. It’s safer, you see. I feel safer with it open.”

“Safer? Safer from what?” Katharine felt all her former uneasiness returning. Something was going on … something was mounting to a climax; and in spite of all Mary’s
confidences
, all her heart-to-heart talks, there was still some vital, central fact which she was keeping to herself.

“What are you afraid of, Mary?” she asked bluntly. “Are you afraid of Alan?”

A curious look came on to Mary’s face—half shocked, half sly.

“Afraid
of
Alan?” she asked uneasily … cautiously…. “Why should I be afraid
of
Alan? I’m afraid
for
him,
naturally
. The dark man—the burglar—he’s coming again tonight: I know he is. This is the night when he plans to strike again.”

“But,
Mary
——!” Once and for all, Katharine meant to get this puzzle cleared up. “What do you mean, the dark man? Were you lying to me when you said there wasn’t any such man? That Alan was making it all up—that you’d stabbed him yourself?”

Mary stared at her in the strangest way—frightened, defensive—yet somehow triumphant. Then, without warning, her eyes filled with tears.

“It’s not fair, Katharine, to accuse me of such awful things. You promised—that day in the cafeteria—that you’d never say such a thing again. You
promised.
And we had a long talk, and decided it
must
have been the man in the raincoat. Why, it was you who were so positive about it—don’t you remember? You absolutely
insisted
that it must have been him. You seemed to think it was quite absurd of me to doubt it….”

Katharine stared down at the anxious, petulant face, and
understanding slowly overwhelmed her. She remembered the tepid cups of coffee, the desolate cafeteria, and she remembered her own words: “You’ll find that you’ll forget all about it yourself—really you will.”

And it had come to pass exactly as she had prophesied. Mary had forgotten.